Similarly to last year, I will not be writing a summary of 2019. Sharing less over the year has been surprisingly liberating. For me, it has forced more deliberate attention to a few selected things instead. My writing, for instance.
That being said, I do often get asked what I do all day. I tend to answer “surprisingly little” which is somewhat correct but mostly an unexpected way of answering an expected question.
A more serious answer would be that I’m an independent advisor and analyst. Throughout 2019, I’ve worked with companies in Canada, China, Denmark, England, Germany, Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan, and the United States. I’m very grateful for having the opportunity to have such a varied day to day life.
I have also written a little more often – and longer – than before. Here’s a summary of the articles I wrote this year:
May 2015. Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL, is on CNBC. He is wearing a navy blazer, no tie, blue shirt. He’s talking fast, and in bursts of excited management speak. He has a lot to be excited about. It has just been announced that Verizon is going to buy AOL for $4.4 billion.
This is of course good news for Mr Armstrong. CNBC anchor, Andrew Ross Sorkin, asks him the key question for the whole telco industry:
– “Why [does] the pipe business need to own content now?”
Telcos – the owners and operators of the infrastructural pipes that the internet and other communications run on – regularly go through this exercise. They ask themselves:
Can we be more than just the backbone for others?
Should we own more of the value chain ourselves?
Can we bundle our existing offering with new, value-added services (VAS)?
The short answer to all of these questions tends to be yes. This is then followed by big acquisitions in the content and media space.
After a few years, it then changes back to no. The telco writes down a massive dollar value and tries to divest the media assets. And so the perpetual identity crisis of telecom companies continues.
This is the Telco Identity Loop. Let’s break it down.
The Telco Identity Loop
Stage 1: “We have to be more than just pipes”
One would think that being the infrastructure for the internet would be a pretty good business. Everyone loves the internet, right?
Turns out, it is in fact a good business. Telcos often have gross margins of over 80%, and profits at around 20%. Not bad, for being pipes.
But since consumers don’t really care which pipes are being used – as long as their services work well – this puts telcos in a situation where competition can get fierce. And fierce competition is expensive, generally speaking.
So, how does one differentiate these uninteresting pipes? Let’s add something to them! Some services, or rather some VAS – value-added services. A favorite acronym in telco world.
VAS are often content bundles, in some shape or form. They serve the purpose of helping with initial customer acquisition, or retaining existing customers longer.
Verizon’s campaign for Disney+
A current example is Disney+ that launches today. Their tie-up with Verizon was what made me write this blog post in the first place. If you are a certain type of Verizon customer, you get a full year of Disney+ for free. List price: $69.99. T-Mobile has a similar deal with Netflix. If you have two phone lines with them, you get Netflix for free too.
Note that neither of these companies have ownership of each other. They are just partnerships, which is indicative of Stage 1. We don’t really want to commit, but we do need something. It also speaks to their competitors’ tie-ups, that have moved on to Stage 2.
Stage 2: “Let’s buy content!”
When partnering isn’t enough, you go to acquisition instead. Let’s build an integrated offering for the consumer! One big bundle of telecommunications and entertainment services on a single monthly bill.
Entering Stage 2 is expensive, because you need to acquire something substantial enough for it to make a difference. Telcos are large companies, after all.
If we stay with AT&T, last week’s announcement of HBO MAX is the latest example of what this type of consolidation looks like in practice. HBO MAX will consist of both HBO content and a long row of additional content from the WarnerMedia ecosystem. And more importantly in this context – it will be free for viewers who already subscribe to HBO via AT&T. One can imagine some great introductory offers for new AT&T customers, once the service launches too.
This all sounds good, until it doesn’t. This is when it starts becoming obvious that the synergies have failed to appear, and that the corporate cultures of a telco and a media company don’t always jive. That’s when you enter Stage 3.
Stage 3: “Why do we own content again?”
Stage 3 often comes along with a broader management shift. It can be a generational change, or simply sluggish figures for too long. A new CEO is brought in, and they understandably want to pave a new path forward.
Hans Vestberg, CEO of Verizon. Photo: Verizon.
In August of 2018, the Swede Hans Vestberg stepped up from CTO to CEO of Verizon. Vestberg was previously at Ericsson – a large provider of telecom services with 5G as their big main bet. Tim Armstrong, who now was running the content division of Verizon (rebranded as Oath), saw the writing on the wall. He left.
As new CEO, Vestberg set out to find out what was really going on inside the company. The process was described like this:
“Vestberg is currently interviewing hundreds of Verizon’s top managers in an effort to refresh the company’s leadership and unify its offerings.”
From Fierce Wireless, by Mike Dano, October 10, 2018
A classic strategic review. It had started earlier in 2018, and had led to shutting down Go90 already. But more things were about to change. Time for Stage 4.
Stage 4: “Back to Basics”
In November of 2018, the new future for Verizon was starting to show.
Oath was written down by $4.6 billion. For context, that’s about half of what they had acquired the two companies for about 2,5 years earlier (Yahoo was $4.5 and AOL was $4.4 billion). Verizon stated that they “didn’t see the synergies it had expected from the combination of Yahoo and AOL” and that 44,000 of their staff had been offered voluntary buyouts.
Fast forward a few months, and Verizon divested Tumblr to Automattic. While Yahoo originally acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion dollars, the sale was less than $3 million. A pretty impressive value destruction in about six years time.
If not content, then what? In Verizon’s case, it’s 5G. Core telco services – infrastructure. Pipes, but slightly wider pipes than before.
This gets us to August of 2019. Hans Vestberg is now on CNBC – also talking to Andrew Ross Sorkin – and predicting that 50% of Americans will use 5G phones by 2024. That’s where Verizon should be too. Back to basics.
Stuck in the loop
Most telcos are somewhere in this loop. The Disney+ deal is a clear example of how Verizon are leaving Stage 4 and are halfway in Stage 1 again (if you want to learn more about Disney+ and what they are getting out of this, then Matthew Ball is the authority). They still have Verizon Media Group (the new name for Oath) but in Q1 2019, their revenue was only $1.8 billion out of a total of $32.1 billion. These 5.6% of revenues aren’t going to hold back a change of strategy.
“We think that we are best equipped to leverage the best network and continue to partner with [media companies] rather than us managing it”
From Barrons, by Nicholas Jasinski, September 19, 2019.
