For an individual or a consulting firm, such an approach means offering the marketplace a unique set of capabilities that, for a given situation, are not to be found elsewhere. My search over the past four or five months for my own personal blue-ocean strategy has dovetailed nicely with a growing understanding that the age of the specialist may well be behind us. Consider the following quote, taken from a recent edition of the CBC’s excellent series examining the nature of work:
“You have this long list of professional trades, and they’re all speaking different languages and they all have some sort of compartmentalized knowledge and that’s the challenge. That’s where the future is, in having a knowledge. The separation of design and build, the Ford model of assembly-line production – we are through that and we’ve entered into almost an older evaluation of skill where people have a sense of the general picture, the big picture and be able to bring together all the different specializations required. And that’s a new way of looking at problems. But it’s also a very old way of looking at problems.”
You might think the person who said the above words was a management consultant, maybe a systems analyst. But although he likes to use that latter term to describe himself, Jonas Spring is, in fact, a rooftop gardener, who needs to pull together many different and heretofore disparate and unconnected specialised professions and trades in order to plan, plant and maintain a rooftop garden.
Although my specialty for the past dozen years or so has been very narrow – we did media and analyst relations and little else, and we did it for B2B technology ventures and no-one else – my skill set is far more diverse than might be immediately apparent, even to me.
For example, a recent assignment that came to me from well beyond the normal ambit of my PR agency was to help a Montréal systems integration company bid to be the Canadian value-added reseller for a U.S. software vendor. What the heck, you might well ask, does a PR guy know about any of that?
Well, as I broke down the requirements with the help of the certified management consultant who brought me in on the assignment, it became quite clear that what I might have seen as quite specialised capabilities could be far more generally applied.
In the first instance, we had to determine if there was a market in Canada for the software company’s product. That’s the sort of straightforward market-sizing research that needs nothing more than an objective definition of the target customer – size, sector and so on – and a good database that can be used to identify who and how many meet the criteria.
Then we had to make the case that our client, the systems integrator, was the right fit for the software company’s requirements. Well, that’s the sort of thing we do in PR all the time – develop, pitch and defend the story that says our clients are the right fit for a certain requirement.
The next step was to demonstrate how, should they get the nod, the systems integration company would go about pursuing the market opportunity and bringing in sales and revenue. Well, that’s a sales and marketing strategy, the sort of thing I had been doing before starting the PR agency.
Finally, the whole thing had to be wrapped up in a well-written, persuasively argued proposal to the software company. And if I am not a writer, I am nothing.
I have gone on to other assignments over the past few months where I might have got my foot in the door thanks to a particular specialisation but where the client has swiftly seen that, in the right situation, I possess the exact mix of skills that are required. Presto – I have a blue-ocean opportunity with that client and face no competition, no qualification round and no pricing pressure. In almost every case, my value has not been a narrow specialisation but, rather, the requirement to apply generalised skills across a broad area. In today’s increasingly complex world where formerly disparate systems and processes must come to work together, this is the future of work.
My thinking in these two areas – the rise of the specialist and building a personal blue-ocean strategy – has progressed to the point where I am about to formalise a market-facing entity to build a business around it. As these plans are unveiled, I will, of course, keep DangleTech’s readers up to speed on what’s happening.