There’s a concept in Blue Ocean Strategy, one of my favorite books, called value innovation. To create value innovation, companies must orient themselves to deliver a “leap in value” for both themselves and their customers. 

 

Most organizations are satisfied to compete in a red ocean stained with the blood of those who came before them and swim there now. They are ensnared by the structures of the way things have always been done. 

 

Value innovation is about breaking free of those restraints, taking a fresh look at the needs of people and constructing something new that transcends current offerings. To accomplish this, you have to challenge everything about the way you do business today…including your marketing.  

 

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my daughter’s entrepreneurial instincts. Since the age of eight, she has demonstrated an uncanny sense of strategy and marketing. At 15, she is flexing her management muscles through quick decision-making on behalf of the greater good. 

 

In a recent school project, the class was instructed to develop a product and bring it to market. The class is taught by a wonderfully creative educator and covers culinary careers and nutrition. My daughter, always the planner, thought the nutrition part of the class might help her keep her 5’3” frame in tip-top shape for her major love, fast-pitch softball. 

 

The teacher broke the class into groups and the students began their planning. After a few minutes of chaos and fearing the worst in terms of her grade, my daughter took over leadership of her team. They came up with a product and began planning their “go-to-market” strategy. The team had to produce their product, sell it on the open market represented by the rest of the class and end up with profit at the end of the exercise. The higher the profit, the better the plan and its execution.

 

I’m starting to think I ought to get my daughter Maggie to be my business mentor. She has better instincts than her mom and none of the baggage.  

Maggie, now almost 15, demonstrated these instincts at the tender age of seven when she started her first business. Like many seven-year-olds, she liked both eating candy and painting her fingernails. She hatched a plan to open a business called Sugar and Style where girls from the neighborhood could buy candy while getting a manicure. The young girls in our Midlothian cul-de-sac far outnumbered the boys so she understood her demographics.  

Maggie is an extremely enthusiastic kid so I’m used to the excited phone calls where 10 sentences of detail spill out before I even realize who is on the end of the line. As this business plan developed, I received one of these phone calls with a request to come home IMMEDIATELY because she had noticed that the PaperTown store at the intersection of Huguenot and Robious roads had closed. She thought this would make an ideal location for her new business venture. Seeing this as a teaching moment, I explained that the owner of the shopping center would charge her rent for the space. She asked me how much, I guessed and said $2,000 a month. She told me that was stupid because she wouldn’t make enough money for herself if she had to pay a landlord $2,000 a month. She had the balance sheet logics down.