The Evolution of the Blue Ocean Strategy in the Digital Age | Capability Amplifier EP#132

One way to create a, create a blue ocean, besides that you're different from anyone else, is keep raising your price. As a matter of fact, when you're.

Operating from a sense of unlimited possibility and potential thinking not just 10x but a thousandx, I think that to me is Blue Ocean.

And they would come in, they would use Coach, and they grow real fast, and then all of a sudden they just stop. Okay. And what I realized is that they were status driven and not growth driven.

You've heard of the Blue Ocean strategy before? Well, this is the Dan Sullivan Mike Koenig's Blue Ocean strategy, which is what is. Is the thinking that's preventing you from seeing massive entrepreneurial opportunities. And what I've managed to do inside of this is interview Dan and come up with 14 key ideas and concepts to create a blue ocean for your own life or for your business. And create massive value, including participating in what Dan has talked about, which is the free zone, the $15 trillion economy. Dan?

Yeah, Mike, I have to tell you, I haven't revisited this concept specifically for. Since the book first became a bestseller around the world. And I realized a couple things. One is that Strategic Coach has moved much more in the direction of being a blue ocean, and so has.

The upper critical mass of our client base. But the other thing is that it, that has about 10 more dimensions to it because of the evolution of the digital age than it did, you know, when it first came out. I think it was in the late, it was in the 2000s, the early 2000s, when it came out. And so it was enormously intriguing to me. And, you know, I have a lot of follow up to do to, you know, see where, you know, we're, we're, we're a blue ocean. And where we're, we're a dirty brown swamp, you know, just no swamp, you know, no swamp. And anyway, so anyway, it's a. It was fascinating and as always, we think that we're going to go in one direction and we end up somewhere else. And that's. I hope this is the joy of the listeners to watch this happen because it's the joy of the two people putting on the podcast.

It was fun. And so if you think you're thinking too small, this is the answer you're looking for. In fact, just number two, point number two in this podcast is going to change the way you think about your future and what you do. This is capability amplifier.

Mike, before our sessions, a lot of people don't know the backstage to the. But you usually have a list of things that you want to talk about. And you had a very, very interesting take on blue oceans, which is not, you know, it's a term that's been out there for 10, 15 years. I don't know when the original book came out, but first of all, just to start this off for all of our watchers and listeners, standpoint, what is a blue ocean? As it's talked about in the marketing world, as it's talked about in the business world, what is a blue ocean as opposed to, I guess, other kinds of oceans?

Okay, well, I think the definition on the website is the blue ocean strategy is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand. It's about creating and capturing uncontested market space, thereby making the competition irrelevant. It is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not a given and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players. Now, my definition of it is when you look in the world without constraints and, and all you see is opportunity in the vastness without competition even being relevant, where if you're in a red ocean strategy, all there is is blood. So when you're operating from a sense of unlimited possibility and potential thinking not just 10x but a thousandx, I think that to me is blue ocean. And part of the reason I wanted to do this is conversation today is I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs like you do, and I'm always amazed at how myopic people get and they start thinking through that everything has to be governed by the rules they've been operating within. And it seems like those walls and those fences get thicker as they age instead of seeing the infinite possibilities. And sometimes it's just as simple as Upgrade your customer 10x your prices and change your messaging, your packaging and positioning. But when you operate inside of a free zone, thinking like Dan Sullivan, where instead of thinking about a country creating a $15 trillion economy, inside strategic coach, that is true blue ocean strategy thinking. So that's my long winded answer.

Yeah. And you, you know, the thing is very interesting. I was, I get interested in a lot of things related to entrepreneurism, but there, there's one association in the world whose members are family businesses that are 500 years or older. Okay. But they've always been in the same family. And the oldest one was actually, just, actually went out of business about two, three years ago. And it was a temple repair business, a temple renovation business in Japan. And they started in the year.

