To Know Your Enemy, Become Your Enemy

Why do new products fail? Because any breakthrough innovation has a lot of enemies, both internal and external.

Make it a habit to take another’s point of view.

• If you were your target customer group, how would your disruptive offering seem to them? What they may dislike or be suspicious of? What existing ties may cause their strong resistance to change? What could make them abandon their old habits and switch to your product?

• If you were your multi-faced and multi-faceted competitor, how would you try to kill your innovation? Would you target the team, the partners, the market, or all of them? How could you outsmart the competitors, anticipate their attacks and prevent or solve problems created by them? How could you turn these problems to opportunities?  >>>

• If you were the Resistance To Change, what barriers would you erect inside and around your project? How could you overcome these barriers?

• If you were the Bad Luck, what failures would you cause in your project, technology, organization, processes, partnerships or customer acquisition approaches? How could you reduce these risks or turn these failures into opportunities?  >>>

Win First, and then Go To War

Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War, believed that victory is won long before the confrontation and insisted that a skilled warrior can observe, calculate and outwit the adversary without ever engaging in a battle. ‘Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win,’ he said. This philosophy works in any competitive environment where people, or companies find themselves contesting with one another for a specific goal.  >>>

Advices by Sun Tzu

Know your enemy and know yourself – your victory will be painless.
Know the weather and the field – your victory will be complete.

Carefully compare the opposing army with your own, so that you may know where strength is superabundant and where it is deficient.

You can deter your potential enemy by using his weaknesses against him.

Attack him when he is unprepared. Leave when he least expects it... More