This post is an extract of my forthcoming book on business model innovation. The innovation book looks at why business model innovation is needed and how it works. You can read more about it here. These posts are early drafts of planned content and I’m putting them out to get feedback. Please do comment below, or subscribe to these pages to get each new section as it is published. In today’s post, we will be looking at finding opportunities in this new world
How did I come to write about business models?
Indeed what do I know about them?
Usually, a book like this is written by an experienced professor at a great business school. It’s usually a sharply dressed, or a consultant from a firm you might have heard of, or a businessman whose company’s rise you will have followed through the years via wired, the FT, or Techcrunch.
I’m none of those people.
If they are important to you, I’d close the book now, send it back to amazon and get a refund.
Justinian
Justinian was a Roman emperor back in 600. If you are a history buff, you’ll know that Rome was conquered by the goths, huns, and vandals well before this point, and was the capital of nothing. So how come there was a Roman emperor?
Justinian instead ruled the roman empire from Byzantium, later Constantinople, later still Istanbul. Like every Roman emperor before him, he wanted to restore the empire to the glory days that it had had under Augustus Caesar. Like the last 40-50 emperors he didn’t have enough men, money, or generals to do the job. Italy and the western roman empire seemed irretrievably lost to him.
Belisarius, who tended to see things differently, what did have was a general. Belisarius had a ‘crooked mind’ according to the historian Procopius. He didn’t do things nearly as elegantly as Sun Tzu described in the Art of War, but, somehow within a few years, Italy was Roman again.
I tell this story not because I think I could do a better job than Belisarius – I’ve tried playing strategy games online, and it was embarrassing. No, I tell it because like him, I’ve tended to see things differently, and it’s worth exploring why.
I could take a slick commercial approach to tell this story. I did this, this, then this happened, which meant this, and so I had a huge awakening. That all put together means that I am superbly qualified to talk about business models.
The last 9 words above are true, but I’m going to tell it in a different way, in a way that it fits the change I want to create.
There is no path. There never is. And there never will be.
My University Journey
I headed off to university to do chemical engineering. I have no idea why. After I wrote that I rang my mum and asked her. She had no idea either.
I took a gap year and ended up in Jerusalem, where I found an awesome second-hand book shop Sefer ve Sefel (Books and Books?). I read and read and read.
Then when I go to university, I announced to the horror of my parents that I was studying philosophy.
There were a lot of things that I could have done, or should have done to have got a decent degree – I got an ordinary one in the end. A summer trying to translate Thomas Aquinas was one of the less pointless expeditions I undertook in the university library.
What was fascinating, and where I did stay the course was when it came to the philosophy of science and the history of ideas. Why do we think the way that we do? Why do the ideas we have about the world change? And why do they get better? Do they get better? What are the rules that govern the way that ideas and theories change? This was both highly technical and highly abstract.
Dissertation
I did my dissertation on medieval theories of motion. Everything I knew about Newtonian, I had to forget, which was very hard. I had to try to get my head around a theory that had the air filling the vacuum left by a spear and then pushing it forward. After thirty years, I’m still not sure if I’ve got that right.
How could I see the world like some of the brightest men in the world had seen it a millennia ago? Also, see it in all the glorious wrongness of their inept, inadequate, and impossible theories. I learned to see the world differently.
Some people see things as they are, but I see things with a different perspective, things that are not there.
If You Want to Read More
I keep everything structured on my niftily titled business model innovation book page. Head there to browse, binge, read straight through or cherry pick. Please do take a moment to comment below or upvote comments that you agree with
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