The CEO and Chairman of AT&T, Randall Stephenson, is clearly deep into Stage 2. They have had to defend that position from activist funds like Elliott Management too. And if margins don’t improve the coming quarters, these concerns will surely come right back again. And then it’s on to Stage 3 again.
Running an undifferentiated business is very difficult, and it’s hard to fault wanting to expand further into the value chain. But these content acquisitions, more often than not, don’t seem to really change the mothership. They’re just bolting on another side business. The culture, what’s considered core business, the way of thinking – it’s all the same as before. And as such, content becomes a secondary priority. Or perhaps a loss leader and marketing expenditure in order to keep the core business going.
The fact that this loop is so recurring also poses the question where a new, innovative vision is going to come from in the telco space. Softbank – that has their core business as a Japanese telco – has certainly tried on a group level. Although you could definitely argue that this vision – including the now infamous Vision Fund – may not be one to emulate for others.
Predictions
With this loop in mind, where will these telcos go next?
Making predictions is a fools errand really, but it’s fun to both read and write. They also have an asymmetrical upside (you’ll probably only remember if I got it right). So here goes nothing:
Current position: Stage 2 (Content Acquisition). Comment: They overspent and fought to push the deal through. Now they have make to make it work, but performance will likely suffer. It is a huge behemoth full of cultural differences and conflicting interests. The likes of Elliot Management will come knocking again, and this will force change.
Prediction: Write-downs and lay-offs starting in 2020. I think at least 25% of the $85 billion acquisition price.
Current position: Coming out of Stage 4 (Write-offs & Divestments), heading into Stage 1 (Content Partnerships). Comment: 5G is their big bet, but it is still quite far away. I think we can expect several partnerships to the marketing going in the meantime. And once 5G is here, they’ll realize that they need to acquire content companies that can make use of this new technology.
Prediction: Major content M&A starting in 2021 (they’ve already bought VR assets from Disney). Could be a company like Magic Leap (if they’ve survived until then).
Current position: Stage 1 (Content Partnerships). Comment: Merger. The FCC just approved the deal and while there are individual states that are still protesting, this is effectively a done deal. The merger has likely taken – and will continue to take – all management attention for the foreseeable future. I can’t see them moving out of Stage 1 any time soon, even if they would have wanted to.
Prediction: Complete strategic standstill for 12+ months. No major M&A.
Current position: Stage 2 (Content Acquisition) Comment: Telia have been trying to acquire Bonnier Broadcasting since the summer of 2018. Things are finally looking up, and the deal is likely to go through just went through. But there have been a lot of stir-ups while they waited. They now have both a new CEO and a new Chairman of Telia. That being said, it would be strange if they immediately divested the very asset they’ve been trying to get hold of – even if it was a different management team doing it.
Prediction: The deal officially passes before Christmas, and the integration begins (Update: The deal went through today!). Once the deal goes through, I predict that they immediately acquire SF Studios from Bonnier too.
Current position: Stage 2 (Content Acquisition). Comment: This Nordic telco have gone in and out of both content and markets the last few years. But it’s hard to look at Telenor without understanding Telia above. Telenor’s entry to Finland is directly aimed at them. Most recently, Telenor merged their cable-tv Canal Digital with NENT Group (formerly half of MTG).
I think they’d like to keep expanding in content, but there isn’t that much to buy in the Nordics. Egmont got TV2 Norway and probably won’t sell. TV2 Denmark has been rumored to sell forever, but never does. TV4 Sweden and MTV Media in Finland just went to Telia. Maybe Discovery would consider selling their Nordic markets?
Prediction: If I had to make a bet, I think Telenor will make a big offer for 51% of TV2 Norway and Egmont will, somewhat reluctantly, accept it. Staying in Stage 2 for a while, in other words.
And finally a long shot, from the other direction:
Current position: N/A Comment: Now this is an outsider since Amazon isn’t a telco. But they are one of few players that could come at this from the opposite direction. Prime Video is a strong video offering and they have plenty of other content offerings too (Audible, Kindle, etc).
Prediction: Amazon takes Prime and becomes a US MVNO within 24 months. I don’t see them building any 5G towers any time soon, but they could easily operate in someone else’s network. They could have bought Boost Mobile in front of Dish, but they might be persuasive enough to find another way out there. That would at least stir things up in an otherwise predictable telco market.
Imagine young people longing for an alternate reality. One where regular rules of life do not apply, and one where your imagination prevails. Their parents worry, because this alternate reality is so compelling that these young people sometimes don’t want to leave it. They don’t want to go outside – they have all they need from their new world. Some of them never want to go back to the realities of everyday life.
Margaret Cohen, a professor at Stanford, described these young people as “considered to be in danger of not being able to differentiate between fiction and life”.
Does this sound familiar?
I am of course talking about women reading fictional books, in the late 1800s. Just like in the novel “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert.
To continue quoting from Margaret Cohen – who is a professor at Stanford, but in French literature:
“I think Flaubert is channeling a century of worries about young women as particularly susceptible to the fantasies they find in novels and the seductions of reading”.
I say this not to disparage the current concerns about screens and children – quite the opposite. Concerns about our young are in fact very common, and have been so for hundreds of years. These concerns also tend to accelerate as new types of media have been introduced.
But as this is a familiar situation – historically speaking – we can also benefit from learning what the actual outcomes of many of these changes have been. What turned out to be true, false – and what was completely unexpected? Delightful, even? And how should we think about new technologies when it comes to our children? This is what I’m going to talk about today.
How can we talk about screen time without knowing what is taking place on the screen?
I intentionally chose the example of books as it represents a media format that is not only accepted, but almost universally seen as preferable. Books are great. Books for kids are great. Kids that read books are great.
While I don’t disagree with these statements, I do think it is an overly simplistic way of describing reality. So let’s go more granular. Is it good that kids read books? Generally speaking, yes, right? Is it good that kids read any type of book? Not necessarily. You wouldn’t choose “50 Shades of Grey” as a bedtime story for a preschooler, for instance.
Hence, saying that “books are good” is less useful than saying “some books are good” (or even “most books are good”, if you are more of a positive person than I am). From this we can conclude that books themselves are neither good nor bad. They can be both. It depends on the context, the reader, the intent – and of course it depends on the book itself.
This sounds obvious. Yet, if we were to apply the same line of reasoning to kids and screens, things immediately get more messy. I’m sure you’ve heard phrases like “No screen time before 2”. “No screen time in the weekdays”. “One hour of screen time a day”.
