Tech Success as Easy as ABC
"I think the fundamentals of how businesses get built and compete with one another haven't changed. In fact, rather than overcomplicating or starting from scratch, one can make sense of today's tech market dynamics and determine the right strategy by following simple logic based on old-fashioned fundamentals.
THREE STEPS. Over the years, I've used a framework articulated by two longtime colleagues, Rich Tong and John Zagula, and found it very effective. Tong and Zagula have captured this framework in their new book, The Marketing Playbook: Five Battled-Tested Plays for Capturing and Keeping the Lead in Any Market. It's based on years of personal and collective experience across a multitude of changes in both technology and business. I will borrow liberally from its 'playing field' concept here.
The concept involves understanding today's tech market via a simple analysis. And I mean simple. It has only three parts:
A: The way things are.
B: The way things could be.
C: What needs to happen, or the gap you need to cross, to get there.
Businesspeople often neglect to do their ABCs -- or to do them often enough to keep current. That's hardly surprising, given how cluttered and complex the playing field seems nowadays. Yet a quick ABC analysis can save a lot of wasted effort and help zero in on the right strategy. "
From this businessweek.com article by Brad Silverberg, a founder of Ignition Partners, a venture-capital firm based in Seattle.