540. Okay. Now there's about three countries that were countries before 540. So this is talking about a company that's lasted going on 1500 years and wow. And so it was. But there's about 500 of these organizations. I don't know if they keep it at 500 or you know, that, that just happens to be the current numbers. But anyway, the what I went back there and I looked and I said what's the industry that they're in? And three quarters of them were, were all related to alcohol.

Really.

So they were either a winery, a distillery, a brewery or they were, you know, a very, very popular. For example the oldest pub in the world, you know, bar or whatever you want to call it is in Devon. Devon. Same family since 940. 940. So you know.

Wow.

Yeah. So but it was really interesting. I said, you know, alcohol is probably one of those 10 times bets on the future. I always say to people, you know, what are some of your ten times strategies? And I say, well I've discovered that one dollar spent on alcohol always gives you a dollar return.

If it's for someone else not drinking alone but.

Drinking with others. There's something very, very.

Expanding and multiplying about people when you put them at ease with alcohol. I mean there's people who, that's not their thing. But I find for example it's easier to do.

A great collaboration or new business deal with people who are inebriated rather than people who are stoned.

Uh huh.

Stoned. You know, it's really hard to get their attention, you know, inebriation, they may be hyper focused, you know, they, you know, they're seeing the future a little bit more. But anyway the, the big thing about what I like about the Blue Ocean strategy and you know, and it's really designed for bigger companies because my attitude was that one way to create a Blue Ocean, besides that you're different from anyone else is keep raising your price. As a matter of fact, you're Apple. Apple is the great example of this with all Apple products are incredibly more expensive than any other compete. So I think that Apple is the truest player in the huge corporation world of Blue Ocean as opposed to, you know, it's not, it's not because they're not doing at the lowest possible cost, they're doing it at the highest possible cost.

Yes. Well the. So two.

Thoughts. The first is.

When you go back to what Steve Jobs did when he created the Think different campaign with.

Or the, the Crazy Ones ad which we were just talking about. Richard Dreyfus he was the first to voice that, that original ad, the crazy.

Ones poem, the Apple guy and the Windows guy.

Well that came after. That came after which was, yeah, Mac versus PC, that's another one. But.

You know, fast forward with Tim Cook who is about as interesting as chalk.

But the DNA of Steve Jobs got embedded inside Apple. Steve Jobs truly was a blue ocean thinker and held the company to the highest standards, created this high quality. But it's cool to own an Apple product, not cool to own a PC or a Windows product and that's really what the PC Windows was. But also think different. You know, you're either a sheep if you're using a Windows computer or for that matter Android, or you're a rebel, a creator, a creative.

And that attitude of, you know, driving a BMW versus a Ford I think.

Got popped in. It just meant something different when you're using a computer. And for a long time there was a certain rebellion to using a Mac in a PC business world. You know, you definitely were weird.

And it was nonstandard. You really had to fight if you had a, at a Mac in a, in an office environment. Certainly not that case any longer. But the other thing that pops into my head beyond Apple is, and the question that I've got to ask is.

When you meet with a founder and you catch them thinking too small, being myopic, what is the first exercise you like to do to get them out of that thinking and lead them to a 10x or a thousandx? Not just a mindset, but moving towards hard implementation, taking action.

And I have a suspicion as to what your formula is, but I'm curious what approach you take.

Well, the first thing is that who do they want to be in the future? So I just zero, you know, not so much in dollars, but who do you want to be as an entrepreneur? And.