But just like we can’t talk about books without knowing more about the specific book – how can we talk about screen time without knowing what is taking place on the screen?
Empathy
The answer is that we can’t, and we shouldn’t. But what we can do is understand why some people do worry about screen time, and empathize with their concerns. There is a lot of conflicting information available on this topic. You read about a study on Facebook, a parent at the playground guilt trips you about letting your kids use an iPad, or you read somewhere that Steve Jobs didn’t let his kids use technology. I’m a parent of two daughters myself. I get it.
A lot of concern is that screens, and for slightly older kids social media, is making kids feel bad or not develop appropriately. Parents are concerned it could be harmful in some way. I found the latest work from Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski, both from Oxford University, to have a good take on this.
The reason why I like their work, is that they have almost ten years of data and over 10,000 British preteens and teens in their study. This is significant, and in this space – very rare. It goes far beyond the anecdotal, which is precisely what we need. Let me read a shortened quote from an article they wrote in The Guardian, summarizing their latest workfrom May of 2019. Their question, simply put, was if social media makes you happy or sad.
“What did we find? Well, mostly nothing! In more than half of the thousands of statistical models we tested, we found nothing more than random statistical noise.
(…)
Our results indicated that 99.6% of the variability in adolescent girls’ satisfaction with life had nothing to do with how much they used social media.
It is undoubtedly tough being an adolescent. But this was true long before there were any screens.
On the flip side, there are some things that seem legitimately concerning. Myopia – being nearsighted – has almost doubled from 1971 and 2008 which in turn can increase risks of vision related diseases. To me it doesn’t seem unreasonable that screens may have contributed to this, but a causal link is yet to be established. We know that nearsightedness has increased, but we do not know why. Not yet.
In fact, that is where most of the studies on this topic are right now. They are inconclusive. They are often done with a very limited data set. We simply don’t have that much data to imply one way or another. That’s not to say that it is completely safe, but that certainly does not mean that it is harmful.
Most parents are not scientists. Therefore evaluating scientific reports is hard. There are also more pressing priorities for parents than to crack open the latest version of the “Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study” on a Friday night. It is easier to listen to an alarmist TV psychologist that – very conveniently – is trying to sell you a book on the topic of screen time.
Siding on caution is not a bad principle in life per se. It is, however, rather blunt and impractical. From a strict harm reduction perspective, it would be best to make kids wear helmets and protective gear at all times. But it is not practical. And it is not preferable, at least not from the kids perspective. Imagine all the things that the kids now could not do! Screens are not dissimilar. By withholding screens from your kids you may be reducing a hypothetical risk, but you are also withholding them from opportunity and potential.
Who should we listen to?
When making this call, who should we listen to? Well, there are some railings to hold on to. The AAP – American Academy of Pediatrics – updated their previously misunderstood screen time guidelines in 2016. In their new recommendations, they specifically call out “high-quality programming/apps” which moves the conversation from looking at the screen itself, towards looking at the activity which is taking place.
Further, they address the context of screen usage and say the following:
“Co-view or co-play with your children, and find other activities to do together that are healthy for the body and mind (e.g., reading, teaching, talking, and playing together)”.
How your kids – and you – are watching, playing, and learning matters too. This is not strictly a numbers game. So say I, and so say the American Academy of Pediatrics too.
Before I conclude, allow me to speculate a little about what the outcomes of screen usage could be. In order to do that, it’s useful to think about what has been said about other media in the past. What did they overlook?
“Withdraw all encouragement relating to the reading of books. Reduce the number available. Act so as to make reading inconvenient except for the set time”.
Now this is easy to laugh about now, but let’s try to empathize with the writer instead. Their concern is the amount of reading, not the reading itself. It is becoming too much, and taking over other activities. Seen in that light, this is a more reasonable approach. It isn’t healthy to only read novels all day. Just as it isn’t healthy to only play football, or to only play Roblox. There is a lesson to be learned here.
Further – where has reading taken us? Especially with the access of the internet, it is the gateway to a world of experiences, literature, perspectives, and knowledge. Most of the world’s written history is available with a few clicks of a button. In all languages, for all people, globally. It only requires a device that costs less than €50. Or in some cases, a free library card.
And while I’m not oblivious to the complexities of conspiracy theorists, disinformation campaigns, and things of that nature – I think it is still fair to say that discouraging reading in 1938 may not have been a great piece of advice. They didn’t know what reading could do for them and their kids – not there and then, and not in the future either. Today this is self-evident.
Where will this thing people call “screen time” take our kids in the future?
With this in mind, where will this thing people call “screen time” take our kids in the future? In some sense we are already there, but just like the reading skeptics in 1938, it is not clear enough for everyone yet.
Fortnite looks like a game where people shoot each other and do weird dances to celebrate it. But Fortnite is also an online social club where leadership and teamwork develop. It’s deep and multi-layered. When was the last time you collaborated with a global group of people, in real-time, towards a common goal?
Minecraft is similar. It looks like a game with strange block-like graphics and people walking around with axes. Or you could say that Minecraft is a creative tool that opened the doors to architecture and construction for millions. Spatial thinking, creative expression, community.
Togetherness
For me, I think the future of screen time is togetherness. I see a world where global collaboration is seamless and enriching. People working together, building on each others knowledge, and learning from each others cultures. The initial building blocks are already in place. Why would we want to hold our children back from these types of experiences?
Four suggestions
So, where do we begin? We need to start on the ground floor, with the simplest of questions. Addressing the immediate needs of guilt-ridden families trying to work out what is best for their kids. With this in mind, here are my four suggestions for how to think about kids and technology:
1. What matters is what is on the screen, not the screen itself.
Help your kids find the right thing for them. There’s so much great stuff out there. Don’t assume that your kids have necessarily found it themselves. And if they have found something – help them to use it the right way. What matters is what is on the screen, not the screen itself.
2.Consider the context
How are your kids playing? Are they doing it together with others – siblings, friends, online friends? Is the screen the main part of the activity, or actually a facilitator of something else? If you think Fortnite is about shooting each other, you haven’t been paying attention.
Is there an opportunity for you to participate in the activity? You can probably add layers to any activity that is going on, creating both a learning opportunity as well as a shared space between you and your kids. Consider the context.
3. Encourage variety
I think there’s much to be gained from Fortnite, but I wouldn’t suggest playing and streaming it for 8 hours straight everyday. But come to think of it – there are very few activities I would recommend for 8 hours straight everyday. Go beyond the screen and ensure that your kids have varied activities in all places – including with screens. Encourage variety.
