Hi ,
An 18K gold ring typically contains around 7.5g of pure gold. At
the current price of gold, this is worth around $750 AU. Yet, an 18K gold ring from Tiffany & Co. sells for more than double that.
In gold bar form, the best Tiffany & Co. could hope to sell their gold for is the market value - any more wouldn't make economic sense.
Buy by transforming the gold into a distinctive piece of jewellery, Tiffany & Co. can convince the market their gold is more valuable than someone else's.
They have successfully de-commoditised a commodity.
Here's the thing...
Data science skills are commodity skills. Yet not every data scientist is a commodity.
Those that aren't are the ones who have successfully distinguished themselves from the other data scientists in their workplace and the market.
I recently spoke to authority-building guru Jonathan Stark on Value Driven Data Science about strategies data scientists could use to de-commoditise themselves.
This was his advice:
"The important thing is to be different, to stand out in a way that's meaningful... different to the people you want to serve. That could be your buyers. It could be your manager; it could be your boss; it
could be the CEO of the company; it could be clients; it could be agencies that you're working through.
One way to be meaningfully different would be this idea of understanding marketing, understanding the business side... Another way could be to niche down on a horizontal. You could look at
your toolkit and get super focused on one thing inside (it).
(However,) if it's not a meaningful difference to the people you hope to serve, you've got more work (to do)."
