A little bit of luck helps, yes, but the key element, which too many in our affluent society have forgotten, is still hard work-grinding it out.

… the title brings to mind "Grinding it out" the long apprenticeship of over thirty years during which Mr.Kroc worked for others as a salesman and sales manager and later in his own small business. 
 
For the great opportunity of his life did not come until 1954 when he was fifty-two, an age when some executives are beginning to contemplate the greener pastures of retirement.

I HAVE ALWAYS believed that each man makes his own happiness and is responsible for his own problems

Yet I was alert to other opportunities. I have a saying that goes, "As long as you're green you're growing, as soon as you're ripe you start to rot."

I was fascinated by the simplicity and effectiveness of the system they described that night. Each step in producing the limited menu was stripped down to its essence and accomplished with a minimum of effort

Notes -
When you go for low prices, offer a five star service on few key elements and remove the rest. (As in cheap airport hotels)

When you are content with the little you got, you might stop seeing what you have in your hands. 
The McDonald brothers didn't recognized that they had "Mc Donald" (On Page 12)

I was a battle-scarred veteran of the business wars, but I was still eager to go into action. 
I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns. 
 
But I was convinced that the best was ahead of me.

I never considered my dreams wasted energy; they were invariably linked to some form of action.

Work is the meat in the hamburger of life. There is an old saying that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. I never believed it because, for me, work was play. I got as much pleasure out of it as I did from playing baseball.

That was where I learned that you could influence people with a smile and enthusiasm and sell them a sundae when what they'd come for was a cup of coffee

No self-respecting pitcher throws the same way to every batter, and no self-respecting salesman makes the same pitch to every client

I sensed that the potential for paper cups was great and that I would do well if I could overcome the inertia of tradition.

I stressed the importance of making a good appearance, wearing a nicely pressed suit, well-polished shoes, hair combed, and nails cleaned. 
 
"Look sharp and act sharp," I told them. "The first thing you have to sell is yourself.

She absolutely refused to help. I'm sure she felt justified, but I felt betrayed. I just couldn't believe she'd let me down like that. 
She wouldn't even agree to work part-time or for a limited period, until I got the business going. 
That was when I began to understand the meaning of the word estrangement. It is a terrible feeling, and once it appears, it grows like dry rot,

The first signals of trouble are all that you need to understand who you are dealing with. 
 
First Clark and the company slashed his pay after years of loyalty and getting little reward. 
Then, the continuous infighting, and finally the "demonic deal" to leave the company. 
 
When you sense trouble, more often then not, is all you need to understand that something is bad.

I paid tribute, in the feudal sense, for many years before I was able to rise with McDonald's on the foundation I had laid. 
Perhaps without that adversity I might not have been able to persevere later on when my financial burdens were redoubled.

I learned then how to keep problems from crushing me. 
I refused to worry about more than one thing at a time, and I would not let useless fretting about a problem, no matter how important, keep me from sleeping. 
 
… I worked out a system that allowed me to turn off nervous tension and shut out nagging questions when I went to bed. I knew that if I didn't, I wouldn't be bright and fresh and able to deal with customers in the morning. 
I would think of my mind as being a blackboard full of messages, most of them urgent, and I practiced imagining a hand with an eraser wiping that blackboard clean

The agreement was that I could not deviate from their plans in my units unless the changes were spelled out in writing, signed by both brothers, and sent to me by registered mail. 
This seemingly innocuous requirement created massive problems for me. There's an old saying that a man who represents himself has a fool for a lawyer

But perfection is very difficult to achieve, and perfection was what I wanted in McDonald's. Everything else was secondary for me.

I believe that if you hire a man to do a job, you ought to get out of the way and let him do it. If you doubt his ability, you shouldn't have hired him in the first place

… insistence on quality has to be emphasized in every procedure, and every crew member must be drilled in the McDonald's method of providing service.

… the basics have to be stressed over and over. … And the operators need the stress on fundamentals as much as their managers and crews. This is especially true of a new location.

… I've always encouraged corporate executive wives to get involved in their husbands' work—two heads are better than one.

In our business there are two kinds of attitudes toward advertising and public relations. 
 
One is the outlook of the begrudger who treats every cent paid for ad programs or publicity campaigns as if they were strictly expenditures. 
 
My own viewpoint is that of the promoter; I never hesitate to spend money in this area, because I can see it coming back to me with interest. 
 
… it comes back in different forms, and that may be the reason a begrudger can’t appreciate it. He has a narrow vision that allows him to see income only in terms of cash in the register.

I want nothing from you but a good product. Don't wine me, don't dine me, don't buy me any Christmas presents. If there are any cost breaks, pass them on to the operators of McDonald's stores."

McDonald's today is the most unstructured corporation I know, and I don't think you could find a happier, more secure, harder working group of executives anywhere.

The three executives were supposed to be equal in authority. 
The problem, however, was that Harry kept hold of the purse strings himself, and what the situation boiled down to, except with Boylan, was responsibility without authority.

Notes -
Who controls the purse, has the power.

“Hell's bells, when times are bad is when you want to build!" I screamed. "Why wait for things to pick up so everything will cost you more? … “

Nothing recedes like success. Don’t let it happen to you.

… “you can hogtie these guys with all the ifs, buts, and whereases you like, but it's not going to help the business one goddam bit. 
There'll be just one great motivator in developing loyalty in this operation. That is if I've got a fair, square deal, and the guy makes money. …”

I believe that if you think small, you’ll stay small.

if you have a few extra feet of griddle and an extra fry station, or if you install one more cash register than existing business requires, you'll be challenged to put them to use.

My brother Bob talks the language of science. He's pedantic and painstaking; he's willing to get fewer things done in order to make fewer mistakes. 
I'm impatient. I'm willing to make a few mistakes in order to get things done.

Happiness is not a tangible thing, it's a byproduct —a byproduct of achievement.

He is the grandest possible refutation of those determinists who hold that events are governed by forces, classes, economics, and geography rather than by the powerful wills of men and women.

It does not seem to have occurred to him to study the example of his older contemporary George Washington, who translated military victory into civil progress and renounced the rule of force in favour of the rule of law. 
 
But Bonaparte always put his trust in bayonets and cannon. 
 
In the end, force was the only language he understood, and in the end it pronounced a hostile judgement on him.

… and the eventual revulsion against Bonaparte played a critical part in creating a spirit of German nationalism that was to become aggressive and threatening itself. 
 
A new concept of total warfare was born, and alongside it grew other institutions: the secret police, large-scale professional espionage, government propaganda machines, and the faking of supposedly democratic movements, elections, and plebiscites.

Notes -
Power by force, only feeds more violence through the generations.

The First World War itself was total warfare of the type Bonaparte's methods adumbrated, and in the political anarchy that emerged from it, a new brand of ideological dictator took Bonaparte's methods of government as a model, first in Russia, then in Italy, and finally in Germany, with many smaller countries following suit. 
 
The totalitarian state of the twentieth century was the ultimate progeny of the Napoleonic reality and myth

Notes -
Violence’s repercussions through generations.

To people of Bonaparte's background, the future lay not inland but outward - on the high seas and the great landmasses beyond.

Notes -
Opportunities can only be found in the landmasses beyond.

Beyond reading Boswell's book and deriving from it lessons that had nothing to do with the island, he took no interest in the place once he had left it. 
 
He never visited it. It never figured in his geopolitical calculations. On the other hand, he gave no sign that he was ashamed of his origins. 
 
He simply dismissed it from the forefront of his mind as carrying no importance in the economy of his ambition.

Though it is clear Bonaparte had bitter memories of his native isle, and wished to erase it from his mind, it did provide him with something important: a map of the kind of power he sought.

Indeed, if there was one characteristic that epitomized Bonaparte throughout his rise and grandeur, it was opportunism. 
 
He was the opportunist incarnate. Few successful men have ever carried a lighter burden of ideology. 
 
He had no patriotism as such, for he had no country. Corsica had been barred to him. France was no more than a career structure and a source of power. 
He had no class feelings, for though legally an aristocrat, he had no land or money or title, and saw the existing system of privilege as a fraud and, more important, as a source of grotesque inefficiency. 
But he had no hatred for kings or nobles as such. Nor did he believe in democracy or rule by votes. 
 
The people he observed with detachment: properly led, they could do remarkable things. Without sensible leadership, they were a dangerous rabble.

But on the whole it was the most successful aspect of Bonaparte's dictatorship, and one that served him well posthumously. 
 
For if Bonaparte had been merely a victorious soldier and conqueror, it would have been impossible in a country like France to have staged the public rehabilitation of the Napoleonic image that began in 1830 and continues to this day. Thanks to Denon, Bonaparte was able to play the cultural card with some success, and it still takes tricks.

Notes -
Investing in cultural growth pays enormous dividends in the long run.

What made Bonaparte such a dangerous opponent was his ability to seize upon a gap in his enemy's defences with extraordinary alertness, and respond to it with an aggressive move at high speed.

… he would have been infinitely wiser to have fought a defensive campaign, which would have raised great, possibly insuperable, problems for the Allies. 'But then he was always too impatient for that.'

Notes -
Patience is key.

Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human. It's our birthright. And it's for all of us.

The outside universe we perceive doesn't exist as such. Through a series of electrical and chemical reactions, we generate a reality internally. We create forests and oceans, warmth and cold. We read words, hear voices, and form interpretations. Then, in an instant, we produce a response. 
 
All of this in a world of our own creation.

Just as trees grow flowers and fruits, humanity creates works of art

If you have an idea you're excited about and you don't bring it to life, it's not uncommon for the idea to find its voice through another maker. This isn't because the other artist stole your idea, but because the idea's time has come.

If your antenna isn't sensitively tuned, you're likely to lose the data in the noise. Particularly since the signals coming through are often more subtle than the content we collect through sensory awareness

Art is a circulation of energetic ideas. What makes them appear new is that they're combining differently each time they come back.

The more raw data we can take in, and the less we shape it, the closer we get to nature.

No matter what tools you use to create, 
the true instrument is you. 
And through you, 
the universe that surrounds us 
all comes into focus.

The spiritual world provides a sense of wonder and a degree of open-mindedness not always found within the confines of science. The world of reason can be narrow and filled with dead ends, while a spiritual viewpoint is limitless and invites fantastic possibilities.

Faith allows you to trust the direction without needing to understand it.

Material for our work surrounds us at every turn. It's woven into conversation, nature, chance encounters, and existing works of art. 
When looking for a solution to a creative problem, pay close attention to what's happening around you. Look for clues pointing to new methods or ways to further develop current ideas.

If we aren't looking for clues, they'll pass by without us ever knowing. Notice connections and consider where they lead.

You might imagine that the outside world is a conveyor belt with a stream of small packages on it, always going by. 
The first step is to notice the conveyor belt is there. And then, any time you want, you can pick up one of those packages, unwrap it, and see what's inside.

When clues present themselves, it can sometimes feel like the delicate mechanism of a clock at work. As if the universe is nudging you with little reminders that it's on your side and wants to provide everything you need to complete your mission.

Look for what you notice 
but no one else sees.

The heart of experiment is mystery. We cannot predict where a seed will lead or if it will take root. Remain open to the new and unknown. Begin with a question mark and embark on a journey of discovery. 
 
…You may be tempted to intervene and steer its development toward a specific goal or preconceived idea. This may not lead to the most productive of its possibilities at this stage of the process. 
 
Allow the seed to follow its own path toward the sun.

Failure is the information you need to get where you're going.

The proven solutions are sometimes the least helpful.

Taking a wrong turn allows you to see landscapes you wouldn't otherwise have seen.

Switching to other projects will engage different muscles and patterns of thinking. These may shed light on paths otherwise unseen. And this may happen over the course of days, weeks, months, or years. 
 
Even in a single work session, moving between multiple projects can be helpful. 
 
There are also times when a single seed has so much power that you choose to focus on it exclusively, and that is your choice to make.

Once enough data is collected, and the vision is clear, it can be helpful to set deadlines for completion. 
The options are no longer unlimited; the process is less open-ended.

In the Craft phase, deadlines are suggested completion dates rather than set in stone. 
There is still an element of surprise and exploration throughout our execution, and it's possible to find ourselves at any moment back in the Experimentation phase.

While crafting, make deadlines for your own motivation, not necessarily to be shared with others unless it helps with accountability. 
 
Once the Craft phase is nearing an end, then we might start thinking in terms of fixed deadlines.

If an artist is creating a beautiful work, and keeps endlessly crafting it beyond the need, sometimes they suddenly want to start all over. This can be because they have changed or the times have changed. 
 
Art is a reflection of the artist's inner and outer world during the period of creation. Extending the period complicates the artist's ability to capture a state of being. The result can be a loss of connection and enthusiasm for the work over time.

When we become overly attached to a premature version of the work, we do a disservice to the project's potential.

Falling short of grander visions might actually put the work exactly where it wants to be. Do not let the scale of your imagination get in the way of executing a more practical version of your project. We may come to realize that this version is better than the initial, seemingly impossible vision.

If you're holding a center puzzle piece in your hand and staring at an empty tabletop, it's difficult to determine where to place it. If all of the puzzle is complete except for that one piece, then you know exactly where it goes. The same is generally true of art. 
The more of the work you can see, the easier it becomes to gracefully place the final details clearly where they belong.

A musician may delay releasing an album for fear they haven't taken the songs as far as they can go. Yet an album is only a diary entry of a moment of time, a snapshot reflection of who the artist is for that period. And no one diary entry is our life story. 
 
Our life's work is far greater than any individual container. The works we do are at most chapters. There will always be a new chapter, and another after that. Though some might be better than others, that is not our concern. 
 
Our objective is to be free to close one chapter and move on to the next, and to continue that process for as long as it pleases us

With each chapter we make, we gain experience, improve at our craft, and inch closer to who we are.

If you're established in a craft or field, temporary rules may be useful to break a pattern. 
They can challenge you to become better, to innovate, and to bring out a new side of yourself or your work

The energy of wonder and discovery can get lost when treading the same ground over and over again.

A rule is a way of structuring awareness.

The more formulaic your creation is, the more it hugs the shore of what's been popular, the less like art it's likely to be. And in fact, creativity in that spirit often fails even at its own goals. 
 
There is no more valid metric to predict what someone else might enjoy than us liking it ourselves. 
 
Fear of criticism, Attachment to a commercial result, Competing with past work. Time and resource constraints, The aspiration of wanting to change the world. 
 
And any story beyond "I want to make the best thing I can make, whatever it is" are all undermining forces in the quest for greatness.

Greatness begets greatness. It's infectious.

Success has nothing to do with variables outside yourself.

Most variables are completely out of our control. The only ones we can control are doing our best work, sharing it, starting the next, and not looking back.

Your trust in your instincts and excitement are what resonate with others.

Instead of sinking into the pain of heartbreak or the stress of being laid off or the grief of loss, if practicing detachment the response might be: I wasn't expecting that plot twist. I wonder what's going to happen to our hero next. 
 
There's always a next scene, and that next scene may be one of great beauty and fulfillment. The hard times were the required setup to allow these new possibilities to come into being.

The ecstatic is our compass, pointing to our true north. It arises genuinely in the process of creation. You're working and struggling, and suddenly you notice a shift. A revelation. 
 
A small tweak is made, a new angle is revealed, and it takes your breath away. 
 
It can arise from even the most seemingly mundane detail. The change of a word in a sentence. Instantly, the passage morphs from nonsense to poetry, and everything falls into place. 
 
An artist will be in the throes of creation, and the work may seem unremarkable for a while. Suddenly, a shift occurs or a moment is revealed, and the same piece now seems extraordinary.

Be aware of strong responses. If you're immediately turned off by an experience, it's worth examining why. Powerful reactions often indicate deeper wells of meaning. And perhaps by exploring them, you'll be led to the next step on your creative path.

With each new project, we are challenging ourselves to most beautifully reflect what's living in us at that particular window of time. 
 
In this spirit of self-competition, task yourself to go further and push into the unexpected. Don't stop even at greatness. Venture beyond.

Distilling a work to get it as close to its essence as possible is a useful and informative practice. Notice how many pieces you can remove before the work you're making ceases to be the work you're making. 
 
Refine it to the point where it is stripped bare, in its least decorative form yet still intact. With nothing extra. Sometimes the ornamentation can be of use, often not. Less is generally more.

>Perfection is finally obtained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there's no longer anything to take away. 
>Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

As artists, our mission is not to fit in or conform to popular thinking. Our purpose is to value and develop our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

It's helpful to work as if the project you're engaged in is bigger than you.

