In the video segment below, author Debra Kaye discusses her new book, Red Thread Thinking. She explains the need to understand the underlying culture at work in a market, and keep pace as it evolves. For example, Facebook (FB 3.83%) needs to be aware of changes in its users' needs and desires in order to stay relevant.The full version of the interview can be found here.
A transcript follows the video.
Brendan Byrnes: You have an example in the book about how Jeff Bezos at Amazon would ring the bell every single time they had a sale in the early days; also Starbucks originally didn't even sell a cup of coffee. They would sell the whole beans.
Could you talk about how technology, and how great innovators -- Howard Schultz, Jeff Bezos -- can use that most effectively, and maybe how other people can apply this, when they're reading your book?
Debra Kaye: Those are little stories of how innovators get excited and have their passion, but I think there's something maybe more important that we can talk about today. There's a lot of things we're hearing about today, about Facebook for example, and that teenagers are using Facebook less and what does that mean for Facebook?
Again, I think it's because we're not looking at the underlying culture. It's that Facebook is changing, and they need to be paying attention to that.
There is something that is very important in America. We have an underlying, core value. We believe in reinvention. We believe in our capacity to change. We believe in this in a very deep way.
Facebook is something where you put a story on. You put your history of yourself on, and it's there permanently. Facebook, today, is almost like email. You don't look at your email in a second, like you look at a text message.
Then comes along something called Snapchat or Instagram, where in that moment you can express your emotion and send it out right away, whereas Facebook is something that's more curated.
That is more about your quicksilver self, which is more of our underlying capacity to reinvent ourselves and things, than Facebook was at that moment. Facebook now needs to understand -- and that's probably why they did buy Instagram, if they have that great foresight -- you need to understand how deep culture, and evolve products based on that.
I think that's what Amazon deeply understands.