The reason they're thinking small is because they've run out of future okay for themselves. So I, you know, earlier the days I didn't get real alert and curious about why people grew, you know, and we would catch people at the earlier stages of their career, you know, they'd be, you know, maybe you have to be at least three years in to a business venture, you know, because, you know, you gotta know what a business cycle feels like and what, you know, the changes from one year to the other. But generally speaking, we would have people with 10 years experience, 15 years experience, and they would come in, they would use coach and they'd grow real fast and then all of a sudd Sudden they just stop. Okay. And what I realized is that they were status driven and not, not growth driven. And what I meant, what I mean by that, when they were little, they felt deprived. They, they looked at people who had more than they had. You know, what kind of house you had, what neighborhood was your house in, you know, what kind of cars did you have, what kind of schools did your children go to, what kind of clubs did you belong to? And you know that it's all status, though. It's how other people are looking at you. And the continual growth people, and you're one of them, and everybody in the free zone is one of them, is that they've, they've already gone through about three or four growth stages that put them way, way beyond what they thought was possible when they started their entrepreneurial career. And now it's about why don't I want to grow into a game where it's just, I mean, it's lucrative, but it's just fun. It's just exciting, you know, I get excited, I'll learn again. And I think that what happens when people get.

Caught in old ideas, the causes them, they've stopped growing intellectually, they've stopped growing ambition wise. Okay. So that you don't have any bigger future for your company than you have a bigger future for yourself as an individual. Okay. So I would say that's the first thing I look at is.

Are they close to the end, Are they at the end, are they past the end, you know, or is there a big jump? Because.

Then you realize if you have a bigger future for yourself, you realize that.

Your present ideas are way too small for your bigger future. So that would be the first thing I would go after.

Oh, that's great. So I'm going to tell you about a.

Conversation I had actually with, I'm going to say a group because I don't want to reveal who it is just in case, but they're, it's a group that's belong to Coach. For a while they've been listeners of the podcast and it turned out they've done business with a bunch of the people that I've interviewed on, you know, some of the in between episodes in this podcast and they followed some of their successes and they've, they're very, very well off. They, they've. Money is not an issue any longer. And they actually started the conversation and said, here's what we want our next act to be. So they're using the messaging that I have in the book, which was interesting, and.

They Just said, what do you think we should do? And I'll just say, they've been in the financial industry for a long time, very, very successful. So.

I said, well, once you've made all the money you want to make and you've served the people you want to serve and you want to grow, you know, one of the next phases is to create a movement with your property, not just a business. And it enables you to.

Help a lot more people, even people who you might not want them to necessarily become clients of your business. You know, that's the, you know, in the Dan world, you've got either join coach or you could read my books. You know, there's, there's not in between. Joe Polish is very much the same way. You can have my podcast for free now is books or you can join Genius Network. You know, it's $25,000. And.

In their particular case, we ended up going down the rabbit hole with what that looked like. And one of them was like, I just said, why not create a media company? That way you can educate a lot of people and it becomes this flywheel and, you know, they've got the financial resources to build such a beast. So. And you think about inside of what you just said here, which is.

You know, how do you create continual growth? When I watch you.

Doing.

Whether it's 10x or.

Free zone.

Every bit of that is a continual growth experience where you're testing out your ideas, presenting tools, doing the exercises, getting results in real time, capturing that information, passing it down to your team, which is making refinements to the tool in near real time.

Right.

There's, you know, when you think about how quickly your IP stack has grown just over the past five years, and I even would say in the past three years, you seem to me to be three times as productive in terms of the volume of useful stuff that's being made.

You know. Any comments?

Actually, I would say it since COVID started because.

We introduced a new form, which was the two hour workshop and where you have frequent contact. I mean, somebody is in free zone and 10 times.

They could be doing.

60 workshops a year if they took advantage of all the things we did. So one of our responses to Covid is that we had to go to Zoom.

Oh, yeah, let's call it Lockdown from now on because otherwise YouTube will flag it.

Yeah, lockdown.

And the other thing was we realized that you had to vastly increase the frequency of contact with the clients. Those were our two. I mean, one, you had to go to Zoom or we didn't have, we didn't have a business.

No business.

But if you go to Zoom, you can have.

You can make use of very, very small.

