Strategic Breakthroughs

The whole secret to being successful as an entrepreneur is to find those rare pieces in the jigsaw puzzle that make it all come together. You can have a ton of data on the one hand and a ton of obvious opportunities on the other and fail to make the kind of connection that will provide some kind of benefit to your customers. When television first appeared on the market it had to be sold through very creative and high-pressure tactics. People were quite content listening to the radio while enjoying their hobbies, cooking or caring for the family. Few of us who saw the birth and growth of television thought it would ever be more than a passing curiosity. A high-tech marvel good for something, but we didn’t know what.

Even Orville Wright said the airplane has reached it’s ultimate capacity for service to mankind when he spoke of the observation flights over Germany in the first world war.

In the very early 80’s I prided myself on mastery of the new invention that was bound to become the most significant piece of technology to hit the American home - the personal computer. I learned BASIC on my TRS-80 and mastered as many software programs as I could. Then I called on my doctor, dentist, lawyer and writing teacher offering my services for free in exchange for their testimonial. It was very slow growth and very expensive and it was not until spreadsheet software appeared that the missing link, that missing piece of the puzzle appeared and leveraged the new revolution. Not only for me, but for everybody connected with the personal computer craze.

You as a budding entrepreneur must learn to define these missing links, the small pieces required to bring the ‘whole’ together.

Take a moment to focus on what you have been exposed to so far in this course: Mind mapping which instantly doubles your mind-power, making lists which opens the door to Pareto analysis, self-management which is converting dreams into visions into action, project management which is the technique for handling dozens of action items at the same time.

The question today is: “What actions can I take today that will leverage everything else that I have in such a manner as to create strategic breakthroughs?”

Unless you are seeking these links on a continuous basis, every minute of your life, while you are awake and while you are asleep, you will not find them!

Remember, this class is in creating successful entrepreneurs, and is not to be confused with a business management course. Business managers keep the status quo, maintain the discipline of an established way of doing things, by definition there is a resistance to change, etc. Entrepreneurship is the opposite to business management. We search for ways to forever improve our delivery to customer satisfaction and take action (which sometimes fails) to bring about change. We don’t do this blindly, we do it through a series of steps, each step pushing technology and knowledge to the limit.

How many times does a championship skater fall down? The answer must be that they fall down every time they practice because they are forever pushing themselves to the ultimate of their ability!

As entrepreneurs we will fail many times at many projects we attempt. And like a championship baseball player we will strike out more times than not. But when we hit that ball, like Babe Ruth, the ball will go outside of the stadium. This is what we are deliberately attempting to do: to go beyond the limits of today’s ability to be of service.

You will find the secrets to making your strategic breakthroughs within the tools you have been exposed to so far in this class. Expanded mental abilities through imagination and logic; the trick to see the familiar as unfamiliar and to make the unfamiliar familiar; of working lists until you dream of them and come up with flashes of insight, and then putting the vision into a system whereby you take action to bring it into reality.

Let’s put it all together now for the formula to bring about strategic breakthroughs, to find the one or two missing pieces of the puzzle that makes it all come together.

First of all you must understand that no major breakthrough will ever come to those who remain within their comfort zone. Don claims to have over 30 years of experience in manufacturing. Wrong! Don has 30 years of experience at Elpac. During those 30 years he has visited perhaps a half dozen other factories and perhaps attended two or three trade shows. Will Don ever create something new within his environment? Smart money would bet against him if the idea even occurred to him.

For Don to bring about any significant change he must first see his job from the outside - to make the familiar unfamiliar. There being no reason for him to do this, he will not take the effort.

You, on the otherhand, have every reason to search and discover better ways to do things and then sell this idea to somebody willing to pay for your idea.

You will be required to write a business plan in this course. You will most likely visualize some business or activity you think you would like and will generate all kinds of wishful thinking to put into this business plan. Your facilitators will help you. But investors such as myself will not listen to your business plan if it does not have 90% of YOU and YOUR experiences and YOUR accomplishments and YOUR failures within this plan. I will not read the business plan of a person who has never failed.

I’m not digressing from the point. We’re still headed toward strategic breakthroughs. Bear with me.

