EMBA的小眼睛

The time to think about middlemen is before there's only one

I grew up near a mall that had 42 shoe stores. If a store didn't carry what you wanted, it wasn't a big deal to walk 22 feet to a store that did.

The core issue of net neutrality isn't whether or not a big corporation ought to have the freedom to maximize profit by choosing what to feature. No, the key issue is: what happens when users are unable to choose a different middleman?

In a town with ten newspapers, finding a newspaper that brings you the truth you seek is not a challenge. But network effects and lock in mean that in more and more arenas, there's a natural monopoly arising.

The simple example is cable TV. It doesn't pay to wire a town with five or six competing cable companies, and so we end up with one middleman. The simple understanding of net neutrality: When there's only one middleman, who gets to decide what you see?

過去發生許多社會事件，導致女性單獨搭乘計程車會有安全上的擔憂，為解決女性乘客的安全顧慮，現在出現專為女性乘客服務的女性駕駛。同時善用科技優勢，美國將推出SheTaxis-SheRides搭車App，以滿足更多女性乘客需求。

■ 女性乘客透過SheTaxis-SheRides尋找女性駕駛。（圖／ADWEEK）

SheTaxis-SheRides是一款專為女性乘客設計的App，此App會將有搭車需求的女性乘客與女性駕駛配對，若乘客為男性，則會將男性乘客連結到其他計程車App上。專為女性乘客服務的女性計程車駕駛預計9月中正式在紐約、曼徹斯特等地上路，但SheTaxis-SheRides目前只適用於ios系統，Android 裝置還需要再等一段時間。

SheTaxis-SheRides創辦人Stella Mateo表示，推出這樣的服務其實一部分是想幫助女性進入男性工作領域。多數國家的計程車司機都是男性，而駕駛工作也多被認定為較不適合女性從事的職業。然而，許多女性乘客皆表示，搭乘女性駕駛的計程車其實感覺比較安全，也更舒服。

台灣方面，其實在今年4月，臺北市政府公共運輸處也在智慧型叫車系統中新增女性駕駛轉接服務，整合目前車隊的女性駕駛資源，希望提升女性乘客搭車安全和滿足其服務需要。雖然目前各國女性駕駛的比例仍是少數，但由SheTaxis-SheRide的推出可發現女性駕駛的需求不斷提高，藉由科技和政策多方管理，期待能給乘客、消費者更好的服務。(蘇 璿，本文經《電子商務時報》授權刊登)
本文經《政大服務創新電子報》授權刊登

Choosing those that choose you

We have the privilege about being picky in who we expect/hope/count on/need to pick us.

Pity the foolish 8-year-old boy who gives a kid just a year older the power to make his day. In that moment, being picked for the kickball team is the most important thing in the world, and his dreams are in the hands of a kid with a demonstrated history of poor judgment. If you were walking by the playground and he yelled, "Hey Mister! Wanna be on our team?" it would (I hope) mean little to you. You're no longer willing to be judged by a kid who can't even ride a bike.

But what if your organization or your brand or your self esteem has chosen a chooser you can't rely on, or one you're not qualified to expect to have come through? If you say, "we need 100 of the top CIOs at the biggest companies in this region to choose our technology," you've made it clear who the choosers are. But if this group is swayed by bribes (which you won't pay) or local salespeople (which you don't have), you have a disconnect.

Or what if you "need" to be picked by the anonymous crowds on social networks, or picked by the apparently powerful editor or the bouncer at the club?

The tragedy of the last 10%

In a competitive market, if you do the work to lower your price by 10%, your market share grows.

If you dig in deep, analyze, reengineer and make thoughtful changes, you can lower your price another 10%. This leads to an even bigger jump in market share.

The third time (or maybe the fourth, or even before then), you only achieve a 10% savings by cutting safety, or quality, or reliability. You cut corners, certainly.

The last 10% costs your workers the chance to make a decent living, it costs your suppliers the opportunity to treat their people with dignity, and it costs you your reputation.

Inventing a tribe

I can't think of a single time that an individual or an organization has created a brand-new worldview, spread it and then led that tribe.

There were Harley-type renegades before there was Harley Davidson. There were digital nomads before there was Apple. There were pop music fans before there were the Beatles and Rastafarians before Marley.

Without a doubt, a new technology creates new experiences. But the early adopters who gravitate to it were early adopters before we got there.

Our job is to find the disconnected and connect them, to find people eager to pursue a goal and give them the structure to go achieve that goal. But just about always, we start with an already existing worldview, a point of view, a hunger that's waiting to be satisfied.

Of course it's been done before

John Koenig calls it vemödalen. The fear that you're doing something that's already been done before, that everything that can be done has been done.

Just about every successful initiative and project starts from a place of replication. The chances of being fundamentally out of the box over the top omg original are close to being zero.

A better question to ask is, "have you ever done this before?" Or perhaps, "are the people you are seeking to serve going to be bored by this?"

Originality is local. The internet destroys, at some level, the idea of local, so sure, if we look hard enough we'll find that turn of a phrase or that unique concept or that app, somewhere else.