ATTN: Why as a product?

The club Attention as a Product has two questions:
(1) What is attention?
(2) How to make attention into a product?

When i started the club Xmas 2004 - only six months ago - i had no idea where this journey would bring us. All i had in mind was to create attention as a product. What i envision is attention accessible for all people at close to zero cost, like clean water and electricity in some parts of the world. For this to happen, attention could become a utility function, provided by the government. So it has to be on the political agenda; and for that to happen it must be on the scientifical agenda; and for that to happen we need to find out what attention is and how to operationalize it, how to make attention measureable. This journey, as presented backwards in time, is what i had in mind when i started the club.

Meanwhile, i have come to the conclusion that we, the members, are in fact one of the products. By this i mean that when we ask the question, in this club and in other clubs like Intellectualize, Belief Management etc, we start to shift paradigm, from 'Business is Business is a zero sum game' towards the Ecademy values like 'winning by sharing' which is a non-zero game.

These days i consider attention as a product to be like pepper. You don't eat a kilo of pepper, what you are looking for are people who create a recipe with pepper as an ingredient. This may or may not be a deviation from the original path. For me as one of the members, i have come up with the idea of an Attention Institute, where this changed perspective may be taught to the aforementioned recipe creators.

As an example: i invited Marcus Cauchi to tell us about his recipe which is the Sandler Sales Training. Marcus has contributed tremendously in my view by accepting my invitation and actively helping us to understand what attention is.

So now i think i begin to understand Sandler. Sandler is about the duality of seller and buyer, is about maximizing the attention on the seller part and minimizing the attention on the buyer part. And now i can return the offer. To create a market for Sandler Sales Training, I could create the opposite, which i could call the Pandit Purchase Training.

When you as a buyer meet someone who is trained in Sandler, you are effectively without any defense. So you need to attend the purchase training. Then, if you meet a salesrep trained in Sandler, you know what to do. Whereas, if you meet a salesrep who has not been trained in Sandler, then the other guy is effectively without any defense.

This scenario is just one out of five in Game Theory. It is the zero-sum play, where only one can win. By creating this opposite training, you have now two trainings instead of one. Sales on both trainings increase because of the zero-sum included in this concept.

Now for the implementation of Game Theory as a non-zero game.
If both players are competitive, you can only implement zero-sum solutions like the one above. Nothing wrong with that, it is the current business paradigm.
If one player is competitive and the other is cooperative, then the latter looses the game because the competitor does not understand cooperation, it is simply outside the paradigm of winning or losing. The most effective strategy for a cooperative person to deal with a competitor is the tit-for-tat strategy : imitate whatever the other person is doing.
If both players are cooperating, then it becomes possible to create a non-zero game like 'winning by sharing'. Then, instead of two opposite trainings, you can create a third training, in which the rules of play for the unity of seller and buyer are taught. This is where you enter the new paradigm, this is where the Green Bank give loans to women in mid African villages to buy one cellphone and make money.

I hope i'm not losing you here. To me the end of my road is perfectly clear. Our dialogue is about the intermediate steps which are unclear to me. And the dialogue is about your personal life goals, which may be a totally different road, and yet there may be elements inside that cooperate with elements of other member's roads.

It is the winning by sharing concept, and i try to implement it and get it to become alive.

Hope this helps,
best regards, Ron
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I-Name: =Ronald.Wopereis
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Freedom is about stopping the past
- Lawrence Lessig