4. Treat the screen like you would anything else
When I was the CEO of Toca Boca and tried to explain my job to people, almost everyone said “ah, you mean educational apps”. It was precluded that if you make apps for children, their primary purpose must be education. There’s no other area in kids lives that you would hold to that standard.
What if all food you served your kids had to have a specific nutritional formula? That’s interesting in theory, but anyone saying that has never been in a car with a hungry toddler. Different circumstances call for different solutions.
Childhood is more than just education. But if you want apps to be educational, you can find plenty that are really great. You can also find ones that encourage kids to become artists or musicians! Or sometimes – just things that let them chill out and relax a little. The screen is just like life in general – don’t treat it any differently.
Next week, I’ll be in Copenhagen to speak at Techfestival. It’s my first talk in quite a while, and the first one for years where I’m representing myself as opposed to a company.
I have prepared a speech(!) called “In Defense of Screen Time“. I hope to add a perspective to the everlasting question of how kids and families should relate to technology.
About a week ago, it was announced that I have joined Acast as an independent board member (link in Swedish). Acast is an international podcasting platform that helps with distribution, analytics, monetization, and much more.
I’m a huge podcast fan, and have followed the industry from the sidelines for many years. I hope to contribute to the continued success of the company by offering an entrepreneurial perspective among the voices on the board.
As my third and final post on the kids app market, I have made a wish list. What if things were different? How could the market improve?
Even if all of my wishes were to come true, the majority of the market complexities would remain. Your user is not your customer. That won’t ever change. But as I’ve stated before – things can still improve. All parts of the ecosystem can do better.
This wish list is my way of contributing to these improvements. I want to show that there are many things that could be reworked, changed, or improved. I sometimes get the feeling that people look at this market as stagnant – almost impossible. With this wishlist I’m simply saying: it doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s make some changes!
There’s more to kids apps than ABCs and 123s One of the reasons it is hard to find great apps is that so many of them are going for the exact same concept. With the same sort of developer name. With the same sort of art style. Everything looks and feels the same, and it creates the impression of a non-differentiated market.
I wish developers would take it a step or two further. Yes, ABCs are important. But that app concept is pretty well covered by now. There’s so much more to be done.
Define your authorship Go beyond the most immediate common denominator when it comes to design. Look at children’s books for inspiration – Jon Klassen or Chris Haughton for example. They have a tone of voice, a look, a sense of authorship. This is far too often missing from kids apps.
Where is the Pixar of apps? By saying Pixar, I don’t necessarily mean that exact studio (although that would have been lovely too). But where are the studios that have that amount of care and attention to detail? The app studios that love their craft like Pixar loves movies? I understand the financial reality of developing for this space – I really do. But ambition is free. And I rarely even see an experiment with a sense of curiosity or adventurousness. It would reinvigorate the market in a way that is needed to get the excitement back.
Don’t forget the parents There’s more to this ecosystem than just apps for kids. Apps for parents live in their own ecosystem currently, but there’s a lot of overlap here in terms of communication and discovery. There’s loads of room for innovation in this area.
Platforms & App Stores
Delay App Store charges by 24h I’ve spoken to countless parents that bought an app (or an IAP) that ended up being bad or disappointing. This had discouraged them from buying other apps in general. This is a huge problem, but an understandable situation.
To me, there’s a very simple change that would increase product quality across the App Store overnight: move the credit card charge 24h forwards in time. Ask the consumer one day later if they’d like to keep the purchase they made, and if not the charge (and purchase) is reverted. What’s more – the ranking in the store should only kick in based on the purchases kept, which instantly rewards quality and longevity. Finally – let bought in-app purchases be shared across all family devices.
Checkbox for kids search Identify the searches that are clearly intended for kids and add a checkbox to filter out all results that aren’t in the Kids category. If you want to show up in search, comply with the rules of the kids category (more on that below).
Encourage inclusion in the Kids category During WWDC this year, Apple announced that they would ban all use of analytics for apps in the Kids category. And while I can understand the intent, this sends the wrong message to the developer community. The Kids category already has more strict requirements than the rest, and several kids developers simply avoid the category and rely on discovery outside it instead. This change penalizes the developers that are trying to comply with best practices and leaves the blatant category misuse from certain developers to continue.
In my opinion, Apple should be doing the opposite. They should be strongly incentivizing developers to join the Kids category (and by doing so, comply with a higher standard of regulation – which is a good thing).
In the context of the App Store, incentives mean promotion. Make a Kids tab in the store. Stop promoting any kids directed app that isn’t in the Kids category. Remove apps from kids directed search (as per above). There’s lots to do here to make the Kids category safer for families and better for developers.
Follow a developer Developers don’t have any way of contacting their former customers in the App Store today. It relies on parents signing up for a mailing list or a social media account and then catch that message when the time comes. There are a lot of steps that can go wrong there. At the same time, consumers don’t want to be spammed from every developer that they ever downloaded an app from.
A solution could be to let consumers follow a developer in the App Store. That way they could voluntarily get notified when developers of their choice released new products, and receive it as a push notification from the App Store. This would encourage loyalty and help with discovery of new products.
Incentivize referrals Apple had an affiliate program that they removed recently. Given how difficult discovery in this category is, they should incentivize outside ecosystems to help with this. Finding quality products will lead to more spending since the experience is better. Sharing this spending with the broader community that helps with the discovery seems very fair and reasonable to me. If there has been issues around fraud in certain categories, only turn this on for the Kids category to begin with.
Parents
Parents, please pay This is simple and perhaps naive, but this is a wish list after all. Please pay for apps. One way or another. Generally, I’m not a big fan of industries complaining that their customers don’t understand their own greatness. But this is an industry that needs support in order to become self-sustaining. And if you want your favorite developers to keep producing great apps for kids, then my wish would be that they got financially supported to a higher extent than today.
Take an informed view of screen time This is a long and complicated topic that I won’t get into here. The jury is also still out on many issues as we wait for the research to come in. But until then, take a look at the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendations. And while I don’t agree with everything there, their view on quality over quantity provides a useful lens to have when determining how you want technology to be used in your family. This shouldn’t be a binary matter.
Media
Treat apps like culture I wish we would stop thinking about apps as software and start treating them as a part of culture instead. Or as a part of media at the very least. Technology is only the carrier – not the category. When apps are seen as small pieces of tech hidden away in the back section of magazines, so much of the potential is lost. I’m not saying all apps deserve to be on the cover of Time Magazine. But looking at them as a part of a broader culture would encourage more developers – and not only kids ditto – to aim higher.