Fred was born and raised in blackest Harlem and today is a successful businessman. A year ago he was a very frustrated and bankrupt person who lost his house. Two years ago he was a successfully employed software engineer. Like so many other aerospace engineers he got the ax and went broke looking for another job. He refused to give up. He made lists and dreamed of a better day. He took inventory of his skills and instead of cursing the world for making him a non-viable economic entity, chose to think he had something to contribute and this changed attitude discovered that he was a superb computer guru. But so are hundreds of unemployed computer gurus. He thought about what he liked the most about his previous jobs and a certain piece of high-tech equipment, an emulator, shone brightly in his imagination. Then the jigsaw puzzle came together in a flash. He called the sales manager of that company and suggested that his technology and the quality of their equipment would make a perfect match. He is now building a manufacturers representative company covering southern California and northern Mexico for the one company whose product he liked so much, plus two others.

His marketing strategy is laced with this kind of strategic breakthrough thinking. His past failures are the assets he used to leverage his business and to get the financing necessary to grow. He converted failures into assets.

Most of us starting in business do not really have enough money to get started. We try on a shoestring and sometimes we make it. There is only one asset that continues to get us by and that is our experience. And experience is for the most part a series of failures. Each failure is a lesson learned and one more perspective on the whole. These perspectives are the key to our success through the system of creating strategic breakthroughs.

People who have not experienced failure cannot CANNOT create something new in one fell swoop. They may think they can, they will talk it up to no end, they will blister at your critical comments on their ideas, but their first try will be a failure. And I’ll be happy to put my money where my mouth is on this one!

In thirty years of designing and building tools, machines and systems I have yet to create a tool, machine or system that could not be improved shortly after going to work. In most cases they failed to perform on the first try and had to be changed in some way before they did what they were supposed to do. Only the most arrogant engineer will force their first design version through the build process without listening to the feedback from those making the tool. And when their bragged brilliance turns to crap they inevitably blame the technicians who built it. They may look good to the boss but in the real world they have branded themselves.

Putting an end to this apparent rambling -- good ideas stem from experience and broad vision. Strategic breakthroughs stem from these good ideas PLUS a shot of intuition and creativity whose source are other good ideas but possibly from another field, another set of ‘physics’. Strategic breakthroughs are those flashes of insight that come from lateral thinking - the kind of thinking attributed to entrepreneurs.

General Motors has millions of dollars dedicated yearly toward research and development but they did not come up with the Miada. The Cancer Society millions. Bell Labs, millions. RCA had millions to develop video recording and failed. Most new ideas that get to the market are conceived and developed by outsiders. Carlson and Xerox, Sikorsky and the helicopter, Casio the quartz driven time-piece, Ampex and video recording machines, Intel and the integrated circuit, etc. Kodak should have invented the Xerox, Boeing should have invented the helicopter, Swiss watchmakers the quartz time-piece, RCA video recording and Bell labs the integrated circuit.

Like most businesses, these traditional giants follow lineal thinking processes. They use today’s know-how and techniques and simply try to improve on them. The outsiders search for solutions from non-traditional sources -- call them ‘far-out’ sources -- to bring about the changes that yield massive improvements. This is strictly inspirational problem solving at it’s best. Sometimes it’s deliberate, sometimes not. Goodyear saw the incredible potential of rubber as did most people in the early 1800’s but it’s use was limited. The stuff would harden in the cold and melt in the heat. From debtor’s prison Goodyear thought of and tried hundreds of experiments combining rubber latex with chemicals and the like to make usable rubber. It wasn’t until he accidentally spilled rubber on a hot stove that vulcanizing was invented. Had Goodyear not been continuously trying, and always failing, he would have not made the connection upon observing the blackened rubber. He called it Vulcanizing and although he received the Legion of Honor from Napoleon III, and even after fighting for his patent rights through none other than Daniel Webster, he died in debt having lost all his money fighting to protect his patents.

Probably the most successful business on earth, ever, became possible from the simple juxtaposition of two human passions. One -- the belief in the almighty and two -- the fear of death. When the idea of life after death took shape through the teachings of one entity, the world changed.

This is the kind of thinking entrepreneurs thrive in. Without this kind of thinking there is no entrepreneurship although there may be business as usual. I am in no way disparaging business. We need the stability and uniformity of the supermarket, of the self-service gas station, the post office, and McDonalds. This class is to develop entrepreneurs and not to teach Business 101 and for this reason the differentiation.

