CHAPTER 8

IDEAS ARE WORTHLESS

Everything can happen.

Everything is possible and probable.

Time and space do not exist.

On a flimsy framework of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns.

August Strindberg, A Dream Play (1901)

The human mind is limitless – we can dream, think and create without boundaries. We can imagine life on a galaxy far far away and make it into a movie, we can create the future out of thin air and we can change the direction of the world by sheer force of the intellect. We can show what life was like when dinosaurs roamed the Earth long before the first humans were born, we can envision how the whole planet is connected and suddenly it actually is, we can turn an idea into a company with products that never existed before and millions of customers, and my children can come up with a story that they turn into a video and potentially show it to millions. A small start-up can launch an app on the global infrastructure of smartphones and become a cultural phenomenon in no time, while the former market leader in mobile phones can become irrelevant in just about the same time. New ideas are created by combining existing ones in an ever accelerating pace, weaving new patterns that build new fortunes and disrupt old ones.

People have always worked with ideas, turning them into new realities. The caveman making an axe from a stone and the fashion designer working on the spring collection are essentially the same homo sapiens. The difference is that much of life today is based on working with ideas. Up until the late 19th century, we lived in an agricultural society; with the industrial revolution the foundation for prosperity shifted to manufacturing in the 20th century. Now, in the new millennium, value creation essentially depends on our skills in developing ideas, turning them into reality, making decisions and strategies about ideas in an increasingly complex idea landscape.

This chapter is about working with ideas, how to realize their value – and how to kill them when they indeed prove to be worthless. Understanding the essence of idea work is a leadership competence: the entrepreneurship to make ideas come true, the management that is administrating the organization where ideas turn into value, and the leadership that is about people working with the ideas and helping them succeed.

#075 Ideas Are Worthless (IAW)

Only the execution makes ideas valuable.

An aspiring entrepreneur was walking in the park when his friend approached him.

‘Hi!’ said his friend, ‘what’s up?’

‘Well,’ said the aspiring entrepreneue, ‘I actually I have this great idea.’

‘Wow, exciting, tell me!’

‘No I can’t. Not yet.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it is so valuable that I don’t want anyone to steal it.’

What is wrong with the story? Well, ideas in and of themselves are worthless. Why can you and should you spread your ideas?

• First, an idea is worth nothing if it is not successfully executed.
• Second, given all the hard work required to make an idea come true, and the fact that most people are already very busy, the probability that someone else will run off with your idea and make it happen is virtually zero.
• Third, it’s fine if they do run away with it because an idea belongs to the person who makes it reality.
• Finally, ideas usually don’t turn out the way they first appear anyway.

By talking about your ideas, the best thing that can happen is that you get useful feedback and comments that will enable you to improve on them. Ideas are always tested in reality, and you may as well start by putting your little baby out there in the cold world. Of course, it is important to exercise a bit of discretion where your established competitors are concerned, but aside from them, and from your friends and family, it is safe to assume that most people will be largely indifferent.

To sum up, to make ideas valuable you need three things:

• The Idea (what you think could be a new and useful thing)
• Resources (capital, time, people, somewhere to work)
• Action (start running, meet with customers and potential collaborators)

To create new realities from thin air is the true magic of entrepreneurship. It just takes that one person believes in the idea – You – and it can and will happen. Then, later, you will be stuck with all the other challenges of management and leadership. Ideas in themselves are worthless. Many entrepreneurs can testify to all the hard work that is needed to make ideas actually become real and valuable. I met a seasoned and wealthy entrepreneur in San Francisco, with a face like a tough cowboy. I asked him about his formula for success. He replied simply: ‘Well, in my alphabet, Work comes before Success.’

#076 Make A Decision (MAD)

Why is it so hard?

Whenever I go to a restaurant I see it as a good training opportunity to make a quick decision. Look at the menu, pick a choice and stick with it. And I try to do it before anyone else has made their choices, as a stupid game. I see it as daily practice. I probably make too many decisions, too fast, and when I shouldn’t or don’t need to. With increasingly more ideas, the importance of making decisions increases accordingly.

There are two types of people: those who like making decisions and those who dread making them. But decision making is at the heart of any human activity and essential to idea work. There are three parts to it:

Steps 1 and 2 are the difficult parts to do right.

What you want to do is the Right Thing, the Right Way, but there are other outcomes: doing the right thing wrong, doing the wrong thing right, doing the wrong thing wrong (which can actually lead to the right thing by mistake).

