sta·sis (stā'sĭs, stās'ĭs) n. pl. sta·ses (stā'sēz, stās'ēz)
A condition of balance among various forces; motionlessness: "Language is a primary element of culture, and stasis in the arts is tantamount to death" (Charles Marsh).
It strikes me that Charles Marsh could easily have gone further...
I have spent just over 5 weeks now looking at the markets that ATEEDA plays in, and trying to pick out relevant information. The semiconductor industry is certainly not in stasis as it moves away from a reasonably high degree of vertical integration, and this creates both opportunity and challenge.
On a less positive note, I had lunch today with some folks who have been recruiting for a marketing role recently, and I was horrified to hear that most of the recent graduates they interviewed (from respectable institutions) had no experience of using the internet in marketing. Their recently completed University courses had taught them nothing about marketing in a world of pay-per-click, viral campaigns, social networks and interactive content. Stasis clearly is "tantamount to death" here, but I fear the principle victims will be the hapless graduates rather than the institutions who have taught them the marketing of a previous decade.
All this brings to mind one of my early experiences diving in the UK was at St Abbs. I descended into some rocky gullies with my wife, and I just couldn't get properly settled. I was used to using the rocks as a visual reference for controlling my depth, but waves on the surface were causing a circular motion in the water at the bottom too. In trying to maintain a stable position relative to the (static) rocks I was fighting the momentum of an Ocean. I was also failing to pay my wife adequate attention (you dive in a buddy pair to look after each other) and she expressed this to me with some hand signs not sanctioned by our instructor but which were nontheless expressive. The point is that before I could make progress on the dive, I had to accept the dynamics of the ocean and let myself flow with it. Then, once I settled myself, I found I could predict the motion of the water and use it to help me move around easily and comfortable.
Understanding dynamics seems to be the trick to learning about a new industry, and it probably should be in designing a successful educational programme too. Thank goodness Babson College and the Saltire Foundation seem to have understood this and taught us more about trends and dynamics than about steady states!
I enjoyed this Ian....
Business model, context, dynamics...almost 'in the moment' with your business in the part of the sea it performs within...
Thanks, Jim
You're right, of course, but there's probably a good and a bad reason for this bias in teaching.
The bad - clearly the people teaching the marketing courses are not the right people to understand new media.
The good - if you understand it properly, I believe "classic" marketing gives you the tools you need to work through "digital marketing". It would be nice if the students didn't have to make the effort to work this out themselves, but the basics of segmentation; understanding what your customer's costs and benefits are; thinking about where best to engage your customer in conversation - I think - are still the building blocks.
Thanks Jim,
Ian, that's a really interesting point and one I have argued myself about teaching the fundamentals to computer scientists and engineers.
However, while all the "classic" principles may hold true, I think there are a lot of new ones to learn and understand too. In Computer Science, the scale needed for todays systems is a whole subject unimagined when I was at University.
Equally I suspect some aspects of "new" marketing have become subjects in their own right. Content generation and social media (blogs, twitter, facebook), inbound marketing and interactive content all have wrinkles that the "classic" world didn't have to deal with. How do you react do when your customers are badmouthing you? How do you generate content that people will share, creating a viral effect? I'm not sure that people with "classic" experience are instinctively doing the right things in these situations. Ford's viral attempts have largely failed. The Guiness Book of Records recently had PR disaster responding to negative feedback too. Maybe that's just bad practice rather than lack of understanding...