Where are Oprah & Ellen? This space needs a cultural icon that points people to good things. Like Oprah and Ellen do. They carry massive influence, are trusted in their spaces, and help guide people to great products. Kids apps really needs their own Oprah and Ellen.
Regulation & Privacy
Clarity In my experience, most kids app developers have the best of intentions. There are easier ways of making money than this, so the immediate gold rush tends to go in other directions. Nevertheless, all of them get tangled up in the regulation that guides this space. Developers are treading on eggshells to not break a law – by mistake.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The developer community just needs clarity in regulation. I’m all for safe harbor programs, but you shouldn’t need one to comply with regulation. I’m not advocating watering the law down – I just want it to be crystal clear when you are compliant and not.
Neutral, private, authentication Account and data management are often needed to create a great experience. It is also the beginning of a privacy nightmare – for everyone. The kids space would benefit from a neutral, private, cross-platform, COPPA/GDPR-K compliant way of handling identity, authentication, and data management. That way developers could use this and therefore not have to solve these issues individually. Quick for the developers, simple for the user, transparent for the parents.
That was my wish list. Please add your own in the comments!
My last post about the kids app market received a lot of interest and a fair bit of feedback too. It’s very rewarding to write when people take the time to read it. Thank you.
To honor the feedback that I got, I will address a few additions and questions here below. The third and last part of this series will be a wish list of improvements and changes that I think would improve the market.
– Where is the publishing and toy industry?
This is a fair question, especially since the early days of kids apps was mainly animated books. Toca Boca was also acquired by a toy company, so clearly there is a connection here.
In short, I look at them in the same way as the entertainment market. Both their strategy and outcomes are the same, more or less.
Longer version: In my model of the market, I chose to only include Gaming, Technology, Education, and Entertainment. This was a simplification to make it more clear. From a structural perspective, however, the publishing and toy industry treat the market very similarly to the entertainment industry. It is a supplement to their main business, and primarily serves a marketing purpose. Their apps are, mainly, created as a consequence of other products being developed first. This is what makes them a good candidate for licensing. You generally wouldn’t license out the categories that you consider your core business.
It is fair to say that there are more players in the market than I initially described, but the additions don’t warrant further analysis if you understand the entertainment side. Their strategies are almost identical.
– What’s the responsibility of parents that don’t pay for high quality apps?
Simply put: Why don’t parents pay for great apps? Wouldn’t this solve everything? In fact, many do pay. But they have stopped paying in the way that a lot of developers prefer, which is upfront. They are also not buying the apps of the highest quality, but rather the ones that are the best at marketing. But since the kids grossing top list is still growing, it means that more money is being spent in the category overall. So where is this discrepancy of perception coming from?
A large part of the kids market frowned upon using in-app purchases for a very long time. It was seen as unethical to try to sell to kids in the middle of their app experience. There’s still a strong case to be made for this, from an experiential point of view.
What’s changed is how parents choose to spend their money. They want to try before they buy. They are surprisingly fine with subscriptions. But the developers of high quality apps don’t necessarily have a product strategy (or overall philosophy) that aligns with this shift in consumer spending. It’s a bit of an indie mentality where you hold onto what you think is right, even if the world has moved on. For better or worse. The paying parents are still there though – they are just paying in different ways.
Then there are the parents that don’t pay at all. Regardless of the business model. And this is the vast majority of parents. They simply don’t value or perceive the quality to be high enough to justify the price. There are countless free apps for kids that seem fine. Why pay?
One reason for them to pay could be to avoid advertising or to not get your kids’ privacy violated. But in order for that to drive a purchase, you have to:
a) know that it is happening, b) perceive it as an issue you’d like to avoid, c) preferably have an equivalent alternative to purchase instead.
There are issues with all three of these prerequisites in the market today. For many parents, this is not clear at all. That being said – there are countless parents that do acknowledge it, complain loudly, and still won’t pay a penny to solve it. It would be better if they did. But this is unlikely to change.
I’m not saying that it is parents fault that the kids app market is hard. It’s not Apple’s or Google’s fault either. Or the developers themselves. But I am saying that all three parties could have – and can – do better.
– What are the advantages of making kids apps?
Perhaps my last post came across as more gloomy than intended. You can be successful in this market. I have been so myself. What I tried to illustrate were the complexities of the market. That naturally skews towards challenges rather than opportunities. But let’s switch sides a little, and shine some light on three positive aspects instead.
1. A recurring target group
If you’re 35, an app you downloaded five years ago is going to be pretty dated by now. Your expectations are higher than they were then. Your taste may have changed.
For a 3 year old, this is not necessarily the case. The 3 year old that is now 8 will feel similarly, but now there’s a new 3 year old in the market instead. And a 3 year old now, compared to a 3 year old five years ago, is going to be pretty similar.
What does this mean? It means that if you make a fantastic app for a 3 year old, it’s probably going to be fantastic for 3 year olds for a very long time. This creates a steady stream of new customers to a product that you finished a long time ago. This is a huge opportunity, if played the right way.
Some regular games fall into the retro category and experience something similar. But it is rare and tends to take much longer. Super Mario Bros 3 is still awesome (and was released in 1988).
2. International kids are similar
With a similar line of reasoning as above, a Chinese 3 year old is considerably more similar to an American or a Norwegian 3 year old than the 35 year olds. Cultural context gets added over time, and in school especially. For developers this means that if you have a great app in one country, other countries are likely to agree. With ecosystems like the App Store that lets you publish to over 100 territories with a single click – this is a big deal and something you should make the most of.
Parents, however, are not especially similar. Language alone can be a barrier. So the marketing will be a challenge. But compared to making a completely new app for a geographical market, this is a big opportunity to take advantage of.
3. It’s simple (but not easy)
Compared to many other categories, developing for kids can be quite simple. By simple, I mean that you don’t need to run constant A/B tests, yield optimizers for ads, price sensitivity testing, live ops management, or community engagement campaigns.
Look at Toca Hair Salon for instance. It is one of the most successful kids apps of all time. It doesn’t even have a backend. Everything lives in the app itself, works offline, and requires no server costs. Over time, this means the app is running at 0% margin cost and 0% distribution cost (minus the 30% cost of sales). Year after year (as per point 1), and in every market (as per point 2). That is a great business.
