SustainableWork

I've used the work of the great writer John McPhee to illustrate a previous point about the shipping grid.

When John McPhee writes about something, you don't need any advance knowledge of that subject. You don't have to have any prior interest in it. But rest assured, you'll come away from his writing not just informed but graced, embraced and made better by Mr. McPhee's immense talent

I've just read an amazingly informative interview/conversation John McPhee had with The New Yorker Online.

McPhee is a Pulitzer prize winner, author of 29 books, with awards and accolades from a zillion directions. He also continues to teach writing at Princeton, well into his 70s.

I was amazed at the open source descriptions John uses to describe his most extraordinary day job. He blocks out his bricks and mortar dance with creativity. It's putting one foot in front of the other. Planning. Executing. Step by step. Day in and day out. Sort of boring from the outside looking in.

However, just imagine being John McPhee looking out. Ooooohhhhh.

This is a person making valuable contributions omnidirectionally. And apparently having a grand life, in a hard working sort of way. He’s changing the world for the better, one 3 X 5 card at a time, one step at a time, one contribution at a time.

Making your own gig doesn't have to involve making widgets. It involves making contributions.

You can do it with your own unique talents and skills. You don't need Pulitzer prizes and neither does Mr. McPhee. You need a day job that brings you a little more control, a little more security, and a lot more peace of mind.

As the Q&A ended, Mr. McPhee was talking about all the pitches he'd made to The New Yorker over the course of 10 years, trying to break in. He'd wanted to write for them since he was a teenager. First ignored, then rejected. He kept pitching. That turned into rejections with notes attached. That's when he started closing in. He offered deals, like working on spec.

When the New Yorker finally started weakening, John McPhee didn't get cautious. McPhee broke the rules. He pitched an idea they specifically told him they did not want. McPhee not only pitched it but buried them in pitch. A 5,000 word letter telling his lifelong target customer why they were wrong and why his never-published-in-their-magazine ideas should prevail.

It finishes like this...

"So the executive editor said they would like to read this article. He said, No guarantees, of course. I wrote the thing, sent it to him, and it changed my existence—I ceased to be a commuter, forever; I went to work in my own garage. And I’m still doing it."

Friend, you're looking into the work of a great peddler. My highest compliment. Not an atom of negative in the term. I'm a peddler.

Whatever your enterprise, whatever you endeavor, whatever your contribution, there will be tough, difficult times. Planning and executing minimizes that stuff, but nothing substitutes for persistence and risk taking with honor.

Are you planning to start your or grow your enterprise? Do one of those athlete training exercises and picture your success in advance. Then build a plan to get there. Then execute. One foot in front of the other.

You'll have your own images of course. Yours will be better for you than anything I can suggest. I wish you the best getting there. You can do it.

But just to get you started, give a thought to John McPhee in his garage.

The New Yorker Online interview with John McPhee

John McPhee’s home page

Labels: entrepreneurship, innovation, John McPhee, sales tales, startups

Tom Peters talks about how the good folks at Fed Ex should wake up every day and be thankful they have such a great competitor in UPS. Ditto, UPS. Throw in DHL, USPS and others. These organizations have been having at each other for a good long piece now. Service is way up, as is ease of use. You, my enterprise friend, are in a lovely position to reap the benefits.

I'm a guy that builds biz models around shipping. It's just my own take on things, but I believe you can lead a much more sustainable life when you don't have to move your service or your product through your own 3D retail location. You can and should use the retail locations of other partners in your food chain, but I've always liked positioning ourselves far enough upriver that much of our production can just be shipped out.

Many people will love having their own retail exposure. It's just not been my gig. If you have a well executed retail presence in ANY market you will attract many great (and lousy) producers and vendors. Those of us without your value added access to your end users need your distribution and marketing skills. You make the place better by appropriately moving our stuff to those who need it.

However, not all of us want to be in 3D retail. For the rest, I'd suggest you focus on the amazing shipping grid the world has laid at our feet.

Physical shipping will add cost but what's a retail outlet going to cost? What are regional offices going to cost? What will staffing, insurance, rent, heating, cooling, and all the rest cost?

Think of the global shipping grid as a big slow motion internet. It's readily accessible without much training. You can get stuff to and from almost anywhere. Its utility for small enterprise has grown from almost negative value to ubiquitous through the economic evolution of the last few decades. You can and should take full advantage of it with relative ease. You can grow your own sustainable enterprise on the back of a knowledge and logistics grid the likes of which the planet has never seen. This tool, like the internet, is just laying out there essentially free, until you need it.

Back in the day, 20 - 25 years ago, trying to work the global shipping grid as a small enterprise was one gnarly ass task. It was set up for high volume shippers. Little guys got chewed up and spit out. Overnight and expedited shipping was proportionally much more expensive. Shipping out of the country was close to brain surgery. If something needed tracing, you'd spend hours on the phone. If something got lost, good luck.

Now the smallest enterprise can order a single pickup and delivery from their computer, know the cost in advance, predict accurate delivery dates, see and capture a record of who signed for it, what time they signed, and get instant traceability on a mess of other metrics. This is available to you from multiple vendors who are all killing themselves to make it easier to do business with them. The capabilities built into the shipping grid now are pretty amazing. And they keep getting better.

One of my favorite writers, John McPhee, wrote a great article about UPS in the New Yorker, April 18,2005. Get this... "Every night around the network UPS has something like thirteen airplanes and thirty-two crewmen ready but unassigned. They sit and wait for trouble to arise, like pilots in the Swiss Air Force, whose planes are hidden inside the Alps, always ready to emerge, in times of need, through camouflaged doors in the sides of the mountains. The UPS term for this is "hot spares". In Louisville or elsewhere, the light lights up, a siren goes off, and a loudspeaker says, "Activate the hot spare!" Hot-spare crews report to work each evening and go out to the ramp to pre-trip their plane. Then they wait. They arrive at seven and go home at three in the morning. If they are triggered by a call to "replace a mechanical" or "rescue that volume!", they have thirty minutes to get their plane off the ground. When the hot-spare light is red, mechanicals are the most common cause. In all its years of flying, UPS has never lost an airplane."

As you're reading this, this kind of evolution of the shipping grid is growing quietly all over the world. It's not costing you a single penny right now. You'll only need to pay when you use the tool, and then, you'll have a bunch of great providers working hard for your business.

Start ups and emerging enterprises don't typically get this treatment.

Take advantage of it.

John McPhee

UPS

FedEx

DHL

USPS US Postal Service

Tom Peters
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Labels: entrepreneurship, John McPhee, startups