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Copyright © 2010 by Youngme Moon

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Business,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Crown

Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division
of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2010.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moon,Youngme.
Different / Youngme Moon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Marketing. 2. Competition. I. Title.
HF5415.M58 2010
658.8—dc22 2009032752

ISBN 978-0-307-46086-8
eISBN 978-0-307-46087-5

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Lauren Dong

Illustrations by Lynn Carruthers
Cover design by Jamie Keenan
Cover photograph: Getty Images

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Paperback Edition

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introduction

when my eldest son was in second grade, he started

bringing home poems to memorize. Each week, a new
poem. So each night, we would memorize a verse, re-
peating the words over and over again until they were
securely mimeographed into the folds of his supple lit-
tle brain.
At first, I did this without question or complaint.
But as the days passed, I found myself reconsidering
the purpose of these mental calisthenics.You see, for
the past ten years I have been an educator myself, a
professor of marketing at the Harvard Business School,
where every semester my colleagues and I require our
students to master a very particular language. We ex-
pose them to the “grammar” of business—essentially a
set of frameworks and best practices—and we make
them rehearse this grammar over and over again, in
case study after case study.
But what I have learned from this experience is that
while a commitment to rehearsal will almost always
produce competence, it will almost always produce a
kind of automaticity, too. There is a reason why so
ix

many educators rail against rote learning, and it is that

Moon_9780307460868_1p_01_r1.qxp 5/13/11 11:07 AM Page x

x they know it can have the self-defeating effect of pro-

moting a kind of mindlessness. Once we over-learn
something, we cease to know it anymore at all. This is
what I see happening in the world of business today. In
industry after industry, business professionals have be-
come so practiced in a particular way of doing things
that they appear to have forgotten the point of it all—
which is to create meaningful and compelling product
offerings for people like you and me. This is not to say
that these folks lack the requisite business skills;
rather, it is to say that they have become almost too
proficient, in the same way that a well-oiled produc-
tion system can be scarily proficient at churning out
one perfectly identical clone after another.
I may be a business academic, but I am also a citi-
zen, a wife, and a mother, and my guess is that I prob-
ably experience the world in much the same way that
you experience it. Which means that when I leave my
house to purchase something as prosaic as a bottle of
shampoo or a carton of juice or a pair of sneakers,
what happens to me is probably very similar to what
happens to you: I am confronted with a dizzying array
of options from which to choose. In every aisle, in
every store, what used to be, just a generation ago, a
relatively modest selection of, say, four or five, has
Introduction

somehow turned into an indistinguishable selection of

eleventy thousand. Meanwhile, there is a redundancy
in the way these products are advertised to me as well.
To be fluent in the language of product marketing is
apparently to have polished the language of hyperbole,
and so I am assured, again and again, that each one of
Moon_9780307460868_1p_01_r1.qxp 5/13/11 1:36 PM Page xi

these products is new and improved. Everything is

Introduction
big better best.
And yet here is the thing. We have all lived through
quite a lot in the past few years. This most recent re-
cession, in particular, hit us all pretty hard, and al-
though each one of us had little choice but to weather
through in our own private way, I can’t help but be-
lieve that the storm refocused us all in some collective
way, too. I remember right after the first wave of the
recession hit—the housing market had just imploded
and the credit markets had frozen up—feeling almost
grateful that I didn’t live in one of the more sumptu-
ous estates in our town, one of those homes that I used
to so admire. I also remember reading stories in the
newspaper about how people, even those who were fi-
nancially secure, had begun rethinking their most basic
consumption patterns. It was as if our notions of aspi-
ration and acquisition had shifted, overnight. Excess
was out, replaced by a more thoughtful consideration
of the stuff with which we filled our homes, our clos-
ets, our lives. The age of abundance is over, I remember
thinking, not because things are no longer abundant, but be-
cause abundance has lost its status as our reigning aspiration.
I have always believed that there is a part of busi-
ness that is an art, and if I had to describe the particu-
lar complexion of this art, I would describe it as the
art of calibration. In my mind, this is where the mar-
keter must step in: The marketer needs to be able to
ascertain the dimensions of our desire—paying heed
to the things that we want, yes, but paying equal heed
xi

to the things that we do not. It may be true that our

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xii desire has no limit, but it certainly has a shape. Yet

what is missing from business today is a sensitivity to
the contours of our aspiration. As a culture, we have
moved well past the point where we are impressed by
the traditional markers of affluence—the profusion of
look-alike choices, the embarrassing display of whis-
tles and bells. Nevertheless, to this day . . . one need
only to walk into a store to experience the degree to
which business doesn’t seem to get this.
A decade ago, product marketing could afford to
be as over-the-top as rock and roll. Hyperbole came
with the territory; a lack of originality was no big deal.
To get the crowd’s attention, all you needed was to
memorize a couple of predictable chord progressions,
nail a catchy chorus, and then hit the stage with confi-
dence, energy, and enthusiasm. The trick was to be
loud, excessive, bold. A few smoke and mirrors didn’t
hurt, either. Today, that kind of marketing is likely to
appear as vacuous as a 1980s heavy metal band.Today,
the business maestros more likely to garner a listening
audience are the ones who understand that, in this era
of more thoughtful consumption, louder is seldom
better, and more-of-the-same almost never adds up to
the best.
I wrote this book because I believe that what most
of us are looking for today is a sound more resonant. A
Introduction

sound more meaningful. A vibration that we are able

to experience, in our bones, as being somehow . . .
different. And so that is what this book is about: It is an
exploration of what it means for a business to commit
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to giving us this. It is an exploration of what it means

