17.1. Cracking open the notion of “competition”

Two complementary angles of using Trialectics are (i) a more foundational understanding (Figure 17.1) and (ii) a more routine view that resembles everyday use (Figure 17.2¹). The first angle will supply an in-depth study of an “Apple way” of competing.

In Figure 17.2, the notion of competition involves friction-based duality (greed: complicity and challenge), the uncertainty of the results (contest: analogy and desire) and the actual distinction in the works (resemblance: acquisition and redundancy). The three “including thirds” reveal the resources needed for action, the posture in exposure (advertising) and the indispensable adaptation to markets.

17.2. Designing an expanded understanding “competition”

We now base a C-K development on the above diagrams and start from a fundamental declaration from Steve Jobs, in that building Apple was a far more difficult endeavor than designing products for Apple. The point in this legacy nugget is not the products and services catalog; it's the company behind them and the capacity of the latter to churn them out correctly. Jobs strikingly distinguished the big capacity shift:

• – from innovation results (1st level), to;
• – innovation process (2nd level) to;
• – innovation capacity (3rd level).

There exists an order of magnitude in difficulty from each level to the next [COR 15]. What Jobs worked at during his span at the company was to build the company, which is today symbolized by a brand. It therefore makes sense to start understanding what “competition” means for Apple by first “exploding” the concept of brand. This has been provided using Trialectics in Appendix 5.

Let’s interpret the findings for “brand” (Figure 17.3) – they are called the “including thirds”:

• – vocation: in between “structuration” and “utopia”;
• – creativity: in between “norm” and “exemplar”;
• – authority: in between “distinction” and “cohabitation”.

The conceptual expansion of each of these three root terms by a C-K diagram should be done in a powerful way first before deepening the roots. The reason why we use the three “including thirds” is that they, by construction, offer the maximum expansion power to the initial concept of “competition” while remaining entirely faithful to it.

Indeed, Jobs wanted his brand to exercise the maximum differentiation through a more singular brand.

C-K development goes through radical expansions in the C concepts space (Figure 17.4 shows a simplified example). The main finding can then be formulated as a set of second generation concepts as follows. In the example given:

• – inducing customer behavior: engagement, faction;
• – creating a unique customer and user experience (commensal);
• – stirring imagination to the limit (both utopia and structure).

This may be synthesized as:

The formula evokes and results in a notion of overall internal tension that underpins the way competition is handled.