If you have web access since 2005, you know Taylor Swift.
Photo: Gilbert Flores | Getty images
The Super -Gwiaze musician is the most often sent artist in the world. He is the first to win the album of the yr 4 times during Grammy Awards. Her Eras trip generated over $ 2 billion of ticket sales. And has a net value $ 1.6 billion.
He also has something priceless to do with Amazon, shaved Jeff, Bezos E-commerce giant, which offers market capitalization value $ 2.5 trillion.
In addition to the status of Swift and Amazon, as two of the most successful brands in the world, the couple shares a rare feature that helped them get there, in line with the former strategist from the Harvard Business School Sinéad O’Sullivan.
In your recent book, Good ideas and movements of power: Ten Success Lessons with Taylor SwiftO’Sullivan claims that Taylor Swift and Amazon have reached the peaks of their industries, being a “antiphragile”.
“In an increasingly complex and seemingly random world, some systems work better in chaos than others. “
The concept of “anti -pharmacy” refers to the field of physics called chaos theory. The Lebanese American scholar of mathematics and financial markets Nassim Taleb got here up with this date after noticing a special event in systems and organizations in many fields, from biology to city development, healthcare and many others.
“He saw that in an increasingly complex and seemingly random world some systems work better In chaos than others, “writes O’Sullivan.
Basically, anti -pharmacy disregards the human desire for stability and instinct of fears, which is different or unstable.
“The idea of anti -criminality goes far beyond the saying that uncertainty does not have to be bad,” explains O’Sullivan. “In fact, he says that there is uncertainty Good. Antifragility is not only surviving chaos; It’s about flourishing in it. It is about transforming the script and transforming adversity into opportunities, uncertainty into innovation and chaos into creativity. “
O’Sullivan notices, the immune system and wine production function real examples of antiphragicity at work. A robust immune system has been exposed to pathogens and can higher repel future threats. Big wine often comes from semi -stress, because smaller grapes with a more concentrated taste grow.
“Amazon becomes stronger because variability erases its competitors.”
According to O’Sullivan, Pandemia helped to disclose which firms were also anti -orphable – people who didn’t have to attend for share prices, because they never really fell. Because many essential retailers fought for the supplies of their shelves, Amazon maintained complete control over the supply chain and saw his online business increased.
“In Amazon there is not a single failure point that would prevent toilet paper from millions of available sellers to millions willingly waiting for buyers,” says O’Sullivan. “Amazon becomes stronger because variability erases its competitors.”
Similarly, SWIFT showed an extraordinary anti -pharmacy while building its activity over the years. O’Sullivan cites 4 moments of his profession when Swift took up a “destructive” path that weakened the competition and strengthened her brand:
1. In 2014, Swift withdrew her music from Spotify, the fastest growing stream platform for music at that point, because she believed that his model of compensation for artists devalued their work.
Why was the movement not “fatal”, how many industry experts assumed? According to O’Sullivan “Firma FirSt” and “Music later”, which he has with his fans, plays an vital role.
“Taylor Swift can be compared to the Rolex watch, not samples,” writes O’Sullivan. “The harder it is for people to have access to her music, the more they want her and are ready to follow her. By withdrawing her music, Taylor Swift has become the so -called” veblen “or” luxurious “.
When Swift left Spotify, her music was on the list of playback of over 19 million users; In the week in which she returned in 2017, she reached almost 48 million streams.
2. Swift is not afraid of “beef” with other musicians and celebrities – like Kanye West after he told her on stage during the MTV Towch Video Awards 2009 that “Beyonce had the best video of all time.”
“The more Kanye West defeated Taylor Swift, the stronger her fans gathered around her, which leads to an extravagant higher level of emotional relationship between Taylor and her fans in Swifverse,” says O’Sullivan.
O’Sullivan adds that “at least from the outside, Taylor never starts fighting”, which also matches the three essential “vibrations”: “powerful men using less powerful women”, “women who are strange and unlucky” and “on the right side of the story.”
3. During the pandemic, Swift has issued not one, but two non -enemy albums despite marketing restrictions among blockades and industry precedents.
“When all others were rummaging to deal with life, like Taylor Swift was able to Amazon herself?” O’Sullivan writes. “Well, most of them come down to the fact that, like Amazon, she spent the whole career, creating, buying and having her own” chain of values ”or various parts of the music industry, with which he must involve to release music.”
Swiftverse is “strategic hell”, notes O’Sullivan – and he maintained it to supply basic products to the market.
4. Finally, Swift again recorded his albums after the Big Machine Label Group was sold to Scooter Braun Ithaca Holdings.
Some industry leaders considered a long and expensive move that “would drain oxygen from her career” – but because Swift is opposite, the opposite turned out to be true, says O’Sullivan.
“As Taylor and Amazon show us [during a crisis] It is exactly when their supplies increase, “writes O’Sullivan.” Investors who pay hundreds of millions of dollars to try to have what they are think Is “Core Product” (music) Taylor Swift simply does not understand its empire as well as he understands it. “
In the future, business and strategy leaders who successfully lead through chaos will build anti -pharmacy organizations – Swift simply overtook the game, says O’Sullivan.
What’s more, as helpful as anti -pharmacy, O’Sullivan admits that taking her is challenging. It requires accepting uncertainty and variability, building immunity and taking “strange and bad things”.
O’sullivana Good ideas and movements of power It offers others from the profession of Swift, which entrepreneurs and business leaders can consider their very own, including a way of being a unicorn, have a strategy and keep on with it, build the world as a substitute of products, negotiate with authenticity and more.