MISCmedia for 8/18/00
Is There a Cure for the Ideavirus?

YESTERDAY, I discussed my ongoing ponderings about my career future. I closed with a brief remark about the burgeoining mini-industry in guidebooks, lectures and courses aimed at people with this same obsession to worry about their own career futures.

One of these books is Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin, excerpted in a recent Fast Company cover story.

Godin, who's posted his book's full text online, is one of those many commentators who treat, as an unspoken "given," the idea that business is, and ought to be, the single driving force and operating metaphor for human life.

He's also one of those who proclaims that business, in this supposedly post-industrial age of global trade and info hi-ways, is entirely about marketing.

And the key to marketing, according to Godin, is The Idea.

But not every idea makes it in this ruthless, hectic world. The ideas that succeed are the ones with the capacity to spread among people like a contagion; hence the "Ideavirus" rubric.

Godin is also one of those business writers who treats the hipster-vilified Nike as an ultimate success story. He sees the Nike concept as a quintessential Ideavirus. The idea was turning athletic shoes from a commodity into a high-profit-margin fashion statement, by spending lavishly on advertising and outsourcing the manufacturing to those cheap overseas subcontractors. The flashiness of the shoes and their ever-prominent logos comprised the "virus" that helped spread that idea.

Another of Godin's great Ideaviruses is the now Microsoft-owned Hotmail. It was not only a simple idea with a powerful promise (free e-mail forever), but it advertised itself within its own product (every free e-mail message ended with a blurb for the service).

Indeed, looking at other hot or recently-hot local companies through Godin's prism can be quite instructive.

• Before Howard Schultz took over Starbucks and opened a gazillion coffee stands, the chain's original founders had a profoundly simple concept--taking Euro-style coffee out of its collegiate and urban-ethnic contexts and rechristening it as an acoutrement for dressed-for-success professionals.

• Amazon.com began by offering easy ordering of every known book; some of the company's Wall Street critics have complained lately that the firm's strayed too far from that.

• Microsoft itself is in the courts because it's fought so aggressively to push the idea that the Windows desktop is the one and only pivot of all computing activity. Linux, conversely, is thoroughly branded as the Anti-Microsoft operating system--not a mass-marketed, one-size-fits-all, packaged product but a line of no-nonsense tools and components for professional programmers.

Of course, this is a gross oversimplification. Many enterprises start out with potentially lucrative concepts, but fail to profitably execute them. Or, the concepts are imitated by bigger outfits. Or, the concepts are successfully quashed or discredited by bigger outfits with their own agendas to push (remember solar energy?).

But simplification is what Ideaviruses appear to be all about.

It's certainly what best-seller business books appear to be all about.

MONDAY: Should I reinvent myself according to the Ideavirus concept?

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