How It Works: Strategic Innovation
How It Works
Overview
Positional Strategy
Expansion
Strategy
Situational Strategy
Strategic
Innovation Overview
The Role of
Sympathy
Creativity From Knowledge
Rearranging Elements
Innovative Openings
Overview
 People think that competitive strategy is insensitive to the needs of others.
The opposite is true. All effective strategy is
based on sympathy. A strategist must
imagine the hopes, dreams, desires, and fears of others. Sympathy starts with selfishness. It is imagining this range and variety of desires that
allows us to accomplish our goals. Criminals lack the imagination of sympathy.
They see what others have and simply want to take it. This leads to conflict and
the unavoidable costs of conflict. Competitive sympathy is work. The fears and desires within a single human heart are complex.
Multiply its unknowns times the population of the world and you have the
boundaries of the need for creativity.
Competitive ingenuity doesn't come from daydreams. According to the
principles of classical strategy, only creativity
based on knowledge can be transformed into strategic force.
We must first know how things work and how work is done in a given area and why
it
is done that way. A great small, simple innovation to a strong working system
can conquer the world, and has many times. These relatively small changes are
what take an existing standard method and push it over the tipping point into
something great.
Using classical strategy's system of innovation, you simply
rearrange parts of the system and
see what happens. Though Sun Tzu's approach is simple and has been around
for 2,500 years, it is surprising how seldom people try it. We could all
be experimenting every day to create our own innovations, but people are
afraid of making mistakes. Part of this is training. The real creativity
of trial and error changing working systems is neither taught nor
encouraged. The result is that people never learn how to experiment
except when they play video games. This is why video games are so popular
and school is not.
Individuals, making little improvements in areas that they know, have opened
up all the huge new territory that exists
today. Every industry, every field of science, and even new governments are
created out of nothing but the human imagination. However, none of our actions
alone creates that opportunity. Opportunities are created by all our efforts
coming together. The value of innovation
is immense, but the real value of innovation is in the beauty of how it all
comes together.
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