Chapter 8
The background to creating an ebusiness
The cafe as a personal interface to the world
Creating a cafe full of personal contacts has been fully covered in the previous two books in this trilogy. Suffice to say here that the cafe will contain only people whom the cafe owner has built up some kind of special relationship with. As such relationships have to be established over a series of many exchanges that engender mutual trust and credibility, these cafes can take quite some considerable time to build, even in the environment of the Internet.
In theory, it is possible to create personal cafes of any size. But, from a practical and strategic viewpoint it is preferable to limit them to a particular maximum number of contacts. From a practical stand point, is is only possible to maintain continuous and constant personal communication with a finite number of people (in my own cafe, this limit is set at fifty).
By deliberately and specifically limiting the number of contacts in a personal cafe, the cafe can then become an immensely powerful tool because it will facilitate the adoption of Mother Nature's strategy of evolutionary improvement and adaptation.
Consider for a moment the consequence of having a strict limit to the number of people in a personal cafe of contacts. With a strict limit, it becomes mandatory that any newly acquired contact must replace somebody else in the cafe before they can be included – shown graphically in figure 8.2
Figure 8.2
By having a strictly limited number of contacts, new contacts will push out the least valuable. If this in an ongoing process, the quality of the contacts in the cafe will constantly improve and continuously adapt the cafe to changing conditions.
As the people pushed out will be the contacts judged to have the least value (in a current situational sense rather than in absolute terms) the cafe becomes progressively more useful and valuable to the cafe owner. Not only will the quality of the contacts improve, they will also change to suit the changing current needs and interests of the cafe owner – effectively, adapting the cafe to the changing conditions to which the cafe owner is exposed.
This suggests that cafe owners should not confine their communication activity exclusively to the the people inside their cafes. They must allocate a fair proportion of their time to speculative associations in the wider world – looking for fresh contacts. The more effectively they can do this, the faster their cafes will be able to evolve and adapt to changing technology and competitive initiatives.