Breakpoint Book

Business, Biology, and Technology: “The truth about Competitive Advantage”

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In case you haven’t already heard, Breakpoint, by Jeff Stibel is being cited as a must read for business people. The book has made it into the Top 20: “What Corporate America is Reading” list compiled by Brian Solis and is rapidly gaining interest amongst America’s brightest leaders. Stibel is the Chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. and Chairman of BrainGate, as well as on the boards for University of Southern California, Brown, and Tufts University.

In addition to Breakpoint, Mr. Stibel has published a number of books and academic articles related to business, economics and other topics, such as neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Business books play an integral role in the evolution of business development, strategic thinking, corporate culture and the overall way that leaders mature, grow and adapt to our ever-progressing society.

The book is distinct from other influential books because it looks at business through a different lens than the rest. Rather than focusing primarily on corporate strategies and other traditional business topics Breakpoint examines correlation between biological systems and technology.

Within the complex world of biology, bigger is rarely better in the long run, and the deadliest creatures are usually not the large or aggressive ones like the lion but the small, out-of-sight ones like viruses and bacteria. Mr. Stibel compares this biological phenomenon to the internet and he takes the position that it is the quality of a network that is important for survival, not the size, and all networks—the human brain, Facebook, Google, even the internet itself—eventually reach a breakpoint and collapse.

The corporate and technological success equation is Quality ≠ Size

Exceptional companies are using their understanding of the internet’s brain-like abilities to create a competitive advantage by building more effective websites, using cloud computing, engaging social media, monetizing effectively, and leveraging a collective consciousness.

The mantra that Jeff has established around the Malibu office is “Work Hard, Play Hard” and because of this focus on quality the company has been able to achieve amazing things. From the company culture to innovative product development, Mr. Stibel truly does lead by example as he encourages both internal and external company initiatives that encourage small business and community growth.

Amidst all the peripheral noise of traditional business books Mr. Stibel has written a truly impactful piece that shows the reader where biology, technology, and business intersect. In a consumer-driven market where corporate responsibility matters and corporate cultures are thriving, it is important to remember that quality will always trump size in the long run.

 

Photo Credit: Mo Riza, Flickr

 

Tech Author Stibel to Facebook: Shrink or stagnate – on VentureBeat

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“Facebook has some serious shrinking to do if it wants to stay relevant.

That’s the assertion of tech executive and New York Times best-selling author Jeff Stibel, 40, who has been thinking long and hard lately about what the Menlo Park-based social media kingpin and its more than 1 billion users need to do in order to grow and avoid the grim fate that befell MySpace.

Read the full article on VentureBeat where it originally appeared.

Facebook’s Breakpoint: How the network giant can maneuver around its predicted collapse

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Two researchers from Princeton University released a now-famous study in mid-January, just as Facebook was about to celebrate its tenth birthday, predicting that the social media behemoth would lose about 80 percent of its users in the next three years. Other researchers, the media and Facebook themselves weighed in on the credibility of this study, criticizing its conclusions, exploring its weight and predicting what a future sans Facebook will look like.

Jeff Stibel, CEO and Chairman of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp., made similar predictions for Facebook and other similar social technology networks in his book, Breakpoint: Why the Web will Implode, Search will be Obsolete, and Everything Else You Need to Know about Technology is in Your Brain, but his were a little bit less extreme, providing possible solutions to the inevitable breakpoint that all networks—biological and technological—experience.

In an interview with KOMO News Radio, spawned after the Princeton Study was released, Stibel described the cyclical stages of networks’ existence: acceleration and hyper-growth; the tipping point or breakpoint, when the network’s growth plateaus; full-bloom; then the shrink period. The shrink period, Stibel said, is when one of two defining things will happen with the network: 1.  It will collapse and die, or 2. The network will hit equilibrium.

While the latter is the obviously the preferred option for networks, many will succumb to the first, take extinct breeds of animals that overpopulated and ran out of food, for example. Similarly, Facebook, which is probably ripe in the full-bloom stage, will no longer have the luxury to tap into new markets and gain new users because most of the population has already signed up, now, they must leverage value and maintain a steady amount of users.

So, while the Princeton study probably had Facebook’s shareholders up in arms, Stibel suggested that Facebook must not panic, but hone in on its value proposition and embrace the loss of some users. If the company can experience value growth in the midst of user decline, he said, it can avoid the predicted implosion.

