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2/ Don’t get me wrong. They can be very clever and make lots of money. But money-driven business problem-solving leads to a sort of lifeless, nihilistic quality to them. The “business patterns”, like arbitrage, have a zer-sum feel even if they’re not strictly zero-sum.
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3/ Three better-than-money motivators for solving business problems are: technology, people, and scale. When you focus on one of these, it’s not that you don’t want to make gobs of money, but that it’s a secondary consideration. You’d rather go bust than make it the primary.
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5/ People: Can people (both as employees and customers) be made to come alive/thrive instead of slouching through life like dispirited zombies? There is something addictive about figuring out problems in ways where you solve for “people aliveness”.
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6/ Finally, scale in a general sense. Can something be made bigger, smaller, cheaper, more centralized, more decentralized, more/less automated? The payoff here is activating/deactivating a constraint, rewriting patterns of abundance/scarcity by turning a knob to some limit.
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7/ All three better-than-money motivators seem to operate by making some new configuration of things come “alive” in some way. The payoff is creating new life, not new financial plumbing. The most motivating way to try and solve a business problem is to “solve for aliveness”
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8/ The 3 patterns are three ways to create new business life, the creative part of the creative destruction cycle. Money-motivation problem solving is important but tends to live on the destruction side. Killing a locus of business vitality when it starts to fade, recycling parts
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9/ Arbitrage, hedge funds, outsourcing, real estate speculation, commodities trading, debt collection... all these kinds of business are on the other side of the fence from “create new life” business motivation. They are “killing” businesses.
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10/ Killing takes less imagination than creating life, and is also close-ended by construction. Arbitrage opportunities remove the assymetries they exploit. Trading diffuses the information it exploits. Takes a darker type of personality to enjoy this. And lots of money.
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11/ These are rarely businesses people would “do for free” if they could. Some people do design/art for the love of it even with no money in sight. Nobody does say commodities trading or debt collection for that kind of motive.
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12/ Mind you, the destruction side businesses are crucial to overall economic vitality, just like scavenger species like vultures are crucial to ecosystems. That common comparison is a good one though the negative connotations should be ignored.
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13/ Still, most humans thrive better on the creative, life-giving side of the economy. Interestingly, “unbundling the corporation” thesis identifies the same 3-way partition of business models, for different reasons, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
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