The dynamics of the middleman

The strategy of the jewellery counter was quite different from the strategies of all the other designers in Hyper Hyper because it didn't use it's own managed team for the supply side of the business. Instead, it relied upon a network of middlemen: a flexible structure that could call upon the expertise, initiatives and capabilities of hundreds of people.

To understand how this works, it is necessary to take into consideration the practical restraints and limitations that are determined by time and money available. As already mentioned, there were something like one hundred different wholesalers in and around Berwick Street and there were hundreds more all over the country not to mention the untold thousands that were located in different places throughout the world. This meant that I had to be selective, limiting my sources to only a very small sub section of all the possible sources available.

A far greater limitation though was the amount of money I had available for buying each week. This even further restricted the number of wholesalers I could buy from. There is a similar restriction in e-business or e-commerce situations, where each end consumer is restricted not only by available selection and time but also and mainly by the money available to spend. What the end user has to spend on has to be carefully selected for and in the environment of the Internet there is always overwhelming competition for a spender's time, attention and money.

Abstracting this procedure over to information exchanges and communications strategies, would see similar practical limitations in the form of the time it takes to access the sources and absorb the content. Email correspondents need writing to, replies have to be read. Web sites need visiting and the content downloaded and looked at. Search engines throw up many possibilities that have to be investigated.

These pragmatic considerations can influence the supply side of the equation far more than the relative quality of the content. Almost invariably, the supply side quest is not for the "best possible" because their isn't enough time to find the best. The most efficient search strategy looks for "good enough" and then stops searching.

So, whether it's products, services or information, the main criterion is going to be the efficiency by which "good enough" can be obtained in the time available. Forget "best", that is not a practical consideration.

Note:

When I first drafted this chapter and sent it out for discussion, Sheelagh Barron, an information researcher for the film industry, wrote about this sentence:

"This worries me. If the bench mark becomes adequate/good enough it inevitably leads to dumbing down. "Good Enough" should be a reluctant last resort not a target......"

Although this would be a commendable attitude to have in the Industrial Age, it is totally inappropriate for the Information Age. The reason is: there is always too much to know, too many different alternatives, too much that is unknowable and on top of that anything that is known is liable to change. This makes it totally inefficient to have a strategy to look for the best because the search space is far too vast. You could go on for ever looking for the best or some kind of improvement on what you already have. Where do you stop?

The obvious stopping place is where you have something that is "good enough". This need not imply that it is a mean compromise. "Good enough" depends upon the strategist's definition, which might well be defined as something that puts them way ahead of the competition. This is the same kind of strategy that the professional investment manager's use. They don't waste their time trying to find a definition of a perfect investment opportunity, they look for investments that are better than others available; it's a relative, as opposed to an absolute, best choice.

This can be appreciated if you consider searching in a Hilbert solution space that contained every person in the world. For example, say you wanted to find the best six people to advise you how to decorate your house. Common sense tells you that it would be impractical to search the whole world for the best six, so, you'd choose six who were the best you could find in a reasonable amount of time.

Everyone who gets married adopts this strategy. People don't go around searching the whole world for the person who would make them the best marriage partner. They make the best choice out of what is available in the time and the geographic area it is practical to search in (this strategy is probably re-enforced by evolved emotions that make it likely that people "fall in love" with somebody within a limited range of choice: eliminating the need for any extensive search and selection procedures).