When something becomes abundant, value doesn’t disappear; it simply moves to the neighboring box — and whoever can’t see that box goes bankrupt exactly where they assumed there was plenty.
Today, production is getting cheap. Images, copy, ad creative, drafts — the unit cost of all of them is racing toward zero. Bringing a single campaign visual into existence once took budget, a team, and days; now it’s a sentence typed into a search box. This reads like good news, and it’s read wrong. Because when a resource becomes abundant, the market stops rewarding it. Abundance works in favor not of the one who produces, but of the one who chooses what’s produced.
The Bottleneck Doesn’t Vanish, It Moves
Every system has a bottleneck, and the system runs exactly as fast as that bottleneck. When you speed up production, you don’t remove the bottleneck; you push it to the next link. Once production becomes limitless, scarcity migrates to production’s neighbors: attention, judgment, trust, distribution. If making one image in ten is a skill, choosing the right one out of ten thousand is a bigger skill. Where everyone has a voice, the scarce thing isn’t voice; it’s being heard.
We see this nakedly in marketing. Ad surfaces multiply, inventory swells, everyone becomes visible at once. But visibility and being remembered, the auction and authority, are now two separate currencies. You can buy visibility; you cannot buy being the trusted source. As production grows abundant, the place the bill lands changes: we used to say “we can’t produce,” now we say “we can’t choose, can’t distinguish, can’t stay remembered.”
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. — Herbert Simon, 1971
Simon wrote this fifty years ago, when no artificial intelligence existed yet. He asked what information consumes, and the answer was simple: the attention of its recipients. The only difference today is that machines now multiply both information and production itself without limit. The equation is the same: what is abundant gets cheap, and what it consumes gains worth.
How Do I Find What’s Scarce
Looking at a business, a market, a decision, I ask myself three questions. All three point to the same place: abundance’s next box.
- What is now free in this business? Which input is racing to zero — and am I still paying the price from the day it was scarce?
- Once that input became abundant, where did the bottleneck slide? Which link carries the value now: selection, trust, distribution?
- Where am I putting my energy — into what’s getting cheap, or into what’s gaining worth?
The answer to the third question is often embarrassing. Because people don’t want to abandon the work they’re good at; yet the work you’re good at may be exactly the work no one pays for anymore, precisely because it’s become abundant. Strategy is choosing not the bottleneck you love, but the bottleneck where the money actually pools.
Positioning Inside Abundance
I’ve written before: strategy is the architecture of saying no. Its counterpart in the age of abundance is this: deciding not what you won’t produce, but which scarcity you will own. Leave production to the machine — that’s cheap now. Keep the scarce things for yourself: the judgment over what gets chosen, the reputation over who gets trusted, the decision over where scattered attention gathers.
The most neglected link in the thought-structure-solution chain, in this era, is right here. Thought is seeing where abundance has fled. Structure is automating what’s cheap and putting a human on what’s scarce. Solution, in a world where everyone produces, comes not from producing but from getting chosen and staying remembered. I sell intelligence; and intelligence, in the age of abundance, has a one-sentence definition: seeing scarcity’s new address before anyone else.