Artists occasionally experience a sense of stagnation. A block. This isn't because the flow of creativity has stopped. It can't. This generative energy is ceaseless. It may just be that we are choosing not to engage with it. 
… 
A block of your own making. A decision, conscious or unconscious, not to participate in the stream of productive energy that is available to us at all times. 
 
When we feel constricted, we might begin to create an opening through surrender. If we let go of our analytical thoughts, the flow might be able to find a path through us more easily, We can be and do, rather than think and try, Create in the present, rather than anticipating the future. 
 
Each time we surrender, we may come to find that the answer we seek is right before our eyes. A new idea arrives. An object in the room inspires. Feelings in the body amplify, This is worth considering in difficult moments when we appear to be stuck, to have lost our way, to have nothing let to give. 
 
What if this is all a story?

It's easy to create a piece, recognize a flaw, and want to discard the entire work. This reflex happens in all areas of life. 
 
When you look at the work, practice truly seeing what's there, without a negativity bias. Be open to seeing both strength and weakness, instead of focusing on the weakness and allowing it to overwhelm the strength. 
… 
When you acknowledge a weakness, always consider how it could either be removed or improved before discarding the entire piece. 
 
What if the source of creativity is always there, knocking patiently on the doors of our perception, waiting for us to unbolt the locks?

If you are open and stay tuned to what's happening, the answers will be revealed.

When gathering seeds to begin our work, we may be tempted to look for a grand sign before committing ourselves. A clap of thunder to assure us that we've found the right path. We may discard ideas that don't seem of great importance or magnitude. 
 
But the size does not matter. Volume does not equal value.

Whatever route the information arrives through, we allow it to come by grace, not effort. The whisper cannot be wrestled into existence, only welcomed with an open state of mind.

As each small surprise leads to another, you'll soon find the biggest surprise: 
 
You learn to trust yourself in the universe, with the universe, as a unique channel to a higher wisdom. 
 
This intelligence is beyond our understanding. Through grace, it is accessible to all.

Living in discovery is at all times preferable to living through assumptions.

Faith is rewarded, perhaps even more than talent or ability.

When we don't yet know where we're going, we don't wait. 
 
We move forward in the dark. If nothing we attempt yields progress, we rely on belief and will. We may take several steps backward in the sequence to move ahead.

There is no failure, as every step we take is necessary to reach our destination, including the missteps. Each experiment is valuable in its own way if we learn something from it. Even if we can't comprehend its worth, we are still practicing our craft, moving ever so much closer to mastery. 
 
With unshakable faith, we work under the assumption that the problem is already solved. The answer is out there, perhaps it's obvious. We just haven't come across it yet. 
 
Over time, as you complete more projects, this faith in experimentation grows. You're able to hold high expectations, move forward with patience, and trust the mysterious unfolding before you. With the understanding that the process will get you where you're going. Wherever that reveals itself to be. And the magical nature of the unfolding never ceases to take our breath away.

When something doesn't go according to plan, we have a choice to either resist it or incorporate it. 
 
Instead of shutting the project down or expressing frustration, we might consider what else can be done with the materials at hand.

A more constructive strategy is to focus less on the lightning bolt and more on the spaces surrounding it. 
The space before, because lightning does not strike unless the right preconditions are met, and the space after, because the electricity dissipates if you do not capture it and use it. When we are struck by an epiphany, our experience of what's possible has been expanded. In that instant, we are broken open. 
We've entered a new reality.

Without diligence, inspiration alone rarely yields work of much consequence

If inspiration does not come to lead the way, we show up anyway.

At any moment, you're prepared to stop what you're doing to make a note or a drawing, or capture a fleeting thought. It becomes second nature. And we're always in it, every hour of the day. 
 
Staying in it means a commitment to remain open to what's around you. Paying attention and listening. Looking for connections and relationships in the outside world. Searching for beauty. Seeking stories. Noticing what you find interesting, what makes you lean forward. And knowing all of this is available to use next time you sit down to work, where the raw data gets put into form.

Art made accidentally has no more or less weight than art created through sweat and struggle. 
 
Whether it took months or minutes does not matter. 
 
Quality isn't based on the amount of time invested. So long as what emerges is pleasing to us, the work has fulfilled its purpose.

Even spontaneity gets better with practice.

Sometimes, it can be the most ordinary moment that creates an extraordinary piece of art.

How can we know which choice will lead us to the best possible version of the work? 
 
The answer is rooted in a universal principle of relationships. We can only tell where something is in relation to something else. And we can only assess an object or principle if we have something to compare and contrast it to. Otherwise it's an absolute beyond evaluation. 
 
We can hack into this principle to improve our creations through A/B testing

If there isn't, we quiet ourselves to see which has a subtle pull. Following the natural feedback in the body, we move toward the option that hints at the ecstatic.

If you're at an impasse in an A/B test, consider the coin toss method. Decide which option will be heads and which will be tails, then flip the coin. When the coin is spinning in the air, you'll likely notice a quiet preference or wish for one of the two to come up. Which are you rooting for? This is the option to go with. It's the one the heart desires. The test is over before the coin ever lands.

What begins as a lightning bolt may not produce a work that reflects its initial magnitude, whereas a humble spark may grow into an epic masterpiece.

What ultimately makes a work great is the sum total of the tiniest details.

Implications (Purpose) 
 
You may sometimes wonder: Why am I doing this? What's it all for? 
 
Questions such as these come early and often for some. 
 
Others seem to go their whole lives without ever troubling themselves with these thoughts. Maybe they know that the maker and the explainer are always two different people, even when they're the same person. 
 
In the end, these questions are of little importance. There doesn't need to be a purpose guiding what we choose to make. When examined more closely, we might find this grandiose idea useless. It implies we know more than we can know. 
 
If we like what we are creating, we don't have to know why. Sometimes the reasons are obvious, sometimes not. 
 
And they can change over time. It could be good for any of a thousand different reasons. When we're making things we love, our mission is accomplished. There's nothing at all to figure out.

Think to yourself: 
 
I'm just here to create.

The world is only as free as it allows its artists to be.

What we say, 
what we sing, 
what we paint— 
we get to choose. 
 
We have no responsibility to anything other than the art itself. 
 
The art is the final word.

It requires the obsessive desire to create great things. This pursuit doesn't have to be agonizing. It can be enlivening. It's up to you.

The gifts of art are more learned and developed than innate. We can always improve.

After being away for a long enough period of time, when we come back, we just may be able to see (the work) as if for the first time. 
 
This is the practice of cleaning the slate. 
 
The ability to create as an artist and experience the work as a first-time viewer, dropping baggage from the past of what you thought you wanted the work to be. The mission is to be in the present moment with the work.

When a piece isn't living up to your expectations, consider changing the context. Look past the principle element examine the variables around it.

Notes -
If your startup isn’t performing as you hoped, consider changing or at least evaluate new customers or markets. 
If you sell photo cameras, are you sure you are in the business of cameras and not in photography (as Nikon failed to recognize)?

The call of the artist is to follow the excitement. Where there’s excitement, there’s energy. And where there’s energy, there is light.

The best work 
is the work you are excited about.

Find a clue, follow a lead, remain unattached to what came before. And avoid getting stuck with a decision you made five minutes ago.

Find a clue, follow a lead, remain unattached to what came before. And avoid getting stuck with a decision you made five minutes ago.

In addition to these environmental variations, we are also always changing within. 
Our moods, our energy level, the stories we tell ourselves, our prior experiences, how hungry or tired we are: 
All these variants create a new way of being in each moment.

Notes -
The stories we tell ourselves define who we are and who we will be.

For this reason, not every work can reflect all of our selves. Perhaps it's never possible, no matter how hard we try. 
 
Instead, we might embrace the prism of self, and keep allowing reality to bend uniquely through us. 
 
Like a kaleidoscope, we can adjust the aperture on our vision and change the results. We may aim to work from one particular aspect, like taking on a character, and create something from our darkest self or our most spiritual self.

Any framework, method, or label you impose on yourself is just as likely to be a limitation as an opening.

Sometimes the most valuable touch a collaborator can have is no touch at all.

Notes -
Let it be

It helps to keep in mind that language is an imperfect means of communication. An idea is altered and diluted through its mistranslation into words. Those words are then further distorted through our filter as we take them in, leaving us in a world of ambiguity.

It requires patience and diligence to get past the story of what you think you're hearing and get close to understanding what's actually being said. 
 
When receiving feedback, a useful practice is to repeat back the information. You may find that what you heard isn't what was said. And what was said may not even be what was actually meant. 
 
Ask questions to gain clarity. When collaborators patiently explain what aspects of the work they're focusing on, we may recognize that our visions are not in opposition. 
 
We're just using different language or noticing different elements. 
 
When sharing observations, specificity creates space. It dissipates the level of emotional charge and enables us to work together in service of the piece.

Notes -
Handling feedback and gaining clarity

The synergy of a group is as important, if not more important than the talent of the individuals.

Art goes deeper than thought. Deeper than the stories about yourself. It breaks through inner walls and accesses what's behind.

Notes -
Music can convey information in a much deeper and broader way than words. Music can transmit a myriad of shades of feelings, ofter without using any word. Just rhythm and sound (Andrew Huberman podcast on music). 
 
Art in general, works the same way.

We are not aiming to reduce the work to its final length. 
 
We are working to reduce it beyond its final length. Even if trimming away 5 percent will leave the work at the scale you intend for it, we may cut deeper and leave only half or a third. 
If you're working on a ten-song album and you've recorded twenty songs, you're not aiming to reduce it to ten. 
You're shrinking it to five, to only the tracks you can't live without. 
If you've written a book that's over three hundred pages, try to reduce it to less than a hundred without losing its essence.

We're not looking for more for the sake of more. We're only looking for more for the sake of better.

"Making the simple complicated is commonplace," 
 
Charles Mingus once said. "Making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity."

Billions of data points are available at any given moment and we collect only a small number. With this glimpse through a keyhole, we assemble an interpretation and add another story to our collection. 
 
With each story we tell ourselves, we negate possibility. 
 
Reality is diminished. Rooms of the self are walled off. 
 
Truth collapses to fit a fictional organizing principle we've adopted.

Friction is the force that resists all action and saps energy. It makes the simple difficult and the difficult seemingly impossible. 
… 
Friction may be mental, as in indecision over a course of action. It may be physical, as in effective enemy fire or a terrain obstacle that must be overcome. Friction may be external, imposed by enemy action, the terrain, weather, or mere chance. 
Friction may be self-induced, caused by such factors as lack as lack of a clearly defined goal, lack of coordination, unclear or complicated plans, complex task organizations or command relationships, or complicated technologies. 
Whatever form it takes, because war is a human enterprise, friction will always have a psychological as well as a physical impact. 
 
While we should attempt to minimize self-induced friction, the greater requirement is to fight effectively despite the existence of friction. 
 
One essential means to overcome friction is the will; we prevail over friction through persistent strength of mind and spirit.

…is precisely those actions that seem improbable that often have the greatest impact on the outcome of war. 
 
Because we can never eliminate uncertainty, we must lear to fight effectively despite it. We can do this by developing source simple, flexible plans; planning for likely contingencies; developing standing operating procedures; and fostering initiative among subordinates.

One important source of uncertainty is a property known nonlinearity. 
… 
Minor incidents or actions can have decisive effects.

…the acceptance of risk does not equate to the imprudent willingness to gamble the entire likelihood of success on a single improbable event.

…we must view chance not only as a threat but also as an opportunity which we must be ever ready to exploit.

Each episode in war is the temporary result of a unique combination of circumstances, presenting a unique set of problems and requiring an original solution. 
 
Nevertheless, no episode can be viewed in isolation. Rather, each episode merges with those that precede and follow it—shaped by the former and shaping the conditions of the latter—creating a continuous, fluctuating flow of activity replete with fleeting opportunities and unforeseen events. 
 
Since war is a fluid phenomenon, its conduct requires flexibility of thought. 
 
Success depends in large part on the ability to adapt—to proactively shape changing events to our advantage as well as to react quickly to constantly changing conditions.

The tempo of war will fluctuate. 
… 
Darkness and weather can influence the tempo of war but need not to halt it.

…war gravitates naturally toward disorder. 
… 
It is precisely this natural disorder which creates the conditions ripe for exploitation by opportunistic will.

Each encounter in war will usually tend to grow increasingly disordered over time. As the situation changes continuously, we are forced to improvise again and again until finally our actions have little, if any, resemblance to the original scheme.

The occurrences of war will not unfold like clockwork. We cannot hope to impose precise, positive control over events. 
 
The best we can hope for is to impose a general framework of order on the disorder, to influence the general flow of action rather than to try to control each event. 
 
If we are to win, we must be able to operate in a disorderly environment. In fact, we must not only be able to fight effectively in the face of disorder, we should seek to generate disorder and use it as a weapon against our opponent.

… war is not governed by the actions or decisions of a single individual in any one place but emerges from the collective behavior of all the individual parts in the system interacting locally in response to local conditions and incomplete information

Efforts to fully centralize military operations and to exert complete control by a single decisionmaker are inconsistent with the intrinsically complex and distributed nature of war.

Human will, instilled through leadership, is the driving force of all action in war. 
 
No degree of technological development or scientific calculation will diminish the human dimension in war.

Courage is not the absence of fear; rather, it is the strength to overcome fear.

Notes -
This is supported by scientific research in the field of psychology. 
Through exposure, a person overcomes fear not because in become less afraid, but because it becomes stronger in the face of that fear.

As the hardware of war improves through technological development, so must the tactical, operational, and strategic usage adapt to its improved capabilities both to maximize our own capabilities and to counteract our enemy's. 
 
If we are ignorant of the changing face of war, we will find ourselves unequal to its challenges.

Notes -
A company must always be in touch with recent technological developments and never become a static target. Instead it must see constant renewal at the cost of completely changing technologies and structure if that becomes a need. 
When disruptive technology are developed, it must be ready to cannibalize its own business in favor of the disruptive if it wants to survive in the long run.

The art of war requires the intuitive ability to grasp the essence of a unique military situation and the creative ability to devise a practical solution.

We thus conclude that the conduct of war is fundamentally a dynamic process of human competition requiring both the knowledge of science and the creativity of art but driven ultimately by the power of human will.

Boldness is superior to timidity in every instance although boldness does not always equate to immediate aggressive action. 
 
(A nervy, calculating patience that allows the enemy to commit himself irrevocably before we strike him can also be a form of boldness.) 
 
Boldness is based on strong situation awareness: We weigh the situation, then act. In other words, boldness must be tempered with judgment lest it border on recklessness.

Notes -
Once proper calculations are made, you must commit 100% to action.

…centers of gravity are any important sources of strength. 
 
…we should focus our efforts against a critical vulnerability, a vulnerability that, if exploited, will do the most significant damage to the enemy's ability to resist us. 
 
… It will often be necessary to attack several lesser centers of gravity or critical vulnerabilities simultaneously or in sequence to have the desired effect.

"The essential thing is action. Action has three stages: the decision born of thought, the order or preparation for execution, and the execution itself. All three stages are governed by the will. The will is rooted in character, and for the man of action character is of more critical importance than intellect. 
 
Intellect without will is worthless, will without intellect is dangerous. 
--Hans von Seeckt

Confidence among comrades results from demonstrated professional skill. Familiarity results from shared experience and a common professional philosophy.

"Now an army may be likened to water, for just as flowing water avoids the heights and hastens to the lowlands, so an army avoids strength and strikes weakness. 
 
--Sun Tzu

"Speed is the essence of war. Take advantage of the enemy's unpreparedness; travel by unexpected routes and strike him where he has taken no precautions. 
 
--Sun Tzu

"Many years ago, as a cadet hoping some day to be an officer, I was poring over the Principles of War,' listed in the old Field Service Regulations, when the Sergeant-Major came up to me. He surveyed me with kindly amusement. 
 
'Don't bother your head about all them things, me lad,' he said. There's only one principle of war and that's this. Hit the other fellow, as quick as you can, and as hard as you can, where it hurts him most, when he ain't lookin'!" 
 
--Sir William Slim

We seek to establish a pace that the enemy cannot maintain so that with each action his reactions are increasingly late-until eventually he is overcome by events. 
Also inherent is the need to focus our efforts in order to maximize effect. In combat this includes violence and shock effect, again not so much as a source of physical attrition, but as a source of disruption. 
 
We concentrate strength against critical enemy vulnerabilities, striking quickly and boldly where, when, and in ways in which it will cause the greatest damage to our enemy's ability to fight. 
Once gained or found, any advantage must be pressed relentlessly and unhesitatingly. 
 
