There is a massive shift happening, from push to pull.

And knowing how to receive is what it’s all about. Whether it’s about designing ideas, selling products, creating community (which I believe is increasingly, how best to sell products), spreading ideas or improving your business…gone are the days when you can cook something up on your own and simply “launch” it. Putting it bluntly, who cares if 5 PhD’s in a room think a Search engine’s performance is swell, if 180 million users in Latin America don’t agree?

Communities want you to pull from them. They want you to pull their ideas, input, complaints, trends and preferences…and DO SOMETHING with them. And the evidence is in the companies that are doing that and succeeding, as much as in the ones who have failed. While each failure may look wildy different, even the the ones who have gone down kicking and screaming share the same common thread, the tendency to PUSH their products on markets that are simply not interested in what 5 PhD’s cooked up in a silo somewhere.