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.
About the same time as I discovered the joys of entrepreneurship, I had the misfortune to read an article in Inc or Forbes.
I say misfortune because nothing I have read has ever brought me so much pain.
I read that most successful entrepreneurs were triathletes.
Looking back on that statement with 20 years of hindsight, I can say that it is not quite the stupidest thing I’ve ever read, but also one of the most profound.
I took it literally and flipped the causality.
I figured that if I became a triathlete, I would be an amazingly successful entrepreneur.
Nope. It doesn’t work like that, but it was a critical part of the journey and the story I have to tell.
Exploring Myself as a Triathlete
Triathletes are rather odd. They can do one thing rather well. That is, they can go in a straight line for a very long time. It doesn’t matter if they are swimming, on a bike, or running.
I started off doing races that took me 2 1/2 hours. Eventually, I moved on to ones that took me 13 hours in 35C temperatures. To do this, I had to train – exercise – for about twenty hours a week on top of everything that I was doing in my startup.
It had an impact on that. At the same time, the hours in the pool gave me space. Time slows down when you exercise, and so do your thoughts. Your mind becomes a place where ideas and plans can slowly crystallize as you free yourself from the barrage of entrepreneurial thoughts that normally dominate them.
After a while, I realized that triathlon was not for me. For me, the fun was seeing whether I could do it. I could. I did multiple Ironman races – one of them, in Malaysia, was one of the toughest Ironman races in the world.
The challenge after that was to optimize everything to reduce my time by an arbitrary by psychologically important amount.
That meant a strict diet regimen and training. It meant living by the clock – how far had I run, what was my heart rate, how much power was I putting out as I pedaled on the bike. It all became a bit too much. So, after stumbling away from the start of a race in Singapore, too tired to even start the race I started running naked.
No!
I wore clothes! Running naked was all about running without a watch. I didn’t want to know how long, how fast, how far. I just want to run. The best place was the jungle.
One of the best runs I ever did was going into the trail barefoot. I was running along – the soil was warm, soft accomodating. You never get that sense when you run in trainers. There was a deep sense of connection with the forest as I did it.
There was a lot less connection with the snake that saw my bare ankles and went for them. Talk about an adrenalin spike!
I did not do that again – but I kept running. Further and further.
The Malaysian Jungle
One of the things about the Malaysian jungle is a lot of the little that is left is on the flanks of the Titiwangsa range. Because there is so much rain, the mountains have eroded to form very steep slopes. None of the rounded English hills of my youth. So they are 30% gradients straight up for as far as the mountain is tall. I did one race in Borneo wherein the first 9 kilometers, we climbed 3km, and I was on my knees as there was far less oxygen than I was used to.
This rather inhospitable terrain means that not a lot of people go there. The mobile phone companies figured this out and decided not to put any mobile phone coverage up. When you leave the road as a solo runner, you are leaving civilization behind.
There is no way to call for help. If I got bitten by a snake, ambushed by a tiger, or fell over, and impaled myself on some bamboo. Well, if I couldn’t get myself out, it was going to be a few days before anyone was going to come and find me.
Am I joking about the animals?
Yes and no. You fear them a lot more than the risk deserves. I came across an angry cobra one day. It hissed at me a lot, and so I retreated 20 meters, and when I cam back a few minutes, later she’d headed off to her nest. For the next few hours, a lot of the roots across the trail looked like her sisters. I was so on edge that the run was quite unpleasant.
One day, just before dawn, I was going up an old road to where I was going to head deep into the jungle. There was a fallen tree across the road. That was a bit odd because it hadn’t been there before. It didn’t have any branches either.
Then it was uncoiled, and despite being inside 2 tonnes of metal, I had a very real sense that I was going to be eaten. That was a fear that other snakes never generated. Its girth was about twice that of a 27’ reticulated python I had seen the week before at the zoo. That was a time that I turned back because there was no way that I could construct a story about why it was a good idea to keep on going out for the run. My wife would have banned me forever.
At least she laughed when I told her about the time the pregnant pit viper fell out of a tree and landed on my shoulder. Pregnant for some reason hit her maternal instincts and camouflaged the true terror I felt just as much as the green scales had camouflaged the wrangler’s pit viper.
This is about exploration though.
Following Every Path
After a while, I’d been up the big trails. Some of these were on maps, most I learned about by word of mouth. Sometimes other runners and hikers told me about them. Other times, I was abusing my limited knowledge of Bahasa Melayu trying to ask old Chinese rubber planters or skinny Orang Asli (the indigenous inhabitants of Malaya) where a path went.
Lots of enthusiasm on both sides, but little knowledge transfer. And, so I followed every path I found. Most were dead ends.
Once I found an illegal poaching operation with rare birds in cages. Coincidentally it was raided by the police a week later
Other times I found beautiful waterfalls, pristine and untouched by man. I stepped in poachers traps and had my legs whipped up into the air, caught in the thick industrial wire. I found the rotting bodies of animals caught in traps and saw pangolin, turtles, and mouse-deer.
Over a few years, I slowly mapped all the paths and trails in a 500km area – that’s about 50km by 10km.
To start with all, I knew was that jungle-covered mountains were reaching up to the sky. Each day I went out and tried to reach them.
It soon became obvious that some roads and paths took me towards them. I mapped those paths and discovered that there weren’t only mountains in front of me. There were also hills and rivers. The rivers then formed new paths that allowed me to go far further than the ever-narrowing paths did.
