Business Model Innovation: Blue Ocean Your Startup Thinking

When I think about what to post each week, foremost in my mind is how I can leverage my startup experience into actionable information that you can use in your business. Startups and small businesses as you all know operate at business velocities that are significantly higher than most companies. Most of the time you are too busy selling, providing services and/or producing product and you don’t have time to think, strategize and vision. I have learned that this can be an important time to stop, think, and look closely at where you are and what the road ahead could be like if you visioned it out and prepared for the growth ahead. It is also an important time to evaluate your long term business model and look for ways of optimizing business critical processes. As Socrates once said “the very thing that made you great will be your undoing,” and how many times have we heard CEOs say, “We made the biggest mistake when we were at the top of our game.” This week’s post is all about seeing the forest and the trees at the same time and creating an organizational culture of thinkers that think things through in pursuit of the Holy Grail, sustainable and profitable business model innovation.

 

One of my favorite business books is Blue Ocean Strategy, written by Professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne of INSEAD, now one of the world’s leading business schools. Blue Ocean Strategy features a great Cirque Du Soleil case study of how to take the best of an old business model and mold it into a new successful one by using the attractive elements of the original model. Cirque as we all know has been wildly successful and has attained global appeal. Blue Ocean thinking can separate the “life style” startups from high growth companies with tremendous potential. I was lucky enough to work with the Cirque founders in the early days of their evolution and helped build some of their internal business processes and workflow engines, which at the time were way ahead of any potential competitors.

 

In my view, Blue Ocean thinking is a key element of any entrepreneurial visionary planning process. Getting out of your own Idaho so to speak, is often a great way to gain new perspective and generate ideas on where you currently are and your vision for the future. We accomplished this in several of my startups by having regular visioning discussions, and we also organized retreats away from the office with key officers and stakeholders in the company. It may sound like herding cats; however, if you bring in outsiders that can help facilitate the meetings and generally keep them on track; you will be much more successful than attempting to do it yourself. I would love to hear from you if you think differently about this strategy.

 

Visioning off sites are not uncommon in Silicon Valley and it is important to conduct them at seminal intervals in a startup company’s development. They are usually associated with revenue thresholds such as $5M, $20 or $100M. I can tell you from experience that off sites of any kind are not for everyone. And it is always in your best interest to carefully architect the offsite team’s chemistry to include just the right combination team members that are visionaries vs. those who are more execution oriented. I will again refer to Lynda Gratton’s excellent book, Hot Spots, as a reference guide to assembling the right team chemistry. Lynda’s research at the London Business School has focused on analyzing the team chemistry/organizational structure and how companies fail and/or are successful in reaching team objectives. Ms Gratton’s research was published in HBR early last year and reviewed more than 80 company’s team building efforts and results, www.hotspotsmovements.com.

 

Results from off sites can deliver amazing results in my experience and bond together executives and regular staff in ways that you never imagined. Make sure to clearly set objectives and if possible break out into sales, marketing and product oriented groups, with each bringing back their own vision of success. The focus is always on the bottom line, seeking sustainable profitable growth and applying what I call “joint value assessments” to business models and processes. Engaged and empowered executives and staff can bring out the best ideas for optimizing individual processes and models to meet the growth demands of the company. Always remember that the most valuable capital in your company is the human capital, and sales does not fix everything all the time, as some pundits say.

 

 The Personality of Fish: The Mole Crab 

At approximately twenty miles out to sea all scents of land and earth disappear and the smell of the ocean dominates. Last week we talked about the ocean being a river of rivers and we followed some of the rivers, visited with their inhabitants and experienced the unique personality of the Portuguese Man o War. One of the amazing things about going to sea for several weeks is the unique scent of the different water masses, and just like fish these water masses have their own personality, including destructive forces like warm core rings and the havoc they bring onto larval fish populations. This week we come closer to shore and enter the hostile world of the surf break zone and experience the life of Emerita, the Mole crab.

 

One of the most hostile places to live on our planet is within the surf or intertidal zone, where thousands of tons of water regularly crash onto sandy beaches, rocky outcroppings, breakwaters and barrier islands. Animals and plants that exist in this zone are some of the toughest on the planet and are regularly exposed to extremes of heat, cold, water and pressure. Mole crabs live in one of the safest places to exist in this environment, just below the surface of the sand and away from the pounding waves. I am sure you have watched birds running along the wave breaks probing the sand with their beaks in the wash zone of beaches; they are in search of mole crab colonies. Mole crabs are slightly bigger than the size of a human thumb and live along most beaches worldwide. In some parts of the world Mole crabs provide an important source of protein are harvested regularly.

 Mole crabs are one of the few inhabitants of sandy beaches and they continually borrow into the sand moving up and down the beach with the tide sifting plankton and detritus from the wave wash. Female mole crabs are much larger than males who become almost parasitic during mating season by clinging to the females for weeks at a time. During the spring and fall the female’s bellies swell with hundreds of red orange eggs and they are eagerly hunted by birds in pursuit of a protein snack. Most people who have been to the beach never realize that there are Mole crab colonies of thousands just below their feet. Often in business innovations and optimizations are so obvious and simple that you can’t see them.

Until next time great marketing and selling in the Millennium!