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John Fraim, GreatHouse Company

Differentiating Ourselves to Death

"The real issue for the future of technology does not appear to be the production of information...Almost anybody can add information. The difficult question is how to reduce it."

Eli Noam

With a core American business paradigm of differentiation, it is little wonder that American business becomes more and more confused as the millennium rolls towards us. The "branding" mantra is to make your company, your product, even you (Tom Peters notes that "You" are your own brand) into a brand and as a brand find uniqueness and differentiation from your competitors.

Yet this strategy has less and less application in the age of the internet when alliances and commonalties are more important than differences. Confusion is only doubled when those providing advice to business (such as graduate business schools and management consulting firms) become more and more caught up in the great differentiation game. American business is sold "branded" advice, and, it is in the best interest of the advice givers to continue to "brand" and differentiate rather than search for commonality.

In an increasing global economy, the need for a unified American perspective to compete becomes essential. But a shared perspective becomes a fading pipe dream. As a result, the American response to the global challenge becomes mired in hundreds of "best seller" fad ideas that come and go with the regularity of Detroit's yearly car model changes.

* * *

Differentiation in the business world and the business advice world, though, is only one of the symptoms of a late capitalistic system and information centered economy. In this context, one needs to ask why it would be in the interest of an economy based on information to lessen the amount of information in it. Money comes by increasing data flow not decreasing data flow. There is only profit in greater segmentation, more products, smaller target markets. More data. Yet more data leads to more confusion. This is one of the great paradoxes of our age. The problem is to reduce information but in a capitalistic system, where is the profit in information reduction?

So, in effect, all of us inhabitants of the strange, new "Post-Modern" America are partly to blame. We are all on the same ship and the ship plunges full steam ahead into the dark cold night. There may be bright, sharp stars overhead. But no one seems to be looking overhead for navigational guidance. The music of the big band on the ship plays away and the drinking and the partying continues. Along the expensive polished wooden decks of the great ship, the advice peddlers set up their booths and sell their "snake oil" to all of those out for an evening stroll in the cold night.

There are a few up there in the ship's crows nest shouting warnings down to us. One is that old critic Peter Drucker who warns us to look up and out. In the August 1998 Forbes the old guru of management says "We can already discern and define the next, and perhaps even more important task in developing an effective information system for top management: the collection and organization of outside-focused information. All the data we have so far, including those provided by the new tools, focus inward. But inside an enterprise - indeed even inside the entire economic chain - there are only costs. Results are only on the outside."

To Drucker, the hope of the computer revolution was to give true information about the outside world to management. Information to make a true business strategy possible for the first time. But sadly this hope has not been realized as computers have been used to control (the internal) rather than understand (the external).

But then, what does an old man, almost ninety years old, know in a world run by Generation X. The warnings from the crows nest are covered by the increasingly loud music of the ships band. We all dance away into the night and the sellers of snake oil continue to bark at us, selling their magical cure- all remedies for all that ails our business.

In the distance a great island shape appears. It looks like an iceberg.

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