The first step is to define the problem or issue that needs a decision. If you are in a group of people, ensure that you are all defining the issue at hand in the same way. The task can be, for example, to avoid a nuclear war, which means you have to choose between two strategies: respond to a threat with an air strike or seek a diplomatic solution, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. For a company, the task can be to decide whether to do project A or project B.

The second step is to ask, as management guru Peter Drucker suggests, what is the objective of the decision? For a company, a typical objective is to decide whether you want the company to grow, be pro­fitable or both. The growth objective will trigger one type of decisions, the profit objective other ones. That can help you make the right decisions in order to achieve your objective. It helps to ask ‘why?’ a number of times when making decisions. Why are we doing this? I have seen that deciding on the objective can be just as hard as making the decision itself.

Should decisions be made quickly or slowly and cautiously? If your gut feeling tells you to go for it and you generally trust your instincts, then go for it. If you are a bit unsure, adopt the 24-hour rule and sleep on the decision before acting. If you have the time, it’s never wrong to reflect before decisions. However, don’t let your mind control your intuition too much.

The worst mistake is to not make any decisions at all when decisions are needed. That miserable place where nothing happens can be called the ‘Non-Decision Void’. Even wrong and terrible decisions are to some extent good because you can learn from them, you get valuable information that will help you to do things differently next time. With Non-Decisions, nothing happens.

Another enemy to decisions is the twins ‘Not Invented Here’ and ‘Tried That Before’. The first one reflects the attitude that any new ideas that are not properly in line with company culture because they come from external sources are bad by definition. The same happens within organizations when one department refuses to adopt ideas from another department, or even see reality any other way, guarding their own ways of doing things (see Interconnected Sub-Cultures #065 ICS).

The other one is the resignation that takes hold of a company or culture injured by too many previous mistakes and failed attempts, where indeed much has maybe been tried, and puts people off trying anything new because of cynicism or knocks to the company’s confidence. But just because you tried something that did not work, it does not mean that the idea was wrong in itself. It could instead have been the wrong team, timing or tactics. Nevertheless, the company does not feel like trying it again. Both ‘Not Invented Here’ and ‘Tried That Before’ are obstacles to making the right decisions.

Finally, it’s a good thing for people to be part of the decision in a constructive way, and to feel ownership of the decision because they were involved in making it. Decisions are often surrounded by conflict, competing opinions and differing views. These conflicts can be constructive if the relationships and discussions are based on trust, and provide everybody with the opportunity to state their views and opinions. Even if the decision doesn’t go their way, everybody must accept it and loyally stand by it, having had their chance to state their views. It feels better to say, ‘I’m against it, as you know, but since this is the company’s decision I will do everything I can to make it work.’ Conflict can create commitment, a point that Patrick Lencioni observed in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. The best decisions actually require healthy disagreements.

Decisions are like ideas: in themselves they are practically worthless. Your decision does not become useful until it is executed, and hopefully executed efficiently and with the result you had in mind. All business is about two things: Strategy and Execution. First you decide what you want to do, then you do it. Unless you actually do it, it does not really matter what you have decided.

#077 Right Before Compromise (RBC)

Don’t make the compromise the standard.

When a group discusses various options when trying to make a decision, it is common that the outcome of the discussion becomes a compromise – and that compromise then becomes the decision.

Here’s a typical case. A software development project will cost $250,000, require five developers and take about three months. If you want to do the project, this is the budget you should decide on and then ask how to finance the project and find the resources. What usually happens is that a group of decision makers comes to the conclusion that you have only a $100,000 budget and two developers, and that you have to do the project with these limited resources or not at all. The decision is then made to do the project with what you have, in other words letting the compromise set the standard. The correct way to do it is to decide to do a project with five developers, $250,000 budget and three months’ development time. Then you might have to compromise anyway to adapt to reality, but if you make the compromise the norm you don’t know when you’re compromising. Decide the thing that is right to do.

#078 Let’s Fail Quickly (LFQ)

if you are going to fail, better fail quickly.

Not all ideas that you believe in will fly. Once it has become clear that someone or something is going to fail, it is better that it happens sooner rather than later. Think about it. If you recruit a new key account manager for your sales team, you want that person to be successful. But it may happen that they are not. Would you rather have years of missed sales targets and time-consuming talks before you come to the conclusion that they are not the right person for the job, or come to the conclusion in just a few months? Of course, for you, your company and the key account manager, it’s better to know sooner rather than later if a situation isn’t working. Would you invest in a new market, project or idea and find out that it is not working in one, five or ten years? Of course, if you can be sure in just one year, you don’t have to burn more resources. Long roads to failure are painful, unnecessary and a waste of time and money.

