Scary scarcity, and the need to be plentiful

When the news network CNN was new, it was important. It was a novelty, an innovation, something unique. But now it is globally available and has competitors. It is an omnipresent given and everybody behaves with the knowledge that a CNN camera is likely to be nearby. The ultimate success is ubiquity, which once achieved means that for as long as it remains plentiful, your product no longer matters. CNN has achieved the ultimate distinction of becoming a part of the collective conscious and the public’s wallpaper.

The secret is to make everything available everywhere to everyone. And this is perfectly possible for both physical and especially electronic products. Global ubiquity has already been largely achieved with distribution and logistics, banking infrastructure, Internet bandwidth and information storage capacity, nice women, processing power, manufacturing, couriers and so on and so forth. All are widely available on a global scale. With distribution widely available, content is king.

It is not just products that need to make themselves universally available. The secret behind being a great manager or leader is to make yourself obsolete. You need to make yourself defunct and turn yourself into a commodity. As Woodruff said, "There is no limit to what a [wo]man can do if [s]he doesn’t mind who gets the credit. Have the courage not to intervene. The aim is to get your business running so well that it runs itself.

Once this distribution of responsibility and autonomy is achieved, your role is complete and you move on. As in, "Some genius invented the Oreo, we’re just living off the inheritance." (From the book, BARBARIANS AT THE GATE). Everyone is an entrepreneur because everyone is perpetually in start up mode. Once established, you move on to something new (often a new venture within the same company using the cash flow generated from ubiquitous products: witness Microsoft) and try to make something else ubiquitous.

Organizations, products and people all need to make their success ubiquitous. Remember, success is a journey, not a destination. If you get there, you’ll be dead on arrival. And you never get there because there is always something else you can do and you always want more.

Similarly, the most exquisite form of democracy is globality. That is to say, we need to form a democratic system in which democracy is so widely dispersed amongst the population that no single person or even partial grouping of people can seize power for their own purposes.

And if they try, globality means that people who are adversely affected can re-locate somewhere else on the globe and avoid the effects of that abuse of power. People need to (be able to) emigrate if socialists get into government. Infringements of human civil liberties are reported by the global media, avoided by global mobility using global forms of transportation, and on arrival global persons can consume global products! Ubiquity fuels ubiquity.

Only scarcity matters. The only things worth worrying about are the scarce things like food and water. Whenever anything beneficial or essential is scarce, we need to pay attention to making it plentiful again. We need to ensure global supply and sensible demand.

We should work to make what is scarce plentiful.

 

Author: Simon Buckingham

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To make a comment to the author, send e-mail to simon@unorgan.com

 

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