Upside Down: The Art of Contrarian Thinking in Agriculture
How unconventional ideas will grow the agricultural giants of tomorrow...
"In advertising, the beginning of greatness is to be conspicuous and different. The beginning of failure is to be invisible and orthodox."
- David Ogilvy
In agriculture today, there are huge opportunities for contrarian thinking.
This is what the mathematician Carl Jacobi called "to invert."
In other words, the ability to turn a situation or a problem upside down or to look at it backward.
This type of thinking looks at the dominance of The Coca-Cola Company and dreams up Red Bull.
🚫 Not competing with a product that chases Coke by coming in a bigger bottle, being cheaper, and tasting better.
✅ But instead, it carves out a new category by coming in a small can, being extraordinarily expensive, and tasting terrible.
The person who sees the success of John Deere and designs SwarmFarm Robotics.
🚫 Not competing with Deere by investing in dealers, expanding equipment size, and innovating with a centralized development platform.
✅ But instead, it carves out a new category by selling directly to growers, untethering machine size from productivity through automation, and building an open development network.
The contrarian is the person who lives like Niels Bohr was right when he said, "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."
And embraces Oscar Wilde's belief, "In art, there is no such thing as a universal truth. A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true."
- There are two good ways to check into a hotel: contactless and high-touch.
- There are two suitable environments for human productivity: collaborative and concentrated.
- There are two effective methods of learning: structured and experiential.
The middle is boring. What's forgettable is the slightly cheaper alternative that gets the job done—the commodity that doesn't delight or leave the customer wanting more. It's the safe consensus that kind of stinks.
It leads to:
- The drudgery of hotel check-ins that are "sort of" streamlined.
- The disaster of open-concept offices where no one can talk or get any real work done.
- The dullness of modern education, where there is no real order and just enough structure to snuff out any learning.
Unfortunately, most of what we have today in agriculture is similarly in the middle. It is a form of what the educator Charlotte Mason referred to as "twaddle."
It fills the market with something and gives our teams something to do today, but it is not worthy of us. It is a cheap imitation of someone else's work. It changes no one. And more often than not, it dies in obscurity. Nobody even knows it's gone.
Many leaders today are terrified of controversy. 'As long as no one says anything bad about what we do, then we must be doing something right.'
But animosity is not the greatest threat to the life of a business. Apathy is.
As Seth Godin said, "In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible."
Do something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.