Introduction
for a business to decide to be different.
I do this by venturing into the world of sameness,
in search of difference. I seek to identify the outliers,
the anomalies, the iconoclasts—the players who have
rejected well-rehearsed business routines in favor of
an approach more adventurous. These are the players
with a feel for improvisation, for experimentation, the
players who have somehow managed to build brands
and create products that are striking a genuine chord
with even the most jaded among us.
Along the way, I make the argument that it is time
for business professionals—marketers, in particular—
to begin letting go of some of the things that they have
come to regard as best practice. This is no easy chal-
lenge; as I tell my students: Learning is easy; forgetting
is hard.Yet this is precisely what I believe is necessary if
business is to build a new culture of consumer engage-
ment, one that creates, at the very least, the possibility
that we will begin listening again.
Incidentally, this past year, it was my younger son’s
turn to start second grade. As expected, it wasn’t
long before he—like his brother before him—began
bringing home poems to memorize. Each week, a
new poem. And so each night, I found myself dutifully
feeding him his lines, over and over again, my déjà vu
complete.
Only this time, my heart wasn’t in it. Because over
the years, I have come to believe that a poem perfectly
memorized is a poem too easily recited. And a poem
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xiv performed without effort is a poem that has lost all

meaning.
1
I have a friend, a businesswoman, who claims that she
can absorb the gist of a business book, any business
book, in under an hour. Of course, whether or not
you’re impressed by her claim depends on whether
you’ve ever read one yourself. Most business books
are written for easy digestion. They are reductive in
the way that subway maps are reductive; the elimina-
tion of unnecessary information creates a kind of con-
ceptual isolation that is functionally efficient to the
extreme.
But reduction can come at a cost. A few years ago,
EdwardTufte, who resides at Yale and spends most of his
time thinking about the presentation of information,
published a monograph (The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint)
about the cognitive hegemony of the world’s most
popular presentation software. As Tufte pointed out,
the unfortunate price of simplification is, well, over-
simplification. Not to mention the additional tax paid
out in the form of pedantry. Imagine if you were to go
to a dinner party only to discover that all of the guests
had decided to present their stories in PowerPoint for-
mat. Yes, the evening would be informative, but it
Introduction

would also be a bore.

When I was in college, I remember reading a book
by the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feyn-
man, entitled Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! What
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was interesting about the book was that it appeared to

Introduction
be nothing more than a compilation of rambling anec-
dotes—about his personal life, his teaching, his work.
And yet the weight of these anecdotes crept up on
you, so that by the time you finished the book it was
impossible to regard it as anything less than a finely
honed indictment of the scientific discipline.
What Feynman seemed to understand was that
there are in fact two ways for a scholar to contribute
to our understanding of something. The first is to
adopt the PowerPoint approach, which is to take a
complex phenomenon and attempt to distill it down
to its core. The second is to do the reverse: to take a
complex phenomenon and attempt to shed new light
on it, not by removing information but by layering on
unexpected shades of nuance, from unexpected
sources. This is what Feynman did: He wove his sub-
ject into the broader tapestry of everyday life. He
added richness, texture, context. He was a man I wish
I could have invited to dinner.
There are other examples of this, of scholars who
have written books that have influenced my own ap-
proach to writing. The physician Atul Gawande has
produced two books (Complications and Better) about
medicine and the health care system in this country.
Gawande’s books are a complicated brew—they touch
on the professional and the personal, they are alter-
nately dispassionate and impassioned, and together
they transformed the way I thought about medicine.
John Stilgoe has written a book entitled Outside Lies
xv
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xvi Magic; it transformed the way I thought about modern

architecture.When I was a graduate student, Don Nor-
man’s seminal The Design of Everyday Things transformed
the way I thought about technology and function.
All of these works exist across wildly different dis-
ciplines, and yet they have something very much in
common: They were written by scholars who were
able to bring their respective disciplines to life, by hu-
manizing them somehow, without dumbing them
down. Their relationship to their work is akin to the
one Calvin Trillin has to food, which is to say that they
regard their subject—whether it be medicine, or ar-
chitecture, or technology—as constituting one small
piece of a much larger fabric. These are writers who
meander, certainly, but only as a means of getting
straight to their point. Meanwhile, they manage to be
the opposite of pedantic, which is another way of say-
ing that they are comfortable with the knowledge that
things can be true and false at the same time.
Their books inspire, because although they provide
a running commentary of all that is wrong with their
respective disciplines, they do not stop there. I have al-
ways thought that the way to keep criticism from de-
volving into cynicism is to make it the starting point
rather than the punctuation mark, and that’s what
Introduction

