To be fair, there are some good key ideas here. The idea of value innovation (focusing on user value, divided into different components) and the idea of focusing on creating new markets, or new demand, instead of focusing on the competition. Nothing of this is new, however, as the book sometimes present it.
If books and authors could be confronted with their ideas while readers read the text, I feel I would have stopped the authors at many, many points along this book. Mainly because too many building blocks here were, in my opinion, biased, or ill-formulated, while the logical construction just built upon layers and layers of less-than-solid foundations.
One of the main problems is that the authors “personalize” companies in a way that is not only simplistic, but also wrong. Thinking that the Cirque du Soleil, for example, created a new market that didn’t exist, and attributing intention to unknown or complex dynamics is almost silly.
It is okay to come up with a post-factum explanation to the success of the Cirque du Soleil, or of Ford Company, or any other of the many “cases” described in the book. But the reality is that most likely none of these cases were purposely conducted from beginning to end.
In other words, entrepreneurs basically combine their known-how, previous experiences and current resources, along with their access to new and evolving technologies, and throw at the mix different hypothesis that are tried out in practice. Many are brave enough to try out ideas, and some of them succeed. Our first bias here is towards finding a hindsight explanation, when many times even the same idea does not succeed first to blossom just some years or decades later.
The book, however, ignores all of these dynamics and basically wants to make us think of it all in terms of ignoring competition and focus on creating new industries or new demands. That’s not how things work out in practice.
One indication as of why this simplistic method is flawed is that the authors themselves don’t seem to have created multi-billion companies or industries, as their method seem to indicate to be quite possible by following their simple rules.
Another irritation point is the claim, at different points, that technology innovations were not enough to explain the success stories presented. Even when they clearly were pivotal. Ford did not start producing cheap cars because he envisioned the brave new blue ocean of an entire new industry for cheap cars. He did it, to a great extent, because the assembly lines were brought to a new industry. And this very technical and process innovation explains much of his success.
In any case, I could go into many counter-arguments to multiple cases presented in the book. But it is not worth it. The time I spent on it was not worth it. Even being a super best-seller, I think the couple good ideas in this title can be absorbed without the need to go through it entirely. I rest my case.
