The Rules of the Passion Economy (parte VI)

Parte I, parte II, parte III, parte IV e parte V.

"RULE #6: TECHNOLOGY SHOULD ALWAYS SUPPORT YOUR BUSINESS, NOT DRIVE IT....Do what technology and large industry cannot do—not the same thing, only slower. To succeed in the Passion Economy, one should not condemn large-scale business and technology or dismiss them as inferior. Instead, the successful passion-based business owner recognizes the tremendous power of larger firms and their tools of automation and avoids competing directly. [Moi ici: Algo que escrevo aqui no blogue há milhares de anos. Enquanto os grandes automatizam... Mongo é demasiado complexo para automatização eficientista] If your core customer cannot easily distinguish your products or services from those of a larger competitor, you need to shift and offer something else.
...Technology-driven scale creates the space for businesses built on value and passion. Businesses built on great scale, by necessity, cannot richly engage narrow audiences. [Moi ici: Como não recordar a metáfora do plancton] Sure, they can use computer programs to create personalized recommendations or to let customers design their own style of shoe or shirt. But that is not the same as personally guiding a customer to some option he could never have imagined himself, offering a service, rooted in passion, that satisfies needs the customer doesn’t know he has.
...
Technology tends toward bigness, so stay small. A central feature of this economy is that technology-driven innovation scales to unimaginable size. Create Facebook or Twitter or a new cell phone and, soon enough, everyone on earth has access to them. Unless you happen to have billions of dollars and a genius for cutting-edge technological innovation, don’t ever bother going big. There is safety in smallness. If you richly serve a small niche in a way that is hard to scale, no big company will ever think to go through the expense of identifying so small a market and serving your customers’ rather particular needs.”