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Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets

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Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets

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Highlights & Notes

The most exciting companies create. They give us new ways of living, thinking, or doing business, many times solving a problem we didn’t know we had—or a problem we didn’t pay attention to because we never thought there was another way.

They don’t sell us better. The most exciting companies sell us different.

They replace our current point of view on the world with a new point of view. They make what came before seem outdated, clunky, inefficient, costly, or painful.

Legendary companies create new categories that generate a gravitational pull on the market. Customers rush to a new category because it makes sense to them. In some cases, people leave an old category behind, and their departure sucks the life out of it. In that way, sure, new categories disrupt old categories. But for the smartest pirates, dreamers, and innovators on the planet, disruption is never the goal. Creation is the goal.

Category kings take it upon themselves to design a great product, a great company, and a great category at the same time.

“Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.”

“All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”

Like it or not, there is increasingly no middle class in business. The wealth goes to the kings. A second-place prince—such as Lyft or Samsung—can get a tidy share of the economics.

In short, any time—up or down or middling—is a good time to get smarter instead of hoping to get luckier.

Category design involves creating a great product (along with its experience), a great company, and a great category at the same time. It is a broad, deep discipline that impacts every part of a company and its leadership team.

The first inventor is an innovator to be thanked. The first to define and develop a category is a category king to be followed.

A company that best frames a problem is the company that often comes to define and take the category. Put another way: winning companies today market the problem, not just the solution.

Once the public understands the problem, people latch on to the most popular solution. Given all of the product and service choices people must make, it can get too burdensome to research every offering. So we pick the leader.

The perceived best takes almost all of the market share; second best manages to hold on to enough to keep going; and the rest get pretty much nothing.

“History shows that the first brand into the brain gets twice the long-term market share of the No. 2 brand and twice again as much as the No. 3 brand,” they wrote. “And the relationships are not easily changed.”

Once a king emerges customers believe it’s the best, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

9 As a result, the people who already own iPads make the people thinking about buying iPads feel safer about the decision.

It turns out we want to buy from category kings because our brains feel safe and happy when we do.

Simple consumer categories catch hold on the earlier side; complex enterprise categories take longer. But the absolutely essential point: It always takes time to define a category, develop it, and change the way we see a problem and its solution. And that time is measured in years.

What does all this mean for a CEO, founder, or category creator of any kind? Your number one job is to change the way people think. Your product, your company culture, your marketing—everything has to be aligned with transforming the way potential customers think. If you change the way they think, they will change their buying behavior. More important, if you are the company that changes the way people think, people will see your company as the category king, and you will win the majority of the customers. That’s why category is the new strategy.

This is why a category-based strategy requires the design of a great product, a great company, and a great category at roughly the same time.

Product design is the purposeful building of a product and experience that solves the problem the market needs solved. The goal is what is traditionally called a great product/market fit—in other words, a great product/category fit.

Company design is the purposeful creation of a business model and an organization with a culture and point of view that fits with the category. The goal is a great company/category fit.

Category design is the mindful creation and development of a new market category, designed so the category will pull in customers who will then make the company its king. In marketing terms it’s “the air wars.” It’s about winning the war for popular opinion, teaching the world to abandon the old and embrace the new. Category design builds the profile of the space while drawing attention to the company creating it.

Conventional wisdom says Google won simply because it built a better search engine. But it won because it also designed a new category and designed its company to fit that category.

A lesson here is that a category needs a king. New categories benefit from a near monopoly. When we don’t yet know where a category is going or what it can become, we really want a king to take charge, set the rules, and define the category. We really want a king to step up and give us a clear choice that we can commit to. A category stalls when that doesn’t happen.

Over time, monopolies tend to get lazy and greedy. But in the category-building stage, a strong king makes all the difference.

And category design combined with company design and product design is the way to change how people think, and so change their buying behavior.

Category design is the discipline of creating and developing a new market category, and conditioning the market so it will demand your solution and crown your company as its king.

•      Category design is about creating a powerful and provocative story that causes customers or users to make a choice. The story evokes something different from what came before, not just better.

