Latest Kevin Maney Quotes from Interviews

• If you spot a market where the only choices are at either one end or the other - high fidelity or high convenience - there's probably a big opportunity at the other end. That was the opening for Federal Express, for instance. When it started, there was only one mail service in America - the US Postal Service, which was high convenience. Fred Smith created a high-fidelity mail service.

  Kevin Maney

  Opportunity, America, Choices

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• If you want to stand out, find a way to be either high fidelity or high convenience in whatever you do. If you're halfway in between on both measures, you're not going to make people feel very excited about you.

  Kevin Maney

  People, Way, Want

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Super fidelity requires constant investment and discipline, but great companies know how to do that.

  Kevin Maney

  Discipline, Investment, Fidelity

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Fidelity is the total quality of an experience, including a sense of exclusiveness and aura. Convenience is simply how easy something is to get, which often means a low price and ubiquitousness. A super-fidelity product or service would lose its luster and quality if it's pushed too hard toward convenience. A super-convenient product or service would start to get expensive and exclusive if it moved toward higher fidelity, which would naturally undermine its convenience.

  Kevin Maney

  Mean, Quality, Auras

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• The explosion of the Web and digital media from 1995 to 2000 shook companies more profoundly in a shorter time than anything since the end of World War II.

  Kevin Maney

  War, Media, World

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Who "wins" and who "loses" depends on when you measure it.

  Kevin Maney

  Winning, Depends, Loses

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• In the long run magazines can't be a convenience play - the Web has stolen that. So magazines have to be high fidelity - a fantastic experience - to thrive. Magazines will survive the Internet age, but only the ones that give people an experience they just can't get anywhere else. A magazine will have to be truly loved to make it.

  Kevin Maney

  Running, Play, Long

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• From about ninth grade on, I knew I was a writer at heart. I had fantasies of being a great novelist, but I thought that seemed like an iffy way to try to make a living. So I tried journalism while in college, and really liked it. But even in journalism, I've always pursued ways to be somewhat literary, whether writing a column or writing books.

  Kevin Maney

  Book, Writing, Heart

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Some of what we're learning suggests a balance between exposing children to new things, yet giving them a chance to repeatedly experience something they enjoy, which builds "chunks" of information in their brains.

  Kevin Maney

  Children, Giving, Brain

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• We learn more about how human brains work. And that leads us to ideas about how to make human brains work better.

  Kevin Maney

  Ideas, Brain, Human Brain

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Eventually, we need to have computers that work differently from the way they do today and have for the past 60-plus years. We're capturing and generating increasingly massive amounts of data, but we can't make computers that keep up with it. One of the most promising solutions is to make computers that work more the way brains work.

  Kevin Maney

  Past, Data, Years

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Our brains are great at knowing what to forget. We actually have to teach computers to do the same.

  Kevin Maney

  Knowing, Brain, Computer

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Our brains seem to have the power to do one or the other - record and remember every detail, or chunk it to higher level concepts and forget the details. We can't seem to do both. The fact that you could not fly over a city and remember every detail is not something to worry about.

  Kevin Maney

  Cities, Worry, Brain

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• When someone is in a state of flow, that person's brain is not thinking about anything - it's just processing things through chunks at a total instinct level. Athletes in a state of flow describe knowing what will happen just before it does - knowing how a defender will react to a certain move an instant before doing it. Of course, if you know what will happen, you can succeed at doing it, so an athlete in flow has a stand-out game.

  Kevin Maney

  Moving, Athlete, Thinking

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Babies have not yet chunked anything. They aren't doing any high level thinking. All they're doing is sucking in all the data they experience in the world around them, and remembering it, raw. It's basically what extreme savants have happen in their brains.

  Kevin Maney

  Baby, Thinking, Data

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Chunking makes our brains more efficient. The more you can chunk something, the faster and easier you can process it. Wayne Gretzky had chunked hockey like no one before or since. Talented people have supremely chunked whatever they become talented at doing.

  Kevin Maney

  Hockey, People, Brain

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Chunking is the ability of the brain to learn from data you take in, without having to go back and access or think about all that data every time. As a kid learning how to ride a bike, for instance, you have to think about everything you're doing. You're brain is taking in all that data, and constantly putting it together, seeing patterns, and chunking them together at a higher level. So eventually, when you get on a bike, your brain doesn't have to think about how to ride a bike anymore. You've chunked bike riding.

  Kevin Maney

  Kids, Thinking, Data

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Anybody can develop a certain amount of talent at something. However, the supremely talented - the superstars - are people who have married a gift of brain wiring to those thousands of hours of practice, usually in favorable circumstances.

  Kevin Maney

  Practice, People, Brain

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Some people seem to have extreme natural wiring - a talent that seems to come out of nowhere. Like a music savant or prodigy. The uplifting news, though, is that many talented people don't have such natural wiring - but they forge a talent through thousands of hours of what's known as deliberate practice or deliberate performance.

  Kevin Maney

  Uplifting, Practice, People

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Wayne Gretzky's talent doesn't come from studying everything he's experienced in hockey and making long-term game plans. It comes from constantly taking in all the data that's happening in the moment on the ice, and instantly generating constant predictions based on super-efficient mental models he's built in his head. Technology has to work more like Gretzky.

  Kevin Maney

  Hockey, Technology, Ice

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Now companies tend to mine gigantic databases for insights into what might happen six months from now. That might always be valuable, but there's a different kind of value - and a competitive edge - in processing ongoing streams of data through a software model that can quickly and constantly make predictions about, say, whether a certain customer is going to defect, or an aircraft is going to run into trouble.

  Kevin Maney

  Running, Data, Six Months

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Talented people can predict with great accuracy what's about to happen just a tiny bit ahead of their competitors. It might be two seconds ahead, or two hundredths of a second, or two days. Napoleon on an eighteenth century battlefield had something more like a two-day advantage. Wayne Gretzky in a hockey game was probably a second ahead of everyone else on the ice.

  Kevin Maney

  Hockey, Ice, Games

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• High fidelity is a rich experience, and you'll put up with terrible convenience to get it - maybe it's high cost, waiting in line, jumping through hoops. High convenience is the opposite - it's a commodity, but it's cheap and easy and ubiquitous. A great exclusive boutique shop is high fidelity; Wal-Mart is high convenience. Both are hard to establish in their own way. The thing to remember about sustaining either is that you can't sit still. Some other entity will always find a way to challenge your fidelity position or your convenience position.

  Kevin Maney

  Opposites, Waiting In Line, Jumping

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• A CD these days is not all that convenient, and it doesn't bring enough fidelity to make you put up with that inconvenience. So, nobody buys CDs anymore.

  Kevin Maney

  Cds, Enough, Fidelity

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Every purchasing decision involves a trade-off between what I call fidelity and convenience. Fidelity is the total experience of something - how great the experience is. Convenience is how easy it is to get something. A live concert is a high fidelity way to experience music; an MP3 file is a high convenience way to experience music. Depending on the situation, one or the other is probably pretty appealing. What's not appealing is something that offers neither.

  Kevin Maney

  Live Concerts, Mp3, Decision

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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