“Marketers fall into one of two categories:

• A few benefit when they make their customers smarter. The more the people they sell to know, the more informed, inquisitive, free-thinking and alert they are, the better they do.
• And most benefit when they work to make their customers dumber. The less they know about options, the easier they are to manipulate, the more helpless they are, the better they do.

 
Tim O’Reilly doesn’t sell books. He sells smarts. The smarter the world gets, the better he does.

The vast majority of marketers, though, take the opposite tack. Ask them for advice about their competitors, they turn away and say “I really wouldn”t know.” Ask them for details about their suppliers, and they don’t want to tell you. Ask them to show you a recipe for how to make what they make on your own, and “it’s a trade secret.” Their perfect customer is someone in a hurry, with plenty of money and not a lot of knowledge about their options.

You’ve already guessed the punchline–if just one player enters the field and works to make people smarter, the competition has a hard time responding with a dumbness offensive. They can obfuscate and run confusing ads, but sooner or later, the inevitability of information spreading works in favor of those that bet on it.”

Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

“If you want to hire people to do a job, to be cogs in the system and to do what they’re told, you might want to focus on people who don’t think very highly of themselves.  People with low self-esteem might be more happy to be bossed around, timed, abused, misused and micromanaged, no?  And the converse is true as well. If you want to raise your game and build an organization filled with people who will change everything, the first thing to look for is someone who hasn’t been brainwashed into believing that they’re not capable of great work.  A harried teacher might find it easier to teach a class to obey first and think second, but is that sort of behavior valuable or scarce now?

Industries that need to subjugate women or demonstrate power over one class of person or another are always on the lookout for people they can diminish. Our task, then, is to find people we can encourage and nurture until they’re as impatient with average as we are.  The paradox is that the very people that are the easiest to categorize, to command and to dominate are the last people we want to work with.”

– Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

“An idea turns into a meeting and then it turns into a project. People get brought along, there’s free donuts, there’s a whiteboard and even a conference call.  It feels like you’re doing the work, but at some point, hopefully, someone asks, “what’s the point of this?”  Is it worth doing?  Compared to everything else we could be investing (don’t say ‘spending’) our time on, is this the scariest, most likely to pay off, most important or the best long-term endeavor?  Or are we just doing it because no one had the guts along the way to say STOP.  Are you doing work worth doing, or are you just doing your job?” – Seth Godin