Vestiges

Unless you just started, your organization is different than it used to
be. It has evolved.

The marketing you do, the decisions you make, the hurdles you have to go
through probably have vestiges of the old model. Sometimes, like the
little feet on the back of a whale, it's easy to ignore the vestiges.
Other times, it's entirely possibly that they prevent you from achieving
your goals.

Example: years ago, Prodigy, the original big online service, reflected
its origins from Sears, CBS and IBM when they unveiled chat and
discussion boards. Every single message posted was read by a censor
before it went online. At one point, they had literally hundreds of full
time editors sitting in an office tower outside of NY, painstakingly
reading every single post.

Example: the production values of an HD TV show are lost in the YouTube
environment, yet plenty of studios and advertisers are having trouble
giving up the staffing and hierarchy that served them so well in the
other medium. So the vestiges remain, slowing down the entire process
(and making it a lot more expensive.) 25 people to film a three minute
clip is just silly, but it makes sense if you look back at how they got
there.

Example: local banks with limited hours were the norm just a few years
ago. The move to online hasn't changed the way they all see the world...
it's a skeleton staff at night, because that's the way it always was.

If you're working hard to work around a vestige, maybe it makes sense to
work just as hard to get rid of it all together.

By Seth Godin

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