I spent last week in snow-plow position, trailing my 4-year-old daughter down ski slopes. On the lift rides up, while singing songs with mispronounced words (Frosty the Snowman has a “bucky” nose, by the way, instead of a button), my thoughts drifted to a struggle that occupies me today. I am negotiating a series of license agreements for my “Outthink the Competition” IP and I want to make sure I don’t get taken for a ride.
I bet you have faced a similar challenge. You’ve created something and you want to get it out into the world, but you also want to make money from it. How can you avoid following the path of countless artists, inventors, and entrepreneurs who have enriched our lives but failed to enrich themselves in the process?
In the mid-1600s, Balthasar Gracian, Spain’s answer to Niccolo Machiavelli, pointed to this fundamental strategic question when he wrote, “The wise man would rather see men needing him than thanking him...He that has satisfied his thirst turns his back on the well, and the orange once sucked falls from the golden platter into the waste-basket.”
If we study history’s most successful companies, we find their success often rests on the fact that they played their hands well; they were loved AND needed, but rarely just loved. At a time when everyone was either building computers or software, Microsoft offered an operating system that allowed the two to communicate with each other. At a time when the tech gurus thought search was a commoditized, low-margin business, Google helped them out by convincing Yahoo and AltaVista to outsource the search business to them.
This week a good friend of mine, Vik Venkatraman, is launching a company that could end up on the right side of the “loved v. needed” equation. On its surface, Clothes Horse looks like a simple solution. You want to buy a piece of clothing but are not sure what size to buy. Every brand adopts slightly different norms. For example, you may wear a medium in Tommy Hilfiger and a ...
[Source: Fast Company]
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