Disclaimer: This is indeed a fiction post (although, its underlying core is non-fiction). The conversations are the product of my imagination. The leaders (those alive & the ones that have passed away) have been selected for their unprecedented contribution to the business world.
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Jobs: Clay nice to see you! Earth is finally sending its finest minds over here.
Christensen: Hi Steve, nice to see you too. Earth sent the finest mind almost a decade ago.
Jobs: You will enjoy it over here, but don’t look down.
Christensen: I already did and regret it.
Jobs: They need help; I wish if I can go down for a few minutes.
Christensen: A few minutes!
Jobs: I only need to talk to one person.
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Robert, do you want to be remembered as someone who brought joy in people’s lives, or do you want to be remembered as the one who fought to liberate their economic destiny?
You, Bezos, Cook, Pichai, Nadella, Zuckerberg, and others, have enough authority, power, and capabilities to reshape the earth’s economic landscape. Instead, you guys are (economically) in a war against each other, over winning customers’ attention!
This war is not just draining your finite resources; it is tearing apart your customers as well. Capital market’s quarterly spikes were never the main reason behind building our businesses. The iPhone was not an end in itself, neither placing a super personal computer inside customers’ pockets. Businesses are supposed to be means towards higher ends.
It is time to place a full-fledged ecosystem in customers and businesses’ pockets; giving businesses, free access to the demand side, and giving customers full control over their economic graph.
The duality of commoditizing the supply and controlling the demand side of the economy is imprisoning the untapped opportunities within the economic graph. Treating the economic graph as a commodity (i.e., extracting it, aggregating it, monetizing it) is too narrow of ambition with a diminishing proposition.
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The economic graph must be empowered to drift freely and persistently be reinvigorated; allowing it to spontaneously hop-on-hop-off across businesses, markets, industries, and economies’ boundaries.
The economic graph is a derivative of the commercial behaviors (i.e., interweaving supply and demand). As such, you guys must build a new economic architecture that governs the proliferation of prudent commercial behaviors to continuously gives birth into the economic graph.
Robert, you thrived during the two eras; you saw how the economic graph was suffocated during the shelf-space scarcity era, and how it is getting trapped during this era of attention scarcity; the same force (the Internet) that divorced the economic graph from the limitations of the industrial age’s underlying units of economic, is once again chocking it (economic graph).
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Focusing on the transaction will not yield more of it; neither focusing on interaction will do. Thriving businesses can only be sustained by enabling opportunities; you guys must rethink how to seed, germinate, and harvest economic values.
It was great to see you. A preliminary logic behind the above can be found here and here. In case you want to think about the above.
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Hi John, I will make it short. Steve is trying to implant a new vision (liberating the economic graph from the centralized value chains), his strategy resides in removing all irrelevant units of economic from the pathway of businesses and customers, and his tactic manifests in the freedom of ads.
I only want to ask you for a small favor: galvanize The Power of Pull and declare an Opportunity-based Narrative. Activate the Creation Space and call-out passionate thinkers to shape serendipitous trust-based relationships. Zoom out, zoom in to scale learning and leverage the growth within the edge of knowledge, to contextualize and conceptualize such a vision, so that they can leap into the launch decade.
It was a pleasure to see you; I must go now.