Don't be better. Be different

The shape of things to come.

In the 1920s and 30s, most top athletes were the same shape.

There was no money in sport, not much competition, and little incentive to scour the planet looking for the perfect athlete for each discipline.

So, a volleyball player, a shot putter, a sprinter, and a high jumper, all looked similar.

Then the money came, loads of it, and competition intensified. Suddenly it was worth applying some science to calculate the perfect body type for each sport.

By the 1970s shot putters were big and beefy, but high jumpers were tall and lanky.

Alan Wells won the 100 metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics in 1980. He was squat and muscular.

Steve Ovett won the 800 metres. He was tall and lean.

It was a phenomenon known as “The Big Bang of Body Types.”

As money and competition increased, sports fragmented into more specific niches, each with precise requirements.

Why am I telling you this?

To draw a stark contrast, because exactly the opposite thing happens when money and competition happen in business. Take my hand and let’s take our specific body type?into part two where I’ll explain myself.

Death by competition

Imagine three SaaS?start ups, all doing something similar.

They all tell you they’re unique.

Then company #1 develops a slick looking dashboard. Customers love it.

Company #2 and #3 are paranoid about competing, so what do they do? They also develop a dashboard.

Company #2 develops an AI bot. They all develop an AI bot.

Company #3 goes self-service, and wanting to compete, #1 and #2 follow suit.

This continues, and gradually over time?all three companies coalesce around an increasingly similar looking product. Rather than seek points of differentiation, they become more and more alike. It’s hard to tell them apart.

That’s a dangerous place to be, because when everything else is the same, the only lever left is price.

Look what happened in the mobile market in the noughties.

Blackberry stole the show by putting email on a smartphone with?a QWERTY keyboard, so you no longer needed to press the keys four hundred times to text your Mum. People loved it.

What did Samsung do? They released the i320. A virtual clone.

Hot on their heels was Motorola with the Q, and Nokia with their E61.

The market had converged around?an identical looking product. It was almost impossible to tell the difference

This is the important bit, so take your hands out of your pockets and pay attention.

Who was the winner?

The guy who?did the opposite, that's who.

In a world where everyone was zigging, enter zagger-in-chief, Steve Jobs and the iPhone. It was about as different to Motor-sam-kia-berry as it’s possible to be. Apple cleaned up, and as far as mobile phones were concerned, Nokia and Motorola went out of business.

The moral of the story?

Competing isn’t the way to win.

The more you compete, the less competitive edge you have.

The answer isn’t to be better. It’s to be different.

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