The trick, of course, is identifying when something is not working. One of the cornerstones of entrepreneurship is persistence – the ability to push ahead with your idea, ignore failure after failure to finally prove the whole world wrong and show that you were right all along. There are stories like that. But more commonly it happens that entrepreneurs, leaders and their companies spend too much money and time on people and things that they would be better off just letting go.

The best and fairest way to find whether someone or something is successful or not is to adopt a process with a time frame, targets and milestones. If the new recruit or a launched project meets certain criteria within six months, then you go ahead. If it doesn’t, you stop. Be very clear about the time horizon and criteria from the beginning so that everybody understands the rules. Then you do everything you can to make that person or project successful. If not, you take your loss and move on. You can make some things work, but if you are doomed to fail, it’s better to fail quickly than to waste your life trying to turn it around.

One final note: think about your ‘Fail Tempo’. Some people prefer to ‘fail’ quickly when things do not work and start again (I’m one of those), others like to keep on longer before failing because they believe they will not fail. We have different views on the potential failure. Usually, it is the ones who have invested the most that are the most unwilling to fail and live on hope for a bit longer. The bottom line? Be unsentimental about failing. It’s part of the job. Just make sure that you don’t fail quickly in all you do.

#079 Win The Game (WTG)

Know what you are playing, and how to win.

How do you win the game? It is one of the smartest questions you can ever ask in business, and I was asked it by Professor Robert Burgelman at Stanford University. I constantly live with this question in the back of my mind when working with my companies. In order to win the game, you must answer a few very straightforward questions:

• What is the game? (What market, industry or product are we in?)
• Who are we competing against? (Competitors, rival products and services?)
• What are we competing with? (What are our products and their advantages?)
• What is winning? (How do we know that we are winning?)

It follows that you cannot participate in more than one game at once, unless you are a very big company with several divisions, each engaged in their various battles – like Google with different ‘games’ in the areas of search, mobile and TV. For the small business and the start-up, concentrating on winning one game is usually more than enough to keep you occupied. Avoid strategic mess where you are trying to do too much at once. Focus creates growth and sets the foundation for success.

For example, if a company is split between being an online marketing agency (delivering a service) and a technology business (offering a product), there will be endless internal discussions about the right way forward. Then it might be better to resolve the issue by dividing the company into two business units or two companies, one being an agency selling services and the other being a technology company selling products (which are two very different businesses) and providing each with the opportunity to win their respective, well-defined game.

If you ask yourself how you and your company are going to win the game, and you have trouble answering questions about the game itself and your part in it, then it is time to reconsider what you are doing – or lose the game. And, adopt a global mindset. The game today is seldom restricted to your local market: games are won or lost on a global scale.

#080 The Slow Company (TSC)

Dare to be slow, most things are. Success takes time.

The concept of the ‘Fast Company’ was popularized around the turn of the millennium to describe a company that was smart and savvy, that launched fast and equally grew fast, usually thanks to new technological infrastructures and an equally smart and savvy global audience. But I would say that to be fast, you first have to be slow and get things right. Nail it, before you scale it’ as someone said. Yes, companies like Groupon and Facebook were very fast to go global, but not until their model was perfected locally. What defines many successful companies is what they did before getting fast: their strategy and management during the set-up phase when the company was being formed, and how they identified the acceleration point – the moment when they started to grow rapidly.

Slow companies allow for ‘set-up time’ to test and reject ideas, refine the business model and develop a winning culture. This allows them to go on to grow exponentially and fast. They have a disciplined approach to innovation. Slow companies focus on a few products and become leaders in their niche markets – then explode into new innovative customer offerings. Slow companies build a customer base through the value proposition of their products – then expand through advertising and marketing to reinforce the brand. Slow companies do not attempt to get big until the time is right. When the Slow Company reaches the acceleration point, high-speed expansion comes naturally. The Slow Company can also be called the ‘conscious’ company.

The concept of a Slow Company has nothing to do with age, or the time it takes to reach a certain scale of revenues and profitability. It is more of a mindset, approach and pattern. Slow companies are about a common growth curve: reasonable set-up time and fast exponential growth.

