Tag: business

You don’t get out what you put in

One of the most important things I didn’t understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear.

Teachers and coaches implicitly told us the returns were linear. “You get out,” I heard a thousand times, “what you put in.” They meant well, but this is rarely true. If your product is only half as good as your competitor’s, you don’t get half as many customers. You get no customers, and you go out of business.

-Paul Graham “Superlinear Returns“

Blue Oceans and Lean Start-ups in my personal life

I think I love new ideas. No, I’m sure I love ideas. That is why I think my wife and I are a great team. She helps to keep me focused and enclose a lot of the ideas I have. I love putting new ideas into practice even more (unless I’m lazy). Today I came in contact with two amazing ideas: lean start-ups and blue oceans.

One of the critical differences is that while existing companies execute a business model, start-ups look for one…It shapes the lean definition of a start-up: a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.

So, with lean start-ups, they are basically a group of people looking for a product and a way to sell it. Talk about lean- these people would be creating ONLY the product the customer says they want to buy!

Kim and Mauborgne recommend creating blue oceans— uncontested market spaces where the competition is irrelevant. In blue oceans, you invent and capture new demand, and you offer customers a leap in value while also streamlining your costs.

I’m curious how I can start practicing the “Blue Ocean” idea in my own life, combined with Blank’s lean startup idea. I guess if I want to make changes in my life, I usually have a reason I want something to change. It would be interesting to start a new style of art or perhaps something I wanted to improve such as public speaking, and then creatively look where I can add value into the “market” of my surrounding community. I’ve heard this is common when people want to improve a part of their own skills- find a place to volunteer to practice your skill.

As much as I love technology, it was good to hear how blue oceans aren’t technology driven. Kim and Mauborgne bring up the idea of cars (Ford and Asian manufacturers), movie theaters (Nikolodean and AMC) and the circus (Cirque De Soleil). These are established industries that were disruptive and didn’t have direct competition for 10-15 years after the new segment was created. I mean, seriously, is there any direct competition to Cirque De Soleil?

Harvard Business Review Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

 

Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything by Steve Blank