5:00PM
Distribution. Taking one thing from here and delivering it to there.
I wonder why we don’t talk about it more. When I was trying to sell solar lanterns in Tanzania for a company called Greenlight Planet, I realized just how complex the distribution networks were. No matter if the lantern was very well engineered to work well and to work well for a long time (it was), what mattered just as much was how it got into the hands of users. In Tanzania, those distribution networks had many different people and organizations working in the middle to make sure things spread. I believe Coca-Cola is so popular in the world yes, because of its taste, but more importantly because of its ability to get Coca-Cola to almost any part of the world. Same for Caterpillar and its ability to service its machines almost anywhere in the world and to do so quickly.
I guess I somewhat think about distribution in those hard, tangible businesses, but less so in the more intangible, information businesses—but isn’t it the same? If I write a book and no one knows it exists, did I write a book? The old if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound? Or, even more specifically, if I live broadcast these writings and people don’t know that I’m doing it, does it really count?
I believe distribution is very important, if not even more important, than what we create. What we create can be a news story or an idea. If someone creates a fake news story, say, blatantly lying about what a politician did, but that story doesn’t distribute to the world, does it matter? I’d argue that no, not much at all. Same with a world-changing vaccine—if we do discover a vaccine to COVID-19, but we don’t tell people that we did or we don’t have the ability to distribute it around the world, what effect will it have?
I believe that, ironically, there’s a lot I can learn from the people who have created fake news stories. Again, maybe, not so much from the people who created them, but the people who distributed them. How to get information to spread from one person to another. How to get a written story, video, or audio to spread from this computer to millions of computers around the world? How to get that concept to jump from the computer into the minds and hearts of the reader? How to get it to stay there? OK, perhaps that last part is less distribution and more storage, but arguably storage is a part of distribution.
I think I’ve avoided to look at the distribution side of creation, even though it plays such a large role. I don’t know if it’s out of fear, out of uncertainty on how important it is, or confusion on how it actually works. Like most things, it’s probably a combination of all of those plus more.
How would this world be if us “creators” started thinking more about how to distribute our creations and took it more seriously?
5:10PM
