We’re so accustomed to being overwhelmed by information that we don’t even notice the fact we can hardly see past the ends of our noses. We suffer from a form of  ’sighted blindness’ that lets us imagine we see forests and landscapes when it’s really all just more trees.

“If you are really curious about the future, just study the present. What we ordinarily see is really what appears in the rearview mirror. What we ordinarily think of as the present is really the past. This habit of seeing back one stage when thinking that one is looking at the present is an age-old human habit.”
Marshall McLuhan

In this digitally mediated post-web era, we face a new sort of business reality that radically challenges prior notions of what is what, when is when, who is who, and why is why.

We’re now faced with a need to develop and extend our capacities for abstraction in ways that push the limits of current understanding to a place where meaning and message form a singular, compressed, indivisible, complex whole. This is a place where conventional ideas of individuality and identity are at the same time destroyed and re-invented.

“The instantaneous world of electric information media involves all of us, all at once. Ours is a brand-new world of all-at-onceness. Time, in a sense, has ceased and space has vanished: we now live in a global village of our own making, a simultaneous happening.”
Marshall McLuhan

New “rules” are needed: The key to innovating, leading, and thriving in this abstract and inherently malleable (read: chaotic) context is to develop an extreme facility with ambiguity and uncertainty.

It’s the nature of ambiguity and uncertainty to insist on defying conventional thinking about identity and persistence. It demands that entrepreneurs, innovators, and business leaders alike become skilled at what can be thought of as “trying to bite your own teeth,” a feat that requires the ability to interact and participate within our world in uncharted ways that call for sometimes entirely new forms of imagination and experimentation.

“The meaning of meaning is meaning.”
Marshall McLuhan

Coming to terms with a ‘contingent present’ is no trivial task. Nowhere have I come across anyone as insightful and articulate about the nature and implications of a digitally mediated post-web world than in good friend and sometime colleague Eric McLuhan.

Eric does an excellent job of setting the stage and laying out the basic principles of the post-web digital era for entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders alike in a recent interview with Second Life Cable Network’s media ecology series host Kenny Hubble.

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. an hallucinating idiot!”
originalthinking

I recommend anyone with a business urge to give this interview the very worthwhile 75 minutes of your time and attention that it requires.

Primary competitors

This group includes companies who are solving the same problem as you are, using the same basic approach or technology. Primary competitors are generally the most obvious threat in a marketplace. Nike is an obvious primary competitor for Adidas. Often, primary competitors are referred to as “direct competition.”

Secondary competitors

This group includes anyone who is solving the same problem as you, but is using an alternative solution. Secondary competitors are typically a little harder to spot than the direct competition. For example, Via Rail is a secondary competitor to Air Canada.

“A solution is the replacement of the current problem by the next level of problem.”
Kim James, management consultant &complexity theorist

Consider that sometimes your toughest “secondary competitor” might actually be your customer in the sense that their prior investment in the status quo acts as “indirect competition” for your offering.

Tertiary competitors

This group is made up of anyone who is not currently solving the same problem as you, but who is in a business position to do so with relative ease if sufficiently motivated. Often, they are much larger companies who tend to dominate entire industries and whose principal interests lie in ensuring a healthy overall economy and market ‘ecosystem’.

Tertiary competitors are seldom obvious at first but frequently become visible later in a venture’s business planning and implementation stages. Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are examples of tertiary competitors for anyone who wants to operate in the online advertising marketplace.

“Life may be short, but it can also be very wide.”
originalthinking

Sometimes referred to as “distant competition,” these tertiary competitors are typically large and acquisitive, and ironically may at some future time simply buy you out rather than fight against you. For instance, Microsoft was once a tertiary competitor for fledging upstart Hotmail, which it decided to acquire - for a substantial sum of cash - rather than try to replicate.

However, it’s worth keeping in mind that a tertiary competitor could also just as easily freeze you out and shut you down. But then if you aren’t paying attention, so could any other competitor.

“It’s amazing how long it can take to see the obvious.”
Ian Stewart, author, Nature’s Numbers

When you’re launching a new business venture or project, it helps to start with the very best ideas right from the beginning. The very best ideas are unique, innovative, and robust. But how can you tell if your ideas meet these criteria?

To find out, you’ll need to answer these five bulletproofing questions:

1. Who are your target customers?
2. What problem are you solving for your customers?
3. What must change about the status quo for your idea to succeed?
4. How will customers know you’ve “delivered the goods?”
5. How does your idea contribute to your business success?

Do this together with one or more of your colleagues or advisors. Keep your responses short and sweet: give yourself no more than 15 words and 15 seconds to get your answers across. Consider asking some of your potential customers to help out. Most of all, apply the “Three R’s” of bulletproofing: Review, Revise, Repeat.

