A Butterfly in a World of Bulls and Bears

Here we talk about the way Steve Jobs thought about teams. The thought was to have small teams of size less than a hundred focused around a product. And have the team members well connected with each other so that everyone knows what the others are working on and can cooperate well bringing the various team members joint thought process to solve the problem. The idea of a team of pirates refers to the informality of the team and the tyrant like power of the leader. There is the joke in the book, "If you are not working on Saturday, don't bother to come on Sunday." The book talks of team members work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. That would be what - 112 hours - way more than seventy hours that our own Narayana Murthy was talking about. I think it is possible. But it should not be seen in isolation. One can do hundred when you are working together like a pirate team chasing a big loot - a dream. When there is no common dream, and still worse no jolly spirit among...

This book is about a charismatic leader while Blue Ocean and Disruptive Innovation were about creating a process that didn't depend on such a leader. So in certain aspects they would be opposed to each other. Especially with someone like Steve Jobs, things can go into the realm of hero worship. This chapter does that to some extent. Some of the things are just blind appreciation of generic leadership traits such as recognizing people which don't really carry differentiatiable insights. But let us look past and see what is replicable by just about anyone. One of them that comes out is integrated architecture versus modular. Steve Jobs clearly was going for integrated architecture. That was the only way he could control every detail right from the customer experience of opening of packing to how the chips inside the computers looked. And to craft an unique experience one really needs to fine tune an optimize value across the end to end value chain. Once the value is established, ...

After reading two books that tried to drive home the point that leaders don't matter but the right process, we switch to a book about one of the most charismatic and successful leaders - Steve Jobs. As we go over the chapters and try to decode his success, we will see how the insights stack up against the ideas in disruptive innovation and blue ocean. The first chapter is about leaders and teams having passion about the product. The book talks about how Steve Jobs while being non technical was very excited about the idea of a personal computer as an user at a time when computer were mainframe behemoths with which communications was through batch jobs painstakingly encoded on data cards.  The book talks of how he like the idea of a cursor controlled by a mouse being the primary control as against the traditional key board. Today the cursor and mouse are so central to our digital experience, we fail to even think of it as an innovation. It feels so obvious. But Steve Jobs was the per...

Blue Oceans once captured can be sustained for some time due to barriers to imitation. The barriers could be economic, cognitive, brand or alignment. Economic is of course scale needed to be viable - imitators have to bleed till they scale up. Cognitive is about going against conventional wisdom - even after seeing someone succeed imitators refuse to believe it. Brand - of course takes consistency over time to imitate. And finally alignment of value, profit and people - it may take some time to get the interlocks right. So while others are getting these right, the company can earn good profits. And once competition gets in, companies have to start looking for the next blue ocean. Which also brings us to the question of who are those companies entering next and what is their strategy. For if they do not enter it will always remain a blue ocean. Guess we need to look at other books to deal with that. Then the authors move on from product level to portfolio level talking of settlers, migr...

 This chapter talks about how one needs to align the three propositions to create a blue ocean that others can't replicate. The three are the value proposition, the profit proposition and the people proposition. Value proposition if of course the unique value for the customers - the job that gets done better cheaper. The profit proposition depends on the cost structure. If competitors do not understand and imitate the cost proposition, they would bleed and eventually have to stop. These two together are similar to the disruptive innovation proposition of opening up a market customer not served or who find existing services too expensive and quicky making it profitable to serve them. And finally, the people proposition which includes employees and all other stakeholders across the eco systems, including the channels for sales and delivery - the execution part. As the popular truism goes however good a strategy the true test is in the execution, which has to be really meticulous....

 This chapter is all about change management though the authors don't use the phrase explicitly. The key idea here is to closely engage the people who are going to implement the strategy and not push it top down. This topic is not specific to blue ocean strategy. It is something applicable to any change that you want to drive through an organization. But makes sense to include here because often best strategies fail at execution. One challenge writing about this topic is that you can't intellectually validate the authors' recommendations. These are aspects of internal workings of an organization and you may not really get reliable information. Everyone likes to say they run a company democratically involving all the people and all. Unless you are in there, you will never know how things were really run. Only way I can think of validating these kind of ideas is by comparing the advice on such matters given by different authors and while speculating causes when what seems lik...

 Strategy is always the fun part. Implementation is the messy part. I have heard people say one can even make a bad strategy work with great execution. I wouldn't go that far though but I acknowledged getting a strategy executes is much more tougher and the area where things come apart.  I have come to view execution as art or innate talent than a science. I mean you can follow step by step project management and change management methodology. But making them work needs that innate instinct that I personally lack. So I tend to view any approaches on this front with cynicism. Let us see what these good professors say. They break the problem into 4 problems - cognitive, resources. political and motivational. I do see overlap between cognitive, political and motivational. Resources is clear. Now let us see how the other 3 differ from each other. Cognitive is about getting acceptance for your framing of the problem and potential solution. Motivational is the next mile from recogni...