Now, it isn’t easy to make an app like Toca Hair Salon. But it is simple to run it, once you have it. That’s more than can be said for most regular games and online services.
– What about the ethics of marketing to kids?
This is a tricky one. And I’m no ethicist either. But I’ll offer a few pieces of advice to consider at least.
Do your homework before you start. There are a lot of resources in this space. I suggest you start looking at the Designing for Children’s Rights Guide.
Take kids seriously. They’re not small adults. They’re not stupid. They shouldn’t have to settle for less. This might sound obvious, but spend five minutes looking at marketing for kids and you’ll see why this is advice is needed.
Make your own guidelines, and stick to them. It is easy to get caught up in trying to increase conversions or click-throughs. But making your own framework can be a good ethical railing to hold onto when you get deep into operations.
Consider the context you are in. This isn’t your average “buy-500-gems-get-250-for-free” game. Or at least it shouldn’t be. Because the notion of buying virtual gems is predatory if the user can’t distinguish what that transaction entails. This goes for how the product is designed, and subsequently for how it is marketed (inside and outside of the app).
Follow the law. Know your COPPA and your GDPR-K. They are there for a reason.
This summarizes the majority of the feedback and questions that I received. As mentioned, the third and final part of this series will be a wish list of how things could be improved to make this market better for all parties.
How do you take on a market where the user isn’t your customer? A market that overlaps and competes with four major industries, but doesn’t belong to any of them? These are questions I have been working with for the past nine years.
Since 2010, I’ve been in the kids app market. First it was as CEO and Co-Founder of Toca Boca, and more recently as an independent advisor.
Still to this day, I get contacted every week by people that want to learn more about how this early stage digital market works. This blog post is a summary of my experiences, and my perspective on how to think about it.
Introduction: Is this app educational?
Five minutes into your initial research, you’ll notice that kids apps and educational apps are terms that are used interchangeably. This primarily comes from the US, where childhood and education are often treated as synonymous.
While there is much more to being a kid than learning math, the market makes little difference between the two. This confusing notion is the starting point for why this market is complex. What does the market even consist of? Coloring books, next to phonics software, next to roleplaying apps. It’s a mess.
One of the reasons why it is messy is that the kids sections of the app stores are still young and underdeveloped. There is hardly any categorization, far too little curation, and search is bad (and often misleading).
When we started Toca Boca in 2010, we used to joke about the app stores. The physical equivalent would have been like walking into a toy store and finding all the toys laying in a huge pile. Hanging above the pile, there would be a sign that simply said “TOYS“. No categorization, differences in merchandising, or segmentation of any kind. To find something, you would have to dig in the pile and hope that you found something good.
Now – almost ten years later – that joke isn’t as funny anymore. Because we’re more or less in the same place.
But while discoverability is still bad and immature, some things have improved. Product quality is consistently higher now. Business models are more sustainable, but only for the developers that have managed to break through already. More on this below. But first we need to take a look at some of the definitions.
Definitions: What is educational, really?
As you browse the App Store and Google Play, you will come across numerous educational claims. Teach your kids to read! Get excited about math! Loved by teachers! If you look just one layer deeper, you will find very little support for these claims. That’s not to say that the developers are necessarily lying, but the burden of proof is very low. In fact, there are no neutral and independent parties that make assessments of these claims in the market. This may sound like a minor issue, but it really isn’t.
With no one to verify claims of educational content, parents are left to their own devices to assess these products. This is a very hard thing to do. It’s a little bit like walking down the cereal aisle at a super market. All the boxes are trying to make you think that they are a healthy choice. But with cereal you at least have the Nutritions Facts Label that helps you to compare. Kids apps don’t even have that.
With educational value being the primary requirement from parents, but no one there to verify or guide, the market ends up being like the wild west. Any developer can make any type of claim. The actual results differ a lot. As does the overall experience. If a parent searches for “educational apps” they’re almost certainly not going to find the best ditto. Therefore their experience of educational apps is going to be worse than it could have been. Imagine wanting to buy a great car, and leaving the lot with a Lada. You’re going to think all cars suck. Which is a shame, and also inaccurate.
This confusion puts the kids app market in a bad light. It makes it hard for real quality to shine through. And as if that wasn’t hard enough, there’s also the issue of the business models. Read on.
Business Models: It’s hard to make money from kids
Everyone loves a good story. In 2018, Apple said that they had paid out over $100bn to developers. At WWDC next week we’ll hear an updated and higher figure. What ever it is, it’s going to be a big number. But what the app stores never talk about is how that money is distributed among developers. Supercell alone made almost $6bn, just in the last three years (not all of it from iOS, but a very healthy share was). What’s the median – not average – revenue for app makers? We don’t know. But it would be a very different story. It would also be very different if we just looked at the different categories of apps.
The Kids category is tricky to monetize for several reasons. You have two audiences to begin with: kids and their parents. These two groups share very little in terms of incentives and overall interest alignment. One controls all of the money, and also the vast majority of all screen time control (of kids under 13).
This dynamic creates a very unusual use case for monetization. The user is not the customer. In order to monetize you must either create an alignment of interest between the two (kid and parent agrees that they should buy something) or rely on the one of them convincing the other (kid nags parent to buy something). This has more in common with selling pet products than most regular gaming.
To add to this complexity, the vast majority of money being spent in the app stores is consumables, bought through in-app purchases. You buy something, but you can always buy more (and that tends to be better). This is how you catch the whales.
The consumables model does not fit kids apps, generally speaking. Virtual currencies are always intentionally abstract, but for a 5 year old it is closer to plain trickery. Parents don’t want this for their kids (but they might feel fine buying boosters in Candy Crush for themselves). The Kids/Family section on the App Store and Google Play also has restrictions since a few years back, limiting the way you can sell in-app purchases. It now requires a few extra clicks and an age gate. This is, of course, a good thing.
If you can’t sell consumables, what are you left with? Four basic models. How they perform in the market primarily depends on your products, but you can oversimplify and segment it like I have in the model below.
A simplified look at the business models in the kids app market.
Paid Apps – Pay once, play forever. The dominant business model in the early 2010’s, but one that has been in a very steady decline ever since. A good fit for parents for the reasons above, but not an especially good model for developers.
Free, with in-app purchase – Try before you buy, basically. Even if you don’t sell consumables, you can still sell permanent expansion packs. And you can sell many more of them in the same app, as opposed to having to make brand new products all the time.
