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Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don't
 
 

Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don't (Hardcover)

by Jim Collins (Foreword), Kevin Maney (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
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“A rare book that leaves you with a simple but profound way to build stronger products, organizations, and careers.  Trade-Off introduces one of those ideas that will stick in your mind for decades. Get ready to re-think what differentiates success from failure.”
--Tom Rath, co-author of the New York Times bestseller Strengths Based Leadership

“What’s new out there, what’s good, and will it be around tomorrow? Kevin Maney has written a provocative and original exploration of some of the mysteries of our consuming lives: why, for instance, has Apple stayed hot and Motorola gone cold? Will Starbucks and Wal-Mart and American Airlines flourish or flop? Required reading for all CEOs; intriguing and entertaining for the rest of us.”
--Harold Evans, author of They Made America: Two Centuries of Innovators

“This book demystifies success in the marketplace. Buy it, read it, learn from it and use it.”
--Keith Ferrazzi, bestselling author of Never Eat Alone and Who’s Got Your Back

“Moving deftly from Crocs to the Kindle, to Ozzy Osborne, to the daily newspaper, Kevin Maney shows how the trade-off between fidelity and convenience can make or break a business.  He shares several success stories, of course. But even better, he tells us about some serious commercial bloopers. These cautionary tales alone are worth the price of this terrific book.” 
-- Daniel H. Pink, author of A Whole New Mind

"Trade-Off by Kevin Maney shows how the tug-of-war between quality and convenience can make or break a product, a brand, or even a company. This book puts a new slant on why we make the choices we make in the marketplace. A fresh and fascinating read!"
--Ken Blanchard, co-author of The One Minute Manager and Leading at a Higher Level

“Packed with historical and contemporary case studies, Trade-Off is a practical guide to overcoming business dilemmas and steering your company toward long-term success.   Kevin Maney offers straight talk about choosing winning strategies that will keep your brand strong.”
--Tom Kelley, bestselling author of The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation

“Unputdownable!  Trade-Off will change the way you think about why some things–iphones or Coach bags–take off, while others fall by the wayside.  It you want to understand why the marketplace works the way it does, read it–then read it again.”
--Linda Kaplan Thaler, bestselling author of The Power of Nice and The Power of Small

“...like Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling books Outliers and Blink, Maney presents a seemingly simple premise and the evidence to support it -- as well as various factors that can complicate it.”
--Reuters

“Worth a read for another take on shifting ideas of quality.”
--Wired

Product Description

A Fresh and Important New Way to Understand Why We Buy

Why did the RAZR ultimately ruin Motorola? Why does Wal-Mart dominate rural and suburban areas but falter in large cities? Why did Starbucks stumble just when it seemed unstoppable?

The answer lies in the ever-present tension between fidelity (the quality of a consumer’s experience) and convenience (the ease of getting and paying for a product). In Trade-Off, Kevin Maney shows how these conflicting forces determine the success, or failure, of new products and services in the marketplace. He shows that almost every decision we make as consumers involves a trade-off between fidelity and convenience–between the products we love and the products we need. Rock stars sell out concerts because the experience is high in fidelity-–it can’t be replicated in any other way, and because of that, we are willing to suffer inconvenience for the experience. In contrast, a downloaded MP3 of a song is low in fidelity, but consumers buy music online because it’s superconvenient. Products that are at one extreme or the other–those that are high in fidelity or high in convenience–-tend to be successful. The things that fall into the middle-–products or services that have moderate fidelity and convenience-–fail to win an enthusiastic audience. Using examples from Amazon and Disney to People Express and the invention of the ATM, Maney demonstrates that the most successful companies skew their offerings to either one extreme or the other-–fidelity or convenience-–in shaping products and building brands.

Inside This Book (Learn More)
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars "If you can't be the best,...then be the most convenient.", Sep 25 2009
By Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
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Compromises are inevitable and usually involve a trade-off in one form or another. In the business world, Kevin Maney suggests that there is an ever-present tension between quality and convenience, more specifically between what he calls "high-fidelity" and "high-convenience." He provides in this volume what Jim Collins suggests in the Foreword, a "strategic lens" that "does not in itself give an answer about what you should do, and not do. Rather - and much better - it forces you to engage in a powerful question, from which you derive your own insight and make your own decisions...The power of a strategic concept [such as the one Maney shares] lies first and foremost in giving us a lens and a stimulus for hard thinking and hard choices. The critical question is not its universal truth, but its usefulness. And in this, I think Kevin Maney has extracted a very useful framework."