these writers do: They look hard to identify the good

amid the bad, and when they find it, they shine a light
on it, they celebrate it, they encourage us to learn
from it. If scholarship is a conversation, then in my
mind these are the ones who make the most com-
pelling conversationalists—the ones braving the unfa-
Moon_9780307460868_1p_01_r1.qxp 5/13/11 1:36 PM Page xvii

miliar dialect, the ones pushing the dialogue forward

Introduction
in unexpected and provocative ways.
1
I wrote this book because I believe that marketing has
become the soundtrack of our generation. It is setting
the pulse, it is creating the rhythm—not just for what
we consume, but for what we crave, what we love and
what we hate. Against this backdrop, there are some
insights that are not well represented by linear think-
ing. And so this is a book full of contradictions. Juxta-
positions. Sideways connections.
In addition, every year, I tell my students that mar-
keting is the only function within the organization that
is expressly designed to sit at the intersection where
business meets people. Real people. And the problem
with real people is that they don’t see the world the
same way a businessperson does. They don’t speak the
language of bullet points; they don’t organize the world
into flowcharts and frameworks. People, real people,
view the world more organically. They are idiosyn-
cratic. They are unpredictable. They are beautifully dis-
organized.
This book could be described in much the same
way. It is intimate. It is organic. It is idiosyncratic. It’s
even a bit disorganized. But in my mind, that’s okay, be-
cause my aspiration is not to be deductive; it is to be
discursive in the unpredictable way that people are dis-
cursive. In business, just as in life, sometimes the most
illuminating insights can emerge from the throwaways.
xvii

I should add that the nicest note I’ve ever received

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xviii from a student was one that said: “The difference be-
tween your course and every other one taught at the
Harvard Business School is that it was so human. It
was a class about us, disguised as lessons in business.”
That’s what this book is. It’s a book about us, dis-
guised as lessons in business.
Introduction
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part 1

the competitive
herd

(critique)
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the herd
instinct

when I was a young girl, I had a teacher who used to

encourage her students to drink glass after glass of
milk. Somehow, she had developed the notion that milk
boosted one’s intellect. For this teacher—a scholar by
heart and by training—there was nothing more pre-
cious, no currency more valuable, than intelligence.
On occasion, one of us would ask her point-blank,
“What’s intelligence?” Each time, she would offer a
different response:
“Intelligence is a baby’s first words.”
“Intelligence is the joke Hyun-Ju made in math les-
son this morning.”
“Intelligence is three brothers holding hands.”
“Intelligence is yellow.”
Her responses would drive us crazy, and now,
some thirty years later, it’s interesting to consider
why. As children, we were in effect asking her to de-
scribe something for us in the most straightforward
way we knew how. And although she would always
respond in a manner that was open and even forth-
coming, her actual responses would build on expres-
21

sions that bore no apparent relation to what she was

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22 describing. The whole thing was pretty maddening, to

be honest with you.
That said, today I’m inclined to be more sympa-
thetic with my elementary school teacher. Over the
years, I’ve learned that description can be a delicate
challenge for the describer, too; the deeper you try to
dig into the essence of the thing, the further you have
to reach to come up with the right words to do justice
to what you’re describing. The nice thing is that it’s
possible to mix-and-match words in an infinite variety
of combinations to help you do this; what’s tough is
that when they’re mixed-and-matched in an unex-
pected or overly ambitious way, the rendition can be-
come almost uninterpretable to the person on the
other end.
As an adult, I’ve been on both sides of this. When I
hear a critic describe a particular wine as “somewhat
challenging, but with significant cerebral appeal,” or
having “a touch of menthol and green eucalyptus on
the entry,” along with “generous notes of acacia honey
and vanilla on the finish,” I’m never quite sure what
I’m supposed to do with the information. Likewise,
there are few things I find as frustrating as poring over
a two-thousand-word review of the latest movie re-
Yo u n g m e M o o n

lease only to walk away still feeling unsatisfied. It’s as if

the reviewer got so caught up in the joys of prose that
he neglected to address the reader’s most fundamental
questions. Yes, the acting was “industrious” and the
lighting “nervy,” but was the movie any good? Was it
worth seeing?
On the other hand, each year, about two hundred
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students enroll in my class. If you were to ask me to