Subscription – Monthly updates, monthly payments. This is the by far fastest growing category for revenue in the kids app space. It also aligns with Apple’s general interests of driving revenue through services. They’ve been building out their subscription offering for developers substantially over the last few years. And remember, Apple didn’t even allow for App Store-based subscriptions outside of media products until 2016. So this is a big shift.
Advertising – Selling privacy compliant ads. Kids apps can drive a lot of traffic, but because of what I’ve described above this traffic doesn’t necessarily convert to sales. This is where the ads come in. Many parents are skeptical to the concept of ads for kids, but they are generally accepted in products that don’t require you to pay.
The question you should be asking yourself after reading this above is: how big is this market then? It depends what you define as the market.
Market Definition: Education + Technology + Entertainment + Gaming
The kids app market doesn’t fit into one existing industry. To understand it, you instead need to look at the adjacent industries that it touches upon. It lives between four different industries – neither of which understand each other particularly well. And they’re not used to competing with each other either.
The kids app market lives between Entertainment, Education, Gaming, and Technology.
In fact, the kids app market lives in-between – and overlaps with – four giant industries, but doesn’t really belong to either of them. This explains why newcomers (like Toca Boca and Sago Mini) have been able to take such strong positions in a market that has a huge amount of incumbents. They’re all incumbents in their own field. Not in the combined field. Identifying this was the initial opportunity in 2010, and I would argue it is still the opportunity in 2019.
Let’s look at each of them:
Gaming: Has never really taken kids’ products seriously, or considered it to be a major discipline of gaming. There’s an endless amount of new game studios that pop up every year. But very, very few of them have even the broader family has their target group. Nintendo being a slight exception here. Look at any Gaming conference and you’d be lucky to find kids’ games having more than a single session.
Education: Sells books to schools, broadly speaking. And they do that well. Given the complicated sales cycles of educational products to institutions, they have well established barriers to keep upcoming companies out of their core B2B business. These lock-in effects don’t, however, create especially good environments for innovation. Oligopolies rarely do. When new B2C companies started touching upon educational topics in their periphery, they didn’t really pay much attention. And still don’t.
Technology: Are often dependent on families as a unit, since the use of services often works best within the same ecosystem. Apple families sharing iCloud, Apple Music, Find My Friends etc. But catering to families means that you can’t completely exclude the youngest kids. Also, the tech companies run the app stores and the mobile operating systems which is their main contribution to this market. But kids’ products is not their focus.
Entertainment: Makes TV & movies, and considers most other categories to be better suited for licensing. Nickelodeon is a classic example of the innovator’s dilemma in this space. They don’t consider kids apps to be a big enough business for them to care about (compared to TV ads), and therefore it is treated as a secondary category – at best. The result is poor products, with generally poor performance too. At least in comparison to the strength of their brands. Disney and Sesame Street are very similar in this regard. They should be crushing everyone in this market on brand recognition alone. But they don’t.
So what is the size of the kids app market? It depends how you cut and slice these four markets above. Generally, people use the figure for the Education market since that seems to be the closest proxy. This isn’t a perfect comparison by any means, but an understandable escape route to a difficult question.
I think a more fair way to assess the market size would be to look at the following:
a) the assumed size of the kids app market (including kids games) itself + b) the share of the Education and Entertainment markets that you think will be digitized + c) the digital advertising spend on kids
I can’t give you an exact figure since there isn’t one to give. The point of writing this is to say that the market depends on how you define it. But that’s not what you’re here for! So let me contradict myself slightly and make a very rough and conservative estimate:
– Let’s say that the kids app category on iOS and Google Play globally grossed around $350 million in 2018. For simplicity, let’s ignore all consoles and PC games (Nintendo, Steam, Xbox, Playstation, etc). I’m also skipping Amazon here (that is a major player) and all of the games outside of the kids category.
– The Education market has an endless amount of estimates. This one says the global market in 2018 was around $6 trillion, of which less than 3% was spent on digital in 2018. But that’s still $152 billion. All of that isn’t for kids, so let’s give that a conservative haircut of 50%.
– The Entertainment market consists of all general TV and video entertainment. Disney+ will be an app for instance. Does that make it a kids app? Maybe. Netflix? Sometimes. But let’s be conservative here too. The global OTT market was $22.6 billion in 2018. Let’s say you can attribute 5% of this market to kids and family, even if it likely much higher than that.
In total, that would mean the total market size is around $80 billion globally in 2019. This assumes no growth and a lot of caveats, as you can see above. It’s still a respectable figure.
To make things more complicated, it isn’t entirely obvious what constitutes a “kids app”. The Entertainment section above illustrates this well. Is Angry Birds a kids app? A lot of adults play that. Is YouTube? A lot of kids use that. And so on.
The reality is that the whole market is on a sliding scale. It doesn’t fit neatly into demographic boxes. 6 year olds are playing Clash of Clans. 14 year olds are playing Toca Life. 2 year olds are also playing Toca Life. These products aren’t intentionally designed for them, but there’s also very little stopping kids from playing. Everything is everything, as Lauryn Hill once said.
Understanding this is important for a few different reasons:
1. You are competing with the best of the best, in terms of expectations.
Look at something like Clash Royale. Regardless of your opinion on their suitability for kids or methods of monetization – this is an incredibly polished and well-made game. No doubt about it. The creators, Supercell, is also one of the most successful and profitable games companies in the world.
Many of the kids you are trying to reach have played Clash Royale. They’re used to that level of fidelity and richness in graphics. This doesn’t mean you need to be like Supercell, but it does mean you can’t ignore the context that includes them.
2. Many kids are outside of the kids category.
It’s easy to look at the Kids top list rankings and think of that as the addressable market. But a closer look will reveal that a few major players aren’t even on that list, even if they definitely have a lot of kids as players. Apps like Minecraft or Roblox for instance. Disney is also largely absent from the Kids category on iOS.
The main reason for developers to not have their apps in the Kids category is to avoid the restrictions that Apple and Google have put in place. Take a look here for Apple’s version. They require parental locks and additional clicks when linking to a purchase or outside of the app, for instance. This is an inherently good thing for families’ safety, but is easily circumvented by simply not putting the app in the category in the first place. And by not doing so, they are also distorting the market perception. This may be changing though, as the FTC is putting some pressure on this issue. But regardless you should remember that this is only looking at apps that arguably are kids apps already, not the ones in point 1 above.