Time periods that are just not possible in the real world. You know, like, you know, I have people who, you know, will see, come to three or four of my two hour workshops during a quarter who live in Auckland, New Zealand, or they live in Mumbai, India, you know, and it's just impossible in the physical world to do that, but on Zoom it is. So I would say that the big, the big thing is that we were confronted with a challenge to the, you know, to the survival of the company that we had to do and we came up with a brand new capability. But that new capability has to be fed with greater creativity. It has to be fed with it. So that was, you know, you know, I wasn't going to retire with lockdown, you know, I mean, that wasn't part of my game plan. And yeah, but I would say this, that I've been more creative and productive since age 70 than I was in the 70 years before 70. I've done more interesting, new, useful work since age 70. I'm 78 now, so anyway, and I expect that the future will continue to grow that way. My 80s will be more productive and creative than my 70s.

Yeah, yeah.

Much like people say, well, how do you know you're going to. I said, well, having really big goals for living a long time is one of the key ways of living a long time.

Well, I was, I think I told you about this earlier. Peter Drucker, I think he was. See, he was born in 1909. I'm looking him up right now.

He wrote more than 10 books in the last six, I think, six years of his life. And he was more active and had more to talk about.

So, yeah, his last book came out in 2008, it looked like. But yeah, he was just a machine. And, and so he's, he's one of these big contributing big minds. And I think there's something about.

The concentration of wisdom and knowledge seems to accelerate as long as you keep your body and your mind active.

So I see, I totally see that for you.

And you have several other things going for you. You have reputation. Okay. You have opportunity. I mean, you have, you know, you have skill and knowledge, skill and wisdom. But you also have, you know, a much wider reputation. Positive. And the other thing you have is that you reputation and credibility. You have that going for you. And the other things you have is that the opportunities keep getting bigger, you know, yeah. And the checks, the checks get bigger.

Yes. Yep.

So I'm, as I look at this.

No discounting after 70.

Yeah.

Yeah. The exclusivity increases as well. So I'm. When I look at. So I'm building Dan's Blue Ocean formula as I'm listening to you here. So one of them is the step one is just who do you want to be as an entrepreneur and realizing that you're thinking small because you've run out of future.

Another one is the you stop growing because you're status versus growth driven. And then what I added here was I put on here time compression, but it's increasing connection, engagement, and intimacy. How are you doing that with your audience and your client base? In your case, it was forced, but it turned into creating new mindsets, new systems, more efficiency. And.

I've said this a number of times, but creativity loves compression. Yeah. Time compression. It loves deadlines and even money compression.

I mean, money compression, any. Any kind of compression, you got to do more with, you know, you got to do far more.

Yeah, I was.

That, you know, the first drones, the flying drones that were effective in warfare were created by the Israelis, okay. And they created their first drone for, I think in American dollars at the time, $170,000. And.

The US had already been working on a drone project for about 15 years, and they were way, way past the billion dollar mark and they had no drone. And the reason is that Israel's got a very limited amount of money, and the United States. United States, the Defense Department, for all practical purposes, has an unlimited amount of money. Okay? Yep. So.

You know, so.

You know, the only thing that creates abundance is scarcity of something. You know, if you think, you know, I.

You know, the. That. That's why I love deadlines, because deadlines is an immediate scarcity. You know.

That'S why I love.

Going for ten times rather than two times. Two times. All you have to do is rearrange the furniture, you know, the.

Furniture. You know, you have to maybe do some cleanup. You have to, you know, stop this or stop this 10 times. You have to have an entirely new game. Okay. You have a fairly new game. You don't have the. You've got. You probably got the skills for two times if, you know, you just work a little bit harder and you, you know, economize here and everything else. That's easy. Then 10. 10 times is a completely different game, you know, and so I think that's. But the other thing that I do that I add to the new ideas that it's what's happening with my best clients. I'm really, really in touch with what's always happening. So it's the dos, it's the dangers, the opportunities and strengths of my best clients. And people say, you know, at your stage, why are you still coaching? You know, why are you still coaching? I mean, if you look at other people upgraded, you know, they've got, they've created a cookie cutter and they have cookie, you know, cookie chefs all over the world and they're punching out. And I said, because I have to be in touch with what the most advanced clients are encountering that's new to them, that they need some new thinking tools to deal with it.