We must be ruthlessly opportunistic, actively seeking out signs of weakness against which we will direct all available combat power. 
 
When the decisive opportunity arrives, we must exploit it fully and aggressively, committing every ounce of combat power we can muster and pushing ourselves to the limits of exhaustion.

In order to appear unpredictable, we must avoid set rules and patterns, which inhibit imagination and initiative.

…subordinate commanders must make decisions on their own initiative, based on their understanding of their senior’s intent.

Notes -
In situations of uncertainty leaders must clearly communicate intent and subordinates must be able to make decisions.

We believe that implicit communication to communicate through mutual understanding, using a minimum of key, well-understood phrases or even anticipating each other's thoughts is a faster, more effective way to communicate than through the use of detailed, explicit instructions. We develop this ability through familiarity and trust, which are based on a shared philosophy and shared experience. 
 
This concept has several practical implications. 
First, we should establish long-term working relationships to develop the necessary familiarity and trust. 
Second, key people --"actuals"-- should talk directly to one another when possible, rather than through communicators or messengers. 
Third, we should communicate orally when possible, because we communicate also in how we talk-our inflections and tone of voice. 
Fourth, we should communicate in person when possible because we communicate also through our gestures and bearing.

The further ahead we think, the less our actual influence can be. Therefore, the further ahead we consider, the less precision we should attempt to impose. Looking ahead thus becomes less a matter of direct influence and more a matter of laying the groundwork for possible future actions.

If we fail to make a decision out of lack of will, we have willingly surrendered the initiative to our foe. 
If we consciously postpone taking action for some reason, that is a decision. 
 
Thus, as a basis for action, any decision is generally better than no decision.

In general, whoever can make and implement decisions consistently faster gains a tremendous, often decisive advantage. 
 
…That said, we should also recognize those situations in which time is not a limiting factor-such as deliberate planning situations-and should not rush our decisions unnecessarily.

We must have the moral courage to make tough decisions in the face of uncertainty-and to accept full responsibility for those decisions-when the natural inclination would be to postpone the decision pending more complete information. 
 
To delay action in an emergency because of incomplete information shows a lack of moral courage. We do not want to make rash decisions, but we must not squander opportunities while trying to gain more information. 
 
Finally, since all decisions must be made in the face of uncertainty and since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any battlefield problem. Therefore, we should not agonize over one. 
 
The essence of the problem is to select a promising course of action with an acceptable degree of risk and to do it more quickly than our foe. In this respect, "a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week."

One key way we put maneuver warfare into practice is through the use of mission tactics. 
 
Mission tactics is just as the name implies: the tactics of assigning a subordinate mission without specifying how the mission must be accomplished. 
We leave the manner of accomplishing the mission to the subordinate, thereby allowing the freedom-and establishing the duty for the subordinate to take whatever steps deemed necessary based on the situation. Mission tactics relies on a subordinate's exercise of initiative framed by proper guidance and understanding. 
 
Mission tactics benefits the senior commander by freeing time to focus on higher-level concerns rather than the details of subordinate execution. 
The senior prescribes the method of execution only to the degree that is essential for coordination. 
 
The senior intervenes in a subordinate's execution only by exception. It is this freedom for initiative that permits the high tempo of operations that we desire. Uninhibited by excessive restrictions from above, subordinates can adapt their actions to the changing situation. They inform the commander of what they have done, but they do not wait for permission.

Notes -
Decentralized command: 
“In the context of command and control, also called mission command and control. Mission tactics involves the use of mission-type orders. 
Mission-type order: Order to a unit to perform a mission without specifying how it is to be accomplished. —Joint pub 1-02” 
 
You need the right people that will be able to accomplish the job without micromanagement. 
They need to be independent, creative, and driven. 
 
From the book Relentless: the most difficult thing for a cleaner to do, is to identify the right people to be surrounded with, that will help him accomplish the job.

Mission tactics requires subordinates to act with "topsight"-a grasp of how their actions fit into the larger situation." 
In other words, subordinates must always think above their own levels in order to contribute to the accomplishment of the higher mission

There are two parts to any mission: the task to be accomplished and the reason or intent behind it. 
 
The intent is thus every mission. 
The task describes the action to be taken while the intent describes the purpose of the action. 
The task denotes what is to be done, and sometimes when and where, the intent explains why. Of the two, the intent is predominant. 
 
While a situation may change, making the task obsolete, the intent is more lasting and continues to guide our actions.

A subordinate should be ever conscious of a senior's intent so that it guides every decision. An intent that is involved or complicated will fail to accomplish this purpose. 
Subordinates must have a clear understanding of what their commander expects. 
 
Further, they should understand the intent of the commander at least two levels up.

Another important tool for providing unity is the main effort. Of all the actions going on within our command, we recognize one as the most critical to success at that moment. 
 
The unit assigned responsibility for accomplishing this key mission is designated as the main effort. 
 
…The main effort receives priority for support of any kind. It becomes clear to all other units in the command that they must support that unit in the accomplishment of its mission. 
 
… Faced with a decision, we ask ourselves: How can I best support the main effort?

The main effort involves a physical and moral commitment, although not an irretrievable one.

…surfaces are hard spots-enemy strengths-and gaps are soft spots-enemy weaknesses. 
 
…if our main effort has struck a surface but another unit has located a gap, we designate the second unit as the main effort and redirect our combat power in support of it. In this manner, we "pull" combat power through gaps from the front rather than "pushing" it through from the rear." 
 
Commanders must rely on the initiative of subordinates to locate gaps and must have the flexibility to respond quickly to opportunities rather than blindly follow predetermined schemes.

Maneuver warfare is a way of thinking in and about war that should shape our every action. It is a state of mind born of a bold will, intellect, initiative, and ruthless opportunism.

…There is required for the composition of a great commander not only massive common sense and reasoning power, not only imagination, but also an element of legerdemain, an original and sinister touch, which leaves the enemy puzzled as well as beaten. 
 
—Winston Churchill

Mission: "The task, together with the purpose, that clearly indicates the action to be taken and the reason therefor." (Joint Pub 1-02)

Most people are willing to settle for "good enough." But if you want to be unstoppable, those words mean nothing to you.

Everything you need to be great is already inside you. All your ambitions and secrets, your darkest dreams… they're waiting for you to just let go

… if you don't make a choice, the choice will be made for you

Being relentless means demanding more of yourself than anyone else could ever demand of you, knowing that every time you stop, you can still do more. You must do more. 
 
The minute your mind thinks, "Done," your instincts say, "Next.

… if you want to be unstoppable, you have to face who you really are and make it work for you, not against you.

… anything that requires a long explanation probably isn't the truth.

In order to have what you really want, you must first be who you really are

Being relentless means never being satisfied. It means creating new goals every time you reach your personal best.

If you want to be great, deliver the unexpected. If you want to be the best, deliver a miracle.

Remember, it's not about talent or brains or wealth. It's about the relentless instinctive drive to do whatever it takes-anything-to get to the top of where you want to be, and to stay there. 
… 
A Cleaner's attitude can be summed up in three words: I own this. He walks in with confidence and leaves with results.

Those who reach this level of excellence don't coast on their talent. They're completely focused on taking responsibility and taking charge, …; they decide how to get the job done, and then they do whatever is necessary to make it happen.

They expect to succeed, and when they do, they never celebrate for long because there's always more to do.

Cleaners have a dark side, and a zone you can't enter. 
 
They get what they want, but they pay for it in solitude. 
 
Excellence is lonely.

Cleaners understand they don't have to love the work to be successful; they just have to be relentless about achieving it, and everything else in between is a diversion and a distraction from the ultimate prize.

It's not necessary-or even possible-to be a Cleaner in all aspects of your life. You don't have to be relentless about everything, you don't have to be the best at everything.

All that matters is the end result, not the instant gratification along the way.

At the highest level of success in any area, everyone has reached some degree of outstanding achievement, so we're talking about shades of greatness. But if you want to be the very best of the best, it's the details that make the difference.

you can't train your body-or excel at anything-before you train your mind. You can't commit to excellence until your mind is ready to take you there. 
 
Teach the mind to train the body.

Do. The. Work. Every day, you have to do something you don't want to do. Every day. Challenge yourself to be uncomfortable, push past the apathy and laziness and fear.

Notes -
Remember David Goggins

Cleaners do the hardest things first, just to show there's no task too big. They might not be happy about it, they don't ever love it, but they're always thinking about the destination, not the bumpy road that takes them there

You control your body, it does not control you. You shut out the fear and emotion and physical stress and you do the thing you dread.

But I'm not going to make it comfortable. Why should I? Comfortable makes you good. We're going for unstoppable, and there's a price to pay for that.

Get comfortable being uncomfortable, or find another place to fail.

No emotion, because in the Zone the only sensation is anger, a quiet, icy anger simmering under your skin never rage, never out of control. Silent, like a storm that moves in slow and dark, its violence unseen until it hits, and can't be measured until it moves on.

Most people are the lion in the cage. Safe, tame, predictable, waiting for something to happen. But for humans, the cage isn't made of glass and steel bars; it's made of bad advice and low selfesteem and bullshit rules and tortured thinking about what you can't do or what you're supposed to do. It's molded around you by a lifetime of overthinking and overanalyzing and worrying about what could go wrong. Stay in the cage long enough, you forget those basic instincts.

If you think, you die.

Notes -
Remember “Warfighting” - Marines doctrine book

The greats never stop learning. Instinct and talent without technique just makes you reckless… . 
 
Instinct is raw clay that can be shaped into a masterpiece, if you develop skills that match your talent. That can only come from learning everything there is to know about what you do. 
 
But real learning doesn't mean clinging to the lessons. 
 
It means absorbing everything you can and then trusting yourself to use what you know instantaneously, without thinking. Instinctive, not impulsive … quick, not hurried.

I'm not telling you to stop searching for answers. But learn about yourself, and then trust what you know so you can build on what you already have. 
 
(Instinct is the opposite of science: research tells you what others have learned, instinct tells you what you have learned. Science studies other people. Instinct is all about you.)

You get there by taking huge risks that others won't take, because you rely on your instincts to know which risks aren't risks at all.

Staying safe means being limited, and you can't be limited if you're going to be relentless.

Unapologetically embrace the dark side. Be sure you control it, and not be the one controlled by it. 
 
Ignore judgement of others, your dark side is what makes you a killer. 
 
If exposed to light, never apologize. Instead embrace it and double down. Don't give-in to the mob.

As soon as they start relaxing for just a moment, they instantly feel as if they're slacking. 
… 
To a Cleaner, relaxing is something weaker people do because they can't handle pressure.

Remember, don't compete with anyone, you make them compete with you. 
…focus only on the internal pressure that drives you. Run to it, embrace it, feel it, so no one else can throw more at you than you've already put on yourself

Stress is what brings you to life. Let it motivate you, make you work harder. Use it, don't run from it. When it makes you uncomfortable, so what? The payoff is worth it. Work through the discomfort, you'll survive. And then go back for more. 
 
Of course, you have to be able to recognize the difference between stress that can bring great results, and stress you create yourself that just causes chaos.

Feel that pressure, and fight to stay there. You have to work for that. It's not owed to you.

…confidence means recognizing something isn't working and having the flexibility and knowledge to make adjustments; cockiness is the inability to admit when something isn't working, and repeating the same mistakes over and over because you stubbornly can't admit you're wrong.

A Cooler takes no risks. 
 
A Closer takes risks when he can prepare in advance and knows the consequences of failing are minimal. 
 
Nothing feels risky to a Cleaner; whatever happens, he'll know what to do.

If you're a Cleaner, you know that feeling, and you've likely been in that kind of situation when everyone else is freaking out and you just know what to do. You don't even know how you know, you just know. I'm not talking about "winging it" or making it up as you go. I'm talking about being so prepared, with so many options and so much experience, that you're truly ready for anything.

You have to be willing to fail if you're going to trust yourself to act from the gut, and then adapt as you go. 
 
That's the confidence or swagger that allows you to take risks and know that whatever happens, you'll figure it out. Adapt, and adapt again.

You want to know a true sign of a Cleaner? He feels no pressure when he screws up and has no problem admitting when he's wrong and shouldering the blame: When a Cooler makes a mistake, he'll give you a lot of excuses but no solutions. 
When a Closer makes a mistake, he finds someone else to blame. 
When a Cleaner makes a mistake, he can look in the you eye and say, "I fucked up.”

Are there times when you truly have no control? 
 
Absolutely. But at that point, it's on you to figure out how to take charge and navigate forward. Otherwise, you're allowing external pressure to dictate the outcome. 
 
Create your own pressure to succeed, don't allow others to create it for you. Have the confidence to trust that you can handle anything.

What the hell is "inner drive"? Inner drive is nothing more than thought without action, internal wanderings that never hit the pavement to go anywhere. Completely worthless until those thoughts become external and convert to action.

Passion: a strong feeling or emotion for something or someone. Very nice. Now what? Are you just feeling it, or are you going to do something about it? 
 
I love hearing motivational speakers tell people to "follow passion." Follow it? How about work at it. Excel at it. Demand to be the best at it.

Trust yourself. Decide. 
 
Every minute, every hour, every day that you sit around trying to figure out what to do, someone else is already doing it.

Thinking doesn’t achieve outcomes, only action does. Prepare yourself with everything you'll need to succeed, then act. 
 
You don't need a hundred people to back you up and be your safety net. Your preparation and your instincts are your safety net.

Good things come to those who wait. 
 
No; good things come to those who work. I understand the value of not rushing into things—you want to be quick, not careless— but you still have to work toward a result, not just sit back and wait for something to happen.

Meanwhile, as you sit back doing nothing because you're afraid to make a mistake, someone else is out there making all kinds of mistakes, learning from them, and getting to where you wanted to be. And probably laughing at your weakness.

Figure out what you do, then do it. And do it better than anyone else.

Interesting how the guy with the most talent and success spent more time working out than anyone else.

Do you need to be pain-free? Or can you push past it and stand by your commitment and decision to go further? It's your choice. 
 
The outcome is on you.

Making it to the top is not the same as making it at the top.

Cleaner Law: when you reduce your competition to whining that you "got lucky," you know you're doing something right. 
 
…It's not about luck, I don't believe in luck. There are facts and opportunities and realities, and how you respond to them determines whether you succeed or fail.

It doesn't matter what you get handed, it's what you do after you receive it that affords you the privilege of saying, "I did this on my own."

You cannot understand what it means to be relentless until you have struggled to possess something that's just out of your reach. 
 
Over and over, as soon as you touch it, it moves farther away. But something inside you that killer instinct-makes you keep going, reaching, until you finally grab it and fight with all your might to keep holding on. Anyone can take what's sitting right in front of him. Only when you're truly relentless can you understand the determination to keep pursuing a target that never stops moving.

If you want to be elite, you have to earn it. Every day, everything you do. Earn it. Prove it. Sacrifice. 
 
No shortcuts. You can't fight the elephants until you've wrestled the pigs, messed around in the mud, handled the scrappy, dirty issues that clutter everyday life, so you can be ready for the heavy stuff later. There's no way you can be prepared to compete and survive at anything if you start with the elephants; no matter how good your instincts are, you'll always lack the basic knowledge needed to build your arsenal of attack weapons. And when you're surrounded by those elephants, they'll know they're looking at a desperate newcomer.

Anyone can start something. Few can finish.

Part of the commitment to hard work is knowing what you have to give up to do the work… learning to control whatever pulls you away from your mission.

Cleaner Law: When you're going through a world of pain, you never hide. 
You show up to work ready to go, you face adversity and your critics and those who judge you, you step into the Zone and perform at that top level when everyone is expecting you to falter. That's being a professional.

When people start broadcasting what they're going to do, and how great they're going to be when they do it, it's a sure sign they're still trying to convince themselves.

respect isn't just about what you can do physically; you have to be able to perform intellectually and mentally as well. The way you conduct yourself in all areas of your life, your ability to show intelligence and class and self-control those are the things that separate you from the rest of the pack.

You don't need a $3,000 suit, go to Walmart and buy three for $100, but come back looking like a man, not a kid who got kicked out of school.

You can't get to the top without stepping on some people, but a Cleaner knows where to step without leaving footprints, because you never know when you may need those people again. 
 
Being feared doesn't mean being a jerk. I want you to carry yourself so you can be respected, not exposed as an insecure jackass who big-times others so he can feel better about himself.

…if you’re truly focused on winning, you’re not concerned with friendship or compassion or loyalty, you're not worried about how others will judge you. 
 
You know what people say about you, and it just drives you harder. Let them hate you; it only shows their weakness and emotion and makes you more powerful. 
 
