Positioning for Onliness, Curbing Transparency, and Decentralization-Market Fit
Each week I share three ideas to help you build better organizations. Here’s one idea on value creation, another on people and fulfillment, and a third on organizational effectiveness:
1. Positioning for Onliness
“Companies need positioning because customers have choices — and if you don’t stand out, you lose. Positioning is what differentiates a brand in the customer’s mind. To win the positioning game, you must answer this simple question: What makes you the only relevant product or service?” (Neumeier, 2006). This is much easier said than done. But I hope this Twitter thread can help.
2. Curbing Transparency
Transparency is generally a good thing, and it’s something we should all aspire to. But there is such a thing as taking it too far. Hastings and Meyer write in No Rules Rules, “When it comes to personal struggles, an individual’s right to privacy trumps an organization’s desire for transparency.”
3. Decentralization-Market Fit
Back in 2021, I wrote that “[o]rganizations built on RDHY are more akin to microservice architectures — structures made up of loosely coupled yet highly aligned MicroEnterprises (MEs). The end result is greater agility and resilience in the face of constant and continuous change.” That’s not to say that such structures are always the better choice! The team at Amazon’s Prime Video recently proved as much by analogy: “Microservices and serverless components are tools that do work at high scale, but whether to use them over a monolith has to be made on a case-by-case basis. Moving our service to a monolith reduced our infrastructure cost by over 90%.” Context is important and there probably is such a thing as Decentralization-Market Fit.
Lessons this week:
- Stand out by being the only relevant choice for customers
- Balance openness with respect for individual privacy rights
- The degree of decentralization must match market conditions
That’s all for this week.
Until next time: Make it matter.
How can we build better organizations? That’s the question I’ve been trying to answer for the past 10 years. Each week, I share some of what I’ve learned in a weekly newsletter called WorkMatters. Subscription is free. Back-issues are published to Medium after three months. This article was originally published on Friday, May 12, 2023.
