The Phenomenology of Business
The other day I received a marketing e-mail from an old comrade out of university days, Alan Rae, of Punch Above Your Weight. Alan now works as a consultant to small businesses, analysing how they do or can grow. One of the key points in the mail was the difference between demand-limited businesses, which are therefore scalable, and production-limited businesses, which are not. For the first business, if you get more demand you source more product, whereas in the second case once you’ve sold it you sold it. Clearly, these types of business need different marketing strategies. The message continued:
It’s local vs national that makes the difference. A local business can get its leads by networking locally. But a national business benefits from the extra reach and randomness that online working gives you.
The comment I send back was that “In many cases, no doubt. But in my case, it’s hard to be more international, yet I am entirely supply-limited. Once I’m booked, I’m booked, and outsourcing would be extremely unprofessional”, to which Alan replied (tongue in cheek, I assume) that I am therefore officially a “gifted amateur”.
By implication, freelance translators in general are “gifted amateurs”, a label that we might not all be happy with. (Yes, yes, I could say “a label with which we might not all be happy”. But I won’t.)
It struck me that this kind of misjudgement happens most easily when we try to analyze a field by sheer conceptual juggling, rather than referring to the phenomena that are out there. As the word “phenomenological” crossed my mind, I was further struck by the parallel with the shift from “comparative religion” to “phenomenology of religion”. Those of you who are not familiar with the field may think that “comparative religion” is an innocuous enough term. It might suggest an earnest, open-minded seeker with a clipboard and a checklist (with the results stored, no doubt, in an Excel file), noting that the Woobalists believe in Blongtarraby, while the breakaway Darishnymites assert that Blongtarraby should really be called Longbartnabing. Interesting stuff, eh? The fact is, however, that “comparative religion” got a bad name as it came to be associated with the almost Victorian notion that one could begin with a preconceived hierarchy, into which discoveries could be fitted as they were made. And yes, the top of the pyramid was monotheism, even “triune monotheism” – wouldn’t you just know it! The “phenomenology of religion” was intended to counter this thinking by putting the central focus on religious phenomena, whatever they may be, and only on that basis proceeding to look for underlying patterns or structures.
Well, academics have to make their living out of this, so the whole field is of course complex and subtle, but I am asking Alan to comment on my suggestion that the problem with his chart is a result of working from preconceived notions rather than from business phenomena.
Member of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting
Well the interesting thing about this is that I didn’t in fact try to make the data fit the concept. The concept came from trying to make sense of the data.
What I imagined when I started the project was that there would be a group of people who used web 2.0 media more than others and from having been active in Ecademy for about 5 years and intereviewed some of the brightest and best that these would be people were selling business services, limited in capacity like thee and me. I expected them to be using internet based tools like cloud computing and collaboration environments like BaseCamp to compete with bigger, corporate players.
I also wanted to get at what they actually did to see if there were any patterns of good practice that came out.
After about 6 months punishing the data we went off and presented what we found having invented the categories to try and explain what we were seeing – and then someone asked me how many were in each category.
I then thought – oh b*ll*cks – I haven’t actually analysed it from that point of view so I gritted my teeth and lo and behold – that’s when I discovered that the cleavage point was between local and national businesses in their behaviour.
It always strikes me that one touchstone of true knowledge is that it takes you by surprise – and I certainly wasn’t expecting to find that running a national business makes you twice as likely to use linked-in and twice as likely to believe in the value of serendipity than someone with a local business.
But hey that’s life.
I just asked them loads of questions about what they did and then went looking for patterns in the data.
Going back to the hierarchy, I naturally believe that Gifted Amateurs are at the head of the evolutionary tree.
In fact the whole project is internally code named ROGA (revenge of the gifted amateur) since we believe that the ability to create business structures out of free(ish) software held together with gaffer tape is one of the core competencies of the networked economy – alongside disobedience and being able to be equally fluent with technology and relationships.
But then having played with me in a band all those years ago you probably knew that already.
Thanks for the challenge
And thanks for rising to it!
I think that I misunderstood your original message. I thought you were saying that scalability correlated closely to the global (national) / local divide. But now I realize you were saying that the global (national) / local divide correlates to the use of online networking. My misreading.
Have I got it now?