The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets

Which Is to Say, Disruption Hurts

Globalization combined with online marketplaces resulted in offshoring and the commoditization of former high-margin businesses and occupations.

Disintermediation has disrupted multiple industries, putting creative people in direct contact with consumers. Increasingly, musicians sell directly to their fans, authors to their readers, filmmakers to their viewers, product producers to consumers via downloadable physical products! Intermediation is transformative, too. The large studios, for instance, dominated their respective industries by curating content producers and owning distribution channels. The Internet brought democracy to these endeavors, but the democratization increases competition and drives down the price of the content, such as with Internet-based crowd-source marketplaces.

The Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away.

Black Swans, White Rats, Red Herrings

Predicting the future is a fool’s errand, and so we may as well be first in line. All this talk about where we might be headed might be more persuasive if we knew where we were now. That being said, our brains work better when we have something to measure against. A baseline or a hypothesis allows us to create some sort of an experiment to determine how reality compares to our guess. Without the baseline, we are more likely to shape what we experience to match what we believed before the experience. It somehow matters little the size of the peg we imagine we can fit into whatever ...