Maney cites the CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, as an example of a business leader who obviously did some hard thinking before making a critically important decision. During a program at a conference that Maney attended, "Hastings said that his strategic decisions at Netflix were driven by one simple core principle: People are willing to trade the quality of an experience for the convenience of getting it, and vice versa." It occurred Maney that Hastings' core concept "was a terrific lens for viewing the way the world works. It can be an invaluable insight when dreaming up new products, when positioning brands, when planning company strategy, or when analyzing competitors."

Each day, business leaders are required to make decisions that involve trade-offs of one kind or another. I agree with Maney that "how they play out in the marketplace is the key to countless business successes and failures." That is what Maney characterizes as "the fidelity swap" and there are five key concepts behind it: fidelity (i.e. the total experience) versus convenience (how easy or difficult it is to get what you want), the tech effect (i.e. technology's impact on improving both fidelity and convenience), the fidelity "belly" (i.e. "the no-man's-land of consumer experience"), the fidelity mirage (i.e. that product or company can achieve both high fidelity and high convenience), and super-fidelity or super-convenience (i.e. this defines the "winners" such Apple's iPhone and Wal-Mart, both of which got to top of one axis or the other...but never attempted to reach both). Maney also identifies two significant additional factors: social accelerants that increase the importance of personal relationships even more and "wrecking ball" moments that occur when a new product or service (e.g. digital cameras in 2000) "smashes" a market sector and creates an entirely new one.

I was especially interested in Chapters Five and Six in which Maney discusses Super Fidelity and then Super Convenience. Is Super Fidelity possible? Yes, difficult but possible. Is it sustainable? Yes, but that's much more difficult to do. As Maney explains in detail, "Corning, the glass company, has thrived on high fidelity for 150 years." Others have done so for much shorter periods of time, notably the aforementioned Apple iPhones, Whole Foods, Cirque du Soleil, and Bose. "Perhaps no one in business understands fidelity better than casino owner Steve Wynn." With regard to Super Convenience, Maney cites and discusses several examples that include MTV, Century 21, McDonald's, and 7-Eleven. "One of the all-time kings of high convenience in the retail industry is Wal-Mart." However, as Maney then explains, Wal-Mart seemed to develop a corporate brain freeze" about 2000 when it "started doing things that were out of step with its long heritage in super-convenience," such as opening stores in the center of major cities (e.g. New York and Chicago) and carrying higher-priced, more fashionable clothes and advertising in upscale magazines. In an attempt to increase its aura, Wal-Mart was forgetting its roots as the lowest-cost retailer. Eventually, there was a corporate flaw, inner-city stores were closed, fashion ads and pricier clothes were eliminated, and a new marketing campaign was launched, based on the promise "Save money. Live Better."

In his essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin divides the world `s creatures into hedgehogs and foxes, based on an ancient Greek parable: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Jim Collins picks up on this idea in Good to Great when introducing the Hedgehog Concept, explaining that "it is not a goal to be the best, a strategy to be the best, an intention to be the best, a plan to be the best. It is an understanding of what you can be the best at. The distinction is absolutely critical." Near the conclusion of Trade-Off Maney recalls a moment while reading Good to Great when coming upon the discussion of the Hedgehog Concept. "It's the notion that great companies figure out what they can do better than anyone else in the world, and then relentlessly focus on that. But the Hedgehog Concept doesn't just apply to companies - it can apply to an individual, too."

Maney then recalls a conversation with Collins. "He said that there are two ways to get to the top. One is to climb an existing ladder, which can be a bit crowded. The other is to make your own ladder, and put yourself at the top. It's a twist on the Hedgehog Concept - if you can't be the best in the existing category, figure out what you can be best at, and create a category that fits." Few companies achieve and then sustain either High Fidelity or High Convenience. (To the best of my knowledge, no company has ever achieved and then sustained both simultaneously.) Committing to one or the other requires all manner of trade-offs, based on hard thinking to make hard choices. To those now involved in that immensely difficult process, Kevin Maney offers a wealth of valuable information in combination with sound advice. In fact, I presume to suggest that his book is a "must read."
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