Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve It by Richard Koch

Author:Richard Koch
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
Published: 2020-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

Landmark 6: Find and Drive Your Personal Vehicle

At last I had authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I had been walking with destiny, and that all of my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL

This chapter presents a simple but vital finding that is often neglected – for unreasonable success, we need our personal vehicle. All our players had a vehicle which multiplied their impact hundreds or thousands of times.

There are two types of vehicle which can give unreasonable success. The first type is useful; the second is indispensable.

Type 1: Pool vehicles

The first type of vehicle is something which already exists in your environment, something external or extraneous to you, which you can leap on and from which you can derive great benefit. I call these ‘pool vehicles’ because I worked in an oil refinery and we had pick-up trucks to drive around its sprawling estate. Pool vehicles could be used by any manager.

In your career, a pool vehicle is something in the environment that can help you. It won’t guarantee success, but it is a good start. What is there around you – knowledge, worldview, technology or other trends – which you can use as a launch pad?

Here are examples of pool vehicles the players used.

For Bill Bain, it was the theories of business strategy that had been originated by the Boston Consulting Group. BCG put its ideas such as the Boston Box out into the public domain to build reputation and sell business. When Bill Bain started Bain & Company, he was able to use all BCG’s concepts. They were high-octane stuff, fuelling a whole new industry.

Jeff Bezos also used the BCG ideas to develop his philosophy for Amazon, especially dominant market share, and lowest costs and prices. Bezos also benefitted from two other pool vehicles – internet retailing and ‘Californian Venture Capital Syndrome’, which values growth above short-term profits, supporting Amazon’s losses for long years, allowing a focus on customer experience and low prices.

Otto von Bismarck rode the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century. This was his pool vehicle to turn Germany from a fragmented cluster of dozens of independent states into a unified superpower dominating central Europe. The popularity he gained by his unification of Germany pleased the liberal politicians and William, the Prussian King, and kept Bismarck in power for a generation.

Winston Churchill’s pool vehicle was the rise of German National Socialism, Hitler’s murderous anti-Semitism, and his own opposition to them. An environmental factor does not have to be appeased or promoted; it can also be a pool vehicle when it is opposed first or most vigorously.

Marie Curie’s pool vehicle was the new field of x-rays and radiation.

The two pool vehicles which Walt Disney exploited so well were the rise of animated cartoons and, later, the rise of amusement parks. Disneyland was in many ways the opposite of traditional amusement parks, which Walt disdained as ‘nasty, dirty places run by hard-faced men’.

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