But here’s the key: if you’re creating a new category, you can make the kind of weather you want to live in. If you move into someone else’s category, you certainly can’t do much about the conditions around your company. If you open up a new category or define the rules for an emerging one, you get to design the whole space the way you want it.

Defining the problem is the start of a journey, and it has to ring true to everyone in the company’s orbit—customers, employees, investors, outside developers, partners, bloggers, and journalists. Everyone starts at from. You have to make sure they get to your to.

Of course, Salesforce then had to deliver. It had to actually build the technology to adequately solve the problem. But when the category demands a product, the product doesn’t have to be perfect right from the get-go. Once the cloud-based sales-force automation category revealed the problem, the market demanded any viable solution. Since Salesforce set up the problem and defined its parameters, it stood at the beginning as the only viable solution. The market looked at Salesforce and said, Give us what you’ve got! Now, dammit!

The company that defines the space is best positioned to dominate it.

This is what we mean by courage. It is the CEO’s job to have that courage, and to infuse the rest of the organization with courage.

1.   Can you explain to me like a five-year-old what problem you’re trying to solve?   2.   If your company solves this problem perfectly, what category are you in?   3.   If you win 85 percent of that category, what’s the size of your category potential?

A market insight involves seeing a “missing” in the world at large and believing that technology can be built to solve it.

A technology insight usually comes from a scientist or engineer. The “missing” is entirely about the technology itself. An inventor sees a way to create something that’s never before existed, often hoping that a worthwhile problem can be found that the invention will solve.

In the end, a market or technology insight only matters if it leads to good answers to Dave’s Three Questions. Can you explain what problem you’re trying to solve? To create a category, that problem needs to be one that people didn’t realize they had or didn’t realize they could solve. If your company solves this problem perfectly, what category are you in? It needs to be a category that doesn’t exist and that you have the ability to create. It must be nonconsensus or you are by default a follower. If you win 85 percent of that category, what’s the size of your category potential? The answer tells the world how big your company can become and how much your company will matter.

The process of category design starts with discovery—looking for those critical insights with the team through a series of conversations, interviews, whiteboarding sessions, or drinks. That insight is always there, but sometimes it is buried under heaps of day-to-day minutiae and can take weeks to unearth. Sometimes it is sitting on the surface. The trick is to spot it, listen for it, and push it around to make sure you really know it when you see it. This becomes the first phase of real category design, converting insight into a plan for a worthy category, a compelling story, and a course of action for conditioning the market to see the world the way you do.

Vision mission: What was the original market or technology insight that led you to create this company? Customers: Who do you envision buying this product or service? Who will use it? Problem statement: What’s the problem you think you can solve for your potential customers? Use cases: What are the specific ways people will use this product or service to solve their problem? Product/solution: Give a detailed explanation of the technology behind the solution—what does it do now, and what else is it capable of doing? Ecosystem: In many cases there are other companies involved in solving the problem or adding additional value. These companies form an ecosystem around the problem and solution. What are all the companies and where in the ecosystem are the control points where one company has leverage? Competition: Who else is trying to solve this problem—or, if no one else sees the problem yet, who might jump in to compete with you to solve the problem once you identify it? Business model: How will your product or service change business for your customers? Will it increase their return on investment or reduce costs in a significant way? Or does it allow them to do something that couldn’t have been done with prior technology, creating huge value? Sales and go-to-market: Enterprise companies should articulate how the product or solution will make its way to the market. Through a sales force? Through distribution partners? Both? For a consumer company, how will users find out about your solution? From app stores? Search? Viral adoption? Growth hacking techniques? Advertising? PR? Organization: How is the company organized? Who are the major influencers on the company? How are decisions made? What kind of culture will work? Funding strategy: What’s the next funding event? A private financing? An IPO? How much runway does the company have before it needs more money and what kind of funding is in place to execute against the category strategy?

The right thinking leads to a name that will help design and dominate a new large space. The name will inform the strategy of the company, not the other way around. A category name should describe the nature of the problem being solved. For companies aimed at the enterprise, the name should speak to the business function where the problem lives. Ideally, the category name will become a line item in every company’s budget. Consumer-facing companies need a category name that’s direct and descriptive, like “social network” or “on-demand transportation.”