IKEA needed 30 years’ set-up time before defining the concept that made it grow into the world’s largest furniture retail company. Fashion company H&M opened its first shop in Sweden in 1947, then expanded abroad to Denmark 20 years later. It continued to launch stores in three more countries during the next 20 years and then finally took off, opening stores in 16 countries, rapidly reaching more than 1,000 stores worldwide. Today, there are around 2,600 H&M stores in more than 40 countries.

A much younger company, Google, spent around four years of set-up time perfecting the search engine and advertising technology that made it the global number one before letting its creativity explode into numerous user tools, applications and services around the mission of organizing the world’s information. Amazon.com first made sure it had the world’s greatest online bookstore and a culture obsessed with customer experience before attempting, and eventually succeeding, to sell virtually everything online. Apple needed to be a struggling computer company for almost 20 years before it finally re-emerged as a brilliant consumer and electronics company, with the iPhone at the core. Other examples of slow companies are the German retail chain Aldi and coffee chain Starbucks. Facebook started in 2004 but it was not until about three years later that it opened up the social network to everybody, having perfected the culture, style and features of the web tool. Groupon went global almost at once, but its model was also much easier to copy and that’s why it needed to move fast. The same goes for Swedish mobile gift card app and start-up Wrapp – it very quickly needed to establish global presence and fend off imitators.

Slow is a metaphor for letting businesses develop organically and moving at the speed of the customers and users. Being ‘slow’ is being committed long term, and eventually being faster and more successful in the same way that the tortoise beats the hare in the fable. The paradox is that you rarely get fast by running fast. Challenge the concept of high speed in business! Think instead of ‘basic speed’, which makes the company competitive by staying focused, keeping things simple and reducing cost and complexity. What can we learn from the success of slow companies?

• Don’t be too creative – focus, say no to new ideas (too many ideas can destroy you).
• Don’t advertise to build a brand (build it by acquiring customers).
• Scale down to scale up (you have to be lean and focused to grow).

You need to be careful about the underlying assumption that speed is good and that growing rapidly is the ultimate sign of success. Coming to re-think the concept of ‘fast’ and ‘speed’ when founding new companies, I started to define the idea of the Slow Company, meaning a company that is fast in a way other than just doing everything at high speed. In an article in Brainheart magazine in 2002 – The Limits of Speed – journalist Marta Sandén invited me along with Bodil Jönsson, Professor at the Department of Design Sciences at Lund Institute of Technology, to discuss the question of time. The interview also touched upon the personal aspects of business, of how we work:

Jönsson: ‘We need set-up time to leave one activity and switch to another, a kind of time to think things over or let them mature, in order to do our own or the collective work, but also to have shared experiences and to create frames of reference.’

The conclusion, that will guide your leadership, is to adopt a rea­sonable perspective on the speed of the development of your business. Do hurry, have a basic speed and don’t waste time, but there is no need to burn out your organization. You will accomplish amazing things with time.

Also think about ‘set-up time’ as ‘transition time’, the space where you move from one state to another, for example from one meeting to the next one. Ideally, as my friend Grant Calder inspired me to do: allow yourself a few minutes to make the transition, especially if going from the whirlwind of your office to a nice lunch with a friend you have not seen for a while and you need to slow your tempo and get in the mood. Time is a tool. (Compare the concept of the Slow Company with Never Give Up #039 NGU and Let’s Fail Quickly #078 LFQ to get a perspective on time.)

#081 Remember The Bread (RTB)

Don’t cut off the hand that feeds you.

It is tempting to go with new ideas – the human mind wants to have fun. New things are always sexy, but it is a mistake for a leader to neglect the bread and butter that is the foundation of a business. Any company that works does so because there is a proven business model that brings in cash flow. That is a good thing. However, it is tempting for the leaders of that company to start to look at new opportunities, exciting things that are fun. Sometimes companies are forced to change and enter new areas to stay alive, since the old core business is declining. Sometimes companies pursue new ventures just because the opportunities are there and they provide the chance to grow further.

In any case, change will usually not happen overnight. Unless you are in the extreme situation of having to shut down a business, you will more likely be facing a transformation – a process where you want to turn around a company in one way or the other.

One example is directory companies. Their old business was to provide addresses and telephone numbers to people and companies through printed catalogues and sell advertising space in those directories. In most countries, the telephone directory was a monopoly, and hugely profitable. With the advent of the Internet, the searches moved online and most directory companies became web-based. Still, even with all the online search options available, printed directories continued to be in demand and deliver great gross profits. If you were running a directory company, it would be unwise to simply say that the future is online and print is dead, even if the long-term trend is indeed a shift from offline media to online, digital and mobile.