You don't need friends; your friends need you. You know whom and they'd better never let you down

…about trusting your instincts to make decisions, … a big part of that is knowing whom you can trust, or whether you can trust anyone at all. 
 
Because no matter who you are, part of success means recognizing the people who can help you get where you want to go, putting all the best pieces in place. 
 
You have to surround yourself with people who can operate at your level of demanding excellence. You can't be unstoppable, or even great, if you can't do that. And it's probably the hardest thing for a Cleaner to do.

A Cleaner views people as if they're tools, each with unique, indispensable qualities. 
… 
You're only as good as the tools you've chosen, and your ability to use them to their maximum potential. 
 
That's a Cleaner's talent, gathering the best possible assets, placing them exactly where they have to be, and if necessary, moving them into specific situations for his benefit. Cleaners are meticulous about putting their key people in place; they'll take a long time to build that ideal team, but when they finally get everyone they need, they stay committed to keeping the team intact.

Someone asks you to do something you don't want to do, and you start explaining, that person is going to ask and again and again. 
Don't explain, don't make excuses, Truth takes one sentence. Simple and direct.

Be open to advice that goes against what you want. 
 
Cleaner Law: surround yourself with those who want you to succeed, who recognize what it takes to be successful. People who don't pursue their own dreams probably won't encourage you to pursue yours; they'll tell you every negative thing they tell themselves.

You don't recognize failure; 
you know there's more than one way 
to get what you want.

Notes -
Similar thought expressed in Rick Rubin’s book— a failure is a road that will show you sides that you’ve never knew existed.

If you don't succeed at everything you do on your first attempt, does that mean you "failed"? Isn't it a good thing that you keep coming back and working at it until you succeed? How can that be failure? 
 
What most people think of as failure, a Cleaner sees as an opportunity to manage and control a situation, pulling it around to his advantage, doing something everyone else says is impossible.

Failure is what happens when you decide you failed. Until then, you're still always looking for ways to get to where you want to be.

Success and failure are 100 percent mental. One person's idea of success might seem like a complete failure to someone else. You must establish your own vision of what it means to be unstoppable, you can't let anyone else define that for you. 
 
What does your gut tell you? What do your instincts know about what you should be doing how you're going to succeed, and what you're going to succeed at? How can anyone tell you what that should be?

That's the progression of good-great-unstoppable. No one starts at unstoppable. 
 
You fuck up, you figure it out, you trust yourself.

(A Cleaner) He doesn't feel embarrassed or ashamed, he doesn't blame anyone else, and he doesn't care what anyone else says about his situation. It's never the end, it's never over. 
 
And he knows, without a doubt, that whatever happens, he'll find a way to come out on top.

If you aim at excellence, you have to be willing to sacrifice. That is the price of success. You never know how bad you want it until you get that first bitter taste of not getting it, but once you taste it, you're going to fight like hell to get that bitterness out of your mouth.

A Cleaner can't ever accept that it's over. But he does recognize when it's time to change direction. 
 
One of the hardest things to do is to change course once you've set your goals. You made a decision, you worked for it, you earned the payoff but for whatever reason, it's not going the way you planned. 
 
It's not weak to recognize when it's time to shift directions. 
 
It's weak to refuse to consider other options and fail at everything because you couldn't adapt to anything.

It takes a special person to say enough is enough and know when it's time to start redirecting your effort into something that can succeed. Maybe your dream isn't going to play out the way you originally envisioned it, but with some creativity and vision you can redirect your goals toward something that keeps you connected to what you always wanted.

A Cleaner feels burnout like everyone else, but the idea of walking away and not thinking about what he walked away from creates more anxiety and stress than keeping it going.

I want the satisfaction of knowing that every move make, every thought, every idea, every action takes further than anyone else has ever gone and makes me better at what I do than anyone else in the world. That's what drives me. Whatever drives you, let it take you where you want to be. Everything you want can be yours. Be a Cleaner and go get it. 
 
Be relentless. 
Done. 
Next.

Notes -
Never listen to those people that says to take it safe. There are no limitations other than those you give yourself. 
If something isn't working, move around it and over. Success isn’t a straight path. There will be times when what you are trying isn't working. 
Move to the next tactic, to the next path to success. 
Never stop. No limitations.

When you have to trust yourself and believe what you feel, not what you see. 
 
Sometimes you take those steps one at a time, sometimes two at a time. Some days you'll feel so good you'll want to sprint, other days you're crawling on your hands and knees, gasping for breath and wishing you'd never started this race. You'll slip and tumble and lose everything you just gained. 
 
And when you finally make some progress more steps to climb. There's a pebble in your shoe, a blister on every toe. Your lungs want to explode. Every day. Every damn day. 
 
Ten steps? Wouldn't that be nice. "Ten steps" are a convenient way to simplify and sell success, but hardly effective.

Notes -
Extract from “W1nning”

The Law of Leadership 
It's better to be first than it is to be better.

The basic issue in marketing is creating a category you can be first in. It's the law of leadership: It's better to be first than it is to be better. It's much easier to get into the mind first than to try to convince someone you have a better product than the one that did get there first.

Not every first is going to become successful, however. Timing is an issue-your first could be too late. 
… 
Some firsts are just bad ideas that will never go anywhere.

If you're introducing the first brand in a new category, you should always try to select a name that can work generically. 
 
Not only does the first brand usually become the leader, but also the sales order of follow-up brands often matches the order of their introductions.

Marketing is a battle of perceptions, not products.

The Law of the Category 
If you can't be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.

When you launch a new product, the first question to ask yourself is not "How is this new product better than the competition?" but "First what?" In other words, what category is this new product first in? 
 
E.g.: 
Charles Schwab didn't open a better brokerage firm. He opened the first discount broker. 
Lear's was not the first woman's magazine. It was the first magazine for the mature woman. (The magazine for the woman who wasn't born yesterday.) 
This is counter to classic marketing thinking, which is brand oriented: How do I get people to prefer my brand? 
 
Forget the brand. Think categories. 
Prospects are on the defensive when it comes to brands. Everyone talks about why their brand is better. But prospects have an open mind when it comes to categories. Everyone is interested in what's new. 
 
Few people are interested in what's better.

The Law of the Mind 
It's better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace

Is something wrong with the law of leadership in chapter 1? No, but the law of the mind modifies it. 
 
It's better to be first in the prospect's mind than first in the marketplace. … 
Being first in the mind is everything in marketing. Being first in the marketplace is important only to the extent that it allows you to get in the mind first. 
 
For example, IBM wasn't first in the marketplace with the mainframe computer. Remington Rand was first, with UNIVAC. But thanks to a massive marketing effort, IBM got into the mind first and won the computer battle early. 
 
The law of the mind follows from the law of perception. If marketing is a battle of perception, not product, then the mind takes precedence over the marketplace.

Once a mind is made up, it rarely, if ever, changes. The single most wasteful thing you can do in marketing is try to change a mind.

If you want to make a big impression on another person, you cannot worm your way into their mind and then slowly build up a favorable opinion over a period of time. The mind doesn't work that way. You have to blast your way into the mind. 
 
The reason you blast instead of worm is that people don't like to change their minds.

Apple's problem in getting into its prospects' minds was helped by its simple, easy-to-remember name. 
 
On the other hand, Apple's competitors had complicated names that were difficult to remember.

The Law of Perception 
Marketing is not a battle of products, it's a battle of perceptions.

Marketing people are preoccupied with doing research and "getting the facts." They analyze the situation to make sure that truth is on their side. Then they sail confidently into the marketing arena, secure in the knowledge that they have the best product and that ultimately the best product will win. 
 
It's an illusion. 
There is no objective reality. 
There are no facts. 
There are no best products. 
All that exists in the world of marketing are perceptions in the minds of the customer or prospect. 
The perception is the reality. 
Everything else is an illusion. 
 
All truth is relative. Relative to your mind or the mind of another human being. When you say, "I'm right and the next person is wrong," all you're really saying is that you're a better perceiver than someone else. 
 
Most people think they are better perceivers than others. They have a sense of personal infallibility. Their perceptions are always more accurate than those of their neighbors or friends. 
 
Truth and perception become fused in the mind, leaving no difference between the two.

If the universe exists, it exists inside your own mind and the minds of others. 
 
That's the reality that marketing programs must deal with. 
 
There may well be oceans, rivers, cities, towns, trees, and houses out there, but there just isn't any way for us to know these things except through our own perceptions. Marketing is a manipulation of those perceptions.

Notes -
the universe exists the way we know it because of the perceptions we evolved to survive.

…the three largest-selling Japanese imported cars in America are Honda, Toyota, and Nissan. Most marketing people think the battle between the three brands is based on quality, styling, horsepower, and price. Not true. It's what people think about a Honda, a Toyota, or a Nissan that determines which brand will win. Marketing is a battle of perceptions.

…customers frequently make buying decisions based on second-hand perceptions. Instead of using their own perceptions, they base their buying decisions on someone else's perception of reality. 
This is the "everybody knows" principle. 
 
Everybody knows that the Japanese make higher quality cars than the Americans do. So people make buying decisions based on the fact that everybody knows the Japanese make higher-quality cars. When you ask shoppers whether they have had any personal experience with a product, most often they say they haven't. 
And, more often than not, their own experience is often twisted to conform to their perceptions. 
 
If you have had a bad experience with a Japanese car, you've just been unlucky, because everybody knows the Japanese make high-quality cars. Conversely, if you have had a good experience with an American car, you've just been lucky, because everybody knows that American cars are poorly made.

Marketing is not a battle of products. It's a battle of perceptions.

The Law of Focus 
The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect's mind.

A company can become incredibly successful if it can find a way to own a word in the mind of the prospect. Not a complicated word. Not an invented one. The simple words are best, words taken right out of the dictionary. 
 
This is the law of focus. You "burn" your way into the mind by narrowing the focus to a single word or concept. It's the ultimate marketing sacrifice.

If you're not a leader, then your word has to have a word has to be "available" in your category. No one else can have a lock on it. 
 
You don't have to be a linguistic genius to find a winner. Prego went against leader Ragu in the spaghetti sauce market and captured a 27 percent share with an idea borrowed from Heinz. Prego's word is thicker. 
 
The most effective words are simple and benefit oriented. No matter how complicated the product, no matter how complicated the needs of the market, it's always better to focus on one word or benefit rather than two or three or four. 
 
Also, there's the halo effect. If you strongly establish one benefit, the prospect is likely to give you a lot of other benefits, too.

You can't take somebody else's word.

Notes -
In a broader sense, you should not jump in a competitive market. 
If you are trying to take somebody elses word, it means that you are attacking entrenched competition. 
(Blue ocean strategy)

The essence of marketing is narrowing the focus. 
 
You become stronger when you reduce the scope of your operations. You can't stand for something if you chase after everything.

Notes -
Words that are too broad won't work (see "quality" ex). No company aims to not ship quality products. 
You can't credibly stand for something that everyone agrees on, or claim to be doing.

The Law of Exclusivity 
Two companies cannot own the same word in the prospect's mind.

When a competitor owns a word or position in the prospect's mind, it is futile to attempt to own the same word.

Notes -
Example of Volvo and "safety: Seems a very broad word.No other company would say to build unsafe cars. I wonder if with good marketing you can win with broad word. Perhaps "safety" can be precisely quantifiable while “quality” can’t be.

You can't change people's minds once they are made up. In fact, what you often do is reinforce your competitor's position by making its concept more important.

The Law of the Ladder 
The strategy to use depends on which rung you occupy on the ladder.

All products are not created equal. There's a hierarchy in the mind that prospects use in making decisions. 
 
For each category, there is a product ladder in the mind. On each rung is a brand name.

In general, a mind accepts only new data that is consistent with its product ladder in that category. Everything else is ignored.

What about your product's ladder in the prospect's mind? How many rungs are there on your ladder? It depends on whether your product is a high-interest or a low-interest product. Products you use every day (cigarettes, cola, beer, toothpaste, cereal) tend to be highinterest products with many rungs on their ladders. Products that are purchased infrequently (furniture, lawn mowers, luggage) usually have few rungs on their ladders. 
 
Products that involve a great deal of personal pride (automobiles, watches, cameras) are also high-interest products with many rungs on their ladders even though they are purchased infrequently. 
 
Products that are purchased infrequently and involve an unpleasant experience usually have very few rungs on their ladders. Automobile batteries, tires, and life insurance are three examples. 
 
The ultimate product that involves the least amount of pleasure and is purchased once in a lifetime has no rungs on its ladder. Ever hear of Batesville caskets? Probably not, although the brand has almost 50 percent of the market. 
 
There's a relationship between market share and your position on the ladder in the prospect's mind. 
You tend to have twice the market share of the brand below you and half the market share of the brand above you.

What's the maximum number of rungs on a ladder? There seems to be a rule of seven in the prospect's mind. 
… 
According to Harvard psychologist Dr. George A. Miller, the average human mind cannot deal with more than seven units at a time.

…it's sometimes better to be No. 3 on a big ladder than No. 1 on a small ladder.

The Law of Duality 
In the long run, every market becomes a two-horse race.

Early on, a new category is a ladder of many rungs. 
Gradually, the ladder becomes a two-rung affair.

The law of duality suggests that these market shares are unstable. Furthermore, the law predicts that the leader will lose market share and No. 2 will gain.

In a maturing industry, third place is a difficult position to be in.

In the long run, marketing is a two-game race. 
Time frames, however, can vary

In 32 of its 44 product categories in the United States, P&G commands the No. 1 or No. 2 brands. 
 
Early on, in a developing market, the No. 3 or No.4 positions look attractive. Sales are increasing. New, relatively unsophisticated customers are coming into the market. These customers don't always know which brands are the leaders, so they pick ones that look interesting or attractive. Quite often, these turn out to be the No. 3 or No. 4 brands. 
 
As time goes on, however, these customers get educated. They want the leading brand, based on the naive assumption that the leading brand must be better. 
 
We repeat: The customer believes that marketing is a battle of products. It's this kind of thinking that keeps the two brands on top: "They must be the best, they're the leaders.”

The Law of the Opposite 
If you're shooting for second place, your strategy is determined by the leader.

In strength there is weakness. Wherever the leader is strong, there is an opportunity for a would-be No.2 to turn the tables. 
Much like a wrestler uses his opponent's strength against him, a company should leverage the leader's strength into a weakness. 
If you want to establish a firm foothold on the second rung of the ladder, study the firm above you. 
Where is it strong? And how do you turn that strength into a weakness? 
You must discover the essence of the leader and then present the prospect with the opposite. (In other words, don't try to be better, try to be different.) It's often the upstart versus old reliable.

When you look at customers in a given product category, there seem to be two kinds of people. There are those who want to buy from the leader and there are those who don't want to buy from the leader. A potential No. 2 has to appeal to the latter group. 
 
In other words, by positioning yourself against the leader, you take business away from all the other alternatives to No. 1.

Too many potential No. 2 brands try to emulate the leader. This usually is an error. You must present yourself as the alternative.

Marketing is often a battle for legitimacy. The first brand that captures the concept is often able to portray its competitors as illegitimate pretenders.

A good No. 2 can't afford to be timid. When you give up focusing on No. 1, you make yourself vulnerable not only to the leader but to the rest of the pack.

The Law of Division 
Over time, a category will divide and become two or more categories.

Notes -
The innovators dilemma

The marketing arena can be viewed as an ever-expanding sea of categories. 
 
A category starts off as a single entity. Computers, for example. But over time, the category breaks up into other segments.

Companies make a mistake when they try to take a well-known brand name in one category and use the same brand name in another category.

What keeps leaders from launching a different brand to cover a new category is the fear of what will happen to their existing brands.

Notes -
Fear of self-cannibalization: if the main brand has to die, let it die. Survival comes first.

Timing is also important. You can be too early to exploit a new category. 
… 
It's better to be early than late. You can't get into the prospect's mind first unless you're prepared to spend some time waiting for things to develop.

The Law of Perspective 
Marketing effects take place over an extended period of time

Any sort of couponing, discounts, or sales tends to educate consumers to buy only when they can get a deal.

The Law of Line Extension 
There's an irresistible pressure to extend the equity of the brand.

One day a company is tightly focused on a single product that is highly profitable. The next day the same company is spread thin over many products and is losing money.

When a company becomes incredibly successful, it invariably plants the seeds for its future problems.

When you try to be all things to all people, you inevitably wind up in trouble. "I'd rather be strong somewhere," said one manager, "than weak everywhere."