Once a company discovers its category, it must fully embrace the category internally. The category has to become part of the very fabric of the company. The CEO at this stage transforms into the chief category officer, taking on the task of convincing management and employees to buy in. Workshops, dinners, or any kind of session that stirs discussion about the category and how to design it becomes critical.

Discovering the category is hard to get right, and costly to get wrong.

WHO ARE THE CUSTOMERS? Identify the kinds of people you’re addressing now and the kinds of people you really want to address. Talk about who they are, what they do, and why they might want your shit.

WHAT’S THE PROBLEM THEY DON’T YET KNOW THEY HAVE OR CAN’T YET SOLVE? This starts requiring some imagination. Presumably, if you’ve come this far, you’re convinced you have some kind of market or technology insight—so you see something potential customers don’t yet see. How do you frame your insight from the customer’s point of view? What would make them have the same aha you had? WHAT ARE THE FROM/TOS? Once you identify the problem, what’s the solution? What’s the journey customers need to take to reject an old way of doing things and embrace your new way of doing things? WHAT’S THE NEW “THING”? If those are the from/tos, then what would be the new thing that every person or company has to have to make that journey? Origami identified “marketing signals.” Airbnb identified “community-driven hospitality.” Les Paul identified “electric guitar.” What’s your new thing that never existed before but that your customers will feel they must have?

We package the discussions and information gained during the workshop into a category design document. The document addresses the following topics: Category Landscape—what the category you create would look like and where it fits. Category Ecosystem—the customers, competitors, developers, suppliers, analysts, media, and everyone else who would plug into the category. Frotos—the from/to journey you want customers to take. Category Name and Description—the final version. The Case for the New Category—write out why the category should exist and what the world will look like if the company creates and dominates the category. Early Draft Game Plan—a sketch of how the company can create and dominate the category.

That’s why category designers tell a story. We call that story a point of view, or POV. After you come up with an aha of an initial market or technology insight, and after you discover and define the right category, you have to craft the story about the category that you’ll tell. You need a powerful POV.

A POV tells the world you’re a company on a mission, not a missionary company looking to make money any way it can. It frames the new problem that your category identifies, and sets you up as the answer. When someone can articulate your problem, you believe that person must have the solution.

A POV conditions the market to accept and embrace the company’s vision and have the same aha the founders experienced. The story leads potential customers on their from/to journey, so they understand both what is missing and why your company can fix that problem. A POV has to shift people’s minds so they reject an old way of thinking and come to believe in something new. It has to reach people on an emotional level. No one remembers what you say—but they remember how you made them feel. That feeling can be excitement about something that’s coming, or fear of missing out. Some of the best POVs make people think: “Oh fuck, I don’t have one of those! I have to get one of those!” To reach people’s emotions, a POV has to sound the way people talk. It has to be simple, direct, visceral. Language matters! Nobody in the history of the human race has ever been moved to joy or tears by a train wreck of lazy business babble. The story about your business is more important than the facts about your business. Sound outrageous? Maybe, but the brain research proves it’s true. People relate to and remember stories—even people who make a living analyzing facts.

A POV tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end. It tells the world why this category and the company creating it are different. Different sticks. Different forces a choice between what was and what can be. A POV built around better is about comparing your offering to the thing customers already know.

Better reinforces the power of the category king you’re trying to beat (who by definition is not you). If customers think two companies are tied in the better wars, they just choose the category king—or the lowest price if there’s no clear king. A great POV takes you outside the better wars and sets you in a different space all your own.

A well-executed POV gives the company an identity and culture. It becomes the invisible hand that guides your priorities. It results in the right kinds of employees joining the company, the right kinds of investors funding it, and the right ecosystem building out around it—and, by the way, repels those you don’t want hanging around. Ultimately, the POV steers the company’s strategy. A powerful POV guides every decision the leadership team makes and every initiative it pursues. The POV helps employees intuitively feel how they should perform their jobs so they align with the company’s strategy. Most great, enduring companies have a POV imprinted on their DNA.