Say a company starts a new business called Products, with the purpose of offering web-based and affordable online advertising tools to customers globally. The new business is launched internally with much fanfare, in the belief that it would motivate and excite staff. However, the bread-and-butter business was the original Services: managing online campaigns for advertisers. With all the new focus on Products, the revenue, profits and motivation in Services quickly dropped. Two bad things happened:

• First, by losing focus on your bread-and-butter business, you risk that business. Whatever you work with, you need to nurture that business every day to stay ahead, or at least to stay around. If you turn your focus on to something new, you can be sure that your old business will start to suffer sooner or later.
• Second, by losing focus on your main business you risk losing the motivation of the people working with that business. If the people hear every day that their work will soon be redundant, it is sure to be demotivating. People need to hear that they are doing something important. You will then be hit from two sides: a business suffering from your lack of focus and people suffering from lack of motivation. The smart leader will change a business by focusing not on the new things but on the old things (while building the new things).

#082 Living Parallel Worlds (LPW)

The confusing but necessary task of executing ideas, while questioning them.

Business is essentially two things: decide where you want to go (strategy) and then go there (execution). The first part is really the idea about your existence and your future, what you are and what you could be.

So, when you run a company, you live in two parallel worlds. One is the execution of the current strategy and the current ideas, the other is the ever-evolving strategy going forward, exploring new ideas (and questioning the existing strategy and ideas). You will have to be comfortable with being in constant motion.

In a company you should dream all the time. And this type of dream is the strategy, vision, long-term ambitions, goals and targets. The difference between this ‘company dreaming’ and regular dreaming is that you dream alongside your daily, waking life – your operations. These are the two parallel worlds that a leader has to balance: the day-to-day execution in a business alongside the ongoing conversation about the company’s future, what could be.

Now, constantly living in two time zones, the present and the future, can be demanding, especially if you require people to spend considerable time thinking about the future and planning ahead, discussing scenarios and various strategic alternatives. Because this will consequently take time from the present, where value is created and people are assessed and paid based on that value creation based in reality. The more time you spend on the future, the more people will feel that you are wasting their time. However, spending too little on the future will create a void of purpose and confusion of direction.

To make things more complicated, as they usually are, the leader’s job is not only to maintain a conversation about the future, and set and execute the strategy, but also to question the strategy itself once it is put in place. This is another way to look at the Two Parallel Worlds: executing a strategy, while at the same time checking whether that strategy is the right one. While necessary, it is also dangerous, because it can appear that you cannot make up your mind. This can undermine your leadership. Still, you have to be able to keep an open discussion about whether you are really on the right track.

The answer to that dilemma is to look at signals, not the strategy itself. Here, your strategy can be used as a map. Think of strategy as ‘a set of simple rules at the edge of chaos’, as suggested by Kathleen Eisenhardt of Stanford University.

Instead of discussing your strategy all the time, make sure that the strategy is firm and understood by everyone, then spend time asking if anyone has picked up any signals (i.e. shifts in the market place or new opportunities) that may require changes in the current thinking. Just be clear to distinguish signals from noise. As someone said, ‘There’s not a paradigm shift every day.’

#083 Top Line Orientation (TLO)

Is your passion revenues or costs?

What is your personality and mindset? To create bottom-line results, would you rather save costs or increase revenues? For the purposes of this exercise, you are not allowed to say ‘both’. If your household economy is off balance, would you rather cut down on the costs, go on fewer nights out and skip that holiday to save money, or would you look for ways to increase your cash flow to pay the bills?

Most entrepreneurs are top-line oriented, since the prerequisite for starting a company or whatever organization is to create some kind of client or user value that delivers revenue from paying customers. Having said that, many fine businesses start with the idea of a low price, and the entrepreneurial challenge is to keep costs low or achieve economies of scale to sustain those low prices. Take IKEA: it is said that they first design the price, then design the product. Would $3 be a really good price for a bedside lamp? OK, what would we then need to do to design and manufacture that product in order to be able to offer it to our customers for $3? The entrepreneur behind IKEA, Ingvar Kamprad, has been really good at creating a culture where costs are kept down, so you can then keep prices low, driving customers to your stores, thereby creating fantastic revenues while serving the Many.

From a leadership perspective, think about whether your natural focus is top-line revenues and growth, costs or the ultimate bottom line. What is the nature of your job, the team you are part of or the project you are working on? Top-line or bottom-line focus will direct the way you communicate with other people. Think about what you normally care about: do you get upset when there are unnecessary costs, when you miss customer opportunities (top-line revenues) or when profits suffer? Think about your orientation, it will guide you as a leader.

