Cancer: turtles, rabbits, and eagles. Some cancers are fast. As soon as you find out about them, it's almost too late, there's nothing you can do, the eagles swoops in quickly, as soon as you're symptomatic, you only have weeks or months left. Treatment might help out but only by extending life by a few months and may end up reducing quality of life for that extended period. Lung cancer tends in this direction.
Some cancers are slow. A blood or even genetic test shows that you have or may eventually have the problem, but as it is now, you're more likely to dies of many other things first before the cancer does you in. Treatment may stop the cancer but again may reduce quality of life for a much longer period which wouldn't have mattered anyway. Prostate cancer tends in this direction.
Some cancers are in between and even capricious. As soon as you find out, treatment could entirely eradicate the problem (colonic polyps, melanoma) or
Notice how I said 'tends'. Everyone's situation is different, but here are tendencies.
Here's a classic Tufte graph of survivability percent over years for the primary types of cancer:
(from Cancer survival rates)
This chart shows a bit more, the progression of mortality of the disease over 20 years. Just the 5 year death rate shown by the first column shows that prostate and thyroid cancer are turtles, and pancreatic and liver are eagles.
Marketing: Rabbit,deer, elephant. When pursuing sales to a customer, there is a continuum from many small customers to few, very large customers.
Rabbits are the millions of casual buyers: people buying socks, or a game app. Mass advertising and viral sharing are the way to get to these buyers.
Elephants are the huge multinational corporations that will either be your only customer or might just acquire your company altogether. Knowing someone inside, or huge involvement in national media is the lead-in to a purchase or acquisition here.
Deer are in between. The upscale cars industrial machinery are the objects for potential buyers.
(from Jeremy Horn via LinkedIn
