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Perhaps a not-so-surprising question asked often about what Edgeware offers to fledgeling and startup entrepreneurs is Am I too old for this? We think this may arise from the perception that outside-the-square approaches to business development, given the emerging digital business models, is the province of the (chronologically) young. It isn’t so.
From the outset it has been remarkable that the people attracted most strongly to the Edgeware approach, style and spirit - our DNA of ‘Make Money, Have Fun, Change the World’ - cannot readily be defined by demographic, that is, by age, gender, ethnicity,geography and so on. Instead, Edgies are better identified and defined by psychographic, neatly framed as IAO - Interests, Activities, and Opinions. The Edgie psychographic is youthful, not necessarily physically young. In our way of thinking, young entrepreneurs are emerging entrepreneurs with a certain mindset, characterised by curiousity, optimism, energy, openness, a sense of fun and a drive to make meaning. So if you feel too ‘old’ for that, you’re probably outside the psychographic.
For more on Edgeware’s UPLOAD Young Entrepreneurship offerings, check out this page.
Did an Edgeware team-building workshop recently at the Logan Women’s Health Centre. The question: ‘Who’s your customer?’ elicited the usual response from not-for-profits: ‘it’s women, who otherwise … etc’. This is fine; these are indeed the clients of the service. But are they the customers? It turned out in conversation that the prime customer of the service was government, that is, that the core value exchange was ‘We give you funding (on behalf of *our* customers, the women of Logan) and you give us a service’. The women who access the service are in fact the customer’s customers, so the thing for the Health Centre to do is identify and recognise the (very different) needs of two customer segments.
It’s sometimes said amongst crusty old cynics that youth is wasted on the young, meaning, we assume, that the benefits of youthfulness - health, energy, optimism, idealism - are something that the crusty old cynics themselves can more sensibly deal with and deploy. They’re wrong. Youth is a time for not knowing what you don’t know. Like KaosPilot trainee Michael Nybrandt, who in 2001 didn’t know you can’t just knock on the door of the Dalai Lama and ask him if you can help start up the first Tibetan National Football Association. As it happens, he got the green light (he didn’t know that he wouldn’t) and the team has been a source of pride to the world’s Tibetans and their supporters, and a thorn in China’s side, ever since. And don’t forget the world’s oldest child, the Dalai Lama himself, a source of constant inspiration and good humour who refuses to ‘know’ that the battle to save the culture of his country is without hope.
Youth is not wasted on the young; cynicism is superfluous in the old.
To avoid the overwhelm that some people feel by the prescription to change the world - the world is so huge, there’s so much to do, and where do I start? - it’s simple enough to start by leaving more value than you take. Doing so, at the very minimum, overcomes the natural inclination towards greed…
This is a call to focus your passion and creativity on creating value that you can share with others, for brilliant, creative, and compassionate people lose more by withholding what they have and not exchanging value than by leaving more of what they have on the table.
From Leave Some Value On The Table by Charlie Gilkey at Productive Flourishing
Interesting to hear the increasing use of the word ‘touch’ in marketing: how many times, and in what way, does your product message and brand ‘touch’ your customers?
Daniel Pink says that products and services of the ‘concept economy’ focus on high touch and high concept. High Touch means intimate, personal, authentic, real. High Concept - a term borrowed from the film world - means imaginative, affective, succinct, compelling.
For Pink, low touch and low concept goods and services have become the domain of emerging economies, or they have been automated. Pink’s excellent book, A Whole New Mind, sets out this premise clearly and compellingly.