There are as many ways to line extend as there are galaxies in the universe. And new ways get invented every day. In the long run and in the presence of serious competition, line extensions almost never work.

Why does top management believe that line extension works, in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary? One reason is that while line extension is a loser in the long term, it can be a winner in the short term (chapter 11: The Law of Perspective). 
 
Management is also blinded by an intense loyalty to the company or brand. Why else would PepsiCo have introduced Crystal Pepsi in spite of the failures of Pepsi Light and Pepsi AM? 
 
More is less. The more products, the more markets, the more alliances a company makes, the less money it makes. "Fullspeed ahead in all directions" seems to be the call from the corporate bridge. When will companies learn that line extension ultimately leads to oblivion? 
 
Less is more. If you want to be successful today, you have to narrow the focus in order to build a position in the prospect's mind. 
 
What does IBM stand for? It used to stand for "mainframe computers." Today it stands for everything, which means it stands for nothing.

For many companies, line extension is the easy way out. Launching a new brand requires not only money, but also an idea or concept. For a new brand to succeed, it ought to be first in a new category (chapter 1: The Law of Leadership). Or the new brand ought to be positioned as an alternative to the leader (chapter 9: The Law of the Opposite). Companies that wait until a new market has developed often find these two leadership positions already preempted. So they fall back on the old reliable line extension approach. 
 
The antidote for line extension is corporate courage, a commodity in short supply.

The Law of Sacrifice 
You have to give up something in order to get something.

There are three things to sacrifice: product line, target market, and constant change. 
 
First sacrifice: the product line. 
Where is it written that the more you have to sell, the more you sell? 
The full line is a luxury for a loser. If you want to be successful, you have to reduce your product line, not expand it. 
 
Second sacrifice: target market. 
… 
There seems to be an almost religious belief that the wider net catches more customers, in spite of many examples to the contrary. 
… 
The target is not the market. That is, the apparent target of your marketing is not the same as the people who will actually buy your product. Even though Pepsi-Cola's target was the teenager, the market was everybody. 
The 50-year-old guy who wants to think he's 29 will drink the Pepsi. 
The target of Marlboro advertising is the cowboy, but the market is everybody. 
 
Third sacrifice: constant change. 
Where is it written that you have to change your strategy every year at budget review time? 
If you try to follow the twists and turns of the market, you are bound to wind up off the road. The best way to maintain a consistent position is not to change it in the first place.

If you want to be successful today, you should give something up.

Marketing is a game of mental warfare. It's a battle of perceptions, not products or services.

Eveready was the long-time leader in batteries. But new technology arrived-as it does in most indus tries. The first technology to change the battery business was the heavy-duty battery. What would you call your heavy-duty battery if you had the No. 1 name in batteries? You'd probably call it the Eveready heavyduty battery, which is what Eveready did. 
Then the alkaline battery arrived. Again, Eveready called its alkaline battery the Eveready alkaline battery. It seemed to make sense. 
Then P.R. Mallory introduced a line of alkaline batteries only. Furthermore, the company gave the line a better name: Duracell. 
The power of the sacrifice for Duracell was in being able to put the "long-lasting battery" idea in the mind of the prospect. Duracell lasts twice as long as Eveready, said the advertising. 
Eveready was forced to change the name of its alkaline battery to "the Energizer." But it was too late. Duracell had already become the leader in the battery market.

Notes -
battery war example

The world of business is populated by big, highly diversified generalists and small, narrowly focused specialists. If line extension and diversification were effective marketing strategies, you'd expect to see the generalists riding high. But they're not. Most of them are in trouble. 
 
The generalist is weak.

There seems to be an almost religious belief that the wider net catches more customers, in spite of many examples to the contrary.

Notes -
Greed and over optimization are amongst the causes.

The Law of Attributes 
For every attribute, there is an opposite, effective attribute.

Too often a company attempts to emulate the leader. 
 
"They must know what works," goes the rationale, "so let's do something similar." Not good thinking. 
 
It's much better to search for an opposite attribute that will allow you to play off against the leader. The key word here is opposite-similar won't do.

Some attributes are more important to customers than oth ers. You must try and own the most important attribute. 
… 
But the law of exclusivity points to the simple truth that once an attribute is successfully taken by your competition, it's gone. You must move on to a lesser attribute and live with a smaller share of the category. Your job is to seize a different attribute, dramatize the value of your attribute, and thus increase your share.

You can't predict the size of a new attribute's share, so never laugh.

Notes -
Disruption

The Law of Candor 
When you admit a negative, the prospect will give you a positive

…one of the most effective ways to get into a prospect's mind is to first admit a negative and then twist it into a positive.

…candor is very disarming. 
Every negative statement you make about yourself is instantly accepted as truth. Positive statements, on the other hand, are looked at as dubious at best. 
Especially in an advertisement. 
 
You have to prove a positive statement to the prospect's satisfaction. No proof is needed for a negative statement.

Marketing is often a search for the obvious. Since you can't change a mind once it's made up, your marketing efforts have to be devoted to using ideas and concepts already installed in the brain.

When a company starts a message by admitting a problem, people tend to, almost instinctively, open their minds.

Some years ago, Scope entered the mouthwash market with a "good-tasting" mouthwash, thus exploiting Listerine's truly terrible taste. 
 
What should Listerine do? It certainly couldn't tell people that Listerine's taste "wasn't all that bad." That would raise a red flag that would reinforce a negative perception. Things could get worse. Instead, Listerine brilliantly invoked the law of candor: "The taste you hate twice a day." 
 
Not only did the company admit the product tasted bad, it admitted that people actually hated it. (Now that's honesty.) This set up the selling idea that Listerine "kills a lot of germs.

Notes -
Good example for the law of candor.

One final note: The law of candor must be used carefully and with great skill. First, your "negative" must be widely perceived as a negative. It has to trigger an instant agreement with your prospect's mind. If the negative doesn't register quickly, your prospect will be confused and will wonder, "What's this all about?" 
 
Next, you have to shift quickly to the positive. The purpose of candor isn't to apologize. The purpose of candor is to set up a benefit that will convince your prospect.

The Law of Singularity 
In each situation, only one move will produce substantial results

Notes -
Pareto distribution

Whether you try hard or try easy, the differences are marginal. Furthermore, the bigger the company, the more the law of averages wipes out any real advantage of a trying harder approach.

History teaches that the only thing that works in marketing is the single, bold stroke. Furthermore, in any given situation there is only one move that will produce substantial results.

Most often there is only one place where a competitor is vulnerable. And that place should be the focus of the entire invading force.

Notes -
Book Warfighting - center of gravity, surfaces, gaps, and striking where it hurts.

While it's theoretically possible to stumble across the right idea if you haphazardly generate all the ideas you can possibly think of, it's not an efficient way to work.

Because of the high cost of mistakes, management can't afford to delegate important marketing decisions. That's what happened at General Motors. 
 
When the financial people took over, the marketing programs collapsed. Their interest was in the numbers, not the brands. The irony is that the numbers went south, along with the brands. 
 
It's hard to find that single move if you're hanging around headquarters and not involved in the process.

The Law of Unpredictability 
Unless you write your competitors' plans, you can't predict the future.

Most of corporate America's problems are not related to short-term marketing thinking. The problem is short-term financial thinking.

Good short-term planning is coming up with that angle or word that differentiates your product or company. Then you set up a coherent long-term marketing direction that builds a program to maximize that idea or angle. 
 
It's not a long-term plan, it's a long-term direction.

How can you best cope with you can get a handle on trends, which is a way to unpredictability? While you can't predict the future, take advantage of change.

The danger in working with trends is extrapolation. Many companies jump to conclusions about how far a trend will go. 
… 
Equally as bad as extrapolating a trend is the common practice of assuming the future will be a replay of the present.

Remember Peter's Law: The unexpected always happens. 
 
While tracking trends can be a useful tool in dealing with the unpredictable future, market research can be more of a problem than a help. Research does best at measuring the past. New ideas and concepts are almost impossible to measure. No one has a frame of reference. People don't know what they will do until they face an actual decision.

One way to cope with an unpredictable world is to build an enormous amount of flexibility into your organization. As change comes sweeping through your category, you have to be willing to change and change quickly if you are to survive in the long term.

It's probably true that a personal mainframe product would undermine IBM's two other main sources of revenue, but a company must be flexible enough to attack itself with a new idea. Change isn't easy, but it's the only way to cope with an unpredictable future.

Notes -
Be ready to implement disruptive technologies even at the cost of cannibalizing your main source of revenue. See The innovators dilemma.

One final note that's worth mentioning: There's a ing a chance" on the future. 
… 
No one can predict the future with any degree of certainty. Nor should marketing plans try to.

The Law of Success 
Success often leads to arrogance, and arrogance to failure.

Ego is the enemy of successful marketing. 
 
Objectivity is what's needed. 
 
When people become successful, they tend to become less objective. They often substitute their own judgment for what the market wants.

When a brand is successful, the company assumes the name is the primary reason for the brand's success. So they promptly look for other products to plaster the name on. 
 
Actually it's the opposite. The name didn't make the brand famous (although a bad name might keep the brand from becoming famous). The brand got famous because you made the right marketing moves.

The more you identify with your brand or corporate name, the more likely you are to fall into the line extension trap. "It can't be the name," you might be thinking when things go wrong. "We have a great name." Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. Proverbs 16:18.

Actually, ego is helpful. It can be an effective driving force in building a business. What hurts is injecting your ego in the marketing process.

Brilliant marketers have the ability to think like a prospect thinks They put themselves in the shoes of their customers. 
They don't impose their own view of the world on the situation. 
 
(Keep in mind that the world is all perception anyway, and the only thing that counts in marketing is the customer's perception.)

The bigger the company, the more likely it is that the chief executive has lost touch with the front lines. 
 
This might be the single most important factor limiting the growth of a corporation. All other factors favor size.

Notes -
Stay in touch with the frontline. See Warfighting.

Like kings, chief executives rarely get honest opinions from their ministers. There's too much intrigue going on at the court.

…chief executives delegate the marketing function. That's a mistake. 
 
Marketing is too important to be turned over to an underling. If you delegate anything, you should delegate the chairmanship of the next fund-raising drive. 
(The vice president of the United States, not the president, attends the state funerals.) 
 
The next thing to cut back on are the meetings. Instead of talking things over, walk out and see for yourself. 
As Gorbachev told Reagan, "It is better to see once than to hear a hundred times."

The Law of Failure 
Failure is to be expected and accepted.

The Japanese seem to be able to admit a mistake early and then make the necessary changes. Their consensus management style tends to eliminate the ego. Since a large number of people have a small piece of a big decision, there is no stigma that can be considered career damaging.

Marketing decisions are often made first with the decision maker's career in mind and second with the impact on the competition or the enemy in mind. 
 
There is a built-in conflict between the personal and the corporate agenda. 
This leads to a failure to take risks. 
 
(It's hard to be first in a new category without sticking your neck out.)

When the senior executive has a high salary and a short time to retirement, a bold move is highly unlikely. 
 
Even junior executives often make "safe" decisions so as to not disrupt their progress up the corporate ladder.

An idea gets rejected not because it isn't fundamentally sound but because no one in top management will personally benefit from its success.

The Law of Нуре 
The situation is often the opposite of the way it appears in the press.

When things are going well, a company doesn't need the hype. When you need the hype, it usually means you're in trouble.

History is filled with marketing failures that were successful in the press.

Forget the front page. If you're looking for clues to the future, look in the back of the paper for those innocuous little stories.

Capturing the imagination of the public is not the same as revolutionizing a market.

For the most part, hype is hype. Real revolutions don't arrive at high noon with marching bands and coverage on the 6:00 P.M. news. Real revolutions arrive unannounced in the middle of the night and kind of sneak up on you.

The Law of Acceleration 
Successful programs are not built on fads, they're built on trends.

A fad is a wave in the ocean, and a trend is the tide. 
 
A fad gets a lot of hype, and a trend gets very little. 
 
Like a wave, a fad is very visible, but it goes up and down in a big hurry. Like the tide, a trend is almost invisible, but it's very powerful over the long term. 
 
A fad is a short-term phenomenon that might be profitable, but a fad doesn't last long enough to do a company much good. Furthermore, a company often tends to gear up as if a fad were a trend. As a result, the company is often stuck with a lot of staff, expensive manufacturing facilities, and distribution networks. 
 
(A fashion, on the other hand, is a fad that repeats itself. Examples: short skirts for women and doublebreasted suits for men. Halley's Comet is a fashion because it comes back every 75 years or so.) 
 
When the fad disappears, a company often goes into a deep financial shock.

Here's the paradox. If you were faced with a rapidly rising business, with all the characteristics of a fad, the best thing you could do would be to dampen the fad. By dampening the fad, you stretch the fad out and it becomes more like a trend. 
 
You see this in the toy business. Some owners of hot toys want to put their hot toy name on everything. The result is that it becomes an enormous fad that is bound to collapse. When everybody has a Ninja turtle, nobody wants one anymore. 
 
The Ninja turtle is a good example of a fad that collapses in a hurry because the owner of the concept got greedy. The owner fans the fad rather than dampening it. 
 
On the other hand, the Barbie doll is a trend. When Barbie was invented years ago, the doll was never heavily merchandised into other areas.

One way to maintain a long-term demand for your product is to never totally satisfy the demand.

The Law of Resources 
Without adequate funding an idea won't get off the ground.

Even the best idea in the world won't go very far without the money to get it off the ground.

Ideas without money are worthless. Well… not quite. But you have to use your idea to find the money, not the marketing help. The marketing can come later.

What about a rich company? How should it approach the law of résources? The answer is simple: Spend enough.

You can't save (money) your way to success.

Industry structure is not given; it can be shaped. 
… 
With industry structure seen as fixed, firms are driven to build their strategies based on it. 
(think five forces or its distant precursor SWOT analysis) 
Here strategy perforce becomes a zero-sum game where one company's gain is another company's loss, as firms are bound by existing market space. 

Blue ocean strategy, by contrast, shows how strategy can shape structure in an organisation’s favour to create new market space.

How many of today's industries were then unknown? 
… Now turn the clock back only forty years. 
… 
Now put the clock forward twenty years or perhaps fifty years and ask yourself how many now unknown industries will likely exist then. 
If history is any predictor of the future, again the answer is many of them.

…the overriding focus of strategic thinking has been on competition-based red ocean strategies. Part of the explanation for this is that corporate strategy is heavily influenced by its roots in military strategy.

…the overriding focus of strategic thinking has been on competition-based red ocean strategies. Part of the explanation for this is that corporate strategy is heavily influenced by its roots in military strategy. 
… 
To focus on the red ocean is therefore to accept the key constraining factors of war-limited terrain and the need to beat an enemy to succeed and to deny the distinctive strength of the business world: the capacity to create new market space that is uncontested.

…history also shows that industries are constantly being created and expanded over time and that industry conditions and boundaries are not given; individual actors can shape them.

What consistently separated winners from losers in creating blue oceans was their approach to strategy. 

The companies caught in the red ocean followed a conventional approach, racing to beat the competition by building a defensible position within the existing industry order. 

The creators of blue oceans, surprisingly, didn't use the competition as their benchmark. Instead, they followed a different strategic logic that we call value innovation. 

Value innovation is the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy. We call it value innovation because instead of focusing on beating the competition, you focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space.

Value innovation places equal emphasis on value and innovation. 

Value without innovation tends to focus on value creation on an incremental scale, something that improves value but is not sufficient to make you stand out in the marketplace. 

Innovation without value tends to be technology-driven, market pioneering, or futuristic, often shooting beyond what buyers are ready to accept and pay for.

Value innovation occurs only when companies align innovation with utility, price, and cost positions. If they fail to anchor innovation with value in this way, technology innovators and market pioneers often lay the eggs that other companies hatch.

…those that seek to create blue oceans pursue differentiation and low cost simultaneously

Notes -
By violating the dogma of value-cost trade off.

For value innovation to be a sustainable strategy, then, the alignment of the company's utility, price, cost, and people is needed. It is this whole-system approach that makes value innovation strategic rather than operational or functional. 
… 
(Value innovation) is about strategy that embraces the entire system of a company's activities. 

Value innovation requires companies to orient the whole system toward achieving a leap in value for both buyers and themselves. Absent such an integral approach, innovation will remain divided from the core of strategy.

(Competition-based red ocean strategy is based on) structuralist view, or environmental determinism. 

In contrast, value innovation is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not given and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players. We call this the reconstructionist view.

The strategy canvas is both a diagnostic and an action framework for building a compelling blue ocean strategy. It serves two purposes. 

