“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw
The legend of David and Goliath never made sense to me until I read the version as told by Malcolm Gladwell. First, let’s take a closer look at Goliath.
According to Gladwell, Goliath was indeed a giant, who also moved extremely slowly. Add to that, the 100 pounds of armor he wore. There are medical experts who believe that Goliath was suffering from acromegaly, a hormone imbalance that causes a human to grow to an extraordinary size. If that was the case, Goliath’s vision was most likely impaired as well.
How about David? Yes, David was small in stature, but he was an accomplished “slinger” and could target and strike large beasts from great distances. Light on his feet, David could move unsuspectingly on a target and still win an attack from far away.
For all these years, humanity has been made to think that David, the underdog, was shown favor by God and defeated Goliath, the heavy favorite. In actuality, Goliath had no chance to win. God favored David by helping him discern a better strategy. The fight was over before it ever began.
Changing the game
David won because he played an entirely different game than Goliath. If David had fought Goliath as tradition stated, one warrior against another in hand-to-hand combat, he would have lost.
And this is what happens to almost every entrepreneur dreaming an idea. Entrepreneurs, whether bootstrapped or funded, have literally no resources compared to the large enterprises with which they are competing.
To succeed, entrepreneurs and startups have to play a different game. If they compete with larger enterprises on the enterprises’ terms, they will most certainly fail. We, at CMI, believe that there are thousands of Davids out there who can and will be successful … but they need a bit of guidance.
Announcing Content Inc.
If you are reading this, you most likely know that Content Marketing Institute focuses on helping marketers in larger enterprises with complex content challenges. This will not change.
At the same time, we’ve had thousands of smaller businesses come to us for help, and we believe we need to address this audience also.
Enter Content Inc. – CMI’s new platform dedicated to entrepreneurs who want to be big. The hypothesis behind Content Inc. is simple – that small businesses should launch, not with a product-first mentality, but with a content-first mission. This means that the initial days, months, and perhaps years will be spent building a loyal audience. By focusing on building an audience first and defining products and services second, an entrepreneur can change the rules of the game as David did, and significantly increase the odds of financial and personal success.
We are launching Content Inc. in four phases. The first phase launches today, with my podcast, appropriately entitled Content Inc. The Content Inc. podcast will be delivered twice a week and will run less than 10 minutes. The goal of each podcast is to give entrepreneurs one thing that can help them grow their business. We launched Content Inc. with quite a few podcasts in the queue. Please check them out here and get the latest podcasts delivered to you directly by subscribing via iTunes or Stitcher.
The second phase of Content Inc. will be a digital content platform, a sub-site of CMI. Here, you’ll get multiple articles each week from myself and some of the leading experts and entrepreneurs on the planet, on how to take a Content Inc. approach to your business.
The third phase will be my fourth book, also entitled Content Inc., which will be published in late August 2015. Content Inc. – the book – offers a look inside high-growth companies that got their start with content. These are non-media (or not exclusively media) brands that began life as content engines. The book explores whether startups can or should focus first on content (and related audience research and development) and second on developing non-content offerings. For example, Brian Clark started his business, Copyblogger, as a blog about the craft of writing, but he’s since built a successful content marketing software and web-hosting business from those content origins.
And the final phase will be a Content Inc. one-day event, which will occur immediately after Content Marketing World on Sept. 11, 2015, in Cleveland.
Once again, I want to reiterate that we are not changing the CMI platform in any way. We still love our enterprise marketers who need plenty of help on content marketing integration, culture change, staffing, and measurement. Content Inc. is our new baby sister, and we are excited to have her join us to help CMI with the content marketing revolution.
If you have any questions, please let me know, and thanks again for all your support as we embark on this new effort.
Be one of the first to join Content Inc. by subscribing via iTunes or Stitcher or listening to them.
Image courtesy of Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