3. You’re competing for attention. Particularly on the device.
Ultimately, you are not competing with other kids apps but rather for their time and attention when they use their devices. Sometimes with the time spent without their devices too. Who is Toca Boca’s biggest competitor? I’d say it is YouTube. The amount of time that YouTube gets on these devices limits the time spent with Toca Boca. Neither company are intentionally going head to head with each other in a traditional sense (in fact, Toca Boca uses YouTube extensively). But in reality, there is a strong competitive force here. You could even make the case that the biggest competitor is school, given the time spent there.
I emphasize this because the reality is more muddy than one would have wanted it to be. Video competes with games. Homework competes with video. Sports competes with homework. Again, when understanding the kids market you need to take this context into consideration. The kids app market is not an island. It’s interlinked with everything else in kids’ and families’ lives. Time allocation, expectations, money spent – they are all connected far outside of their originally defined markets.
Marketing: The Incentives of Kids & Parents
Given the complex market dynamic described above, how can you effectively market to kids and families? The short answer is: you can’t. Or being slightly more optimistic: marketing is by far the most difficult part of this market.
There are several reasons for this. One of them is the simple fact that I stated above: Your user is not the customer. The majority of app makers will never have encountered this. Kids and parents are two completely different people with different interests, motives, incentives, and views on what quality is. To make things worse – a lot of times, your user can’t read. So there goes all UI and communication based on written language. These two things alone are a tricky challenge.
What’s more, the level of control and agency that kids have as they grow varies a lot. Below I have made an intentionally oversimplified model to illustrate this.
A simplified model to illustrate who really controls kids media and spending.
If you’re going for preschoolers, you can safely market to parents as your primary target group. It is unlikely that parents are going to let their kids roam freely in the app stores. And they have likely taken a look at the apps that they download before their kids start playing with them.
Once kids start school (around age 5-6), the influence of kids to kids starts to increase. Parents still know what’s going on, but they can’t control their kids interests to the same extent. Kids come home and ask for certain apps. Parents make the call if they can have them or not.
As kids become tweens and teens, parents start losing track of what they are really doing. It becomes tricky to both enforce rules, or to have any transparency into the reality of what apps they are using. A challenging time for many parents.
Regardless of age, kids’ and parents’ interests and perception of quality vary a lot. To generalize, parents care more about educational content than kids do. So depending on how your product is positioned, consider the likely recipient of your marketing message. Offering tutoring to a 10 year old is going to be a hard sell. Offering to the 10 year olds’ parent might work though. And vice versa with a game that is just plain fun.
Summary: How to think about the kids app market
When I first looked at this market in 2010, I thought we were already too late. The ship had already sailed. I quickly realized that in fact, the market had hardly even started.
When I look at it now, in 2019, I think it’s still early. The eco systems are yet to develop. There is supply and there is demand. But they’re not meeting each other adequately. As I described above, this is a market living between other markets. Until it grows up and becomes its own thing, it is going to be misunderstood and underdeveloped.
My macro view in 2010 was also pretty much the same as I have now. I posed three questions then:
– Will the amount of kids with access to touchscreen based devices increase over the coming 5-10 years?
– Will these devices decrease in cost and significantly increase in capacity and performance?
– Is it reasonable to assume that kids will use these devices for some form of entertainment and/or education?
If your answer to these three questions is “yes”, then there’s a market here. It doesn’t mean it is an easy one to capture, for all the reasons I’ve written about above. But it’s there, it’s early, and it’s waiting for the next generation of great products for kids.
Edit: I have written two follow up pieces that includes the role of parents, the toy and publishing market, thoughts on the ethics of marketing to kids, and an overall wish list for the future.
If you have more questions about the kids app market, I now offer single sessions that can be scheduled on the web. It’s a 90 minute advisory session where we go through the challenges and questions that you want answered. If you’re interested in scheduling such a session, please click here to see my availability.
A year ago today, I launched my advisory business. It’s been really great. The independence, flexibility, diversity of client work – all in all a very pleasurable working experience. And one that I’m intending to continue.
Five months in, I wrote a brief update about what I actually have been doing. I thought I would do the same now. I can’t mention any client names since some of the work is confidential. You’ll get the general idea though.
Some of the projects mentioned earlier are still ongoing, but this is a selection of the new projects I’ve been working on lately:
I wrote an extensive report on voice assistants and smart speakers for a Nordic media company. It was a combination of market data, strategic analysis, and case studies.
I did a full week workshop in New York that produced a new business concept together with a very interesting group of people.
I helped an XR company from Israel go to market.
I joined the team behind the chatbot Shim to help create a new product, Enjo, and reposition the company towards American parents. Earlier this week it was announced that the healthcare company KRY/LIVI had acquired Enjo. There’s a longer story to be told here, but that’s for another day.
I wrote a strategic overview of the kids app market for a new startup in Sweden.
I started working with the femtech company Clue (my first seed investment) as their acting VP of Special Projects.
I went to Denmark and spoke about how to create components of corporate culture.
I helped a California based edtech company with marketing and App Store Optimization.
I prepared a report on trends in corporate venture capital for a company in that sector.
Quite a year. A great balance between loads of interesting projects while still having time to read and learn more than in many years. If you have a project you’d like to work on together, please get in touch.
In any business there’s a series of rules to follow. Most of them aren’t explicitly stated, but follow a type of common (business) sense. A general modus operandi (MO) develops.
Both as a founder or an employee it’s easiest to stick to this MO. It feels sensible and like it saves time. But by doing so, you are recreating the same issues that these structures have created for all companies before you. To make it worse, people have a higher level of tolerance for these types of issues. They’re annoying but also implicitly accepted as “that’s just what office life is like“.
This is lazy. These commonly accepted problems are holding you back. And a lot of them make no sense. You want to buy a few books for $100? Ask your manager. Maybe expense it. You want to invite six people for a two hour meeting? That’s free. (Except it’s not. It actually costs $840, assuming $100K salaries).
As I wrote in The Strategy Tax, “doing the same thing as last year requires no preparation and little effort”. Your modus operandi starts to own you. It dictates rules that you can’t be bothered to challenge, or even think about.
Questions to ask yourself:
Why is it okay to lie in a budget, but not in a meeting?
Why does it matter how many hours someone works?
Why is an upward trajectory for your title assumed to be good?
No one knows. It just is.
The systems that you use to run your business, shape it too. Break the curse of the modus operandi and you’ve unlocked a new way to run and differentiate your business.