Different
characterize this group of students to you, you’d
probably expect me to do so along predictable lines.
You wouldn’t expect me to tell you that they are
soundproof, or squeezably soft, or that they need
daily watering. You’d expect me to tell you that they
are smart, witty, kind, or outgoing. A good descrip-
tion is one that captures distinctiveness along dimen-
sions that make sense to us. If it doesn’t do this, we
have no means of figuring out where to place the de-
scribed entity in our heads.
But even though I know this, I’d still be tempted to
liven up my description of my students to do them
better justice, which would eventually lead me back to
the thorny issue of vocabulary. When it comes to por-
traying something as complex as, say, an individual or
a group of individuals, there remain too many words
to play with. A person could be described as obnox-
ious, quaint, acerbic, fragile, loquacious, or energetic.
It’s the endless variety problem again.
This is where a uniform method of description can
be useful. What a uniform method of description does
is put discipline around the words. It creates a com-
mon ground for our characterizations by enforcing a
shared set of touch points, at the same time heading
off an endless game of vocabulary mix-and-match.
Consider, for example, one of the more popular
methods of description around: the standard personal-
ity test. A personality test is a measurement tool de-
signed to depict an individual’s persona along a
23

predetermined set of dimensions. There are obviously

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24 many variations of the test, but a rudimentary one can

be devised from just two (fairly self-explanatory) di-
mensions: dominance/submissiveness and friendli-
ness/unfriendliness.

What’s appealing about this kind of measurement

tool is the extent to which it can capture a dispropor-
tionate amount of information with parsimony. Most
personality tests involve four or five dimensions, but
even a crude two-dimensional metric can be curi-
Yo u n g m e M o o n

ously revealing. To say that someone is an “unfriendly-

submissive” is to say a tremendous amount about
them. Sure, you could extrapolate an additional set of
descriptors (e.g., “passive aggressive,” “sulky,” “resent-
ful”) to flesh out the complexion more fully, but the
nucleus of the description is there. This is what a good
descriptive metric does—it gets to the heart of the
Moon_9780307460868_1p_01_r1.qxp 5/13/11 11:07 AM Page 25

matter; it captures the core of a characterization that

Different
could otherwise go on forever.
In addition, it’s impossible to study a 2 × 2 map
such as this one and not project yourself onto it. It
wouldn’t take much to figure out which quadrant you
belonged in; similarly, it wouldn’t take much to figure
out where to place your friends, your family mem-
bers, your co-workers.

This is the second element of a good descriptive

metric—it invites comparison. It depicts individual
distinctiveness in a way that makes it possible to see
connections that were not obvious up to that point. (It
can be oddly addictive in this regard.) It generates that
“oh, this is why George has always reminded me of
25

Richard” pang of association.

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26 1
What businesspeople do with products and brands is
not unlike what psychologists do with individuals:They
rely on descriptive tools to lay bare the essence of what
they’re trying to understand. The metrics themselves
are also generated in an analogous fashion: by asking
people to provide their perceptions of a product or
brand, and then using those perceptions to plot the
product or brand on a diagram such as this one:
Yo u n g m e M o o n

Brand managers call these diagrams positioning

maps, and they spawn different versions depending on
the product category. A typical positioning map for the
hotel category, for example, might be anchored by the
dimensions of price, luxury, service, and location. A
positioning map for the laptop category might be an-
Moon_9780307460868_1p_01_r1.qxp 5/13/11 11:07 AM Page 27

chored by the dimensions of price, features, quality,

Different
and weight.
Once created, this positioning map can end up
being the linchpin for a company’s competitive strat-
egy, not only because it provides a snapshot of the
brand’s personality in the eyes of consumers but also
because it does so relative to the competition. By plot-
ting all the category offerings on a single map, compa-
nies can compare and contrast their own strengths and
weaknesses to those of other players.

27
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28 For consumers, a snapshot like this can be informa-

tive for a symmetrical reason. To resurrect that poor
alien from the previous chapter, think of how helpful a
basic 2 × 2 would have been in navigating that byzan-
tine cereal aisle:

We may not be aware of it, but we’ve all used these

kinds of snapshots at one point or another. My earli-
est introduction to U.S. News & World Report’s college
Yo u n g m e M o o n

report probably took place some twenty-odd years

ago. At the time, there were two things I found star-
tling about the report. The first was how radical it
was in its transparency. In an era in which universities
had become comfortable relying on amorphous per-
ceptions of “reputation” to attract students, the re-
port held nothing back. It exposed the empirical
Moon_9780307460868_1p_01_r1.qxp 5/13/11 11:07 AM Page 29

guts of these institutions—tuition costs, SAT scores,

Different
instructor-student ratios—with a granularity that
would have been otherwise impossible for the average
applicant to obtain. It was like seeing “inside” a college
for the first time.
The second was the extent to which the report in-
vited comparison. In effect, the report was a competi-
tive positioning map rendered in tabular form, and the
consolidation of the data made it impossible not to
hold one school up against another, across this dimen-
sion or that dimension.
Again, as consumers, we seek out these kinds of
comparative metrics all the time. The data may not
necessarily be available to us in graphical form, but no
matter. Whether it be data involving universities, ho-
tels, or automobiles, the metrics can be oddly addic-
tive—empowering, even—in their ability to dispatch
so much information with so much efficiency.
1
But measurement can cut both ways. In track and
field, we happen to measure speed, and so we culti-
vate a nation of speedsters. If we happened to mea-
sure running style, we would cultivate a nation of
gazelles. The minute we choose to measure some-
thing, we are essentially choosing to aspire to it. A
metric, in other words, creates a pointer in a particu-
lar direction. And once the pointer is created, it is
only a matter of time before competitors herd in the
direction of that pointer.
29

