The Artisans' Long Tail
The unfair advantage
We are all familiar with the idea of long-tail distributions—that in the age of digitisation, an almost infinite range of incrementally different varieties of products and services is accessible at almost zero cost.
This makes me wonder why so many people spend so much time and money to be just about the same as everybody else. For those in corporate roles and many professions, it means that there is an endless supply of people who can fulfil your job description available at a moment’s notice.
Technology will exacerbate it when we have impressive technology to do the grunt work, as even more people will be able to fill those job descriptions with a little help from their digital pal. Our educators’ and politicians’ obsession with STEM subjects will guarantee a continuous supply of raw materials.
“When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.”
―C. S. Lewis
The MBA market is huge, worth approaching $80bn, half of it in finance. Competition means that whilst Harvard and Yale lead the way, every other business school in the world is following them. Instead of producing rounded, creative thinkers about business, we are providing Meat-Based Algorithms capable of slotting easily into expensive, pre-defined, interchangeable roles.
Change and healthy market growth require both innovation and evolution - not just new ideas, but new perspectives that will take us away from mindless production and consumption to something more wholesome and sustainable - and that is unlikely to come from those who have been programmed more than educated in business.
What we need will come from the long tail—those who understand biology as well as balance sheets, philosophy as well as profit statements, and altruism as well as artificial intelligence. As the NRA like to shout, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” so we can say the same about business. It’s even more lethal in the wrong hands.
Alan Moore has a wonderful little book, “Do Build,” which asks thirteen questions about making business beautiful. I’m showing it here. There’s never been a more important time to slip these questions into your mind and look at Alan’s work.
These are “long tail” questions that sit near the surface of every artisan’s mind but remain vanishingly rare in the resumés of those queuing up for the big jobs in finance and technology. (Steve Jobs was an exception. He did seem to do alright, though.)
The question this begs is how we turn up at work and seek work. A few of us, through a combination of good fortune (and age), find ourselves in a place where the world of work fascinates us but has no hold over us. Most, however, are faced with compromise: how to keep the artisan alive and growing when operating within the tight constraints of organizational boundaries designed for efficiency, productivity, and compliance.
An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but will never break.”
Chinese Proverb.
How do we bring the “red thread” of our commitment to our craft to our work without ringing the alarm bells in those who find it threatening in order to allow beauty to do its quiet work?
If we can do that in a world that worships compliance and conformity, we have an unfair advantage.
I believe the answer lies in conversation with others asking themselves the same question: somewhere quiet, Outside the Walls of conventional business thinking and practice. From the end of this month, New Artisans will move over and be included in my substack, “Outside the Walls” (OTW). I am moving those already registered here over to OTW and extending current paid subscriptions to April 2025 as a thank you for being here.
If you’re not there yet, it would be wonderful to have you along as we explore the space outside the walls. Heretics, Poachers, Pirates and Wanderers very welcome…
I notice this is the NHS. So many smart, very well educated folks on the front line who are confined by the guideline-imperative. The need to follow a set of, often out dated, tick box exercises in the name of standardisation and risk avoidance which reduce the work to an unthinking automaton. All the care and noticing get squeezed out leaving the individual feeling no meaning or agency in their work. No wonder so many GPs, doctors and nurses are leaving the profession early. The story of nursing staff unwilling to lift a patient in a ward resulting in an ambulance having to be called to take the patient a few hundred yards to A&E for a check up and X-ray. This meant the patient sat on the loo floor (after a fall) for hours. It’s not that the nursing staff didn’t care, they were fearful of breaching the protocol which could mean they are reported for a disciplinary review. These protocols give leaders an unsafe perception of good care and safety been provided. Ticking the box does not mean the right thing is done, often quick the opposite. It de-humanises the interaction in a profession that is all about care. This needs light shining on it so it can be tackled rather than remaining in the shadows.
Just as moving Outside the Walls requires a different mindset, so does understanding how we fit into a long tail world. When Chris Anderson introduced the idea in 2006, I thought it was an idea whose time had come. It was the early days of the internet, before smart phones. Everything look bright and hopeful for the future. But along the way, the reality that we live in a world of globally centralized institutions has made it harder, not impossible, for the long tail to become a reality.
We are at a historic juncture in modern history, where the sustainability of large, centralized institutions of governance and finance is in question. The power of smart phone technology has made forming networks of collaborative relationships a reality. The challenge is the access to products, manufacturers, and distributors who can serve a long tail business and its customers.