In many ways, we might be right to ignore competition. Keeping our eye on the other guy tends to keep our focus on our “in common” activities. That tends to “sameness” that promotes commoditization and margin erosion in our similar offerings. By contrast if we focus on the “jobs-to-be-done” in our market, we will go where no one has gone before. We need to know what frustrates, scares and delights our customers. We need to be able to make their life easier and simpler. For that they will cheerfully pay us a premium. If we will live in their world, they will live in ours. So first we keep our customers happy, satisfied, by optimizing our current Performance Engine. Then second we love them by building new engines that will bring them what they’ve never had.
Building new engines, new S-Curves is critical to our growth, for without organic growth, we first atrophy and then later die. It’s all about direction. However, putting together a new performance engine is anything but easy. Chris Trimble says “Organizations are not designed for innovation. Quite the contrary, they are designed for ongoing operations”.