“A company can’t own its facts,” Benioff recalled about those decisions. “What a company can own, however, is a personality.” And that personality drives action. “We act the way people expect us to, which has made them feel connected to us,” Benioff wrote. “It’s an emotional attachment, and that’s an asset that cannot be stolen by any competitor.”4 To put an exclamation point on that, years later—in 2015—when the state of Indiana passed legislation seen as discriminating against the gay population, Benioff took a highly publicized stand and pulled Salesforce out of the state. The move seemed authentic and not a stunt because it was authentic. It fit with Salesforce’s long-held POV on the world, and in the end boosted Salesforce’s reputation in the tech industry.

When companies have a strong POV, their actions always seem inevitable.

An entrepreneur might have a brilliant vision that’s exactly right for a decade from now. If that entrepreneur expresses a decade-out POV today, it might get press attention, but it might not feel right to customers. A great POV pushes people just enough into the future, while giving the world a view toward what lies beyond. If the POV sits too much in the present, then at best it’s not very exciting, and at worst it makes you seem like a me-too copycat. Cast the POV too far forward ahead of the technology and your team can struggle to make a product that lives up to the promise, while your external audience either isn’t ready for your vision or flat-out doesn’t believe it.

When we tackle this step of expressing the POV, we approach it as if we are creating a movie trailer for the category story. It has to tell the story at a simple gut level. In as few words as possible, it should lay out the problem and its ramifications, describe a vision for the category, sketch a blueprint for how to build the category, and paint a picture of potential outcomes. The strategic use of language matters. A demarcation point in language creates a demarcation point in thinking, which creates a demarcation point in behavior … which creates a demarcation point in spending. In order to charge five dollars for a coffee and convince people to wait in a ten-minute line to get it, Starbucks had to call it something different—like a triple grande non-fat latte.

If the world accepts the story and the problem the way Origami laid it out, Origami will always be at an advantage—because the story and problem are tailored to Origami. When all of this works the way it’s supposed to work, a category is born, and a probable category king is already on its way to claiming its crown.

The way you use language recasts thinking, and when you recast thinking, you recast action.

A strong POV tells the engineers, product managers, writers, architects, designers, and other creators what to build—and, more important, what not to build. Every product and feature needs to align with the POV and further the company’s mission.

Some cranky business butt-head might hear about POV and grumble that it’s the same thing as stuff like branding and positioning. But POV is an articulation of strategy, and so POV informs branding and positioning. POV first is the company’s identity, looking inward. Once that identity is embraced internally, then the company can turn to the public and confidently say, this is who we are and why we matter.

In the end, point of view is an articulation of strategy. If you know and internalize a POV, you have your strategy—that grand overarching plan for creating a category, a company, and a product that matter. But getting to that POV takes a deep mining of the company’s soul. The work can take time, and it’s hard. But we promise you, it’s worth

The POV needs to express different, not better. So what is that difference? What are all the things that are different about this company and product? Which ones will strike a chord with which audiences? What is the different that could ultimately give the company its identity?

You have to know how to clearly state the problem you’re solving before you can describe your solution.

Remember what we said earlier: whoever frames the problem best has the best chance of winning the category. Understanding the customer’s problem lets loose oxytocin in their brains, opening them up to your way of thinking. So figure out your category’s problem, and find a way to say it in a way that touches people’s emotions.

In a limited number of powerful words, the POV should lay out the problem and its ramifications, describe a vision for the category, sketch a blueprint for how to build the category, and paint a picture of potential outcomes.

We’re constantly amazed how many companies market a so-called solution in the absence of a problem.

Write the POV as a short document or series of slides. It must be able to be quickly read or presented—perhaps taking no more than ten minutes to absorb. Keep in mind that the Declaration of Independence, one of the most enduring and successful POV documents in history, contains 1,337 words.

Train your people in orientation meetings. Certify them. Make it religion. Make it conditional for employment. One very effective training technique is having every new employee stand in front of the entire company and recite the POV. Make it a contest and reward the best presenters. Make it fun and part of your culture. Invite your people to craft videos and presentations on why the POV matters. Enlist them and your teams will reward you with enthusiasm. Also, the Zeds will flee the building.