First, it captures the current state of play in the known market space. This allows you to understand where the competition is currently investing, the factors the industry currently competes on in products, service, and delivery, and what customers receive from the existing competitive offerings on the market. 

The horizontal axis captures the range of factors the industry competes on and invests in. 

…the vertical axis of the strategy canvas, which captures the offering level that buyers receive across all these key competing factors. A high score means that a company offers buyers more, and hence invests more, in that factor. In the case of price, a higher score indicates a higher price. 

The value curve, the basic component of the strategy canvas, is a graphic depiction of a company's relative performance across its industry's factors of competition.

To reconstruct buyer value elements in crafting a new value curve, we have developed the four actions framework. 

…there are four key questions to challenge an industry's strategic logic and business model: 

1.Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated? 
2.Which factors should be reduced well below the industry's standard? 
3.Which factors should be raised well above the industry's standard? 
4.Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered? 

The first question forces you to consider eliminating factors that companies in your industry have long competed on. Often those factors are taken for granted even though they no longer have value or may even detract from value, Sometimes there is a fundamental change in what buyers value, but companies that are focused on benchmarking one another do not act on, or even perceive, the change. 

The second question forces you to determine whether products or services have been overdesigned in the race to match and beat the competition. Here, companies overserve customers, increasing their cost structure for no gain. 

The third question pushes you to uncover and eliminate the compromises your industry forces customers to make. 

The fourth question helps you to discover entirely new sources of value for the industry. 

It is by pursuing the first two questions (of eliminating and reducing) that you gain insight into how to drop your cost structure vis-à-vis competitors. 

The second two factors, by contrast, provide you with insight into how to lift buyer value and create new demand. 

Collectively they allow you to systematically explore how you can reconstruct buyer value elements across alternative industries to offer buyers entirely new experiences while keeping your cost structure low.

Notes -
Reconstruct buyer value elements to craft a new value curve. To do so, four key questions must be answered. See also Management course part 3.1 on value innovation (Kinepolis and hotel formule1).

…a supplementary analytic to the four actions framework called the eliminate-reduce-raise-create grid. 

The grid pushes companies not only to ask all four questions in the four actions framework but also to act on all four to create a new value curve. 
…the grid gives companies four immediate benefits: 

1.It pushes them to simultaneously pursue differentiation and low costs to break the value-cost trade-off. 
2.It immediately flags companies that are focused only on raising and creating and thereby lifting their cost structure and often overengineering products and services-a common plight in many companies. 
3.It is easily understood by managers at any level, creating a high level of engagement in its application 
4.Because completing the grid is a challenging task, it drives companies to robustly scrutinize every factor the industry compotes on, making them discover the range of implicit assumptions they make unconsciously in competing.

Three characteristics of a good strategy: 

Focus: (in the value curve) the company did not diffuse its efforts across all key factors of competition. 

Divergence: The shape of its value curve diverged from the other players'. 
Tagline: a clear strategic profile that can easily be communicated and understood by potential customers. 

When expressed through a value curve, then, an effective blue ocean strategy has three complementary qualities: focus, divergence, and a compelling tagline. 

These three characteristics serve as an initial litmus test of the commercial viability of blue ocean ideas.

(When) investing across the board, companies let their competitors' moves set their own agendas. Costly business models result.

When a company's strategy is formed reactively as it tries to keep up with the competition, it loses its uniqueness.

A good strategy has a clear-cut and compelling tagline.

Notes -
Own a word - The 22 immutable laws of marketing

The first question the value curves answer is whether a business deserves to be a winner. 

When a company's value curve, or its competitors', meets the three criteria that define a good blue ocean strategy-focus, divergence, and a compelling tagline that speaks to the market the company is on the right track. 

On the other hand, when a company's value curve lacks focus, its cost structure will tend to be high and its business model complex in implementation and execution. 
When it lacks divergence, a company's strategy is a metoo, with no reason to stand apart in the marketplace. 

When it lacks a compelling tagline that speaks to buyers, it is likely to be internally driven or a classic example of innovation for innovation's sake with no great commercial potential and no natural take-off capability

Are there strategic contradictions? These are areas where a company is offering a high level on one competing factor while ignoring others that support that factor. 

An example is investing heavily in making a company's website easy to use but failing to correct the site's slow speed of operation.

In drawing the strategy canvas, how does a company label the industry's competing factors? 

Are the competing factors stated in terms buyers can understand and value, or are they in operational jargon? 

The kind of language used in the strategy canvas gives insight as to whether a company's strategic vision is built on an "outside-in" perspective, driven by the demand side, or an "inside-out" perspective that is operationally driven.

The first principle of blue ocean strategy is to reconstruct market boundaries to break from the competition and create blue oceans.

We found clear patterns for creating blue oceans. Specifically, we found six basic approaches to remaking market boundaries. 
We call this the six paths framework. 
… 
These six assumptions, on which most companies hypnotically build their strategies, keep companies trapped competing in red oceans. Specifically, companies tend to do the following: 

	• Define their industry similarly and focus on being the best within it 

	• Look at their industries through the lens of generally accepted strategic groups (such as luxury automobiles, economy cars, and family vehicles), and strive to stand out in the strategic group they play in 

	• Focus on the same buyer group, be it the purchaser (as in the office equipment industry), the user (as in the clothing industry), or the influencer (as in the pharmaceutical industry) 

	• Define the scope of the products and services offered by their industry similarly 

	• Accept their industry's functional or emotional orientation 

	• Focus on the same point in time and often on current competitive threats-in formulating strategy 

The more that companies share this conventional wisdom about them.

To break out of red oceans, companies must break out of the accepted boundaries that define how they compete. 
… 
They need to look across alternative industries, across strategic groups, across buyer groups, across complementary product and service offerings, across the functional-emotional orientation of an industry, and even across time. 

This gives companies keen insight into how to reconstruct market realities to open up blue oceans.

…a company competes not only with the other firms in its own industry but also with companies in those other industries that produce alternative products or services. 

Alternatives are broader than substitutes. 

Substitutes: products or services that have different forms but offer the same functionality or core utility 

Alternatives: products or services that have different functions and forms but the same purpose.

What are the alternative industries to your industry? 
Why do customers trade across them? 

By focusing on the key factors that lead buyers to trade across alternative industries and eliminating or reducing everything else, you can create a blue ocean of new market space

Looking across strategic groups. 
The term refers to a group of companies within an industry that pursue a similar strategy. 

In most industries, the fundamental strategic differences among industry players are captured by a small number of strategic groups.

Strategic groups can generally be ranked in a rough hierarchical order built on two dimensions: price and performance. 

Each jump in price tends to bring a corresponding jump in some dimensions of performance. 
Most companies focus on improving their competitive position within a strategic group.

The key to creating a blue ocean across existing strategic groups is to break out of this narrow tunnel vision by understanding which factors determine customers' decisions to trade up or down from one group to another.

What are the strategic groups in your industry? 
Why do customers trade up for the higher group, and why do they trade down for the lower one?

(There is not a target buyer) there is a chain of "buyers" who are directly or indirectly involved in the buying decision. 

The purchasers who pay for the product or service may differ from the actual users, and in some cases there are important influencers as well. Although these three groups may overlap, they often differ. 

Purchaser: who physically pays for the product or service. 
User: who actually uses the product or service. 
Influencers: who can influence the decisions to buy the product or service.

Challenging an industry's conventional wisdom about which buyer group to target can lead to the discovery of a new blue ocean

By questioning conventional definitions of who can and should be the target buyer, companies can often see fundamentally new ways to unlock value.

What is the chain of buyers in your industry? 
Which buyer group does your industry typically focus on? 
If you shifted the buyer group of your industry, how could you unlock new value?

Few products and services are used in a vacuum. In most cases, other products and services affect their value. 
… 
Untapped value is often hidden in complementary products and services. The key is to define the total solution buyers seek when they choose a product or service. A simple way to do so is to think about what happens before, during, and after your product is used.

What is the context in which your product or service is used? 
What happens before, during, and after? Can you identify the pain points? 
How can you eliminate these pain points through a complementary product or service offering?

Some industries compete principally on price and function largely on calculations of utility: their appeal is rational. 

Other industries compete largely on feelings: their appeal is emotional. 

Yet the appeal of most products or services is rarely intrinsically one or the other. Rather it is usually a result of the way companies have competed in the past, which has unconsciously educated consumers on what to expect. Companies' behavior affects buyers' 
… 
No wonder market research rarely reveals new insights into what attracts customers.

When companies are willing to challenge the functional-emotional orientation of their industry, they often find new market space. 
We have observed two common patterns. 

Emotionally oriented industries offer many extras that add price without enhancing functionality. Stripping away those extras may create a fundamentally simpler, lower-priced, lower-cost business model that customers would welcome. 

Conversely, functionally oriented industries can often infuse commodity products with new life by adding a dose of emotion and, in so doing, can stimulate new demand.

Does your industry compete on functionality or emotional appeal? 
If you compete on emotional appeal, what elements can you strip out to make it functional? 
If you compete on functionality, what elements can be added to make it emotional?

By looking across time from the value a market delivers today to the value it might deliver tomorrow --managers can actively shape their future and lay claim to a new blue ocean. 

We are not talking about predicting the future, something inherently impossible. Rather we’re talking about finding insights in trends that are observable today.

Notes -
See also trends description from The 22 immutable laws of marketing.

Three principles are critical to assessing trends across time. 

Decisive: they must be decisive to your business. 
Irreversible: they must be irreversible 
Clear trajectory: and they must have a clear trajectory. 
… 
Having identified a trend of this nature, you can then look across time and ask yourself what the market would look like if the trend were taken to its logical conclusion. 

Working back from that vision of a blue ocean strategy, you can identify what must be changed today to unlock a new blue ocean.

What trends have a high probability of impacting your industry, are irreversible, and are evolving in a clear trajectory? 
How will these trends impact your industry? 
Given this, how can you open up unprecedented customer utility?

The process of discovering and creating blue oceans is not about predicting or preempting industry trends. Nor is it a trial-and-error process of implementing wild new business ideas that happen to come across managers' minds or intuition. 
Rather, managers are engaged in a structured process of reordering market realities in a fundamentally new way. 

Through reconstructing existing market elements across industry and market boundaries, they will be able to free themselves from head-to-head competition in the red ocean.

The second principle of blue ocean strategy is to focus on the big picture, not the numbers. 

This principle is key to mitigating the planning risk of investing lots of effort and lots of time but delivering only tactical red ocean moves.

…we have found that drawing a strategy canvas not only visualizes a company's current strategic position in its marketplace but also helps it chart its future strategy. 

By building a company's strategic planning process around a strategy canvas, a company and its managers focus their main attention on the big picture rather than becoming immersed in numbers and jargon and getting caught up in operational details.

…drawing a strategy canvas does three things: 

First, it shows the strategic profile of an industry by depicting very clearly the factors (and the possible future factors) that affect competition among industry players. 

Second, it shows the strategic profile of current and potential competitors, identifying which factors they invest in strategically. 

Finally, it shows the company's strategic profile or value curve depicting how it invests in the factors of competition and how it might invest in them in the future.

Most managers have a strong impression of how they and their competitors fare along one or two dimensions within their own scope of responsibility, but very few can see the overall dynamics of their industry. 
… 
But that focus makes consistent measurement difficult; what seems to be a very big difference to the catering manager may not be important to customers, who look at the complete offering.

The process (visualizing the strategy canvas), which builds on the six paths of creating blue oceans and involves a lot of visual stimulation in order to unlock people's creativity, has four major steps: 

1.Visual awakening 
2.Visual exploration 
3.Visual strategy fair 
4.Visual communication

A common mistake is to discuss changes in strategy before resolying differences of opinion about the current state of play. Another problem is that executives are often reluctant to accept the need for change; 
… 
Fortunately, we've found that asking executives to draw the value curve of their company's strategy brings home the need for change. It serves as a forceful wake-up call for companies to challenge their existing strategies.

Getting the wake-up call is only the first step. The next step is to send a team into the field, putting managers face-to-face with what they must make sense of: how people use or don't use their products or services. 

This step may seem obvious, but we have found that managers often outsource this part of the strategy-making process. 
They rely on reports that other people (often at one or two removes from the world they report on) have put together. 

A company should never outsource its eyes. There is simply no substitute for seeing for yourself.

Great strategic insights like this are less the product of genius than of getting into the field and challenging the boundaries of competition. 
… 
Obviously, the first port of call should be the customers. But you should not stop there. 

You should also go after noncustomers. And when the customer is not the same as the user, you need to extend your observations to the users. 

You should not only talk to these people but also watch them in action. Identifying the array of complementary products and services that are consumed alongside your own may give you insight into bundling opportunities. 

Finally, you need to look at how customers might find alternative ways of fulfilling the need that your product or service satisfies.

…draw six new value curves using the six path framework explained in chapter 3. 

Each new value curve had to depict a strategy that would make the company stand out in its market. 

By demanding six pictures from each team, we hoped to push managers to create innovative proposals and break the boundaries of their conventional thinking. 

For each visual strategy, the teams also had to write a compelling tagline that captured the essence of the strategy and spoke directly to buyers.

…teams presented their strategy canvases at what we call a visual strategy fair. 

Attendees included senior corporate executives but consisted mainly of representatives of (company)'s external constituencies the kinds of people the managers had met with during their field trips, including noncustomers, customers of competitors, and some of the most demanding (company’s) customers. 
… 
They were given no more than ten minutes to present each curve, on the theory that any idea that takes more than ten minutes to communicate is probably too complicated to be any good. 
… 
After the twelve strategies were presented, each judge-an invited attendee was given five sticky notes and told to put them next to his or her favorites. 
The judges could put all five on a single strategy.

After the future strategy is set, the last step is to communicate it in a way that can be easily understood by any employee.

Do your business unit heads lack an understanding of the other businesses in your corporate portfolio? 
Are your strategic best practices poorly communicated across your business units? 
Are your low-performing units quick to blame their competitive situations for their results? 

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, try drawing, and then sharing, the strategy canvases of your business units.

…pioneers are the businesses that offer unprecedented value. 

…settlers (are) businesses whose value curves conform to the basic shape of the industry's. These are me too businesses. 

…migrators lies somewhere in between. Such businesses extend the industry's curve by giving customers more for less, but they don't alter its basic shape. 
… 
A useful exercise for a corporate management team pursuing profitable growth is to plot the company's current and planned portfolios on a pioneer migrator-settler (PMS) map. 
… 
If both the current portfolio and the planned offerings consist mainly of settlers, the company has a low growth trajectory, 
… 
If current and planned offerings consist of a lot of migrators, reasonable growth can be expected.

Today's market share is a reflection of how well a business has performed historically.

…innovative ideas will be profitable only if they are linked to what buyers are willing to pay for.

How do you maximize the size of the blue ocean you are creating? 
This brings us to the third principle of blue ocean strategy: reach beyond existing demand. 
… 
To achieve this, companies should challenge two conventional strategy practices. One is the focus on existing customers. The other is the drive for finer segmentation to accommodate buyer differences. 
… 
As companies compete to embrace customer preferences through finer segmentation, they often risk creating too-small target markets. 

To maximize the size of their blue oceans, companies need to take a reverse course. Instead of concentrating on customers, they need to look to non-customers. 
And instead of focusing on customer differences, they need to build on powerful commonalities in what buyers value. 
That allows companies to reach beyond existing demand to unlock a new mass of customers that did not exist before.

Where is your locus of attention-on capturing a greater share of existing customers, or on converting noncustomers of the industry into new demand? 
Do you seek out key commonalities in what buyers value, or do you strive to embrace customer differences through finer customization and segmentation? 

To reach beyond existing demand, think non-customers before customers; commonalities before differences; and desegmentation before pursuing finer segmentation.

There are three tiers of noncustomers that can be transformed into customers. They differ in their relative distance from your market. 

The first tier of noncustomers is closest to your market. 
They sit on the edge of the market.They are buyers who minimally purchase an industry's offering out of necessity but are mentally noncustomers of the industry. They are waiting to jump ship and leave the industry as soon as the opportunity presents itself. 
However, if offered a leap in value, not only would they stay, but also their frequency of purchases would multiply, unlocking enormous latent demand. 

The second tier of noncustomers is people who refuse to use your industry's offerings. 
These are buyers who have seen your industry's offerings as an option to fulfill their needs but have voted against them. 

The third tier of noncustomers is farthest from your market. 
They are noncustomers who have never thought of your market's offerings as an option. 

By focusing on key commonalities across these noncustomers and existing customers, companies can understand how to pull them into their new market.

