Take It and Make It Your Own – How to Steal a Business Idea and Make It Flourish

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.

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Stratagems #4 and #5: Surprise, deception and deceit (Sun Tzu Series)

This is fourth installment of my Sun Tzu Stratagems series.

Boy, do these stratagems ever get a lot of love from Sun Tzu. Where to start, right? The Art of War is full of strategies and insights that include elements of surprise, deception and deceit. From doing battle and planning a siege to maneuvering armies, surprise and deception appear everywhere in Sun Tzu’s thinking.

We’ll look into some of the insights from Sun Tzu and visit how Japanese automakers played hardball with the Big Three automakers of Detroit.

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Stratagem #2: Foreknowledge (Sun Tzu Series)

This is second post in my Sun Tzu Stratagems series.
Stratagem #2: Foreknowledge
In the last post, I talked about shaping the opponent and acting according to the enemy. One of the core components of this principle is foreknowledge – foresight and intelligence that helps us to better orient to the situation, environment and the opponent.
Sun Tzu [...]

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Stratagem #1: According to the enemy (Sun Tzu Series)

This is the first post in my Sun Tzu Stratagems series.
Stratagem #1: According to the enemy
As I noted in the prefacing post of this series, John Boyd was heavily influenced by Eastern cultures, especially classical Taoism and Zen. In Chinese philosophy, there’s well-known concept of yin yang and it is used to describe how [...]

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Sun Tzu’s Stratagems

Recently I’ve started researching Frans P.B. Osinga’s excellent book Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd. John Boyd was a USAF fighter pilot and military strategist, whose theories have been highly influential in the military and in business, although very few people (seem to) have heard about Boyd. I’ll be writing a [...]

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