Peter Paul Rubens painted ‘Consequences of War’ at the end of his life, in response to the devastating Thirty Years War in Europe.   Mars tramples everything that is good and beautiful as he is dragged off to conquest by the Furies.   This massive painting hanging in Palazzo Pitti is spell-binding.   We find war appalling.  Yet mankind is so readily drawn into conflict, with all of the resultant horrors.  The structures of power, war and conquest are deeply entrenched in our thinking.   No more so than in our business thinking.

In our companies we have ‘Head Quarters’, Chief Executive ‘Officers’, ‘troops’, the ‘front-lines’.  We may glory in our culture of ‘Power’.  And when we decide on where to focus we set ‘strategy’.   And where does this come from? The ‘Strategoi’ were Greek generals, who maintained the army and navy in times of peace, and planned and lead the battles in war.   When we plan our way forward we step right into a battle mindset. Of course we need to hold our territory in business. Maintaining our market share and keeping good relationships with our customers is a struggle.

You can have a battle strategy based on “Innovation”

However, a power or confrontational perspective can blind us to untapped opportunities.  Technology has been advancing for at an ever-increasing pace since the industrial revolution. The field of opportunity is constantly changing.  In the last 100 years we have seen the emergence of automobiles, air-travel, petrochemicals, recorded music, health-care, even management consulting, all completely new industries. Mobile phones, the internet, E-mail, Microfinance, Fibre optics, Large scale wind turbines, ATMs, PC and laptop computers are all innovations emerging in the last 30 years.  Does your strategy take account of these changes?  Or are you leaning heavily on raw power?

Power or Brute Force without Innovation is self-defeating

Focussing on competition also leads, inadvertently to commoditisation. Companies add feature after feature to differentiate their offer.   Or they multiply choices.   The period of customers’ delight with each innovation, gets shorter and shorter as they plod their way to ‘Ho-hum’ on the Hedonic Treadmill.  Shelves fill with a growing profusion of alternatives of proportionately insignificant difference. The micro segmentation becomes a blur. The options all look the same and customers ignore the frantic branding literature and pick the lowest price.
So how do we find our way out of this self-defeating cycle in which progress makes things better until it makes them worse. How do we see the opportunities for fresh approaches?

One possible answer lies in discovering new, untapped fields of endeavour through ‘Value Innovation’. This is the essence of the ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ process created by Kim and Mauborgne.

Realising value demands innovation

Seeking value through power alone, with no innovation, leads to incremental strategy in which differentiation becomes hard to find. Focussing on innovation without value can put an offer beyond what the market can comprehend. Value Innovation allows you to define a business model to make a healthy profit possible by aligning three components:

  • A compelling reason for people to buy it.
  • An easily accessible price to the mass of buyers.
  • The cost of production.

Innovation:  the refreshing benefits

Value innovation allows you to move from:

  • The either/or dilemma of cost vs. differentiation to excelling in both.
  • Competing in existing spaces to creating uncontested market space.
  • Beating the competition to making the competition irrelevant.
  • Exploiting existing demand to creating and capturing new demand.
  • Trading off between value and cost to achieving value and cost reduction.
  • Building on your decision between differentiation and cost to aligning your strategy around differentiation and cost leadership.

So, what is it to be?  Beat your breast and your competition into grudging submission, or something a little more elegant.

As I update this note, an illustration from Jane Goodall comes to mind.  There was a very low ranking chimpanzee in a troop she observed who learnt to roll an empty parafin can around the camp.  OK this was a demonstration of power.  But it did not require blood-letting.