Hunters
and Farmers
Seth has inspired me again today with his insight; thank you Seth Godin for your wisdom.
10,000 years ago, civilization forked. Farming was invented and the way many
people spent their time was changed forever.
Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.
It's not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills. Thom Hartmann has written extensively on this. He points out that medicating kids who might be better at hunting so that they can sit quietly in a school designed to teach farming doesn't make a lot of sense.
A kid who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the brush is exactly what you'd need to do if you were hunting. Scan and scan and pounce. That same kid is able to drop everything and focus like a laser--for a while--if it's urgent. The farming kid, on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each a bit like the other. Just don't ask him to change gears instantly.
Marketers confuse the two groups. Are you selling a product that helps farmers... and hoping that hunters will buy it? How do you expect that people will discover your product, or believe that it will help them? The woman who reads each issue of Vogue, hurrying through the pages then clicking over to Zappos to overnight order the latest styles--she's hunting. Contrast this to the CTO who spends six months issuing RFPs to buy a PBX that was last updated three years ago... she's farming.
Both groups are worthy, both groups are profitable. But each group is very different from the other, and I think we need to consider teaching, hiring and marketing to these groups in completely different ways. I'm not sure if there's a genetic component or if this is merely a convenient grouping of people's personas. All I know is that it often explains a lot about behavior (including mine).
Some ways to think about this:
- George Clooney (in Up in the Air) and James Bond
are both fictional hunters. Give them a desk job and they freak out.
- Farmers don't dislike technology. They dislike failure.
Technology that works is a boon.
- Hunters are in sync with Google, a hunting site,
farmers like Facebook.
- When you promote a first-rate hunting salesperson to
internal sales management, be prepared for failure.
- Farmers prefer productive meetings, hunters want to
simply try stuff and see what happens.
- Warren Buffet is a farmer. So is Bill Gates. Richard Branson is a hunter.
- Hunters want a high-stakes mission, farmers want to
avoid epic failure.
- Trade shows are designed to entrance hunters, yet all
too often, the booths are staffed with farmers.
- The last hundred years of our economy favored smart
farmers. It seems as though the next hundred are going to belong to the
persistent hunters able to stick with it for the long haul.
- A hunter will often buy something merely because it is
difficult to acquire.
- One of the paradoxes of venture capital is that it
takes a hunter to get the investment and a farmer to patiently make the
business work.
- A farmer often relies on other farmers in her peer
group to be sure a purchase is riskless.
Who
are you hiring? Competing against? Teaching? Living with?
Regards,
John Singh
Some time ago, I needed to buy a house for my organization but I didn't earn enough cash and could not purchase something. Thank God my colleague adviced to take the business loans from trustworthy creditors. Thus, I acted that and used to be happy with my collateral loan.
Posted by: BridgettRiggs | February 28, 2010 at 01:42 PM