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 why I am using the style I am
Business Books Should Be Dry and Boring
My style has been nagging at me for a while. That’s not bad and its the way I’m going.
But it is quite different to most business books.
It’s rambling, oblique and seems to often come at the subject from an odd direction.
This morning I wrote a brilliant piece which started with Archimedes, wandered through the strategy of the Peloponnesian war, through fantastical accounts of ancient siege warfare, alighted on the idea of using a lever as a metaphor, but then dived into using a spearman as a metaphor for principles of competition and why existing ways of thinking about business are wrong, before getting into the details of how and why you need to look at your competition differently.
Discursive and interesting, but not really dry and to the point…
Not
Why do I need to write like this?
Because if I just give an action plan of what needs to be done the results that people get aren’t going to be good, and critical, not that much different to the competition.
What is critical – and it keeps coming back to Hilma AF Klimt – is that we get a perceptual shift in how we see the world.
What I believe I am doing, and this needs to be tested more, is using metaphors and unusual stories to take my audience of business people away from the visible world and take them into the liminal place where they can start to see the invisible world where the forms (using it in the platonic sense) of business models float, ready to be seen, grasped and used by entrepreneurs
This again comes back to my exploratory values – If you are on a motorway trying to get to the next city as fast as you can you are not going to see anything new, find anything of value or do anything different. it s only when you abandon left-brain logical thinking or intend Kahneman’s System 2 and start getting data in very different forms are you then able to pierce the veil and grasp what is not yet seen, but which soon could be…..
Now I am getting transcendental!
Moments of Insight
I was talking to a friend earlier this week, Ben Trenchard, who does really clever things with aircraft design. We were talking about lockpick and how there is that moment of insight when everything starts to click and come together as you master a lock.
Is lockpicking a science or an art? The science was too difficult for me, and the art took too long to master. What Ben said though, in response to business models is very perceptive. A lot of the time we take a brute force approach to business models, thinking that we can logically identify and find the next business model that we need.
Uber is throwing billions of dollars at a business model that it (and investor s) believe is going to work – but it isn’t there yet. This is a brute force approach to finding the business model, using highly structured rational thinking. The way that I am advocating in the book is far more magical, nebulous. It is an approach that requires us to open ourselves up to inspiration and ideas, and gently play with them to coach them to uncurl, as a koru does in the gentle New Zealand sun.
Brute force is well and good when you have billions and a large organisation behind you. It will give you a set of obvious business models that can deliver. This does not help the millions of small businesses facing extinction – which realistically all need different, or differing business models to create lasting niches and success for themselves. This is the true benefit of the approach that this book covers
And that is why stories and extended metaphors work so much better for my audience than a dry and boring business how to book.
This isn’t to say that these first drafts don’t need a lot of editing to tidy everything up….. 🙂
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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