Leverage the fringe
While all knowledge about the past of your business is at its core, all insight about its future is at the fringes. For clues about how to innovate and differentiate in a fundamental and meaningful way look at the periphery of your business. As Jack Welch said, “You’ve got to be out there on the lunatic fringe.”
Every business consists of an established core and a periphery. The established core is populated by the mainstream constituents of your business – your best and most profitable customers, your star employees, your most significant competitors. These protagonists fundamentally agree with you about the way you do business and are a source of insight for incremental improvements.
In contrast, the periphery looks at your business in a radically different way. It comprises of the extreme constituents of your business – complaining or lost customers, trouble-making employees and maverick competitors who are in fundamental dissent with you. Since these marginal players are not trapped in the same kind of status-quo thinking as the core, they are able to see the things to come more clearly. It’s the contrarians, the defectors and the rebels who can provide a window into the future.
Hardly ever was the relevance of the fringe articulated more elaborately than by Apple in its 1997 "Think Different" campaign. For those who care to (re)watch, here’s to the crazy ones:
[Reference: This article is largely based on ideas from Wayne C. Burkan, Wide-angel vision: Beat your competition by focusing on fringe competitors, lost customers, and rogue employees, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1996.]
Founder-Editor at MedicinMan.net
5 年What we traditionally and instinctively ignore becomes our blindspot and downfall. Rarely do we appreciate dissent, much less take it as an useful and actionable insight. Instead we pay to hear what we want to hear... Well articulated by Matthias Mueller, thank you...
Enabling cell & gene therapy companies to commercialize their therapies || Deloitte Strategy (Monitor)
5 年It's a very interesting perspective and if we think about it we realize all disruptions indeed start on the fringe. It's an outlier first, becomes a trend gaining momentum and ultimately disrupts the status quo. It's scary for businesses because the fringe is so hard to understand or manage. Every business focuses on voice of customer or market research but if you look at the case of apple, market research is worthless for the customer does not know he will buy an all touch phone if all he has seen are old feature phones. Thus conventional thinking goes out of the window and progress depends on the person in charge of decisioning agreeing to nextgen products. Which in apple could work with Steve jobs as a CEO but fail if the CEO is a status quo person
Strategist & Innovation Driver | Non Executive Board Member | Investor | C-Level experience | People Connector
5 年I like the perspective and the video!