Loud Nothings: Focus On The Spectacle Rather Than Substance Hurts Everyone

Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing – Shakespeare (Macbeth)

We go for the show. And rightly so.

The spectacular is much more impressive than substance. Why think deeply about anything when you can let the smooth, butter tones send your brain on a journey of whimsy.

Why do any of the hard, boring work when you bask in the glory of something astonishing?

A Snap Shot In Time

NCAA basketball is back baby.

The beautiful game, well the other one, is in full swing and highlights a-plenty are coming thick and fast.

One that crossed my social media feed today was this explosive play by VJ Edgecombe from Baylor.

You can see why it has gone viral. The athleticism, the grace, the power. The embarrassing attempt by the walk-on (meaning non-scholarship athlete who might not play much at all. Also, this is the coach’s son) Joe Few to block this dunk.

Check it out here, watch it a couple of times. It is awesome.

Aiming At The Wrong Target

Did you see the problem with this?

The play was great. Great steal, great bounce pass in rhythm, great dunk. The whole thing was great. Chefs Kiss.

The problem is that Baylor is down nearly 40 points. They are getting their arse kicked and this is what we see.

We don’t see all of the boring, fundamental things that got Gonzaga the huge lead.

We see the highlight and so we encourage people to seek the highlight.

The problem is focusing on the wrong thing. Goodhart’s Law says when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

There are no highlights for a good open pass, or making a good defense read. What we get is a highlight of a crazy dunk.

The point is to win the game, not have the best highlights.

Return to Shareholders

Apple and Amazon are two of the biggest companies in the world. Apple is admittedly much more fancy than Amazon but they both became huge by doing simple things very well.

Apple has an amazing supply chain and logistics so it can make the iPhone as cheap as a mass-market product but sell it at luxury margins.

Amazon made shipping into a revenue line for them and turned cloud storage into Amazon Web Services which would be an enormous company all on it’s own.

Substance or Style

When you are with your team and working on projects, you want to make sure that what is being attempted is creating value, either requiring less effort and time from your team, being able to charge more for what you are offering, increasing the quality/reducing the defects of what you are offering.

Most of these things are super boring. All of the little decisions are thoughtful and time-consuming. They are not the highlight that gets played, however, we often reward the person who sells some idea like it is a highlight.

The challenge is those smooth talkers might sound good but are what they offering really adding value or just selling a spectacle.

You have to be careful if what they are saying is all sound and fury, signfying nothing.