A commodity is something of value; but it is also something so abundant that there is little profit margin, something widely available on the market. Water, air, agricultural products, etc. are examples of commodities. They are important but so abundant that little profit can be made and you have to control large swaths of land, for example, to make potato farming profitable.
Since we all have limited resources, we want to avoid dabbling in commodities, and what’s more as consultants and advisors we want to give something unique, special, or one-of-a-kind not something you can get anywhere and everywhere. You want to avoid falling in the “commodity slice” of the value cycle.
One way to avoid the “commodity slice” is to not hurry to give an answer, but first understand why it matters, and where the question is coming from. Then calibrate the answer accordingly. If you give an answer quickly you might as well be “google search,” or “AI.” Furthermore, if you rush to the answer, you cannot possibly have understood all the nuances of the question and you are likely to give half an answer, and sound shallow.
There are however times when you want to give an answer quickly and clearly. When it comes to protecting your time, to not taking on more responsibility, to defending your team – for example. These are times when you should speak fast. You should be prepared with a why, a how, and why not, but you should be able to answer quickly.
But commodity slice is more than answering quickly or slowly. Being a commodity has to do with your brand, your service offering, your pricing, and a dozen other messages you send out about yourself or your company.
Generally, you don’t want to be a commodity unless you are planning to do it at scale. AWS for example has made money with commodity computing; in fact the selling point is why do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting,” of racking and stacking computers, let us do that for you. But then again AWS was born out of surplus compute capacity and with lots of wisdom and good fortune managed to revolutionize computing. Elon Musk by comparison started with the most expensive cars, at the top of the market, and then worked his way down to the commodity electric car end of the market. Even Amazon itself was extremely focused when it started, selling books for the reasons that should be ovious when you understand Jeff Bezos’ initial GTM plan.
