November 06, 2007

Tide and Febreze

Febreze is a magical product. It kills smells in fabric and other things. Whether you believe it or not, its buyers do believe it. One product that hit the shelves in the not too distant past was Febreze laundry supplement (can't remember the real name). Add it to your laundry detergent and it took the smell out of clothes (perception or reality, does it really matter?). An actually pretty good product from my perspective.

Then, in a surprise move, it disappeared from the shelves. What?! Why did it go away? What happened to it? Thinking it was a momentary lapse in product on the shelves, I found that it never came back... until now! But, in a different form...

Introducing Tide with Febreze! What?? What about my standalone Febreze addition... ah! It all makes sense now.

P&G, Febreze and Tide's parent company, has essentially put the Febreze in Tide and taken it out of all my other laundry detergents. I buy whatever's cheap - Wisk, All, private label, whatever. Febreze worked well with those products. While it's a guess, maybe it worked too well.

Generalizing this strategy, whether P&G did this deliberately or not (rolls eyes), is that a feature can be a category killer. Think cup holders, think Oxi/Oxy/whatever. Because P&G owned the feature (smell reduction) of this category (laundry detergent), it could move it to its brand leader Tide exclusively.

Clever and annoying.

update as of 11/6/07

Posted by wayofgo at 09:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 19, 2006

Strategy Typology

What is the Way of Go? In a sense, GO'S RULES are a strategy typology. While it is not collectively exhaustive of all strategic rules, it does cover a lot of ground for strategic planning and attempts to be somewhat mutually exclusive. The interesting part of the Way of Go's typology, however, is that it does exhibit a symmetric structure; poles counterbalance each other:

Global vs Local

Owe vs Save

Slack vs Taut

Reverse vs Forward

Us vs Them

Lead vs Follow

Expand vs Focus

While these chapter headers don't go into great depths, if you want to know more, click on the header of this page to get the book. ;)

Posted by wayofgo at 01:10 PM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2005

Plastic Bags

I guess I work over one credit card in particular when I go shopping and what not. After time, I go to the supermarket and am asked to slide my card and it doesn't work. Grocery stores are fond of telling me that if I put a bag on my card that it will work. It's a strange bit of tewari and Reverse that I thought would make an interesting blog.

It's not the bag that does the magic. While the bag does perform an important function for a nearly stripped card, the real issue is one of distance.

Most of us, when something doesn't work, try to do things more, when we should do things less. If a foreigner doesn't speak our language, we should talk louder. No. If a credit card doesn't work in a reader, we should scan it closer to the the reader. Wrong.

I wondered about the bag trick for a while when I thought I'd best apply tewari - thinking through a problem backward (as one does in Go) - to see what I could see. What is a bag doing? It's changing the optics, but despite being a card "reader", it's not really reading anything optically. It's a magnetic strip and what the bag is doing is pushing your card away from the reader to get a better read on it.

If that's the case, do I need the bag? Turns out no. While the bag is a handy way of getting your card away from the reader and going against the usual desire to get closer, more, louder, etc. the actual thing the bag solves is distance. Moving my card away from the reader on my own, actually solves the problem. The card works. Without a magic bag!

So, the next time you've used your card too much and the stripe is down to its last legs and the check-out person says, "Sorry, you're card doesn't work" (and it's one of those annoying places where they won't enter your card), offer to try it for them. Be sure to move the card as far from the reader-side of the slide as possible, and if there's some stripe at all, it will work.

Then, feel free to pass along that you saw the solution on the Way of Go website so that they can tell others. :)

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September 14, 2004

When To Stay The Course

The description of the Way of Go lists several examples of where strategies of Go could be applied. One, "Which initiatives to continue and which to abandon" needs a bit more explanation.

In the book, you'll find the most references to this critical decision in the chapter Expand Focus. This chapter covers the dilemma between the rules "not putting all your eggs in one basket" (Expand) and Vince Lombardi's "Success demands singleness of purpose" (Focus). In this chapter, you'll read about USG's decision to stay in a number of products or exit out of them.

