10 Things I Learned from “How To Kill A Unicorn”
So I bought this book quite awhile back during a Big Bad Wolf event late last year, thinking that it has something to do about killing unicorn in the unicorn == Uber sense. As it turns out, the unicorn that the author had in mind was essentially ideas that are so fantastic and out of this world that it can’t ever be implemented in real life — which basically wastes everyone’s time and the company’s resources.
In my previous book review, I kinda went and wrote quite a rather lengthy review on what I thought about a book, and how I felt about it in general.
This time around, I’m going to keep it simple and stick to just the 10 things that I find most valuable from this particular book.
- The bias towards customer/user-centered when implementing design thinking is a mistake, since it often (not always) fail to appeal to the people who’d execute it (ie, marketing dept, sales, support etc …) . Rather, any ideas that are brought up at the brainstorming stage should also consider how it could solve a business problem. TL;DR — each ideas should aim to solve problems for two stakeholders, the external and internal; to ensure higher rate of success when doing innovation (might be worthwhile to bring in the business/operational experts into your session too).
- For each of those ideas, plot it down on a 2 X 2 Low-High matrix of “Marketplace Disruption” vs “Company Disruption”. Pick ones that gives high disruption for on the marketplace yet low disruption for the company (this one seems rather obvious isn’t it.)
- To be able to properly execute #1 and #2, a thorough understanding of the problem/customer needs and company capability is required. Approach A seems interesting for the consumer, but do we have the resources to do it? Is our factory operating at it’s full capacity? Are any of our existing assets underutilized? Hunt for the insights on both the customer and operational end.
- Success = existing customer behaviour + existing operational capability + big ideas
- In coming up with innovative ideas, one needs to first know what set of questions that they actually need to be asking. Some guidelines:
a. Assume that the platform is already burning and that change is direly needed. This transforms the mood from “should we do this” to “ok, what can we do now”
b. Temporarily forget what you already know. Distance one-self from internal belief and ideas that one comes up with.
c. Question the norm of present reality. Do employers really need to read resumes and cover letters? What is the underlying problem that the two items are trying to solve actually?
d. Ask yourself whether are your competitor currently thinking of the same idea. How likely would that be? If it’s quite likely, then probably the idea is not THAT transformative to begin with.
e. You probably have done some surveys and gotten some feedbacks. What about things that users HAVE NOT said? What didn’t we hear that was interesting?
f. Move around and see the problem from a different perspective. Try to experience the problem firsthand in the customer’s shoes or go about the problem the product’s lifecycle perspective — if I’m an ice cream, what can I do to attract customers to buy me.
6. Problems that are well defined and scoped have higher chances of success of being solved.
7. Instead of blindly throwing ideas on the post-it notes within an hour session of brainstorming, team members should be given time to research their own ideas and gather back to discuss their findings, where they are then judged and evaluated.
8. Failure shouldn’t be celebrated. It’s OK to fail, but really, don’t glamorize it.
9. Assess your failure to learn from it. Create metrics to understand at which stage does your innovation ideas usually come up short. Is the project overall a success? Did it made the launch? Knowing where you fail teaches you what (and where) to fix things.
10. Rules (like ones above) are useful if you’re planning to break some, as it provides you with the constraints to work with and encourages creativity to want to overcome it.
The book is written by the co-founder of Fahrenheit 212, a consulting firm that helps transform businesses and consumer experiences.
I found the book to be quite refreshing in the sense that it places some emphasis on the importance of involving the operational/commercial side of the business at the initial stage of business innovation/ideation — and the two domain (creative + commercial) would work together hand in hand till the end of the project until it gets executed.
This is in contrast to the current design thinking approach where the emphasis of whether an idea gets the green light or not solely depends on how the user/customer feels about it.
While I don’t doubt that design thinking have it’s uses, an entrenched company might have a higher success rate in innovating if they were to include the commercial side as well (since they’re not that nimble to begin with).