Yes.

So my ideas are not ideas that I think up.

In a silo. I'm not thinking up new ideas in a silo. I'm totally engaged. I coach more than any other coach and strategic coach. I do more workshops and I do it with more clients than any other minor advanced clients. And so my whole thing is that I'm just sitting there listening to what people are talking about, their challenges and where they're seeing breakthroughs and everything else. And it's all going into my tool making factory, you know, and I say, okay, they need a new tool. And, you know, and I, and I don't get ahead of my skis here. New tool for the next quarter. A new tool because the world changes, you know, world changes. And boy, I tell you, if you think you've seen any change in the world in the last 20 years, it's nothing compared with what's happening coming next.

Yes. Yeah. The world, the world belongs to the innovators now more than ever. Those who can deal with unimaginable chaos. Which leads me to two big things that I wrote down here. So again, I'm just going to repeat some of the things he talked about, which is, you know, we talked about time, compression, increasing connection, engagement, intimacy. Then there's the.

I just lumped these all together. I'll think about how to deconstruct them later. But it's reputation, opportunity, skill, knowledge, wisdom, credibility. So I'm going to call that the cumulative sum of who you are.

Well, it's kind of your total. It's your total, I call it impact property. It's your total impact property.

Yeah, there we go. Great.

Yeah.

I think the other one is that.

Who you are is having an impact outside of you. And, you know, I mean, you experience it because you're inside of the. You're inside of your creativity. But More and more who you are, that you most want to be is actually having a positive and transformative impact outside of the world. And you own that property. You know, that's, that's property as much as your house is. That's property as much as you, you know, other things that you own, you actually own. And it can't be reproduced by anyone else. No one else can own that, that property.

Okay. So another one is I just lumped it as price increase, but it's a constant focus on creating more value.

Yeah.

Now the way I.

And this is tied to the other one, which is there's the constantly creating more value, but also working with the most expensive and highest end clients and.

Customers, which is, I mean, that's a service. I mean, I don't know if it works in the manufacturing industry, but I.

Suspect it does the road, I would say absolutely. Yeah.

Manufacturers. Yeah.

If you think about.

You know, increasing and elevating the value of your product means focusing on an always increasing valued customer who expects more, who demands more and wants more technology.

Versus moving downward. I always tell anyone, if you start a business, never start at the bottom. Start and create the most expensive category in, in a business and try to find a way to create a 10 times price tag over everyone. It forces you to think very differently.

And you know, going back to exclusivity and not creating discounts or no discounts as well. As soon as you're, you're entering into having a discount conversation, you've lost control of the conversation.

Yeah.

And then one that you've, you've said before that is tied to this, but it's, it demands a separate line item which is the willingness to experiment, iterate and test to find breakthroughs. It's having a rap living in.

Having a living laboratory. Yeah. Dan Sullivan has a constant living laboratory. You're testing out messaging all the time. You're communicating and creating, you know, a bunch of podcasts. Creating all these products constantly in the lab. And you've got your personal lab, which is Dan's finding ways to extend his life. Why not create tools and make that available? He's extending the value of the business by creating tools inside the company. So I'd say a constant upgraded operating system. Strategic Coach gets a new operating system every quarter or so with these new tools. And then it gets tested on buying clients. And Dan is discontinuing being accessible to teach the last course. Right now you are in 2023. It's going to be free zone only.

And lifetime extender and the New IP value builder. Yeah. With Keegan New ip. Yeah. And you know, and the thing is, you started off the thing about my goal for age 100, which is 2044, that the impact of the entire Strategic Coach worldwide network of active clients would be equal to $15 trillion.