In the 1980s and 1990s, a number of prominent

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30 hospitals agreed to make public their mortality rates.

The agreement was considered a breakthrough in hos-
pital openness, promising to give patients the kind of
insider view into hospital quality that they’d never
been privy to before. If a hospital’s mission is to heal,
then what better way to audit the performance of a
hospital than to track the ultimate measure of that
healing ability?
What soon became evident, however, was that a
hospital’s mortality rate is a function of an elaborate
host of factors—including the type of patients it ad-
mits, the amount of experimental research its doctors
conduct, and the degree of care it provides—each of
which can heavily conflate the intended meaning of
the metric.
To put it more bluntly, it soon became evident that
the easiest way for a hospital to improve its mortality
rate would be to stop admitting the sickest patients.
Yet if all hospitals were to do this, the overall effect on
the medical system would be chilling: There would be
fewer hospitals accepting the most challenging cases,
experimenting with the riskiest treatments, becoming
specialists in the most intractable disease areas. Hospi-
tals wouldn’t get better, they would simply become
Yo u n g m e M o o n

more like each other.

In recent years, the college ranking system has
come under fire for precisely this reason—for damp-
ening the likelihood that universities will experiment
with models of pedagogy that may not reflect well in
the metrics. The rankings have made it hazardous to be
a nonconformist.
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This, then, is the problem with uniform systems of

Different
measurement: The more entrenched a system of mea-
surement, the more difficult it is for a deviant, an out-
lier, or even an experimenter to emerge. Another way
to say this is to say that a competitive metric, any com-
petitive metric, tends to bring out the herd in us. The
dynamic can be likened to the observer effect in
physics, only applied with too little foresight: The act
of measurement changes the behavior of the thing
being measured.
1
Here is another example. Jeep is a brand with a legiti-
mate heritage in the sport utility category, and in my
mind, anyway, deserves much of the credit for the de-
velopment of an SUV market in this country. Twenty
years ago, its brand was synonymous with the concept
of rugged four-wheel-drive transportation, such that a
perceptual metric comparing Jeep’s image along this
dimension against, say, the image of competitors like
Nissan or Toyota, would have heavily favored Jeep. On
the other hand, a comparison of these same brands
along a dimension such as, say, reliability, would have
favored Nissan or Toyota:
31
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32

Today, both of these diagrams would look more

like this:

What has happened in the interim? Quite simply,

Yo u n g m e M o o n

ruggedness and reliability have become standard met-

rics against which car companies measure themselves
in the SUV category, which means that brands lagging
along these dimensions have raced to catch up. Multi-
ply this effect across all of the other dimensions that
SUVs have come to be measured against—gas mile-
age, safety ratings, comfort, and so on—and the cu-
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mulative effect has been a gradual homogenization of

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the offerings within the category over time:

This same competitive trend can be seen in category

after category. Ten years ago, Volvo was a brand known
for its practicality and safety, whereas Audi was a brand
known for its sportiness; nowadays, Audi outperforms
Volvo in safety tests, whereas Volvo’s advertisements
work to assure customers that its cars are fun to drive.
The dynamic is not unlike a popularity contest in
which everyone tries to win by being equal parts
friendly, happy, active, and fun. Or an election cam-
paign in which all the candidates try to be charming,
serious, humble, and strong. Once everyone starts
doing it, no one stands out.
Even consumers are not immune to this behavior.
Ask Volvo drivers for suggestions on how to improve
the brand and they will tell you that they love its safety
focus, but could you please improve its sex appeal; ask
33

Audi drivers the same question and they will tell you
Moon_9780307460868_1p_01_r1.qxp 5/13/11 11:07 AM Page 34