The breakpoint that Facebook is currently experiencing should be a lesson for other networks, namely the World Wide Web, which Stibel predicts might succumb to user-preferred apps in the coming years.

 

Photo Credit: Stockmonkeys.com via Flickr

How to Cope with What the Internet Does to Your Brain – by Jeff Stibel

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Would it surprise you to learn that our brains have been shrinking for the last 20,000 years? It’s true. In a major reversal from the two million years before that, our brains have actually been growing smaller. We’ve lost about a baseball sized amount of matter in a brain that’s not any bigger than a football. One reason for that is our bodies are smaller as well (except for maybe Shaq), but that only accounts for a small amount of the loss.

Read the full article on LinkedIn where it originally appeared.

The (Imperfect) Perfect Job Interview – By Jeff Stibel

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I’ve known for a while now that my process for selecting new employees is a little unorthodox, and I let candidates know this right away. I usually start speaking before the door is even closed, so many people in the office have heard me say the same line again and again: “This isn’t an interview.”

But it’s not just a line; it’s genuine. I don’t believe that the standard interview question and answer session works. The reason is that as soon as you ask a question, you’re putting the candidate in a box. You condition people by the very nature of the question. This is a well-known psychological phenomenon. For example, if you ask “how much will you contribute to your 401(k),” the answer will be different than if you ask “how little will you contribute to your 401(k).” In the context of an interview, this phenomenon is even more pronounced: anytime you ask a question, you can bet that it’s leading. Good interviewers are best suited for television or radio, where simply by their questions they shape the story that’s being told. Good interviewers are not suited to choosing good employees.

Read the full article on LinkedIn where it originally appeared.

Photo credit:Pressmaster / Shutterstock

The Most Important Decision You Need To Make When Building A Network – Interview with Jeff Stibel

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Lane Wood was about to turn 30, and he was in a full-on identity crisis. He had recently left charity: water where he worked directly with the founder, Scott Harrison, and A-list celebrities to bring clean drinking water across the planet.

It had been an amazing, life-changing experience; especially for a former pastor from rural Oklahoma.

However, on a winter night in 2011 at a Union Square cafe in New York City, he confided in a close friend and nervously wondered, “What happens when my email doesn’t end in charitywater.org? Have I built real relationships or have I just increased my social media follower number?”

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Which relationships do we deepen, and which ones do we let fizzle or never form?

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For Jeff Stibel, a 40-year-old brain scientist, the Chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp., and the author of Breakpoint, the answer lies in other types of networks that share similar properties.

In Jeff’s words, “The goods news is that we can look to biology and biological networks such as ants, bees, and even termites to tell us what happens in networks as a whole. We can see that there are very consistent, predictable cycles. Those cycles drive not just biological networks but business networks, economic networks, and social networks.”

Read the whole article on Forbes where it originally appeared.

The Logic Behind Facebook’s Recent Moves – By Jeff Stibel

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Recently, two Princeton graduate students released a study predicting the demise of Facebook by 2017, using concepts from epidemiology. No quicker had the media reported the results of the study than numerous rebuttals were posted. A few Facebook data scientists had great fun by posting their analyses showing that Princeton University would run out of students by 2021 and that the Earth would run out of air by 2060.

Read the whole article where is originally appeared.

Is Twitter in Trouble? – By Jeff Stibel

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Last week, Twitter’s stock took a big tumble after it released its first quarterly earnings report. The report showed that revenue is up (and better than expected), but user growth is slowing and engagement is down. Declining user growth is not an issue in itself, and actually can be a great thing for a network (in fact, I wrote a whole book on this topic). Lack of engagement, on the other hand, is something different.

Read the whole article where it originally appeared.

Image Credit:Matt Hamm, Flickr

Google Is Already in Our Nests – By Jeff Stibel

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Last month, Google bought Nest Labs, a company that makes smart home thermostats and smoke detectors. While a few applauded the acquisition (mostly geeks and tech investors), much of the reporting centered on privacy fears and predictions of doomsday advertising scenarios. It’s just the latest story exploiting our collective fear of the growing “internet of things” and distrust of the companies who leverage it.

Read the whole article where it originally appeared.

Photo Credit:plantronicsgermany, Flickr

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