I have recently often picked up the book on hardball business strategies as I’ve researched for my Sun Tzu series. In the latest stratagem piece I talked about two hardball strategies. In the book sandwiched (literally) between them was another interesting hardball strategy, Take It and Make It Your Own.

Take It and Make It Your Own

Take It and Make It Your Own means that you recognize the value of an existing idea, practice or business model and make it your own, improve and strengthen the concept and run with it. If you are a hardball player, you are always on the lookout for ideas that you can adopt or adapt to your own business.

This means that you are an avid student of trade practices, pricing schemes, technologies, marketing and selling methods, customer service programs and other facets of business that are better than your own not just in your own industry and among competitors, but across industries and markets. Often new radical business innovations in a particular market are actually imported and adapted from another industry where they have been staple practice for years or even decades.

Meanwhile in the real world, Kisko Labs has gotten involved in two business development projects where we would be playing our own version of this hardball strategy with existing players in the market should the projects go forward as anticipated and planned. Here’s a couple of tips from the book and a few personal thoughts how to adapt an idea to your business and make it flourish.

Practices and pitfalls

Stalk and Lachenauer offer four points in their book on how to go about adapting an idea from a competitor of a company in a different industry.

Copy only when it will enable you to gain leadership^[1]
If you go ahead and adapt an idea, a practice or a business model from your competition, you must use the borrowed idea to become a leader in the market, especially when compared to the competitor from whom you adapted the idea. You need to gain a distinctive competitive advantage from the idea to become the new number one or you need to redefine the market and your position in it in a way that you’ll be seen as the top dog. It’s not worth copying if all you get is a second or third place and you are seen as a knock-off who couldn’t even get it right.

Borrow when it will facilitate the indirect attack^[2]
Try to avoid direct competition with the company you adapted the idea from. Instead, aim for an indirect attack so that you are not necessarily seen as a major threat to your competitors but as another player in the market. Better yet, your competition might not think of you as a direct competitor to them and might even ignore you until it’s too late. Case in point, Ricoh and the copier market. Ricoh copied Xerox’s machine but sold them mainly to small businesses through small distributors. Xerox thought the big machines and service orientation would give them competitive advantage, but when the leases on Xerox’s machines ended, they lost a lot of business to Ricoh.

Copy completely, commit fully^[3]
The most common way to go astray is to copy an idea or a model incompletely and not fully commit to it. Southwest Airlines is often imitated but never truly successfully replicated. Many airlines have tried to answer to Southwest’s winning formula but have failed miserably because they have adapted the face of Southwest but failed to transplant the heart of its business model.

Make the copy your own^[4]
Hardball competitors seize on a good idea when they see one and then they add something to the model – improve, adapt or interpret it. It is possibly to completely copy a successful model and sprinkle your own flavor on the top to give your version its own distinct identity.

Insights from the trenches

Here are a couple of thoughts and ideas I’ve found true, valuable and inspirational when working on creating new business for ourselves at Kisko Labs and our customers, especially in the realm of adapting proven good ideas from others – the competitors in the market or players in other industries.

You need to value innovate
Introducing more-of-the-same in a different package won’t entice the market to suddenly start buying from you instead of established players. As the authors said, you have to make the copy your own and introduce distinctive characteristics to make your product or service stand out from the pack. Offer your customers a huge leap in value, and that will give rise to new markets.

Make the competition irrelevant
Value innovation helps you to redefine the market you have entered and make the competition more or less irrelevant. Redefining the market and capturing the leadership position in it will push your competitors to react and make them to respond to the new relevant market leader, you.

Use inexperience as your advantage
Being a novice or a newcomer isn’t always bad at all. In fact, it may be an advantage as the established practice and the-ways-it’s-always-been-done aren’t hindering you and won’t prevent you from doing even the radical innovations in business models or practices. Also, chances are that you won’t have the same resource, capacity, personnel or capital burden that the existing players or implementors of an idea have. This enables you to pull off game-changing innovation moves.

Jump to the next curve
Don’t get stuck battling in the same curve and ballpark as the competition. Don’t try lower the price by 5% or 10%, redefine the product or the service altogether. As Guy Kawasaki says, jump to the next curve.

Question of the day: Have you used this hardball strategy and if you have, what were your experiences and takeaways from using it? Leave the answer as a comment.

The 737 on the runway image courtesy of Creative Commons and Flickr user brentdanley

References

1. Stalk, Lachenauer, Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win, p. 82
2. Ibid., p. 83
3. Ibid., p. 83
4. Ibid., p. 84