34 the converse. Indeed, the problem with asking con-

sumers what they want is that not only will they ask for
things they’re not getting, but their requests will usually
be driven by what they see being offered by the compe-
tition. This is one of the (many) problems with market
research. And so it is that we end up with a Volvo that
runs like an Audi and an Audi that runs like a Volvo.
There is a cost to differentiation.There is a price to be
paid for excellence, in anything. A college that empha-
sizes great teaching isn’t necessarily going to have the
best research facilities.A tennis player with a great serve-
and-volley game isn’t necessarily going to have the best
ground strokes. Consumers don’t always understand
this.This is why, if you’re looking for a compromise solu-
tion, then yes—take a poll, conduct some research, sur-
vey the people. But if you’re looking for a unique
solution, the last thing you should do is ask for a vote.
1
When I first started teaching as a graduate student
many years ago, I came up with what I thought was a
benign way to motivate the dozen or so students en-
rolled in the small seminar I was leading. At the mid-
way point of the semester, I decided to provide them
Yo u n g m e M o o n

with some fairly detailed feedback on their perfor-

mance to date. A few days later, one of my strongest
students walked into my office bearing a troubled
look. I had given him a mid-semester evaluation that
looked something like this, relative to his peers:
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The question he had for me was, what could he do to
improve his creative contributions to our discussions?
It was only after he had left my office and a few ad-
ditional weeks of the semester had passed that the cu-
mulative effect of my feedback became apparent to me:
Just about everyone in my class was focused on im-
proving their weaknesses. The most creative thinkers in
the room were intent on improving their analytical
skills, while the most analytical thinkers in the room
were intent on improving their creative contributions.
This was evident both in their written assignments and
in their discussion comments. No one was playing to
their strengths anymore. As a result, our class discus-
sions had begun to lose their sparkle.
A funny thing happens the minute you begin to
35

capture comparative differences on paper: There is a

Moon_9780307460868_1p_01_r1.qxp 5/13/11 11:08 AM Page 36

36 natural inclination for folks in the comparative set to

focus on eliminating those differences, rather than ac-
centuating them. I’m as guilty of this as anyone. Over
the course of my career, I’ve been the recipient of per-
formance feedback any number of times, with respect
to my research, my teaching, and so on. Yet no matter
how strong the feedback is on any single dimension, if
the overall feedback is “lopsided” in any way, I experi-
ence the knee-jerk urge to push myself toward a more
well-rounded output.
Companies fall into this trap as well. If you were
the brand manager for a particular automotive brand,
and market research revealed the following percep-
tions of your brand, where would you devote your
marketing energies?
Yo u n g m e M o o n

My guess is that you’d feel pressure to address the

“vulnerabilities” in your brand. Meanwhile, it might
not even occur to you to do the opposite—to double
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down on your strengths, further extending the dis-

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tance between you and your competitors.

And yet ultimately, this is how well-meaning efforts

to monitor your competitive position—whether it’s
through brand positioning maps, market research, or
any other form of competitive analysis—can turn into a
cattle prod for homogenization. Back when I used to
give that mid-semester feedback to my students, it was
never my intention to diminish the overall quality of our
class discussions by stifling the differences among them,
but this is in fact what I did. Similarly, when organiza-
tions deliver performance feedback to their employees,
the intention is not to cultivate a homogeneous work-
force, but this is in fact what can occur as a result.
The truth of the matter is, true differentiation—
sustainable differentiation—is rarely a function of
well-roundedness; it is typically a function of lopsid-
edness. The same can be said for excellence. If you
37

were to meet a brain surgeon who also claimed to be a

Moon_9780307460868_1p_01_r1.qxp 5/13/11 11:08 AM Page 38

38 pediatric orthopedist who also claimed to be a special-

ist in Botox treatments, you’d likely view all of his cre-
dentials with skepticism. Why? Because intuitively you
understand that excellence on any extreme almost al-
ways involves a trade-off. It’s like the typical movie
portrayal of the high school football coach who also
happens to teach social studies—he may be a football
genius, but he’s probably not going to win any awards
in the classroom.
Applying the same logic, if Hummer were to come
out with an advertising campaign boasting a family-
friendly ride, it would hurt its claim to being the
toughest motherf*cker on the road. If Ferrari were to
come out with an advertising campaign that under-
scored its commitment to child safety, it would hurt
its claim to being the baddest sports car on the
market. Negative trade-offs are not only a marker of ex-
cellence, they are a marker of differentiation. This is as
true for products and brands as it is for brain surgeons.
For businesses, however, the impulse to move to a
more well-rounded output can be hard to resist. And
the cumulative effect of this, in too many cases, is a
herdlike regression toward the mean. As I write this,
Starbucks is experimenting with offering breakfast
Yo u n g m e M o o n

value meals in its coffee shops while McDonald’s is ex-

perimenting with putting coffee bars in its fast-food
outlets.
1
In animal behavior, the defining characteristic of a
herd is the absence of conspiracy; it is the uncoordi-
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nated behaviors of self-seeking individuals that create

