Author: Franz Malten Buemann

“What’s a fax machine?”

There are people working today who don’t know.

In the 1980s, I produced a book about VCR tapes and video stores that’s so obsolete, you can’t even find a used copy any more.

Technical generations keep getting shorter–A hard drive from ten years ago is probably not going to work with your new laptop.

Contrast this with us. Human generations have been chronicled for thousands of years. We know who begat who.

Lee De Forest, father of radio, was raised by people who voted for Abraham Lincoln, but he died when Bruce Springsteen was twelve years old. That’s not many handshakes from “The Battle Hymn” to “Blinded by the Light”… During that same period of time, we invented and moved on from radio, live TV, nationwide magazines, color TV, cable TV, Compuserve, Yahoo, GeoCities, The Globe, MySpace and 10,000 other steps.

I’ve lived exactly half my adult life in the 20th century and the other half in the 21st. The cycles keep getting faster, but not the human generations. This means that we’re either bringing a bit of insight and wisdom to the changes, or allowing ourselves to be whipsawed, brainwashed or blindsided by all the change.

Up to us.

Business models rework the world.

Organize assets. Add labor. Sell something for enough money that you get to do it again, but more.

That’s how we ended up with a $5 chicken in many pots, a car in front of many houses and a world that’s been paved. One cycle at a time, one dollar at a time.

Originally, business models were primarily about needs. You need food, I’ll build a farm. You need shelter, I’ll build houses.

As parts of the world have gotten richer and richer, though, the money that’s spent (which is what business models are based on) has shifted largely to wants. One millionaire buying collectible cars spends far more than 100 families buying beans or lettuce.

Marvel spent $400,000,000 to make Avengers: Endgame. Because there was a business model in place that made it a reasonable investment choice.

What if we wanted to cure river blindness or address ineffective policing as much as we wanted to watch movies? The business model would shift and things would change–in a different direction.

I’m not sure there’s an intrinsic reason that watching a particular movie is more satisfying than solving an endemic problem. We’ve simply evolved our culture to be focused on the business of amusement instead of the journey toward better.

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It’s true, at least for now, that there are plenty of fish in the sea.
And it’s also true that shooting fish in a barrel is pretty easy if there are enough fish and the barrel is small enough.
You can’t have both.
Either you approach the world as a widely dispersed bunch of opportunities where you’re never specific or on the hook.
Or you realize that finding a very focused place to do your work rewards you many times over.