At that time, you know. Well, you know, whatever. 15 trillion is. 15 trillion. But the thing is, I'm now realizing that it's going to be measured in IP asset value. The 15 trillion IP asset value. And what that does, it introduces a tool that is the asset value according to Keegan's formula and how he goes through it. Keegan Caldwell is a IP lawyer, a revolutionary IP lawyer in our strategic Coach free zone. And he said, you know, I'm thinking more and more that if you take all the revenues that you've created in your company so far and you add them up, that probably you're unidentified and uncredentialed. IP properly treated and assessed would probably equal the total amount of revenues that you've ever made. Mm.

Well, that's an interesting challenge. Can I make my IP valuation equal to the total amount of money I pay? It's almost like you didn't pay any taxes and you didn't have any expenses.

Yes. So I'm going to label this and then I'm going to plus it for you, which is shortcuts as multipliers.

And even shortcuts as amplifiers, because sometimes an amplifier is enabling, but then.

Simplifiers have simplifying shortcuts, multipliers have multiplying shortcuts.

Yeah.

Oh, that's good.

Yeah.

So what we look for are where are. Where can we create immediate results.

With a mindset shift? Now, in the case of IP value increase.

That'S one of them. Collaborations can do that. You can get a 10x with a collaboration, get access to a whole new marketing channel. A way to 10x the value of a product or service was simply. You know, what I found is when we're doing our three day.

Workshops.

All we have to do is create a better pitch, a better offer, a better brand.

A better story. And the perceived value of a product or service can 10x in a new conversation.

Yep.

Right. And, and that can be proven within a day or two. We call it the sizzle effect. It's. It's. Sizzle has value and it can increase a buyer's perception of. Of value. Because it's been a reframed conversation.

Who versus how is the same way. But I'm, I'll add, here's the plus. I was Going to give you. Which.

Like right now, Strategic Coach has value because of its ip. It has value because of its revenue, it's got value because of its EBITDA and there's goodwill. But one thing that isn't being.

Valued right now is its data. So this is that guy I was telling you about, Chuck, who we created datamoo, that's what we call this company. And his basic idea, just like when Keegan can come in and say, here's all your IP and there's a way to value that and put it into a financial instrument where you can finance and get cash for it that you can use for various applications.

You can borrow against the assessed value of your intellectual property.

Yeah, that's amazing. So one of the things that's happening now is it's possible to take your data and monetize that in different ways. Or I remember that there was a business. Here's a real life example, because I worked with a broker and they had a trucking company, this trucking company.

They were trying to sell it. It was like a 40 year family business and they were lucky. They couldn't even get one one and a half times.

When they tried to sell it. So that was a crap deal. But they had been working on a little skunk works project for a little while, which was software that helped them calculate.

A combination of, well, basically logistics software. Okay. So it was time, distance, how they were packing the trucks, et cetera. And they just reframed the type of business and made this business a.

A company that was logistics software. And they wound up getting 20x.

Yeah.

By just calling it something different. And then the, the trucking side was the living laboratory. It became the proof conduit in, in their case, the living laboratory. So I think, you know, a right fit advisor consultant to help you rethink where the value is. Or now what can happen is you separate the data side of the business and that becomes a separate deal. Just like in the case of ip, you can take your. Yeah. Put that in a separate company. You could set up a licensing agreement that could be overseas. There's all sorts of tax advantages you can create as well. So I think that might be another way to contribute to a shortcut to the $15 trillion is maybe there's a way to examine data.

Yeah, I see the free zone as the central sort of. If I'm looking ahead, the central road is the free zone. And remember, I didn't create the lifetime extender and the IP until we had had free zone going. Okay. Because One thing is that once you enter into a collaborative world.

You don't want to die soon.

Yeah, no, I mean, I mean, the only reason why people check out in terms of retirement is because they're tired of intense competition. You know, they're in their intense. But if you're living in, you know, a blue ocean, you've created a blue ocean and you're living in a free zone.