#084 Adding Up Numbers (AUN)

Business, or any activity, is ultimately a numbers game.

The purpose of leadership is to create results, and the most realistic way to see your business, non-profit organization or local tennis club is a flow of numbers adding up. The idea behind your company, or a new project within that company, will ultimately translate into numbers in one way or the other. It is basically the only way to monitor how well an idea becomes reality: you look at the maths. There are several kind of numbers, for example:

• Revenue, cost, margins, cash, donations
• Customers, paying users, downloads, likes
• Followers, tweets, retweets, views
• Impressions, clicks, conversions of visitors to buyers
• Reviews, comments, posts
• Employees, countries, markets
• Growth rate, sign-up rate, daily orders
• Members, volunteers, participants
• Won games, gold medals, current ranking

As the success of ideas ultimately is tracked by the numbers, it is good to know what numbers, or KPIs, you will use to evaluate your idea. If the business is a mobile app, the number of downloads is one appropriate number. If your idea is a streaming music business like Spotify, the main number is probably the number of paying premium users. If your idea is to mount a revolution against a dictator with a corrupt regime, the number of protesters in the streets is a key number. The way you add up the numbers tells the story about the idea.

#085 Vision, Mission & Goals (VMG)

Putting your idea into words and goals.

Some of the most superfluous activities in a new business involve drafting visions and mission statements. The probability is that, once formulated, the documents themselves will become redundant. Still, if you build a business on an idea, you have to express it in an efficient way. What is it all about? If you are going to use a vision, mission and goals, make sure you put them in the right order. This is what it can look like for this book:

• The vision (‘We are all leaders’)
• The mission (‘To make you a better leader’)
• The goals (‘Turn X people into better leaders; sell X copies of this book’)

The vision is a general thought that is the foundation for what you do. For Microsoft it was ‘a computer on every desk’. The mission, meanwhile, is what you will do for the customer, like Google’s ‘organising the world’s information’. The goal is the way you capture your ambitions in numbers. There is not an absolute rule for this, of course, but I have seen how this simple structure works. Vision, mission and goals can serve as a practical way to explain what you do. The mission has also been called a ‘mantra’.

Or you can just describe it: ‘This app lets you listen to all the music in the world on your mobile phone.’ Either way, to make your idea fly, you have to be able to communicate it in a way so others understand it and the value it brings.

#086 Here To Stay (HTS)

Show competitors that you will not move.

It was my Israeli mentor who taught me that your job as a leader is to show the competition that you are here to stay. New ideas, like new businesses, will sometimes provoke aggressive reactions from competitors. In one case, my company was suddenly heavily attacked by a competitor that seemed to want to kill us. The company supplied us with the tracking technology that is necessary to measure performance of online marketing, which in turn was the foundation for the performance-based pricing model of the business. We realized that our competitor (which was also our long-term supplier that we had trusted) was going to shut down the service at the latest possible time, according to the contract, leaving us with no time to find another solution. If this happened, it would hurt us badly.

I was surprised by the aggressive tactics and turned to my board to discuss the issue. Eventually I got in touch with a mentor to get his view on the challenge.

My first reaction was an impulse to fight back, but I learned that the right thing to do (in this case anyway) was simply to show that we were there to stay. Competition is a fact of life. Your job is to survive and make sure you don’t let the competition get you. When the competition realizes that you and your company are indeed here to stay, they will start to cooperate. And that is exactly what happened in the case of my company.

We accordingly implemented another solution with much effort, assuming that our competitor/supplier would act to do as much harm as possible. When they indeed terminated the contract in a very bad way, we already had a new solution in place and carried on. We showed that we were there to stay. And then they started to cooperate, the aggressive CEO of the competitor was fired, the fight stopped and we eventually entered into a new agreement instead.

The pattern has often been the same in my various companies. Existing players in the industry, with nothing to gain and everything to lose from your success will try to stop you. And if you are going to fail, make sure it’s you who decides when and how – not the competition.

An idea can start out being worthless (because it has not yet started to add up the numbers), turn valuable when it proves to be successful and then eventually die when it is replaced by something better (pushed out by an aggressive competitor). It is the circle of market capitalism’s ‘creative destruction’, popularized by economist Joseph Schumpeter. On this ever-spinning carousel, once you have launched a new idea, your job is to show that you are here to stay.