Uncontested markets

Between the pessimistic reality and the wishful utopia, there’s a thin layer through which we can walk: uncontested markets, stressed ideas, different ways of looking at the industry, extending the box, breaking boundaries… a reconstructive approach.

After Schumpeter argued that innovation can happen through the creativity of entrepreneurs, and after the new growth theory added that this innovation could be replicated through the understanding of its patterns, did the reconstructive approach clarified what was the approximate meaning of this recipe, saying that the deployment of this knowledge and ideas could make the company grow from inside, with the assets the they already have.

Writing this down in clear words would mean to say that you can tackle the market not only defining your strategy through the environment determinism, trying to kill the others and survive yourself, but also flying higher, extending the box and look for a playground outside the war arena: the uncontested markets.

It sounds both classical and easy to say it, but actually is a matter of fighting against a natural instinct of survival where we were taught to kill the other to survive, while actually we can also run, hide, jump, skip, dodge… AVOID.

Bringing the three factors into the game –cost reduction, differentiation (value) and buyer price- we could either choose between cost reduction or differentiation as your mean to achieve performance or combine them together. Most of the times, the differentiator factor would bring a higher cost associated to it, and the reduction of cost is prone to impact the value provided to those who pay, and the very end, the differentiator will be affected. So, it’s also possible to combine them together and pursue the innovation of value: optimize the cost structure and increase the value provided to the buyer.

Coming to the aforementioned reconstructive ideas, it’s worth to mention that the idea of an approach and mix of theories allow us to see that there’s a method to aim our strategy towards this combined objective. Yes… there’s no need to keep adding tools to the box to teach us how to compete in the market (frameworks, tools, analytics, historical data… just to mention some of them), but there’s not too much information around to detect and define how a strategy could be directed towards a combined approach that help us swimming into an uncontested market space.

This framework will be discuss in the next posts, but just as introduction… start working on the following conversions: forget about competitors –think on alternatives-, don’t think about customer… think about buyers. This word wide the concept and includes potential customers as well.

Hiring: Gut feeling VS Technique

Noises coming from the stomach can play us a bad move when the time to choose the correct candidate comes. It’s for sure that a role has to play, but we have to be careful and not let ourselves be lead only by the “belly”.

It’s also truth that 2 and 2 doesn’t make 4, and that nobody has the secret recipe to mix the correct members that will be part of our company. Not a small detail if you’re asking yourself what do you have to pay attention to while pointing at the people that will help you growing… the ingredients.

But it’s for sure, that interviewing and recruiting it not a 21st century’s concern. People have already thought about the two previous paragraphs already and several ideas, correctly combined with something I consider is a skill, help managers choosing the “most” correct people at the correct time.

Leaving aside the creativity and capability to take possibilities out of the blue that psychologist have, and to bomb 100 questions per second to the seating victim to come up with an endless papyrus that will tell you a ratio, percentage and quantification of each skill like you were measuring the amount of salt in water with a chemical reactor, there’s still normal people : ) that wants to find the equilibrium between “how to listen noises coming from my stomach” and “how to interpret the answers to which questions”.

It’s a matter of fact that there’s no secret to decode the path to success on an screening and interviewing process that will lead us to the “perfect” candidate, but we can rely on many techniques and guide lines that, at least, will help us reducing the risk of choosing those who are not for the position and, going deeper, “the most accurate one”.  Of course, non of these trends and schools won’t require a “pinch of personal taste”.

We need to know what do we want, to start thinking about “how do we fill that need”. Aiming to a target and start walking towards use to help: defining what we call the Person (or Job) Specifications and having a very clear picture of the job we are seeking candidates for, through a Job Description, we just have to design the interview based on those questions whose answers are going to shed the information we are looking for.

A Job Specification could be like this:

	Essential	Desirable
Education
Experience
General and Technical Skills
Other Attributes

The document coming out of this table, should be considered as an organization asset and may have as many forms as ideas the interviewers have. The key point that cannot be missing, is the possibility of knowing from it, what’s the complete profile and required skills set of the person we are looking for.

Always avoiding poor questions, we should be able to ask those which are going to let us know what’s the matching level between whom we have seating in front of us and the ideal model we had already defined. Which questions and how to interpret them is a whole different story (post).