Instead of working on true north, engineers increasingly find themselves working on customer requests, and customers generally ask for something better, not different.

Category kings don’t ignore everything gravity pulls them toward, but they have to find a magical line between giving the market just enough of what it’s asking for and leading on to a new place—to a new category of the future.

The blueprint is a design for how the product or service will work going forward. It should tell customers what they can expect the category king to deliver.

But a category blueprint can and should be an external document. It is meant to show people what to expect over time from the category. It’s not a promise of what the company will deliver, but a vision of a category that the company wants to bring into existence.

The category blueprint often leads to an “oh shit!” moment inside a company. The blueprint paints a picture of what your product needs to become, and then you look back at the current product and suddenly see what’s missing, or misrepresented, or packaged wrongly. So you have to sit down and think about the current product through the lens of the blueprint. Maybe you need to pull out features that were buried inside the overall product and give those pieces new names. Maybe you need to split the product into pieces and re-label and re-price them, or put pieces together in a new way. Basically, this exercise means taking your product apart, giving the pieces labels that synch with the blueprint, and putting it all back together so it makes sense for the category you’re designing.

That’s why automobile dealers no longer sell used cars. They sell pre-owned vehicles. It was hard for Congress to vote against something called “the PATRIOT Act.” If you want the world to value your product innovations, give them innovator names that tie back to your category design.

Identify who the customers are. And then think through the elements of what makes a great new category. For instance, remember that a new category solves a problem in a new way—so what is that problem and how will you solve it? What is that from/to journey you want to take users through? What’s the ultimate benefit? Again, different people around the company have probably already thought about a lot of this. Pull that thinking out of wherever you might find it: sales decks, persona studies, segmentation analysis, marketing work, and so on. The more the use cases can be specific and detailed, the easier it will be for marketing and sales to be effective. Absent use cases, you’re doing the equivalent of sending your team out hunting and only telling them they have to come back with food. They won’t know where to go or what weapon to take along. Things get easier if they know they’re specifically hunting pheasant. Get crisp and get real.

The blueprint defines the category architecture, the taxonomy describes your product and offer as it relates to the category, and the use cases define the category’s customers and pain points. The remaining piece involves the outside players who will be involved in the development of the category. We call this the category ecosystem, and mapping it out completes your understanding of how to develop and dominate your new category.

Every healthy category has a healthy ecosystem around it. The players include third-party developers, consultants who help companies adopt your product, stores that carry a consumer product, analysts, data or content providers, partners of all stripes, and even competitors.

No company exists in a vacuum. All are surrounded by an ecosystem. A vibrant ecosystem, in fact, needs its category king. If the king falters, the ecosystem can actually help prop it up. The ecosystem fills in the spaces of the category. The combined efforts of the ecosystem act like a multiplier for the category king. But a category king defines and exerts control over its ecosystem, so everyone plays by the king’s rules. That means that competitors in the category wind up having to play by the king’s rules, too—a clear advantage for the king. Any ecosystem has control points—places where one entity can exert enormous control. Apple’s iTunes serves as a control point for all the media flowing into iPods, iPhones, and iPads. Wal-Mart became a massive control point for hard retail goods flowing to Americans. Bloomberg made itself a choke point for information getting to Wall Street. Control points are a great place to collect tolls and make a ton of money. Hopefully, in designing your category, you own a control point.

Also expect some devotees of Agile and Extreme programming to fight back. They will say that their methods are proof a blueprint cannot be defined or delivered. Agile and Extreme are high-speed, short-burst work processes built around quickly designing good-enough products by the end of each work sprint. That often leads to comments like, “We don’t plan out six months let alone eighteen months.” But category design is a balance between speed and vision. In today’s environment, any company can do speed. Category kings harness speed for a larger cause.

“That company understands my problem better than any other, and must have the solution.”

That’s the simple argument for a lightning strike. You’ve got to do something to cut through the noise and get into people’s brains.