Different
the deception of a single, unified group moving as one.
When you see a herd in action, what you are seeing is
coordination without a coordinator, or what scientists
would refer to as a self-organizing system. Elsewhere,
I use the phrase “organic collusion” to evoke precisely
this kind of unpremeditated collaboration.
A hive is a self-organizing system. An ant colony is a
self-organizing system. Flocks, traffic flows, the stock
market—all of these are self-organizing systems.
The easiest way to understand how self-organizing
systems operate is to essentially break one down. In
the 1980s, Craig Reynolds became intrigued by the
phenomenon of birds flying in coordinated flocks. A
computer animator by training, he decided to try to
build a program that would generate a facsimile of
flocking behavior on the screen. He began by pro-
gramming each artificial bird to abide by three simple
rules: (1) avoid crowding or colliding into nearby
birds; (2) keep up with nearby birds (by flying at
roughly the same heading and speed); and (3) drift in
the direction of the average position of nearby birds.
Although he knew he had more work to do before
he was finished, he went ahead and tested the simula-
tion using just these three rules. To his surprise, with-
out any further programming, the birds flocked
perfectly. Reynolds’s contribution to the field of artifi-
cial life was to reinforce the notion that sometimes, all
it takes is individual parties abiding by self-interested,
myopic rules of behavior to generate the semblance of
39

choreographed activity.
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40 What’s compelling about the concept of self-

organizing systems is how little they demand of their
participants. There are really only two essential re-
quirements for participation in a flock. The first is a
sensory apparatus, an awareness of what other parties
are doing around you. In business, this is effectively
what our competitive positioning maps do for us: They
provide us with an awareness of our position relative
to others, a hyper-sensitivity to where our closest
competitors stand in relation to us.
The second is a predisposition to make the neces-
sary adjustments when nearby parties shift direction.
When it comes to flocking, the rules of behavior are
fundamentally reactive. What this means is that if
nearby birds start drifting to the left, there must be an
inclination to follow suit. If they start speeding up to
the right, there must be an inclination to follow suit.
In business, not only does this inclination exist, it
is ingrained. Our competitive sensory apparatus has
conditioned us to not let other companies get too
close, but not let them get too far either. So when
American Airlines gains a slight edge in the airline in-
dustry by introducing a frequent-flier program, or
when Colgate gains a slight edge in oral cosmetics by
Yo u n g m e M o o n

introducing tooth-whitening control, we are keenly

aware of the imperative to match pace. More gener-
ally, if the competition as a whole appears to be mov-
ing in a particular direction, the inclination to drift in
the same direction can feel natural to the point of au-
tomaticity.
This proclivity to stay with the flock can be partic-
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ularly pronounced with respect to nearby competi-

Different
tors. Think about it: If Harvard were to offer all of its
students a free year abroad, the pressure would be on
Yale and Princeton—not the University of Florida—
to do likewise. If the Ritz-Carlton were to announce
free overnight dry cleaning for all of its guests, the
Four Seasons would experience more pressure to
match the offer than if Motel 6 were to announce the
same. This is why competitive clusters within a cate-
gory often appear to be moving in such tight lockstep
with each other—because conformity is most likely
to manifest among groups of competitors that are al-
ready the most similar to begin with.
It is also why organic collusion can be so endemic
in cutthroat markets. The more tightly contested the
category, the more clustered the competition, which
means (1) the more hyper-vigilant companies are going
to be to the movements of those around them and (2)
the more poised they will be to respond in kind. It
doesn’t take much to see how this kind of ongoing
jockeying can quickly become all-consuming; when
companies are fighting tooth and nail for every market
share point, the relentlessness of this kind of competi-
tive engagement can easily take on a life of its own.
And yet for the individual firm, this meta-dynamic
is unlikely to register, for the same reason that drivers
stuck in a traffic jam rarely stop to think about their
own role in the congestion. As Craig Reynolds’s algo-
rithm so elegantly suggests, sometimes the view from
the inside out can be very different than the view from
41

the outside in.

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42 1
It was Irving Janis who in 1972 popularized the term
“groupthink” to describe the phenomenon of individuals
in a group reaching consensus without a critical testing
and evaluation of ideas.The pejorative was in many ways
an echo of the social mindset at the time; if you remem-
ber, the 1970s were an era in which we viewed collec-
tive behavior of any sort—particularly that which
carried even a whiff of Orwellian mindlessness—with
suspicion. When I was growing up, conformity was an
epithet. Peer pressure was an epithet. Mob psychology
was an epithet. Even the word “collective” called to
mind Soviet-like connotations.
But in the past couple of decades, something has
turned. There has been a change in the tenor of our
conversation around group behavior. Today, our cul-
tural lexicon is replete with references to a newfound
optimism in the benefits of self-organizing systems.
Collective intelligence. Smart mobs. The wisdom of
crowds. The central conceit in this more recent dia-
logue is that organic collusion of the sort that arises
from intelligent, independent decision making can
lead to optimal and even beautiful outcomes.
Yo u n g m e M o o n

I raise these two countervailing perspectives, not to

argue for the validity of one over the other, but because
I believe there’s a crux in their reconciliation. The lat-
ter view reminds us that there are scenarios in which a
single, shared outcome can be beneficial to all. Collec-
tive intelligence, collaborative filtering, Wikipedia—in
all of these scenarios, it has become evident that un-
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premeditated collaboration holds the potential to work

