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Assuming competitive environment.
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Taking actions that many people think are “the right thing to do” leads to [competition
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There are many reasons to think “this is the right thing to do.”
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It tends to be “right” because many people agree with it (social proof).
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But if you take it one step further into abstraction, the choice to “make the same decision as the majority” is not correct.
- [Let’s call it the Competitive Strategy Layer.
- When the competitive strategy layer is discussing “how is the right thing to do?” and someone makes a proposal based on the argument that “this idea is right because many people agree with it,” the people in the competitive strategy layer laugh and pass it by.
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On the other hand, those who are passed over complain that they are not understood even though they have argued what many people say is right.
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The problem is that those in the competitive strategy layer were not able to share in advance the layers on which the discussion was based.
- Social proof layer people didn’t understand that different layers have different correctness issues
concrete example - When I was writing Technology Supporting Coding, there was a suggestion that I should clarify the target audience.
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This sounds like a good argument.
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But I ignored them.
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When restricting the target audience, we tend to think of targeting “beginners” who are the most numerous.
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Considered a red ocean for technical books for beginners
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So the strategy was to start with texts that beginners could understand, explaining things that beginners tend to stumble upon, while gradually accelerating and penetrating to the “world that might come after class,” which was the cutting edge at the time.
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Continued sales over the past five years indicate the success of the strategy.
- There was discussion about whether to keep the title The Intellectual Production of Engineers and focus on engineers as the target audience, or to remove engineers from the title and make it a book for the general public.
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I decided that neither of us was right.
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Untargeted intellectual production books are a red ocean
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Targeted at engineers, and designed so that readers would say, “This can be recommended to non-engineers” by making analogies and the like for engineers, but devising explanations that can be understood without that knowledge.
Social proof
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