Cognitive Biases, Positive Black Swan Events and Startups
Success and Cognitive Bias One thing that often strikes me about conversations regarding start-up success is the pervasiveness of the narrative fallacy and hindsight bias. We can go to Wikipedia’s entry on Taleb for a definition: Narrative fallacy: creating a...State of Customer Development Survey Raffle Winners
Hi everyone! Thank you for your participation in the survey, especially if you were kind enough to tweet about it. (While the raffle is over, if you haven’t responded, the survey is still open.) The purpose of the survey was two-fold. First, we thought it would...
State of Customer Development (Part II)
Thanks to all who have filled out the survey. I thought it would be fun to share some of the results! (Updated 12/22/09: for those interested, the survey is still open, but the raffle is over. ==> I have read Steve Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany....The State of Customer Development
When I first started blogging about Customer Development, last February, I felt like there were only a handful of people talking about it. I’m sure that’s just a matter of perception. The likes of Sean Ellis, Sean Murphy, Nivi at VentureHacks, Dave...Your Business "Driving Force"
In Andrew Chen’s recent post, “Does every startup need a Steve Jobs?”, he discusses IDEO’s “product framework for Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability.” Chen’s descriptions of business-, engineering-, and design-focused product perspectives reminded me of the work on companies’ “driving force” popularized by Michel Robert in his series of business strategy books. Understanding your “driving force” is critical to understanding what products to build and who to build them for. The driving force helps shape technology choices, importance of design, market segment, and business model as well as company culture, growth plan and exit strategy.
The basic point, is that while all companies employ technology, sell products or services, employ technology, market to specific segments and use certain distribution methods, one factor dominates (or should dominate) the others in terms of business strategy.
one component of the business is the driving force of the strategy — the company’s so-called DNA. This driving force, in turn, greatly determines the array of products, customers, industry segments, and geographic markets that management chooses to emphasize more or emphasize less
Here is a subset of driving forces Robert discusses:
