Steve Jobs speaks...

Quoting Jobs:

"It's not about pop culture, and it's not about fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what we want. And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That's what we get paid to do.

"So you can't go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There's a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, 'If I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me "A faster horse."'"

...

"My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.""

...

"We don't have a lot of process at Apple..."

...

"At Pixar when we were making Toy Story, there came a time when we were forced to admit that the story wasn't great. It just wasn't great. We stopped production for five months.... We paid them all to twiddle their thumbs while the team perfected the story into what became Toy Story. And if they hadn't had the courage to stop, there would have never been a Toy Story the way it is, and there probably would have never been a Pixar.

"We called that the 'story crisis,' and we never expected to have another one. But you know what? There's been one on every film. We don't stop production for five months. We've gotten a little smarter about it. But there always seems to come a moment where it's just not working, and it's so easy to fool yourself - to convince yourself that it is when you know in your heart that it isn't.

"Well, you know what? It's been that way with [almost] every major project at Apple, too.... Take the iPhone. We had a different enclosure design for this iPhone until way too close to the introduction to ever change it. And I came in one Monday morning, I said, 'I just don't love this. I can't convince myself to fall in love with this. And this is the most important product we've ever done.'

"And we pushed the reset button. We went through all of the zillions of models we'd made and ideas we'd had. And we ended up creating what you see here as the iPhone, which is dramatically better. It was hell because we had to go to the team and say, 'All this work you've [done] for the last year, we're going to have to throw it away and start over, and we're going to have to work twice as hard now because we don't have enough time.' And you know what everybody said? 'Sign us up.'

"That happens more than you think, because this is not just engineering and science. There is art, too. Sometimes when you're in the middle of one of these crises, you're not sure you're going to make it to the other end. But we've always made it, and so we have a certain degree of confidence, although sometimes you wonder. I think the key thing is that we're not all terrified at the same time. I mean, we do put our heart and soul into these things."

Blue Ocean Strategy In Real Life

IRL = In Real Life. Answering a question I've been asked a few times: Yes, I've used Blue Ocean Strategy to create products. Some went on to do great; others not so great. Whatever the eventual outcome, I believe in the process and wouldn't spawn a new business without going through it.

Here are the steps, in order, I personally recommend to create a BOS business. Remember, everybody seems to have a different answer to this question. Like everything else here, this is solely my personal opinion.

1. Create a Pioneer-Migrator-Settler Chart. Be honest: many companies are big red blobs that may not shrink in total revenue, but will shrink dramatically in gross profit, over time.


2. Do a comprehensive six-path study in this order:
   1) time/trends, 2) chain of buyers, 3) strategic groups, 4) alternative industries, 5) complementary products & services, then 6) functional/emotional appeal. Why that order? I'll explain in a later post. Officially, the order doesn't matter, but I came up with this after a lot of thought and having been through the process a few times. It's important to study these for both current buyers and, more importantly, non-customers.


3. In parallel, send some engineers to figure out possible things that can be used in the "Create" portion of the Four Actions Framework, coming up later. I've developed these rules for a successful Create element: 1) there's an overwhelming chance the element will involve technology, 2) the technology will be catalytic: the end-user won't notice it directly, 3) the technology must exist and is usually mature, 4) you're looking for a new use of the technology, and 5) the technology is usually, though not always, from a different industry. They should be spending more time at Disneyworld and CES, and less in the lab. You might need to attach a marketer to them to keep them focused. If you do, find a creative geek (shameless plug: or just hire me to work with your engineers).


4. Abstract key elements from the above and plot your As-Is Value Curve: allow no more than 10 key elements; the fewer the better. Don't allow participants to guess in advance which should be eliminated, reduced, raised, and created (ERRC'd).


5. Complete your Strategy Canvas by plotting substitute offerings.


6. Figure out which key elements to eliminate and reduce. Eliminate and reduce substantive key elements: if there aren't a few people who swear you'll ruin the company by eliminating and reducing these -- and who show how important the elements are by pointing out how much competitors are working on these -- the elements aren't important enough.


7. Given what's left, raise it -- high. This is fun: it's the easiest part of the process. Make sure you don't slip into technical innovation, innovation for the sake of innovation, when doing this work.


8. Make the engineers/marketers from the Create study come back and show their nifty things: see which complement the key elements you've raised and add real consumer value.


9. Map a TO-BE curve out of all this.


10. Now ... iteratively go back and forth over the prior steps until you find a set of key elements that allow you to draw a TO-BE curve that matters. When you think you're there, use the Buyer Utility Map to see if it adds adequate value. If not, back to the Strategy Canvas.

All this should take a substantive amount of time and cause mental anguish. If everybody is giddy, happy, and/or relaxed you've missed something.

Finally, take your new curve and transform it into a business model that makes billions of dollars.

PS: About those flops... I attribute those more to managerial failure than to any issues with Blue Ocean Strategy. Using BOS honestly and accurately will churn out great businesses, but talented teams and managers are still needed to execute the models. For help with this, read the last third of the book.