I wrote about how our business environment has everyone thinking about hamburgers and hamburgers only.
I don’t remember where I heard this, but something like “If you want the best chance of being successful in business, you should sell hamburgers. People will always buy hamburgers.”
So the bulk of our smartest minds are currently focused on turning everything into hamburgers. 👇
The big problem with focusing on Hamburgerification is that focused attention is a limited resource. Every moment you think about how to turn something into a hamburger is a moment that you aren’t playing, mastering a skill, cultivating empathy, connecting with other humans.
As an early employee at Facebook said: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
“How can we turn XXXXX into a hamburger” is a very specific problem. It demands a very specific type of thinking.
There’s nothing wrong with pursuing a scalable business. I’m currently doing one myself. But not all businesses can or should be about massive scale.
But when all you have is a billionaire-or-bust sledgehammer, everything looks like a hamburger.
Cuts
This problem is built right into our financial system. Why, and I ask this earnestly, does Apple need to grow? Worse yet, why does Apple’s growth rate need to be accelerating? Anyone who understands basic math/physics knows that’s not a sustainable thing. Yet this is