Yeah, this post violates what I'm about to say.
First, before I dig into any business plan discovery, we'll lay out the context for a while. And answer two questions that confront any new business. Why? and Why now?
The posts are obviously not presentations, but I'd like to use Doc Searl's "It's the Story, Stupid: Don't Let Presentation Software Keep You From Getting Your Story Across" as the framework for many of the blog posts here. Secondarily, I'll use the book One Page Business Plan as well.
To set context, I'll think a lot in terms of metaphor. Powerful stories have powerful metaphors. For instance, I'm intrigued by the blogs as public marketplaces, as fourth place refuges metaphor.
I was strolling in Pike Place Market just before Gnomedex 5.0.
It’s publicly-owned by the city and managed by the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority. I learned from their Heritage Center signs that:
"The Pike Place Market began as a place where consumers could “Meet the Producer” and buy directly from farmers. These words also extend to artists and craftspeople, who must themselves sell the pieces they have made. They are required to meet customers in the Market at least once a week. Chances are, the person behind the table is the farmer, artisan, or business owner who grew or created the product you are now purchasing."
[The ‘producer’ is virtually any of us. Including 'consumers.']
“There is a difference between a public marketplace and a shopping mall – a difference in how the marketplace functions as a social setting meeting the human need to be with others.”
[Signs explain the citizen ballot vote to buy the private buildings to place into public ownership in 1971….]
“The 1971 vote also mandated that the Market continue its historic functions of supporting local farmers, incubating small, owner-operated businesses, and providing housing and services for low-income residents.”
[Mass production and the malling of America have left us disconnected from what we buy and who we buy from. And I like the idea of incubating small, artisan-based businesses.]
“Trade has linked human communities for thousands of years. Wherever people have gathered to share the surplus of their harvest, a market appeared. Many became established as major year-round trading centers, and with that exchange of knowledge and culture. Villages first developed at the crossroads of trade and the market place became their center. During the 1800s the Native tribes of the Puget Sound region, including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Tulalip, and Muckleshoot, traded and shared their knowledge, culture, and goods along the shores of Elliot Bay, near the very spot we now call Pike Place Market.
Today, markets, souks, and bazaars of the past remain the public center of the world’s cities and have become the true meeting places that bring local communities together.”
[I like how we share our bounty with others. Our overflowing surplus. I like how we come together.]
PLUS...
Via Johnnie:
James takes a day trip to the Fourth Estate.
However, it's the interaction between blogs that makes them so interesting and influential. A single blog can be akin to a ranting madman on the corner. However, when linked together into massive intertwining communities they have the vibrancy and passion of an enormous street market, with information, opinions and whispers exchanging hands at light speed.
Via Hugh:
A nice thought from Caterina, which of course got me thinking about how it all fits in with English Cut:
As I was saying to Andy the other day, the marketplace used to be a human place, where people exchanged the goods they'd grown or made, and each exchange was an exchange between people. Now there are supermarkets and Walmart, and I had a conversation with a clerk at Borders who said that they were going to replace him with a system whereby your goods were tallied by an RFID reader as you walked out the door. There's something different about knowing the people who make your clothes and grow your food, and I think that this will be an enormous force going forward.
Via Johnza: The Fourth Place?
What would happen if instead of just thinking yourself simply in terms of your product or service – no matter what product or service you offer - instead you were driven by the vision of the internet becoming this 4th place, if you saw your mission to help make the internet exactly that? What would you do, what would you need?
Well, here are a few things I guess I would take from both the Clue/Hugh-train and the Starbucks/3rd place handbook:
- Be easy to find
- Be easy to use
- Be simple to understand
- Be consistent
- Be responsive
- Be fun to work for
So why not aspire to make your business just such a refuge or place? Not a physical one (unless you are in bricks and mortar retail), but rather as a welcome but as a virtual, psychological place, where your customers feel a sense of relief at arriving, where they find exactly what they want, and where they feel a need to keep coming back.
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