Different
the kind of wonders that no amount of orchestration
could ever match.
The former view reminds us, however, that there
are other times when convergence toward a single,
shared outcome can leave us with an aftermath that is
nothing less than stifling. The critical question comes
down to whether in a given situation there is value in
diversity, in the emergence of multiple divergent out-
comes. When it comes to track-and-field, we may
want our runners moving in the same direction, but
when it comes to medical care or higher education, we
may not.
In business, of course, differentiation is generally
considered a firm’s primary defense against commoditi-
zation. And in theory, the more fierce the competition,
the stronger the firm’s commitment to differentiation
should be. But in fact, I have argued that the opposite is
often true: The more diligently firms compete with
each other, the less differentiated they can become, at
least in the eyes of consumers.
Moreover, the irony is this: To a large extent, the
herdlike behaviors I have described in this chapter em-
anate from what most managers would regard as best
practice wisdoms. Know thy competition. Listen to
your customers. They tap into characteristics that most
managers would regard as best practice traits. Vigi-
lance. Lack of complacency. Responsiveness.
Meanwhile, the very instruments that these man-
agers are relying on to establish and reinforce differen-
43

tiation—competitive metrics, positioning maps, and

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44 customer surveys—have devolved into their obverse.

They contribute to the herding behavior as opposed to
protect against it. It’s as if the entire community has
been betrayed by the tools of their trade.
1
So just for the fun of it, let’s conjure up a counterfac-
tual. Let’s imagine a category in which ten compa-
nies were forced to operate blind to what each other
was doing. Or to put it more specifically, let’s imag-
ine a category in which all ten competitors had to
make all of their business decisions—about what to
offer, how to innovate, how to price, how to adver-
tise, and so on—without the benefit of knowing
where they stood relative to one another. What
would be the result?
My prediction is that you’d get ten companies pur-
suing wildly divergent strategies. Or to use the lan-
guage of this chapter, ten birds flying off in completely
different directions.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that
businesses should operate this way; I offer the coun-
terfactual to be provocative, not prescriptive. Still,
to carry the scenario one step further, what do you
Yo u n g m e M o o n

think would happen to these companies once they

were in flight?
My guess is that while a few would probably crash
and burn pretty quickly, a few would probably manage
to stay aflight . . . and most important, a couple might
even make their way to a place pretty fantastic.
By the same token, as a teacher, I’ve learned that
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when I want to assign my students a large project to

Different
complete, there are two ways I can go about it. One way
is to give them a list of project benchmarks and to be
explicit about the parameters along which they will be
evaluated. A second way is to provide them with no ex-
plicit benchmarks, no specific parameters for grad-
ing—to provide them with nothing more than the
understanding that my expectations for their perfor-
mance will be high.
When I do the first, the results are pretty pre-
dictable. At the end of the semester I get a bunch of
projects that are safe and conventional, easy to com-
pare against each other, and a cinch to grade. But
when I do the second, something different happens.
Certainly, I have to spend a good deal of time at the
beginning of the semester managing student confusion
and uncertainty over the lack of clear guidelines.
However, my reward comes at the end of the semester
when I am handed a bunch of projects that are differ-
ent from each other in as many ways as it is possible
for them to be different. And although some of these
projects invariably miss the mark, most of them turn
out just fine . . . and there are always a couple that
have managed to find excellence of a sort that I would
never have dreamed of asking for in the first place.
1
When I think back to my teacher’s comments about
intelligence, the reason I think I was so frustrated with
her responses was that they simply weren’t actionable.
45

I wanted to be intelligent, and her answers didn’t tell

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46 me how to get there. What I really wanted, in other

words, was an IQ test, along with instructions for how
to study for it. I needed a focus for my aspiration.
Fortunately for me, she would have none of it.
Because this is what my teacher understood: When
it comes to some things—particularly aspirational
ideals like intelligence, or quality, or performance, or
beauty—we find psychological safety in definitions
that are concrete, measurable, and agreed upon.
Take these away, and we will almost certainly expe-
rience feelings of dislocation. This is what happens
whenever anyone is forced to operate outside of their
comfort zone.Yet in the long run, this is not necessar-
ily a bad thing, especially if the objective is not to cre-
ate a flock of obedient followers, but to sustain a
divergence of unconstrained thinking.
As a teacher, when you refuse to put a box around
some abstract vision of achievement, when you refuse
to impose a measuring tape against which that achieve-
ment can be measured, you are in many ways coaxing
your students to constructively rebel. You are encour-
aging them to consider the meaning of excellence ab-
sent the authority of an exogenous metric, and you are
giving them license to surprise you—and perhaps even
Yo u n g m e M o o n

surprise themselves—with what they come up with.