First 30 Services

In the past 20 years, great fortunes have been made digitizing and making broadly available the vast warehouse of human information. As a result, the world has been transformed, beneficially for the most part.

However, the deluge of digital information tsunami may be too much — waaay too much — of a good thing. In fact, substantial evidence shows individuals and businesses are now smothering under the weight of all the available information, and it is only going to get worse.

If you are looking for a pain point likely to drive a breakthrough business success, this is it. Turn the current trends on their head and find ways to help people create, receive and interact with less information. Not only will you get rich; you’ll probably be hailed as a hero by multitudes who are getting their lives out from under the digital data Mt. Trashmore.

Just how bad is the pain of information overwhelm? It beggars belief:

The amount of digital information worldwide today is far beyond the point of being expressed in gigabytes or even terabytes. The size of the digital universe today approaches one zettabyte –  or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (10007). This data heap would fill 15 stacks of books extending the 93 million miles between the Earth and sun. Even more appallingly, the digital universe is expected to grow 10 times larger over the next five years.

Companies can’t cope with all this information. Evidence mounts that the data deluge is spurring an epidemic of corporate attention deficit disorder. As economist Martin Greenberger says: “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

An Accenture survey of managers in the United States and Great Britain found that executives spend up to two hours a day searching for information, with more than 50 percent of what they find useless. And nearly 60 percent reported missing information that might be valuable to the companies almost every day because of “poor information distribution.” The executives know the information exists somewhere in the company but they just cannot find it. In addition, 42 percent of respondents said they accidentally use the wrong information at least once a week.

Trouble on the borderland where human meets data has become so pervasive that acronyms have begun to emerge to describe it. One is SADD– situational attention deficit disorder– a term coined by Anderson Consulting’s Institute for Strategic Change. SADD was first observed when flight engineers added hundreds of communication devices in cockpits in an effort to improve pilot performance. Instead, pilot performance decreased. SADD occurs, Anderson argues, when people are bombarded by so many demands on our attention that their brains close down. “It’s a phenomenon of our time,” says author and work/life expert Eileen McDargh, “Our brains evolved over eons to respond to our environment… Everyone and everything is vying for attention. We are hardwired to respond but when it’s deluged like that, the brain just ‘goes blind.’ ”

The 2008 Lexis-Nexis Workplace Productivity Survey found that a majority of professionals are close to the breaking point, where they will be unable to effectively process or handle any increase in information flow.

Against this backdrop most modern corporations elect to slog through the information glut, living with complicated management systems, disjointed operating processes and inconsistent internal and external communication programs. Employees dutifully plow through the clutter, rationalizing the dysfunction with the myth that navigating chaos is a skill to be cultivated in the modern workplace. Executives attempt to channel a typhoon of choices into traditional decision-making buckets and establish new bureaucratic layers to weigh, discuss and debate the innumerable options. Meanwhile, the email chains snake through the organization distracting ever lengthening lists of recipients, strangling productivity.

You want to be the next Bill Gates? Solve this problem.

My old boss, Bill Ziff, used to say, “Language is truth,” meaning that humans reveal more than they realize about their motivating inner sensibilities through their words.

So, what do we learn about the worldview of venture capitalists by examining their language?

If there is one word most frequently on the lips of VCs it is: Exit.

The VC business model is predicated on the liquidity that comes from market exits, either IPOs or private sales. No Exit presents VCs with a version of hell far worse than Sartre’s. In fact, VCs are trapped in precisely this hell right now. So, “whither exits?” philosophizing has reached mania proportions.

But, curiously absent in venture lingo is a word of greater power in determining ultimate business success in good times and bad: Entrance.

You never hear VCs sitting around talking about how they have a unique approach to getting companies initiated. Exit? Yes. Develop? Often. Assist? Frequently. But Start? Hardly ever. It is almost as if, in the VC universe, companies should spring full blown from the brow of Zeus: neat, complete teams, puissant, girded for battle, armed with phalanxes of protectable IP and ready to hit the market.

Like all mythological presumptions, this one has some truth to it. But, it very rarely represents reality. It is simply true that a good exit generally requires a great entrance and that great entrances seldom happen organically.

VCs have underserved this critical component in the way they have approached company development.  That’s because great company birthings aren’t deal-driven activities propelled by price, but are operational endeavors carried through by the grunt and sweat of hard work.

Through recent roller coaster markets the value of  these solid operational fundamentals has been marginalized in favor of flash, sizzle and a tumescent fixation on the big finish.

Perhaps one bit of silver in the current financial grey cloud will be a renascent recognition among investors that beginnings matter and must be carefully husbanded by people as dedicated to getting start-up seeds planted properly as VCs are to reaping their harvest.