Netflix Strategy and House of Cards

Seth Godin makes the argument that Netflix made a marketing mistake with its release of the entire first season of House of Cards:

HBO understands this, and used shows like the Sopranos to build subscriptions. The day after each episode, people at work would talk about what happened the night before. Not two days later, or four days later, but the very next day. If you didn't watch or didn't have HBO, you felt left out....

Today, of course, we don't wait for work the next day. We talk about it now. And the mistake Netflix made was that they didn't drip. They didn't queue it up for their viewers, didn't coordinate and sync the buzz. In short: they didn't tell you WHEN to talk about it. If "spoiler alert" comes up too often, then we're afraid to speak and afraid to listen (depending on where we are in the viewing cycle).

While I agree that Netflix might have generated some buzz by releasing the episodes on a weekly basis, and that the buzz could draw in new viewers, I think that they both recognized the different expectations of their viewers and also the difficulty of establishing the required level of viewership and buzz in that manner. For example, I've read a number of reviews in which the writer commented that he didn't really get hooked until the fifth or sixth episode. Also, it's not particularly unusual for Netflix to provide TV content, one season at a time, so it has viewers who are used to the luxury of being able to watch all of the episodes from a particular season over a short period of time.

If Netflix releases the entire second season of House of Cards at once, I'll agree with Godin - they don't "get it". But if, as I suspect, they start releasing their original material on a week-by-week basis, I think it's fair to say that the release of the complete first season was a strategic move. While Godin may be correct that an HBO-style strategy would have been better from the outset, I think a compelling case can be made that Netflix needs to establish itself as a producer of high quality original programming and get its members hooked on its original, streamed content before it shifts to a more traditional schedule for releasing new episodes.

Where the Jobs... Aren't

The full analysis is more complicated, involving tradable jobs, and higher and lower value-added jobs, but Seth Godin highlights an important statistic for U.S. job creation:

Nobel-prize winning economist Michael Spence makes this really clear: there are tradable jobs (making things that could be made somewhere else, like building cars, designing chairs and answering the phone) and non-tradable jobs (like mowing the lawn or cooking burgers). Is there any question that the first kind of job is worth keeping in our economy? Alas, Spence reports that from 1990 to 2008, the US economy added only 600,000 tradable jobs.

I can't say that it's surprising that when you look at the production of goods you'll find that manufacturers seek out the lowest-cost means of production. Domestically that means automation and other efforts that can reduce the cost of production and, of course, outsourcing. As Godin puts it,

If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

Godin is correct to question the approach taken by schools, and a model of education that still seems largely designed to create quiet, industrious workers for the factory floor, but re-inventing schools will not solve this problem. Even if we could imagine a scenario in which K-12 education primed U.S. school children for a high tech, competitive, innovative, entrepreneurial, creative work environment, there simply aren't enough jobs that require 21st century post-industrial skill set. That is to say, employment focused on invention, design and creativity has to at some level be attached to a product or service. An economy, no matter how large or robust, has limits in its capacity to sell and consume products and services, and the economy will continue to require large numbers of low-level workers to produce the goods and deliver the services. Rather than creating a society in which most people have satisfying, creative jobs and all have the opportunity for such jobs, I suspect that as our economy moves closer to Godin's vision we'll see a continued squeeze on the middle class. But Godin's not offering a solution - he's sharing a warning:

The post-industrial revolution is here. Do you care enough to teach your kids to take advantage of it?

Get your kids the education and tools they need for the future, because we're not going back.

Hard Work Can Come at the End of Long Work

Seth Godin illustrates his theory of hard work vs. long work by alluding to the legal profession:

Long work is what the lawyer who bills 14 hours a day filling in forms does.

Hard work is what the insightful litigator does when she synthesizes four disparate ideas and comes up with an argument that wins the case--in less than five minutes.

Which lawyer do you think is billing by the hour and which is working on a fixed or contingency fee?

Seriously, though, I suspect Godin hasn't spent much time looking at what lawyers actually do for a living. Yes, you may find what you think to be the seminal case or come up with what should be a winning argument inside of five magic minutes, but that doesn't mean that opposing counsel will read the case the way you do. Or the judge. I recall a trial in which a judge, responding to an objection that a witness's own out-of-court statements were hearsay, "That's not what they taught at my law school." If it's on the finer points of the rules of evidence, fat lot of good the "winning argument" is going to do in that court. And then, of course, you have appellate courts in which your perfect precedent may be revised, narrowed or reversed.

The lay notion that there's always a statute or case exactly on point is one that doesn't often hold true in legal practice. There's almost always a way to distinguish a case based even upon slight differences in fact or in the legal issues presented. The five minutes it takes to find the best, most relevant case may be followed by several hours preparing a motion and brief to present the argument to opposing counsel and the court.

Frankly, in most cases the issues aren't that complex. When you're looking at a car accident in which both drivers claim that they had right-of-way, the brilliant, winning idea would presumably be, "The other driver is lying or mistaken." But pulling together all of the relevant evidence, photographs, and witness statements necessary to prove that to a court will be a time-consuming process. Yes, on rare occasion you might find the damning memo buried in boxes of documents delivered by the opposing party and know, within minutes, that you're going to settle or win the case, but odds are those documents were delivered by truck - that is, you're only going to find the memo by plodding through dozens to hundreds of boxes filled with similar documents.

It may, in fact, be the attorney in the forms-driven practice who is better able to follow Godin's suggestion - for example, he can hire a paralegal or two to complete the paperwork, such that he can serve more clients while performing less work himself. Or he can create an automated system in which the client fills out an initial online questionnaire and 95% of the spaces on the forms are automatically populated with the client's information, significantly reducing the amount of work necessary to revise and refine the document to the client's specific need.

Back when I was in law school, a graduate student who was studying math and computer science suggested that it might, ultimately, be possible to create a computer program to analyze case law, then fork through the cases to automatically find appropriate outcomes to legal disputes. Godin's comment reminds me of that proposal - it would be nice if it were true, but in the world of legal disputes the human factor is simply too great for that to ever become a reality.

Why Stay in a Bad Job....

Seth Godin offers something of a challenge to dissatisfied workers:

You might very well be doing a good job. But that doesn't mean you're a linchpin, the one we'll miss. For that, you have to stop thinking about the job and start thinking about your platform, your point of view and your mission.

It's entirely possible you work somewhere that gives you no option but to merely do a job. If that's actually true, I wonder why someone with your potential would stay...

Last year I read Godin's book, Linchpin and found a lot of good ideas. I know that some will read it in the hope that it's a how-to guide, and be disappointed that it's much more a description of a mindset. The concept as presented is at times a bit too personality-oriented, but I think any good manager reading the book can find inspiration for how to improve a workplace and get more from his workers, and any worker whose job includes a creative element can find inspiration for how to make himself more valuable. That said, as I read the book I couldn't help but think back to my last traditional job and how completely out of synch that workplace was with Godin's concept of the linchpin. I won't bore you with examples, but... oh, my. And yes, I got out.

Look, I appreciate how "in this economy" (or any economy) people want to keep their jobs. Or to have another job offer lined up before giving notice. But for professionals I'm finding myself thinking along the lines of Godin, that "the very nature of a job is outmoded". That if you can find ways to make your skills and insights more valuable, you'll do better and be happier outside of a traditional "job" (even if you have a traditional employer and collect a traditional paycheck). Is the path from 'here' to 'there' going to be an easy one? For most people, no, it will involve hard work and risk-taking. But you know what? The boring, mind-numbing traditional jobs will continue to be around for a while, so you have a fall-back position. And if the risk pays off, you won't look back.