One late fall day, sometime in the 90s, the latest issue of Snowboarder magazine arrived in my mailbox. Despite being the most recent issue, it read like a time capsule.
The competition coverage breathlessly documenting the latest stunts - happened six months earlier. The jaw-dropping trick stunning crowds in my lastest issue is now the minimum expected level of performance. Yet here it was presented as 'news'. Such are the time misalignments of pre-internet print media.
Someone needed to write up the story of the event, someone else needed to edit it to the exact column inches, someone else needed to layout the article in the magazine, then once all the ads and articles were laid out, it was sent to press, printed, then mailed out around North America, five times a year. All of this almost makes six months sound fast.
Almost.
But even then, in the relatively early days of snowboarding, innovation was so aggressively pursued, six months was multiple lifetimes, creating a latency so wide each magazine more documenting history than celebrating real-time breakthrough.
To solve this latency, the handful of people in my high school with professional ambitions moved to Banff every summer, and came back casually landing backflips.
--
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator tells the story of a stock trader in a small brokerage in Ohio circa 1900.
The trader, Jesse Livermore, quickly moves up the ranks of the Ohio grokerage and makes a pile of money. Feeling confident and flush, Livermore moves to New York. Unbeknownst to him, his success was built on the latency of information between Ohio and New York. New York, moves faster than Ohio - as the physical distance to execute trades was 500 miles shorter. Eventually Livermore catches up, but not after going bust multiple times.
Even today, getting even closer - in space and time - to the NYSE is an ongoing arms race. As recently as 2020, experimental hollow-core fiber optic cables were promising to shave billionths of a second off transaction times.
In my work with founders I listen for how they're reducing latency, and finding their competitive advantage;
If the problem they want to solve is in restaurants, are they picking up shifts in those restaurants this week?
If the problem they want to solve is at farms in northern Minnesota, how many cows have they seen this week?
If the problem is turning sales around, how many past customers have they interviewed this week?
I listen for if they're putting their ass where their heart want to be.
Just as today's X-Games competitors have long ago integrated all the 1990s snowboarding innovations, and today's stock traders have long ago integrated Jesse Livermore's lessons, today's product innovation professionals have long ago integrated the Google's Design Sprints (2012), Business Model Canvas (2010), Lean Startup (2008), Amazon's Working Backwards (2004). The tricks and techniques they advocate are no longer novel. They're the minimum expected level of performance.
Somewhere, someone - maybe you - is building a new business via a truly innovative framework they're developing on the fly, perhaps unconsciously. This framework acknowledges all the productivity, marketing, and collaboration tools and techniques we currently have at our fingertips. But, it won't be until they've repeatedly, consistently found success with it before they document it and share it. At that point, it'll be too late for the rest of us. They've already extracted all the competitive advantage.
Mind the time gap.