Author: JP

Four Pillars and Marketing’s traditional 4 Ps

Have you reached the stage where everything you read feels stale, you get a sense of deja vu, you’ve heard and seen it all before? Quite a few people tell me they have.

I guess I’m lucky that way, I don’t feel that staleness at all. I really enjoy reading “parallel” texts on specific topics, feeling a sense of joy when, as a result, I receive fresh insight into that topic. A different perspective. This happens often when I read the Bible, and occasionally when I read some favourite poem or play.

It seems to happen most when you are actually familiar with something, yet open to unfamiliar concepts and constructs about that familiar thing.

Well, that’s what happened to me when I read the Sviokla post below. And I think it’s part of the richness of the blogosphere, part of how ideas mutate and move.

Thanks to Jonathan Peterson and way.nu for sending these snowballs my way. [Which reminds me. Maybe we need a term for the connections made explicitly and exclusively by blogosphere. Ideas anyone?]

Jonathan referred me to this recent post by John Sviokla (with Antony Paoni) on Marketing Remix.

Information congregates where customers go. And transactions are enabled there as well. Products and services butterfly into contact with customers. Perspectives we may have heard, but said succinctly and differently.

I feel that relationship, intention and co-creation need to be brought in more effectively by John, but that the core arguments are worth a read. See what you think.

What’s the matter with the Information Technology workforce?

That’s the provocative title of a recently published piece I found on First Monday. Some profound thoughts, especially at a time like this, with the future of the internet being debated and new intellectual property wrongs being created.
Example quote:

…..all the licensing and examinations in the world will not protect a profession in which the nature of the work changes when new knowledge enters the field.


I’ve been reading First Monday for some years now, and much of what I’ve read is first rate. Thanks to all at First Monday. One of the first places I saw opensourcing of ideas in practice. 

Four Pillars: New layers of lock-in

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There’s an apocryphal story about India, prohibition and unemployment, one of my absolute favourites. It goes like this:

1977. Elections, out with the old, in with the new. Prime Minister’s a teetotaller, declares the country “dry”. And so it is, except for the odd exception. You could drink if you had a permit. You could only have a permit if you were (a) a foreigner spending welcome foreign currency or (b) if you had a medical condition that required alcohol, and a doctor’s certificate to prove it.

So there was a new industry. Government departments busy churning out permits on the back of doctors busy churning out certificates on the back of patients busy claiming unusual alcohol-requiring medical conditions and underpinning their claims with unwanted soft-currency rupees.

A few years later, everyone’s had enough of this game. The dialogue changes. Let’s remove prohibition. You cannot be serious.  Do you realise how many people work in the permit offices? What are we going to do with them? We cannot shut down the permit offices. Ergo prohibition must continue.
Wisdom of Solomon moment. Archimedes and tub and Eureka. Paul and Road to Damascus and scales from eyes. Newton and apple headache. Lightbulb. All that jazz.
I know.

Don’t shut the permit offices down. From tomorrow everyone can drink.

But everyone needs a permit.

Time for another apocryphal story.

An august group of people concerned about intellectual property rights debate whether to create a new one, a right with a difference. This new one will be designed to benefit people who cannot get a copyright, because a work belongs to someone else (the person or group that created it), or because the information is in the public domain. The new right is not a “copyright,” but a “broadcaster” or “webcaster” right.

I only wish it was apocryphal. Sorry, it’s happening now. Please read James Love’s post on the WIPO meeting, which you can find here. I have a lot of time for what James Love has to say about IPR in general.

The implications are worrying.

Middleman rights that increase the very transaction costs that the web seeks to decrease. Middleman rights that make distribution a bigger source of lock-in than ever before. Middleman rights that enforce the orderly transfer of savings generated from lower distribution costs to… the distributors and not the customers.

Some years ago I remember reading about attempts being made to patent the curative powers of turmeric, ginger, garlic, chillies and the like. Attempts that failed. Attempts that will succeed if WIPO do what they are thinking of doing.
[Gordon, thanks for the tip-off which I saw while travelling.]

Jane Jacobs 1916-2006

I was sad to learn about the death of Jane Jacobs last week.

Her books and approach were (and continue to be) significant influences on me, particularly when I seek to understand how communities work. What damage can be done by (often well-meaning) politicians, developers, financiers and industrialists.

How to keep remembering the humanity that is, and should remain, at the heart of everything we do.

Thank you Jane Jacobs.

A segue from Laocoon

In my last post I quoted Laocoon from Virgil, and it gives me the opportunity of linking to one of my favourite Rudyard Kipling poems: Et Dona Ferentes.

When I read it as a child, I was incredibly smitten with the image of three-castored grand pianos cantering away… and  a little smitten with the rest of the poem as well.