These soon-to-be noncustomers are those who minimally use the current market offerings to get by as they search for something better. 
Upon finding any better alternative, they will eagerly jump ship. In this sense, they sit on the edge of the market. 

A market becomes stagnant and develops a growth problem as the number of soon-to-be noncustomers increases. 
Yet locked within these first tier non customers is an ocean of untapped demand waiting to be released.

The lesson: 
non-customers tend to offer far more insight into how to unlock and grow a blue ocean than do relatively content existing customers.

What are the key reasons first-tier noncustomers want to jump ship and leave your industry? 
Look for the commonalities across their responses. 
Focus on these, and not on the differences between them. 
You will glean insight into how to desegment buyers and unleash an ocean of latent untapped demand.

[Second tier non-customers] are refusing noncustomers, people who either do not use or cannot afford to use the current market offerings because they find the offerings unacceptable or beyond their means. 

Their needs either dealt with by other means or ignored. Harboring within refusing noncustomers, however, is an ocean of untapped demand waiting to be released.

What are the key reasons second-tier noncustomers refuse to use the products or services of your industry? 

Look for the commonalities across their responses. Focus on these, and not on their differences. You will glean insight into how to unleash an ocean of latent untapped demand.

The third tier of noncustomers is the farthest away from an industry's existing customers. 

Typically, these unexplored noncustomers have not been targeted or thought of as potential customers by any player in the industry. 
That's because their needs and the business opportunities associated with them have somehow always been assumed to belong to other markets.

At the end of the day, actual delivery of performance is a function of not only creative conception but also good execution.

Because the scale of blue ocean opportunities that a specific tier of noncustomers can unlock varies across time and industries, you should focus on the tier that represents the biggest catchment that your organization has the capability to act on. 

But you should also explore whether there are overlapping commonalities across all three tiers of noncustomers. 
In that way, you can expand the scope of latent demand you can unleash. When that is the case, you should not focus on a specific tier but instead should look across tiers. 

The rule here is to go for the largest catchment that your organization has competence to seize.

The next challenge is to build a robust business model to ensure that you make a healthy profit on your blue ocean idea. 

This brings us to the fourth principle of blue ocean strategy: get the strategic sequence right. 

1. Buyer utility: is it useful to people? 
2. Price: is the process right to the targeted market? 
3. Cost: are you able to produce and have a healthy margin? 
4. Adoption: is there anything blocking your path?

The starting point is buyer utility: 
Does your offering unlock exceptional utility? 
Is there a compelling reason for the target mass of people to buy it? 

Absent this, there is no blue ocean potential to begin with. Here there are only two options. Park the idea, or rethink it until you reach an affirmative answer.

Second step (in the strategic sequence): 
setting the right strategic price. 

Remember, a company does not want to rely solely on price to create demand.The key question here is this: 
Is your offering priced to attract the mass of target buyers so that they have a compelling ability to pay for your offering? 

If it is not, they cannot buy it. Nor will the offering create irresistible market buzz.

Securing the profit side brings us to the third element: cost. 
Can you produce your offering at the target cost and still earn a healthy profit margin? 
Can you profit at the strategic price --the price easily accessible to the mass of target buyers? 

You should not let costs drive prices. Nor should you scale down utility because high costs block your ability to profit at the strategic price. 

When the target cost cannot be met, you must either forgo the idea because the blue ocean won't be profitable, or you must innovate your business model to hit the target cost.

It is the combination of exceptional utility, strategic pricing, and target costing that allows companies to achieve value innovation.

The last step is to address adoption hurdles. 
What are the adoption hurdles in rolling out your idea? 
Have you addressed these up front? 

The formulation of blue ocean strategy is complete only when you can address adoption hurdles in the beginning to ensure the successful actualization of your idea. 

Adoption hurdles include, for example, potential resistance to the idea by retailers or partners.

The need to assess the buyer utility of your offering may seem self-evident. Yet many companies fail to deliver exceptional value because they are obsessed by the novelty of their product or service, especially if new technology plays a part in it.

They acted on the assumption that bleeding-edge technology is equivalent to bleeding-edge utility for buyers-something that, our research found, is rarely the case. 
… 
Unless the technology makes buyers' lives dramatically simpler, more convenient, more productive, less risky, or more fun and fashionable, it will not attract the masses no matter how many awards it wins. 

Value innovation is not the same as technology innovation.

The buyer utility map helps managers look at this issue from the right perspective. 
It outlines all the levers companies can pull to deliver exceptional utility to buyers as well as the various experiences buyers can have with a product or service. 
This map allows managers to identify the full range of utility spaces that a product or service can potentially fill.

Cutting across the stages of the buyer's experience are what we call utility levers: the ways in which companies can unlock exceptional utility for buyers. 
... 
To test for exceptional utility, companies should check whether their offering has removed the greatest blocks to utility across the entire buyer experience cycle for customers and noncustomers. The greatest blocks to utility often represent the greatest and most pressing opportunities to unlock exceptional value. 
… 
(The utility map is made of 6 stages and 6 levers. Totalling 36 spaces.) 
If your offering falls on the same space or spaces as those of other players, chances are it is not a blue ocean offering.

A buyer's experience can usually be broken into a cycle of six stages, running more or less sequentially from purchase to disposal. Each stage encompasses a wide variety of specific experiences: 
1. Purchase 
2. Delivery 
3. Use 
4. Supplements 
5. Maintenance 
6. Disposal

Where are the greatest blocks to utility across the buyer experience cycle for your customers and noncustomers? 
Does your offering effectively eliminate these blocks? 
If it does not, chances are your offering is innovation for innovation's sake or a revision of existing offerings. 
When a company's offering passes this test, the company is ready to move to the next step.

To secure a strong revenue stream for your offering, you must set the right strategic price. 

This step ensures that buyers not only will want to buy your offering but also will have a compelling ability to pay for it. 
Many companies take a reverse course, first testing the waters of a new product or service by targeting novelty-seeking, price-insensitive customers at the launch of a new business idea; 
only over time do they drop prices to attract mainstream buyers. It is increasingly important, however, to know from the start what price will quickly capture the mass of target buyers. 

There are two reasons for this change. 
First, companies are discovering that volume generates higher returns than it used to. As the nature of goods becomes more knowledge intensive, companies bear much more of their costs in product development than in manufacturing. 
… 
A second reason is that to a buyer, the value of a product or service may be closely tied to the total number of people using it. 
… As a result of this phenomenon, called network externalities, many products and services are increasingly an all-or-nothing proposition: either you sell millions at once, or you sell nothing at all.

In the meantime, the rise of knowledge-intensive products also creates the potential for free riding. 
… 
All this means that the strategic price you set for your offering must not only attract buyers in large numbers but also help you to retain them. 

Given the high potential for free riding, an offering's reputation must be earned on day one, because brand building increasingly relies heavily on word-of-mouth recommendations spreading rapidly through our networked society. 

Companies must therefore start with an offer that buyers can't refuse and must keep it that way to discourage any free-riding imitations. This is what makes strategic pricing key. 

Strategic pricing addresses this question: 
Is your offering priced to attract the mass of target buyers from the start so that they have a compelling ability to pay for it? 
When exceptional utility is combined with strategic pricing, imitation is discouraged.

We have developed a tool called the price corridor of the target mass to help managers find the right price for an irresistible offer, which, by the way, isn't necessarily the lower price. 

The tool involves two distinct but interrelated steps: 

1. Price corridor of the target mass 
2. Level within a price corridor

So the main challenge in determining a strategic price is to understand the price sensitivities of those people who will be comparing the new product or service with a host of very different-looking products and services offered outside the group of traditional competitors. 

A good way to look outside industry boundaries is to list products and services that fall into two categories: 
those that take different forms but perform the same function; 
and those that take different forms and functions but share the same overarching objective.

Different form, same function. 

Many companies that create blue oceans attract customers from other industries who use a product or service that performs the same function or bears the same core utility as the new one but takes a very different physical form.

Listing the groups of alternative products and services allows managers to see the full range of buyers they can poach from other industries as well as from non-industries, such as parents (for the school lunch catering industry) or the noble pencil in managing household finances (for the personal finance software industry). 
… 
This approach provides a straightforward way to identify where the mass of target buyers is and what prices these buyers are prepared to pay for the products and services they currently use. 

The price bandwidth that captures the largest groups of target buyers is the price corridor of the target mass.

The key here is not to pursue pricing against the competition within an industry but rather to pursue pricing against substitutes and alternatives across industries and non-industries.

The second part of the tool helps managers determine how high a price they can afford to set within the corridor without inviting competition from imitation products or services. 

That assessment depends on two principal factors. 

First is the degree to which the product or service is protected legally through patents or copyrights. 

Second is the degree to which the company owns some exclusive asset or core capability, such as an expensive production plant or unique design competence that can block imitation. 

As for companies that have no such protection, lower-boundary strategic pricing is advised.

The price corridor of the target mass not only signals the strategic pricing zone central to pulling in an ocean of new demand but also signals how you might need to adjust your initial price estimates to achieve this. 

When your offering passes the test of strategic pricing, you're ready to move to the next step.

Companies would be wise to pursue mid- to lower-boundary strategic pricing from the start if any of the following apply: 

- Their blue ocean offering has high fixed costs and marginal variable costs. 

- The attractiveness of the blue ocean offering depends heavily on network externalities. 

- The cost structure behind the blue ocean offering benefits from steep economies of scale and scope. In these cases, volume brings with it significant cost advantages, something that makes pricing for volume even more key.

Target costing, the next step in the strategic sequence, addresses the profit side of the business model. 

To maximize the profit potential of a blue ocean idea, a company should start with the strategic price and then deduct its desired profit margin from the price to arrive at the target cost. 

Here, price-minus costing, and not cost plus pricing, is essential if you are to arrive at a cost structure that is both profitable and hard for potential followers to match.

Part of the challenge of meeting the target cost is addressed in building a strategic profile that has not only divergence but also focus, which makes a company strip out costs.

Instead of drilling down and finding ways to creatively meet the target cost as Ford did, if companies give in to the tempting route of either bumping up the strategic price or cutting back on utility, they are not on the path to lucrative blue waters. 

To hit the cost target, companies have three principal levers: 
1. Streamlining operations 
2. Partnering 
3. Change pricing model

The first involves streamlining operations and introducing cost innovations from manufacturing to distribution. 

Can the product's or service's raw materials be replaced by unconventional, less expensive ones such as switching from metal to plastic or shifting a call center from the UK to Bangalore? 
Can high-cost, low-value-added activities in your value chain be significantly eliminated, reduced, or outsourced? 
Can the physical location of your product or service be shifted from prime real estate locations to lower-cost locations, as The Home Depot, IKEA, and Walmart have done in retail or Southwest Airlines has done by shifting from major to secondary airports? 
Can you truncate the number of parts or steps used in production by shifting the way things are made, as Ford did by introducing the assembly line? 
Can you digitize activities to reduce costs?

Beyond streamlining operations and introducing cost innovations, a second lever companies can pull to meet their target cost is partnering. 

Partnering, however, provides a way for companies to secure needed capabilities fast and effectively while dropping their cost structure. It allows a company to leverage other companies' expertise and economies of scale. 

Partnering includes closing gaps in capabilities through making small acquisitions when doing so is faster and cheaper, providing access to needed expertise that has already been mastered.

…the third lever companies can use to make their desired profit margin without compromising their strategic price: changing the pricing model of the industry. 
By changing the pricing model used-and not the level of the strategic price-companies can often overcome this problem. 

Timeshare: buy the right to use a (product) for a certain amount of time rather than buy the (product) itself. 

Slice-share; mutual fund managers, for example, bring high-quality portfolio services --traditionally provided by private banks to the rich-to the small investor by selling a sliver of the portfolio rather than its whole. 

Freemium is yet another pricing strategy some companies are using by which a product or service (typically a digital offering such as software, media, games, or web services) is provided free of charge to pull in the target mass, but a premium is charged for proprietary features, functionality, or virtual goods. 

These are all examples of pricing innovation. 
Remember, however, that what is a pricing Innovation innovation for one industry is often a standard pricing model in another industry.

Of course, even when the target cost can be met, pricing innovation still can be pursued.

A business model built in the sequence of exceptional utility, strategic pricing, and target costing produces value innovation.

Even an unbeatable business model may not be enough to guarantee the commercial success of a blue ocean idea. 
Almost by definition, it threatens the status quo, and for that reason it may provoke fear and resistance among a company's three main stakeholders: 
its employees, its business partners, and the general public

Failure to adequately address the concerns of employees about the impact of a new business idea on their work and livelihoods can be expensive. 
… 
Before companies go public with an idea and set out to implement it, they should make a concerted effort to communicate to employees that they are aware of the threats posed by the execution of the idea. 

Companies should work with employees to find ways of defusing the threats so that everyone in the company wins, despite shifts in people's roles, responsibilities, and rewards.

Potentially even more damaging than employee disaffection is the resistance of partners who fear that their revenue streams or market positions are threatened by a new business idea.

Opposition to a new business idea can also spread to the general public, especially if the idea threatens established social or political norms. The effects can be dire. 
… 
In educating these three groups of stakeholders-your employees, your partners, and the general publicthe key challenge is to engage in an open discussion about why the adoption of the new idea is necessary.

Although companies should build their blue ocean strategy in the sequence of utility, price, cost, and adoption, these criteria form an integral whole to ensure commercial success. 
The blue ocean idea (BOI) index provides a simple but robust test of this system view.

Once a company has developed a blue ocean strategy with a profitable business model, it must execute it. The challenge of execution exists in any strategy. 
… 
(Managers) face four hurdles. 
One is cognitive: waking employees up to the need for a strategic shift. Red oceans may not be the paths to future profitable growth, but they feel comfortable to people and may have even served an organization well until now, so why rock the boat? 

The second hurdle is limited resources. The greater the shift in strategy, the greater it is assumed are the resources needed to execute it. But resources were being cut, and not raised, in many of the organizations we studied. 

Third is motivation. How do you motivate key players to move fast and tenaciously to carry out a break from the status quo? That will take years, and managers don't have that kind of time. 

The final hurdle is politics. As one manager put it, “In our organization you get shot down before you stand up.”

The key to tipping point leadership is concentration, not diffusion. 
Tipping point leadership builds on the rarely exploited corporate reality that in every organization, there are people, acts, and activities that exercise a disproportionate influence on performance.

The key questions answered by tipping point leaders are as follows: 
What factors or acts exercise a disproportionately positive influence on breaking the status quo? 
On getting the maximum bang out of each buck of resources? 
On motivating key players to aggressively move forward with change? And on knocking down political roadblocks that often trip up even the best strategies? 

By single-mindedly focusing on points of disproportionate influence, tipping point leaders can topple the four hurdles that limit execution of blue ocean strategy. They can do this fast and at low cost.

Tipping point leadership does not rely on numbers to break through the organization's cognitive hurdle. To tip the cognitive hurdle fast, tipping point leaders zoom in on the act of disproportionate influence: 

making people see and experience harsh reality firsthand.

Tipping point leadership builds on this insight to inspire a fast change in mind-set that is internally driven of people's own accord. 
Instead of relying on numbers to tip the cognitive hurdle, they make people experience the need for change in two ways: 

1. To break the status quo, employees must come face-to-face with the worst operational problems. 
Don't let top brass, middle brass, or any brass hypothesize about reality. 
Numbers are disputable and uninspiring, but coming face-to-face with poor performance is shocking and inescapable, but actionable. This direct experience exercises a disproportionate influence on tipping people's cognitive hurdle fast. 

2. To tip the cognitive hurdle, not only must you get your managers out of the office to see operational horror, but you also must get them to listen to their most disgruntled customers firsthand. 
Don't rely on market surveys. To what extent does your top team actively observe the market firsthand and meet with your most disgruntled customers to hear their concerns? Do you ever wonder why sales don't match your confidence in your product? 
Simply put, there is no substitute for meeting and listening to dissatisfied customers directly.

When you want to wake up your organization to the need for a strategic shift and a break from the status quo, do you make your case with numbers? 
Or do you get your managers, employees, and superiors (and yourself) face-to-face with your worst operational problems? 
Do you get your managers to meet the market and listen to disenchanted customers holler? 
Or do you outsource your eyes and send out market research questionnaires?

How do you get an organization to execute a strategic shift with fewer resources? 

Instead of focusing on getting more resources, tipping point leaders concentrate on multiplying the value of the resources they have. 
When it comes to scarce resources, there are three factors of disproportionate influence that executives can leverage to dramatically free resources, on the one hand, and multiply the value of resources, on the other. 

These are hot spots, cold spots, and horse trading. 