Not all product launches are lightning strikes and not all strikes have to include product launches. Consider your audience, the calendar, and your product schedule, and see what makes sense.

There are two requirements. The first is that the content has to be big, bold, and different enough to cut through the noise and reach the brains of the target audience. That could mean engaging a superstar speaker like Bill Clinton or going onstage with the president of El Salvador. It could mean saying something no one has heard before (like a company saying it won’t be evil). It could mean demonstrating a product that takes people’s breath away (an iPhone). If there’s any debate, lean toward playing bigger and bolder. Remember that this is lightning. You’re not hedging your budget so you can spread marketing resources all over like peanut better. You’re pumping everything you’ve got into this one bolt from the heavens.

The second requirement for content is that it has to evangelize the category problem first and your product or service second. Use the strike to identify the problem that can be solved, and then help your audience come to the same aha you had about how to solve it. Begin taking them on a from/to journey—from what they know now, to how things can be if they adopt your solution. If you lead with your solution and the audience doesn’t yet understand the problem, whatever you say will bounce off their brains and land with a clunk on the floor. The problem is the key that unlocks your target audience’s minds.

A successful lightning strike needs the equivalent of both an air war and a ground war. Air wars are about perception and changing people’s minds. But that stalls if the ground troops aren’t ready to come in behind the air cover and demonstrate working products and close deals.

In our advisory practice, we call these teasing events thunderclaps.12 A well-timed, intriguing thunderclap can help make the lightning strike effective.

That’s what we call a hijack. To increase the odds of becoming a category king, smart companies don’t waste time and money on pointless vanilla, overly polite public relations. They go for PR that is opportunistic and edgy. And one good way for an upstart to leverage PR is to hijack some bigger company’s PR or news.

A lightning strike is, really, a beginning—the opening salvo in defining, developing, and dominating a new category. Once the strike is over, a company has to relentlessly execute on its category strategy, over and over again, for years.

The follow-up strikes and hijacks can’t just be marketing events; they have to be company events. The messages need substance behind them, so the company must mobilize continuously, building the muscles that back up the words. All in all, this becomes an ongoing exercise in total execution.

They secured a position as a category king, then put a flywheel in motion that helped them continuously grow their category potential, all the while guided by a powerful point of view.

A company’s value is rooted in its category. First comes category potential. Investors need to believe that a company is in a category with great untapped potential, and if so, the investors will pay for access to that category.

When category potential, position in the category, and execution all come together in investors’ minds, they see the future and want a piece of it.

The more people think a company is a category king, the more people’s brains are made happy buying and using products from the king.

A flywheel can be the most powerful force in business. Get it started by employing category design. Guide it with a POV. Power it with lightning strikes and mobilizations. Grow it by expanding the category potential. Do all of that, and a company will increase its odds of becoming not just a category king, but a legendary category king that alters everyday life and work.

A company’s value is based on its category potential, its position in the category, and its execution.

George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The Microsoft story brings us around to something we often say: there comes a time when every CEO of a category king realizes that her current position is the biggest inhibitor to growth. That moment arrives when she figures out that the category she dominates will soon run out of potential.

To continue to grow with alacrity, the category king then has to design and build a new category with greater category potential.

Success is a shitty teacher.

Another sign of stuck category potential is when you look up and realize you can count your potential customers.

A category is a problem to be solved in a new way, and once the public sees that problem, they can’t unsee it. There is no way to unring a bell. The market will demand a solution. If you define that category and disappoint the market for any reason—you don’t have the resources or wherewithal or whatever to become its king—then the market will look for a different king. This is why the old saw about “first-mover advantage” is mostly bullshit. The first mover has an advantage only if the first mover has the wherewithal to become king and deliver on its promises.

Earlier in the book, we pointed out the two different kinds of insights that lead to category creation. One is a technology insight, which is the invention of a new technology that needs to find a market; the other is a market insight, which identifies a new opportunity that could be met by building a new technology.