A conclusion is where you stopped thinking.
originalthinking

When you bulletproof your ideas using this approach, two important things will happen:

• By taking the customer’s point of view right from the start, you’ll expose hidden strengths and weaknesses in your business ideas that would otherwise go unnoticed until too late
• Secondly, you’ll discover a dramatic improvement in how well you grasp your customers’s real needs so that you can improve your ideas to lead to profitable solutions that actually make a difference

For more insight to using the five bulletproofing questions outlined here, read Bulletproofing Your Business Ideas (coming shortly).

In the early stages, a loose, informal structure among a small group of initial founders is usually enough to get the job done. But once the job gets bigger, it typically becomes harder to coordinate increasingly complicated tasks among the growing number of people on the team. At some point, usually sooner than anticipated, it becomes necessary to divide up the work according to a more formal structure.

Formalizing an organizational structure involves defining the specific roles and responsibilities that people involved with the business will be required to take on. By doing this, it becomes possible to:

• Plan and organize work and deploy resources for maximum performance
• Establish a basis for setting performance metrics
• Provide a framework for creating effective recruiting and compensation schemes

Not to be overlooked, another important reason for becoming more formally organized is to satisfy the needs of potential investors and regulatory bodies, particularly with respect to the assignment of fiduciary and other related ’structural’ accountabilities and responsibilities.

Examples of executive and senior management roles within many information technology-based companies are described elsewhere on this site in an article titled, typical executive roles & responsibilities.

“All my life I wanted to be a somebody. Now I realize I needed to be more specific.”
Lily Tomlin

There are a million obvious reasons for business leaders and entrepreneurs to ‘do planning’ but there is really only one reason to create a plan, and that’s to communicate something important to others who need to know. And if there’s one thing we know in business, there are always a lot of people who need or want to know about what you have planned for the future.

Ultimately, deciding whether to spend a lot of precious time and attention on planning depends almost entirely on two things:

1. How much risk you can handle
2. How efficiently that risk must be managed for the venture to succeed

The decision of whether to produce a plan depends on who and how many people you need to communicate with about what needs to be done, by whom, when, and where, how much of it, and to what standards.

Quite often, the planners of a venture already know ‘in their head’ much of what will go into the business plan (this is true for almost any kind of strategic planning). However, the actual development of the business plan document greatly helps to clarify purpose and ensure that key stakeholders are all “on the same page.”

Frequently, the ‘customer’ for the plan is yourself. Consider that the actual process of producing a plan will expose many things that can help or hinder your path forward, and can be invaluable in shaping the strategies that will help you reach your goals.

“Luck is not a strategy, hope is not a plan.”
originalthinking

So, deciding whether or not to plan should be a forgone conclusion for anyone who hopes to succeed in business – as long as you use judgement in fitting the task to the need.

If you want more information, read business planning basics for more discussion of when to plan and what a good business plan should contain.

“More isn’t better, it’s just more.”
originalthinking

When it comes to making things simpler, less is almost always better.

The simpler your ’story’, the more quickly and easily your target audiences – investors, employees, customers, and suppliers alike – will grasp how you can help them reach their goals… and the more likely they’ll be to help you with meeting yours.

But simple is hard. One of the biggest challenges faced by every entrepreneur is making their new and visionary ideas simple enough for others to easily understand and embrace. Still, if history is any guide, the task is worth the effort.

“The best marketing tool you can have is a well designed application.”
Robert Hoekman, jr.

A well designed product isn’t just something that looks good or sounds good, it’s a product that’s been designed to meet a genuine need, and to do it well.

Well-designed products consider the entire life cycle of their existence, and address every aspect of their use or consumption at each step along the way. Well-designed products ‘fit’ with intended users’ ways of seeing and doing things, and contribute toward improving their performance and quality of life.

When you design products with real people and real needs in mind, your prospective customers will connect with them almost intuitively. In other words, to get the most from your marketing efforts, investing in well-designed products just plain makes sense.

“Art is making something from nothing, and then selling it.”
Frank Zappa

Entrepreneurs are the true artists of the business world. When artists are faced with a blank canvas, they follow a process and not a set of rules. The secret to this process is to treat rules just like any other tool: 

• use them when its appropriate
• set them aside when its not
• discard them when they’re no longer useful

Like artists, successful entrepreneurs instinctively know to do this.

“Treat a rule as a tool, or it’ll turn you into a fool.”
originalthinking

Entrepreneurs and artists alike know that it’s far better to define the rules than to have them define you.