Hot spots are activities that have low resource input but high potential performance gains. 

In contrast, cold spots are activities that have high resource input but low performance impact. 

Horse trading involves trading your unit's excess resources in one area for another unit's excess resources to fill remaining resource gaps. 

By learning to use their current resources right, companies often find they can tip the resource hurdle outright.

What actions consume your greatest resources but have scant performance impact? 
Conversely, what activities have the greatest performance impact but are resource starved? 

When the questions are framed in this way, organizations rapidly gain insight into freeing up low-return resources and redirecting them to highimpact areas. In this way, both lower costs and higher value are simultaneously pursued and achieved.

Notes -
Note:  Identify and redistribute resources from cold spots to hot spots. 
Furthermore, identify what excess resources you have and exchange them to get resources that are scarce in your context.

To reach your organization's tipping point and execute blue ocean strategy, you must alert employees to the need for a strategic shift and identify how it can be achieved with limited resources. 

For a new strategy to become a movement, people must not only recognize what needs to be done, but they must also act on that insight in a sustained and meaningful way. 
How can you motivate the mass of employees fast and at low cost? 
… 
Instead of diffusing change efforts widely, tipping point leaders follow a reverse course and seek massive concentration. They focus on three factors of disproportionate influence in motivating employees, what we call kingpins, fishbowl management, and atomization.

To trigger an epidemic movement of positive energy, however, you should not spread your efforts thin. Rather, you should concentrate your efforts on kingpins, the key influencers in the organization.

At the heart of motivating the kingpins in a sustained and meaningful way is shining a spotlight on their actions in a repeated and highly visible way. 

This is what we refer to as fishbowl management, where kingpins' actions and inaction are made as transparent to others as are fish in a bowl of water. 

By placing kingpins in a fishbowl in this way, you greatly raise the stakes of inaction. Light is shined on who is lagging behind, and a fair stage is set for rapid change agents to shine. 
… 
For this to work, however, organizations must simultaneously make fair process the modus operandi. 
By fair process we mean engaging all the affected people in the process, explaining to them the basis of decisions and the reasons people will be promoted or sidestepped in the future, and setting clear expectations of what that means to employees' performance.

Atomization relates to the framing of the strategic challenge-one of the most subtle and sensitive tasks of the tipping point leader. 
Unless people believe that the strategic challenge is attainable, the change is not likely to succeed.

Notes -
Breakdown ambitious plans into smaller, more attainable goals to increase buy-in.

Do you indiscriminately try to motivate the masses? 
Or do you focus on key influencers, your kingpins? 
Do you put the spotlight on and manage kingpins in a fishbowl based on fair process? 
Or do you just demand high performance and cross your fingers until the next quarter numbers come out? 
Do you issue grand strategic visions? 
Or do you atomize the issue to make it actionable to all levels?

The more likely change becomes, the more fiercely and vocally these negative influencers --both internal and external-- will fight to protect their positions, and their resistance can seriously damage and even derail the strategy execution process. 

To overcome these political forces, tipping point leaders focus on three disproportionate influence factors: leveraging angels, silencing devils, and getting a consigliere on their top management team. 

Angels are those who have the most to gain from the strategic shift. 

Devils are those who have the most to lose from it. 

And a consigliere is a politically adept but highly respected insider who knows in advance all the land mines, including who will fight you and who will support you.

Don't fight alone. Get the higher and wider voice to fight with you. Identify your detractors and supporters forget the middle and strive to create a win-win outcome for both. But move quickly. 

Isolate your detractors by building a broader coalition with your angels before a battle begins. In this way, you will discourage the war before it has a chance to start or gain steam.

Do you have a consigliere a highly respected insider-in your top management team, or only a CFO and other functional heads? 
Do you know who will fight you and who will align with the new strategy? 
Have you built coalitions with natural allies to encircle dissidents? 
Do you have your consigliere remove the biggest land mines so that you don't have to focus on changing those who cannot and will not change?

Don't follow conventional wisdom. Not every challenge requires a proportionate action. Focus on acts of disproportionate influence. This is a critical leadership component for making blue ocean strategy happen.

You must create a culture of trust and commitment that motivates people to execute the agreed strategy-not to the letter, but to the spirit.

Notes -
Warfighting: commander’s intent & decentralised command.

The more removed people are from the top and the less they have been involved in the creation of the strategy, the more this trepidation builds. On the front line, at the very level at which a strategy must be executed day in and day out, people can resent having a strategy thrust upon them with little regard for what they think and feel. Just when you think you have done everything right, things can suddenly go very wrong on your front line.

Notes -
Warfighting: subordinates must know the strategy at least two levels up.

Sixth principle of blue ocean strategy: 
to build people's trust and commitment deep in the ranks and inspire their voluntary cooperation, companies need to build execution into strategy from the start.

(Two researchers combined) psychology of justice with the study of process, creating the term procedural justice. 
… 
Their research established that people care as much about the justice of the process through which an outcome is produced as they do about the outcome itself. 
… 
Fair process is our managerial expression of procedural justice theory.

There are three mutually reinforcing elements that define fair process: engagement, explanation, and clarity of expectation. 
… We call them the three E principles of fair process. 

Engagement means involving individuals in the strategic decisions that affect them by asking for their input and allowing them to refute the merits of one another's ideas and assumptions. 
Engagement communicates management's respect for individuals and their ideas. 
Encouraging refutation sharpens everyone's thinking and builds better collective wisdom. 
… 
Explanation means that everyone involved and affected should understand why final strategic decisions are made as they are. 
An explanation of the thinking that underlies decisions makes people confident that managers have considered their opinions and have made decisions impartially in the overall interests of the company. 
An explanation allows employees to trust managers' intentions even if their own ideas have been rejected. It also serves as a pow erful feedback loop that enhances learning. 

Expectation clarity requires that after a strategy is set, managers state clearly the new rules of the game. Although the expectations may be demanding, employees should know up front what standards they will be judged by and the penalties for failure. What are the goals of the new strategy? What are the new targets and milestones? Who is responsible for what? 
To achieve fair process, it matters less what the new goals, expectations, and responsibilities are and more that they are clearly understood. 
… 
Taken together, these three criteria collectively lead to judgments of fair process. This is important, because any subset of the three does not create judgments of fair process.

Why is fair process important in shaping people's attitudes and behavior? …It all comes down to intellectual and emotional recognition. 

Emotionally, individuals seek recognition of their value, not as "labor," "personnel," or "human resources" but as human beings who are treated with full respect and dignity and appreciated for their individual worth regardless of hierarchical level. 
Intellectually, individuals seek recognition that their ideas are sought after and given thoughtful reflection, and that others think enough of their intelligence to explain their thinking to them.

The question companies wrestle with is how to create trust, commitment, and voluntary cooperation deep in the organization. 
You don't do it by separating strategy formulation from execution. Although this disconnect may be a hallmark of most companies' practice

…the practice of fair process with external stakeholders could be said to play an even greater role in strategy execution as external stakeholders are outside of hierarchical control and often have diverging interests and understandings.

At the highest level, there are three propositions essential to the success of strategy: 
the value proposition; 
the profit proposition; 
and the people proposition. 

For any strategy to be successful and sustainable, an organization must develop an offering that attracts buyers; it must create a business model that enables the company to make money out of its offering; and it must motivate the people working for or with the company to execute the strategy.

Strategic alignment is the responsibility of an organization's top executives versus those in charge of marketing, manufacturing, human resources, or other functions. 

Executives with a strong functional bias typically cannot successfully fulfill this important role because they tend to focus on a part, not the whole, of the three strategy propositions, hence missing the alignment.

Value proposition 
The utility buyers receive from an offering minus the price they pay for it. 

Profit proposition 
The revenues an organization generates from an offering minus the cost to produce and deliver it. 

People proposition 
The positive motivations and incentives put in place for the people needed to support and implement the strategy.

To produce a high-performing and sustainable blue ocean strategy, you need to ask the following questions: 

Are your three strategy propositions aligned in pursuit of differentiation and low cost? 
Have you identified all the key stakeholders, including external ones on which the effective execution of your blue ocean strategy will depend? 
Have you developed compelling people propositions for each of these to ensure they are motivated and behind the execution of your new idea?

Do you have a holistic understanding of strategy? Has your new strategy fully developed and aligned the three strategy propositions for sustained success? The continuing success of your company's strategy depends on it.

…the creation of blue oceans is not a oneoff occurrence but is institutionalized as a repeatable process in an organization.

A blue ocean strategy brings with it considerable barriers to imitation that effectively prolong sustainability. This sustainability can be traced to the following imitation barriers: 

Alignment barrier 
• Alignment of the value, profit, and people propositions around both differentiation and low cos builds sustainability and hence a formidable barrier to imitation. 

Cognitive and organizational barrier 
• Value innovation does not make sense to a company's conventional logic. 
• Imitation often requires significant organizational changes. 

Brand barrier 
• Blue ocean strategy may conflict with other companies' brand image. 
• Companies that value-innovate earn brand buzz and a loyal customer following that tends to shun imitators. 

Economic and legal barrier 
• Natural monopoly: The market often cannot support a second player. 
• High volume leads to rapid cost advantage for the value innovator, discouraging followers from entering the market. 
• Network externalities discourage imitation. 
• Patents or legal permits block imitation.

To avoid the trap of competing at the individual business level, monitoring value curves on the strategy canvas is essential. 
Monitoring value curves signals when to value-innovate and when not to. It alerts an organization to reach out for another blue ocean when its value curve begins to converge with those of the competition.

Renewal issue for companies with multiple businesses 

… A complementary tool is needed for companies that have a portfolio of diverse business offerings. 
… 
A dynamic extension of the pioneer-migrator-settler (PMS) map introduced in chapter 4 serves this purpose well. It can be used to visually depict the movement of a corporate portfolio in one picture by capturing a corporation's portfolio of business offerings over time. 

By plotting the corporate portfolio as pioneers, migrators, and settlers on the dynamic PMS map, executives can see at a glance where the gravity of its current portfolio of businesses is, how this has shifted over time, and when there is a need to create a new blue ocean to renew the portfolio. 
… 
To maximize growth prospects then, a company's portfolio should have a healthy balance between pioneers for future growth and migrators and settlers for cash flow at a given point in time.

Companies with a diverse portfolio of businesses, will always need to swim in both red and blue oceans at a given point in time and succeed in both oceans at the corporate level. 

This means that understanding and applying the competition-based principles of red ocean strategy are also needed.

Red Ocean Trap One: The belief that blue ocean strategy is a customer-oriented strategy that's about being customer led. 

A blue ocean strategist gains insights about reconstructing market boundaries not by looking at existing customers, but by exploring noncustomers.

Red Ocean Trap Two: The belief that to create blue oceans, you must venture beyond your core business. 

Blue oceans are right next to you in every industry. Understanding this is key. When companies mistakenly believe that they must venture beyond their core business to create blue oceans, they tend to either shy away from venturing beyond the red ocean or, to the contrary, look far afield to other industries that have little overlap with their knowledge.

Red Ocean Trap Three: The misconception that blue ocean strategy is about new technologies. 

When companies mistakenly assume blue ocean strategy hinges on new technologies, their organizations tend to push for products or services that are either too out there, too complicated, or lacking the complementary ecosystem needed to open up a new market space.

Red Ocean Trap Four: The belief that to create a blue ocean, you must be first to market. 
… 
Organizations that mistakenly assume blue ocean strategy is about being first to market all too often get their priorities wrong. They inadvertently put speed before value. While speed is important, speed alone will not unlock a blue ocean.

Red Ocean Trap Five: The misconception that blue ocean strategy and differentiation strategy are synonymous. 
… 
Blue ocean strategy, by contrast, is about breaking the value-cost trade-off to open up new market space. It is about pursuing differentiation and low cost simultaneously.

Red Ocean Trap Six: The misconception that blue ocean strategy is a low-cost strategy that focuses on low pricing. 

… blue ocean strategy pursues differentiation and low cost simultaneously by reconstructing market boundaries. Instead of focusing on low cost per se, it seeks to create a leap in buyer value at a lower cost. Further, a blue ocean strategic move captures the mass of target buyers not through low-cost pricing, but through strategic pricing. 
… 
Using strategic pricing, a blue ocean does not have to be created at the low end of the market. Instead it can be created at the high end, at the low end, or in the middle range of a market.

Red Ocean Trap Seven: The belief that blue ocean strategy is the same as innovation. 

Value innovation, not innovation per se, is the singular focus of blue ocean strategy. Simply creating something original and useful through innovation is not enough to create and capture a blue ocean, even if the innovation wins the company accolades and its researchers a Nobel Prize. 
… 
When organizations fail to register the difference between value innovation and innovation per se, they all too often end with an innovation that breaks new ground but does not unlock the mass of target buyers, keeping them by and large stuck in the red ocean.

Red Ocean Trap Eight: The belief that blue ocean strategy is a theory of marketing and a niche strategy. 

To equate blue ocean strategy with a theory of marketing myopically masks the holistic approach needed to create a sustainable highperformance strategy, including overcoming organizational hurdles, winning people's trust and commitment, and creating the proper incentives via a compelling people proposition. 
… 
Blue ocean strategy should also not be confused with a niche strategy. 

When practitioners confuse the two, they all too often are driven to look for customer differences for niche markets in the existing industry space rather than the commonalities that cut across buyer groups in search of blue oceans of new demand.

Red Ocean Trap Nine: The belief that blue ocean strategy sees competition as bad when in fact it can be good for companies. 

Blue ocean strategy does not see competition as bad. However, unlike traditional economic thought, it does not see competition as always good. 

… while understanding how to compete in existing market space is important, blue ocean strategy addresses the critical challenge of how to redefine industry boundaries and create new market space when structural conditions work against you.

Red Ocean Trap Ten: The belief that blue ocean strategy is synonymous with creative destruction or disruption. 

... Unlike disruption, however, blue ocean strategy does not necessitate displacement or destruction. Blue ocean strategy is a broader concept that goes beyond creative destruction to embrace nondestructive creation, which is its overriding emphasis. 

Instead, blue ocean strategy is about redefining the problem itself, which tends to create a new demand or an offering that often complements rather than displaces existing products and services.

The structuralist view of strategy has its roots in industrial organization (IO) economics. 

The model of industrial organization analysis proposes a structure-conduct-performance paradigm, which suggests a causal flow from market structure to conduct and performance. Market structure, given by supply and demand conditions, shapes sellers' and buyers' conduct, which, in turn, determines end performance. 

Systemwide changes are induced by factors that are external to the market structure, such as fundamental changes in basic economic conditions and technological breakthroughs. 

The structuralist view (or environmental determinism) often leads to competition-based strategic thinking. 
Taking market structure as given, it drives companies to try to carve out a defensible position against the competition in the existing market space. 
… 
Here, grabbing a bigger share of the market is seen as a zerosum game in which one company's gain is achieved at another company's loss

The reconstructionist view of strategy, on the other hand, is built on the theory of endogenous growth. 

… the forces that change economic structure and industry landscapes can come from within the system. 
(This) innovation is still (considered) black-boxed, because it is the product of the ingenuity of entrepreneurs and cannot be reproduced systematically. 

To reconstructionist eyes, however, the strategic challenge looks very different. Recognizing that structure and market boundaries exist only in managers' minds, practitioners who hold this view do not let existing market structures limit their thinking. To re structor them, extra demand is out there, largely untapped. The crux of the problem is how to create it.

The new growth theory (shows) that innovation can be replicable endogenously via an understanding of the patterns or recipes behind innovation. 
… 
However, despite this important advance, we still lack an understanding of what those recipes or patterns are.

Value innovators achieve a leap in value by creating new wealth rather than necessarily at the expense of competitors in the traditional sense. 
In this way, value innovation goes beyond creative destruction that displaces and, hence, destructs the players in existing markets.

In a world of nonrival and nonexcludable goods, such as knowledge and ideas that are imbued with the potential of economies of scale, learning, and increasing returns, the importance of volume, price, and cost grows in an unprecedented way. 

Under these conditions, companies would do well to capture the mass of target buyers from the outset and expand the size of the market by offering radically superior value at price points accessible to them.

The focus of blue ocean strategy is not on restricting output at a high price but rather on creating new aggregate demand through a leap in buyer value at an accessible price. 

This creates a strong incentive not only to reduce costs to the lowest possible level at the start but also to keep it that way over time to discourage potential free-riding imitators. 

In this way, buyers win and the society benefits from improved efficiency. This creates a win-win scenario. 
A breakthrough in value is achieved for buyers, for the company, and for society at large.