What was initially strange and very scary became familiar as I learned the paths, and started to make my own.
The first time you put a trail through a section of the jungle, it can take an hour per hundred meters. It is brutal, uncomfortable work. You use a parang. That’s the Malaya name for something like a machete. Typically the blade has a sliding curve to it. The handle is designed so that you lift the blade and then control its fall. You let gravity and the sharpness of the blade cut through the vegetation
The most important thing is to have a firm footing for your feet. There is always rotting wood on the ground, covered with leaves. Being able to stand safely as you use the parang is key.
You always hack away from yourself. In the high humidity, your whole body is constantly covered with sweat. All your clothes are sodden, hanging off you as if they came out of the washing machine without a spin cycle. And sometimes, the sweat makes your hands so slippery that the parang goes flying – slipping straight out of your grasp or twisted away as you hit something at the wrong angle. A lot better to have the parang fly away – rather than towards you.
A Way Forward
Typically you do a mix of vertical and horizontal strokes. The vertical strokes strip branches off close to the trunks. Easier to do that. More comfortable too. Every single tree seems to have long columns of ants going up and down. Shake the leaves too much, and you have ants going up and down your neck and head. And biting. It’s more irritating than painful – but having had both – ants in my pants is far better than ants in my hair and on my face. So by taking the branches off, the pants fall to the ground and generally stay there.
Then you hack horizontally. Small saplings in the path get chopped at ground level. Karger ones at knee height. The effect is to create a dark green tunnel through the trees. It’s very raw. There is a trail of dead and shattered plants left behind. It’s butcher’s work – not that of an artist. Slowly you push the trail forward.
You cant’ keep a straight line. Every minute you are making small tactical decisions. How steep is the slope? What are the trees like tend feet ahead? Is that a rattan? Rattan has horrible long leaves covered with hooks and thorns. The fibers make them difficult to cut through cleanly. Bamboo requires an immense amount of effort to cut through – a single 10cm stalk is fine – but you are likely to have to do dozens. They also have cobras nesting in the roots.
So the trail staggers like a drunk man on the way home from the pub. Heading in the right direction – but not consistently. Your arms rising and falling consistently. Chopping away. Fingers and shins become increasingly bloody as more and more thorns and vines cut and scratch you.
Eventually, you make it through.
Then, you need to go back over the path, smoothing another 10 to 20 times to make it something that, with effort, a mountain bike can make its way through. Eventually, with a few hundred passages the vegetation gets compacted into the soil, the trail becomes smoother and it becomes a path.
It’s not always this tough. Often you can find areas where you can walk through – twisting your shoulders and body so that you can find a way. Other times you can follow a stream
Streams are amazing. Trees don’t grow in streams. So you don’t have to do any hacking. Instead, you can be waist-deep in water for hours. Wading upstream, your feet finding spots among the rocks that provide balance. Launching yourself into deep pools to cross to the other side, and what looks to be a better path. Sometimes territorial hornets take offense, and you have to dive under the water to avoid their stings (each the same as quickly downing half a pint on a Friday evening) and drift out of their kill zone.
This is all wonderful, or terrible, depending on your perspective.
The toughest thing is that you are blind. You have no idea where you are or where you are going. I’ve never tried to count, but at any point, there are probably 300+ trees within a few meters of you. Each of these has a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of leaves and branches. These are all in motion. All slightly different shades of green and different shapes. The jungle floor is of brown leaves, broken sticks, rotting trunks, and stones.
The result is an incredibly dense visual experience. There are no straight lines. You can’t get your bearings. Even after going into the jungle for 15 years, I can’t reliably turn round and see the way I have come. I have to mark the way – cutting blazes on trees or marking the path with tape.
Disappearance
I know three people who have gone into the jungle and disappeared. On one ultra-marathon we started with a steep hill that had little shade. That caused a lot of the participants to overheat. One got disorientated and confused wandered off further and further as he tried to find the path. He eventually fell down a slope and never regained consciousness. On another race, a runner just disappeared. Over a thousand people looked for him, and no trace apart from his water bottle was found. And then there was Nora, a young French teenager, who stayed in a beautiful jungle resort a few years after I’d stayed there with my family and parents. It took the search party over a week to find her body.
One of the big themes of this book s that we need to explore. I’ve spent much of my life working with entrepreneurs who have gone into the jungle, and they have not come out. They have searched for new business models and were swallowed by the big green.
Over the past twenty years, we have slowly managed to equip our entrepreneurial explorers better, but their success rate has barely changed. Their bones still rot, unfound, in the wilderness.
The problem has been that we have not taught them the skills to survive and use their equipment effectively.
The rest of this book is about how we can head into the jungle, into the wilderness, in our search to find new business models.
It lays out a process for effectively mapping the jungle, how you make your paths, and survive as you explore.
It is very clear that most of the jungle is trees, rotting wood, biting insects, and sweat and tears. As you master the methods of exploring, as you master the mental game of leaving safety and certainty behind you can find some wonderful treasures. That makes it worth the effort. More than worth it.
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
Subscribe to the New Book Chapters
As I write each new section you can have them sent to your email. The plan is to write something 2 – 3 times a week. It is easy to unsubscribe, but I hope you won’t as the goal is to delight and entertain as well as educate and train you through this business model innovation journey.
