Truth be told, 20 pages into Mark W. Johnson’s Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal, I figured I’d hate it. Nothing personal; Johnson’s local and surely kind to small creatures, but with lines like, “I lay out in detail a structured process for designing new business models and developing them into profitable, thriving enterprises, and investigate the managerial challenges that commonly thwart unguided forays into the unknown,” like me you might roll – and close – your eyes. Gee, only another 160 pages of dry babble to go! (Some might also wonder if Johnson was the audiotape narrator of George Costanza’s required reading on risk management… you know, the one that asked, “How do you spot risk, how do you avoid risk, and what makes it so risky?”) But you know what? The author does what he sets out to do and, while he may not be your go-to guy for belly laughs,he’s written a meaningful book that will surely help every reader in at least one key way – sharpening the all-important customer value proposition (CVP).
Johnson writes, “The overall value of a successful CVP derives from three key metrics: 1. How important the job-to-be-done is to customers; 2. How satisfied customers are with current solutions; 3. How well the new offering gets the job done, relative to the other options.” Pretty straightforward, sure, but when was the last time you closely examined each of your offerings through this lens? Yesterday? Alrighty then, knock off early today! Or perhaps it’s been a while. The book makes plain the need to simplify and focus the CVP; doing so leads to fresh opportunities that yield new target customers (this being the so-called white space). He goes on to challenge the reader: “If you can’t describe your customer value proposition in a few sentences that non-businesspeople can understand, then it is not clear or focused enough.” And you probably don’t need an army of white men in grey suits to fix it, either. Just lock yourself in a conference room with your team. A couple of hours on a white board with the rainbow pack of Expo markers and some tuna sandwiches… what else do you need, really? Chips? Okay, get some of those, too.
The author advises we stop asking prospects and clients what they need and start asking them what they’re trying to get done. The key is to first find something that needs doing and then develop a solution that outperforms alternative ideas at the lowest appropriate price. Say you’ve done that; the next steps all surround testing and Johnson admonishes we do this early, often, and cheaply. If Delta had taken this approach with its lower-priced Song division, it may not have ever fully rolled out the “stylish and affordable” option and could have avoided being embarrassed and crushed like a little grape by Southwest and JetBlue. Reading those CVP-related charts laid out in Seizing the White Space, one wonders who at Delta could have pulled the trigger on such a wrong-headed idea. Johnson says that every business, if it is to last, must be built to transform. Fine. But if you’re a big, bloated airline going after your more nimble competitors, you may want to at least hire fun flight attendants or put TVs in the headrests.