A wheelbarrow is an example of strategic breakthrough - where by the simple addition of a wheel on one end of the box a person is capable of carrying twice as much as before. Other examples are the lever, magnifying glass, bicycle, the hull such as a canoe (oceangoing liner or aircraft), domesticated wolves (the dog), planting and harvesting, threadmaking, sewing machines and so forth.

There are more strategic breakthrough opportunities now than the sum total of the history of mankind. Specialized knowledge is expanding exponentially and the number of topics and specialties are increasing at the same rate. Linking dissimilar specialties to create a unique specialty is one way to create strategic breakthroughs. Some pages back we saw a small group invent a living paint because one in the group was a biologist. Plastic is welded through ultrasonics and somebody thought this energy could be used to break up gall stones and sure enough a device like a Bronson welder shoots sound waves through human skin to the rocks inside and disintegrates them. Great ideas from different fields. Strategic breakthroughs.

For your own success it is imperative that you begin harvesting the assets from all your past successes and failures -- from your experience. Then as you begin to see a force-field develop around these assets within your imagination, to search out the missing ingredients you ‘feel’ are needed to make this kind of connection.

Step by step instructions on achieving strategic breakthroughs:

1. Ask yourself “If I had one wish concerning my venture or idea which would come true no matter how far-fetched or impossible it appears now, but would nonetheless come true, what would it be?”

2. Write it down

3. Play with the idea of it coming true. See yourself and your most significant others within the world where this wish of yours has come true. Feel it, see it in different colors, hear it, sense it at a psychic level. Go deep within your imagination and sense as much as you can about this.

4. Don’t attempt to define the steps required to achieve it at this time. It is important to visualize as much as possible and to do your best to convince your inner self that this vision is a reality. You are convincing your subconscious that it is real. This is critical because before you can attain strategic breakthroughs you must believe they are possible.

5. Play with the feelings from this idea for a few days. Come back to the vision as often as possible while driving, before going to sleep, first thing in the morning, while relaxing, while reading. Avoid watching TV and instead draw things relating to this idea. Write lists and draw things.

6. Don’t tell anybody about it - yet. You don’t need negative feedback at this time. The objective here is to fully convince yourself that it will come to pass. Period.

7. Make a list of the advantages to humankind (your customers) from having this new ‘whatever’. By now you should have a feeling deep within you that you are dealaing with a real possibility and not a pipe dream.

8. Make a list of any negatives from it both to humanity (your customers) or from competitors or from potential litigation from sue-happy lawyers and the like.

9. Write a solid specification around this new idea whether it be a thing, a process or whatever.

10. Let it rest for a few days as you tackle other important challenges. But call it to mind first thing every morning by having the name of it on a postit on your mirror.

11. Make a note of every idea that comes to you during the day or night concerning this project.

12. Start putting a time-frame around it. Dare to put a date on which it will become reality. Dare to measure it’s size.

13. Start asking near-strangers what they would do if they had one and listen with all six senses to their responses.

14. Tell your close friends and associates the wild ideas you have heard from these near-strangers. Don’t tell them it’s your idea.

15. Research the technology that would be necessary to make it happen.

16. Find a forum on the Internet or CompuServe of people with an interest in it. Put out a message stating you have it. (even though you don’t. You may recognize this as a typical marketing ploy used by Microsoft and others called vaporware). It clearly establishes you as first to invent and can be the basis of a patent later on if you want to go broke defending your patents as have so many inventors - Goodyear, Tesla, Orville Wright, etc, etc.

17. Once you are firmly convinced the idea will be of value to your customers and that you can profit from it, get a brainstorming group to develop the specific technology to make it happen.

18. Brainstorm the idea. Break it down into a project, into tasks, into definite resources and responsibilities.

19. Make it happen!

20. Start the process all over again because the life cycle of the typical new product or idea is getting shorter and shorter. HP develop product knowing the life cycle to be less than two years.

The next chapter gets into the details of money needed to do the job and how to measure expected returns which make it possible for you to get the financing to make the strategic breakthrough. Then, a chapter on problem definition and solution using some of the best tools around.

So: “If you had one wish and you knew it would come true no matter how far-fetched your wish, what is that wish?”

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What’s keeping you from making it come true?