You play Go on a big board. Virtually six chess boards worth of places to play - 361 intersections of places to play. In that spirit, if you're going to win, you have to have at least a presence over 181 of those intersections. But, at the beginning of the game, you don't know which parts of the board will be more critical to winning than any other.

Some of the keys to staying the course or not are to pay attention to the stage of the game you're in and then to pay attention to the spectrum of rules between focus and expand. At the beginning of the game, it is generally better to expand, keep diversified, don't ditch any positions utterly. In the middle, you have to start sacrificing because uncertainty is less and you have to make tradeoffs with the opponent. In the end game, it is rare to see big exchanges in territory or to have any investments around the board that you still have the option to renew.

So it is with most anything else; for instance, college. If you're not a strict pre-med or some other vocationally-motivated college program, you're likely to not know what you want to be when you grow up, much less what topic you want to major in. So, you take a variety of classes to see what sticks. This is Expand at its best. As you leave your freshman and start your sophomore year, you get more pressure to pick a major, but with still two more years, you don't have to ditch your favorite options, but if you want to graduate in four years, you'd best have some favorites and not be in between all options, like you could be freshman year. By your junior year (again, if you want to finish or if your parents require you to finish in four), you need to have narrowed things down considerably. Moreover, your options best be close topically. By your senior year, you can dual major and maybe even triple, if you've given up on the things most college students value most - social life, other activities - but most likely, you have to focus to have kept your options open till the end. This is college majoring options ruled by stages.

Aside from stage realities, you do want to pay attention to the Expand Focus advice from the book:

- Focus when you're clear what you want to do
- Keep your options open when uncertainty is prevalent
- A move with two or more meanings is better than a similar value move with only one
- Don't be like the chicken that partly crossed the road, once you've decided to cross the road, keep going; otherwise, foul fowl

See the Expand Focus chapter for more...

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August 17, 2004

Strategic Planning Pitfalls

The key to strategic planning is understanding what it is. It is a plan. A blueprint for what to do given what you know. It is not a combination for a padlock. Unlike a padlock, you don't know if it's going to be many turns to the right, two to the left and then one to the right. It could be any which way and there might be numbers you didn't account for.

Strategic plans that say, "should the enemy do X or Y, we'll do A or B" are of the better variety. This respects that the future is unknown. Strategic plans that say, "in Q1, we'll do A; in Q2, we'll do B; in Q3, we'll do C; and, in Q4, we'll do D" are fine only in the sense of knowing what the future will be. Most organizations and people don't have this degree of certainty in their lives.

Should you find yourself in an organization (business, marriage, detente) whose future is unclear, but whose plans seem so, try to find out what happens if the conditions change. Ask if, in all instances, this is what we'll do, no matter what. If your organization still wants to hold to plan despite future uncertainties, you'll be rewarded if you guessed right...

Posted by wayofgo at 04:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 05, 2004

Applying Go to _______

Make no mistake, you cannot map Go directly to any other topic. Period. What you can say, however, is that Go points to the fundamental essences of strategy and principles in other arts, ways, and endeavors. Is it any wonder that Go has been used to inform business, politics, military, martial arts, or other fields? No. The cool part about understanding the root issues is that those root issues don't change from Go to various arts and ways (i.e., martial arts, war, business, sports, politics, and life). This is the The Way of Go's message in part.

The game of Go strips away chance, and advantage in resource, making you play a game where you and the opponent are equally matched and resourced. You win based on your better understanding of those fundamental essences. If you can win in this pure competitive landscape, you can apply that understanding when you have advantages, chance and resources in your favor.

Does being a good Go player mean you'll apply these lessons in your life? Goodness, no! There have been plenty of top players that make miserable life decisions despite understanding the principles at the highest level. Key is to take the lessons from your field, abstract them, then reapply them. Otherwise, what you have learned is subject to the confines of where you learned it.

And remember, the distance between knowing and acting shapes how the word "execution" applies to you. ;^)

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