Xerox was a famous example. In the 1970s it operated one of the most legendary labs in technology history, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). It invented almost everything that Apple later put into its first Macintosh computer, including the revolutionary graphical interface and mouse. Xerox completely missed its own technology insight and never capitalized on it. You know why? Because Xerox listened to its customers, who wanted better copiers, not something different called a personal computer. As Christensen pointed out in Innovator’s Dilemma, listening to customers leads you to constantly build better, but never to build different. And different is what creates new categories. Better leads to a faster horse; different leads to a Model T.

Well aware of Corning’s decades-long work on thinner, stronger glass, Weeks now had a market insight in one pocket and a technology insight in his other pocket. He told Jobs: If you create the problem (a smartphone category that needs a surface), we can create the solution (a new category of glass). Back at Corning, he told his lab and his team: if we create a solution (the new glass), we’ll have a problem waiting to suck it out of us (smartphones). This is an example of the advantage smart corporations can exploit: they have relationships that give them a big window on market insights, and a set of core capabilities that can create and deploy a technology insight. In this case, Jobs said, Yes, we’ll trust you to build the glass. Weeks said, Okay, we trust you to make a market for us.

A few other points from Weeks: “Listen to [customers] so that you understand what the root problem is rather than just doing the solution, because if we just do what we’re told, they wouldn’t need us, and if they didn’t need us, we wouldn’t be able to generate the kind of profitability and competitive advantage that it takes to define a category.” “Understand how important time is. It takes a long time to [invent] new materials. We build that knowledge, then the skills in our people, then we’re able to use that knowledge to attack other markets. It’s way more knowledge-efficient.” “You’ve got to make sure you’re on the creative side of creative destruction. Because if you aren’t, you’ll ultimately end as a company.”

If a big old company applies category thinking, all of what we’ve written about in this book can happen inside the fortress. Category design is not only for pirates who storm the gates—it works for pirates already inside the gates.

Successful new categories can change the flavor of the parent company.

This is one of those lessons for large enterprises: when big companies sit around discussing new products or services, one of the key tests should be whether the product or service would define a new category, or if it would be entering an existing category already dominated by a king. If big companies understood the difference, they’d more rarely spend a dime entering someone else’s category.

We particularly love Amazon’s rubric of “from customer needs to our skills” or “from our skills to new customers.”

In the blog post announcing the change to Alphabet, CEO Larry Page wrote that his cofounder “Sergey [Brin] and I are seriously in the business of starting new things.”12 So Page and Brin are decoupling managing the “as-is” business from creating “to-be” businesses.

The lesson from Alphabet is that big companies need to know the difference between harvesting and creation, and set those apart. It’s not easy. Investors tend to want one or the other. Google/Alphabet is building harvesting/creation separation into the very structure of the company.

Category creation can’t happen when management’s focus is entirely on profits and making quarterly numbers. Most big old corporations have investors who expect the company to behave like a stereotypical big old corporation, with predictable growth and nice dividends. If you’re the CEO and want to become a daring category designer, you’re going to need your shareholders’ support—or a new set of shareholders.

But better is what you do when category harvesting. Different is what you do when category designing.

you build a reputation as the go-to person to solve a particular problem, you will be much more in demand than the runner-ups.

Either way, that kind of thinking can apply to the way you find your category. Consider your skills and knowledge, and look for an unfulfilled need for it. If you don’t have the abilities to solve it, go get them—by taking courses or lessons or whatever is necessary.

Design yourself, what you can do, and your category together. Designing yourself might involve developing a personal set of beliefs and a way of conducting your life that fits with what you do and the category you address. Design the “product”—that is, your offering to the world—by developing your skills. And design the space around you so it fits your capabilities but also challenges you.

You can’t be a category king in your career by winning the activities contest. Ten years of work is not necessarily ten years of experience. Think of your career as something to be purposefully designed. Everything you do should result in another brick you can use to build your personal brand as a problem solver, or creative artist, or as the best closer in business. Don’t define yourself by activities—generate results that have a material impact on your life and use these to create and design your own category of leadership and value.

Your POV defines what type of person you are, what makes you different, and why people should care. And if you live your POV, it will attract the right people into your life, and repel the wrong people from your life.

Category kings start out as pirates, dreamers, and innovators. The truly legendary kings leave the scene as heroes.

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