You would never want to stop.

Growing as an entrepreneur. You just, you know, you just went through it. The other thing is that if everything you create, in addition to making retail revenue, is also got an equal amount of IP asset value, when do you want to stop creating? And if everything you're doing that can be measured by growing information might be worth four times what your revenues are, or four times your EBITDA and everything else. So what I see is a growing highway where the free zone is the central highway. And then you have these other dimensions, other lanes to the highway. You have the lifetime extender, you have the IP value builder, and let's say the data. You know, the data thing. And I have a client in Cleveland who can measure the. Your digital footprint value in the marketplace and actually put a value. And he said, I'll give you what a score of 10 would look like just based on your.

Your digital footprint, okay? And he said, I've never even. People who are doing great have never gotten higher than a 3 from the original analysis. They have another 7 that they can do. Just doing what they're doing, they can get seven times more value.

So these are all interesting, but, you know, they'll happen when they happen. And, you know, I mean, you know, I. I work on a quarterly basis and I, you know, I work on a. You know, I get my 22 weeks of free days in every year, you know, and take care of myself and life around. God bless America. You know, life is. Yeah, life is good. Yeah.

Okay, well, here's the. Here's what I added. Just listening to that last block is.

And so when you said that the reason why people quit and die is because they're tired of intense competition, I. I'd also say.

When you quit being useful, purposeful and relevant. And I know when I watch what I'd call the saddled man or saddled lady syndrome, it's people who just can't seem to capture relevance. They don't feel purposeful. They can't get attention anymore for what they create because they've lost their ability to message properly, package themselves properly, or be interesting to whatever.

The potential Buying audience is, you know, it's like you lose your edge and there's nothing more pathetic than a has been entertainer who can't get back in the game again. And then they sell themselves out. But the same is true for a former author. Whatever. They just lose that edge.

Yep, yep. Yeah. And it happens everywhere. And there, you know, there aren't many people in any line of work or profession who seem to just be able to reinvent their game and reinvent who they have to be in the new game. But my feeling is that you have to practice that from an early stage. That's what the game is. And you know, I think that the coach tools make it easier to do that because they're always asking you, you know, what's next quarter that's going to be better than the past quarter. You know what, you know, it's qualitative change, quantitative change as a result of qualitative change. You know, and you know, 10x has to happen qualitatively before it can happen. Measurable, you know, who not how is a qualitative change, you know, that's good.

Well, any, any last thoughts or summary words?

I learned a lot about this and I'm very, you know, I mean there's all sorts of great ideas out there, but Blue Ocean has, you know, it doesn't get talked about very much anywhere. And it probably needs a new iteration because first of all, the digital world.

Changes the whole dynamic of what constitutes competition, what constitutes collaboration, what constitutes value creation. But I think probably one of the greatest collaborations that Apple pulled off was the App Store.

Yeah. Oh, hell yeah.

They've got 2 million, they've got 2 million people doing R and D for them and paying, you know, not all of them. I mean, our app is free on, I mean, but we have to pay to put it on the, you know, the App Store. But they just turned all their users into their R and D. You know, they just sit there and they watch the new things and then they adjust their, their operating system and they adjust their chips to take in the new variety and everything that they're seeing in their, in their, you know, in their App Store. I mean that, I mean.

It'S not a large amount of money to get an app on the App Store. You know, it's not a, it's, you know, they did the same thing with itunes, but then there were more dedicated companies that could do a better job than Apple could, you know. Right.

So here's what I'll add to our list. I actually have 13.

Multipliers right now, Blue ocean multipliers. And the last one I added was platform. I think when you look at, like you said, Apple's app store, itunes, movies. One of the things that we talked about. This is another Chuck story, the guy we did data move with.

We defined four different levels of a company, what they go through. So a level one company increases by adding more customers, more transactions, or higher prices. Okay. Pretty much a linear relationship. A Level 2 company is one that creates more channels. So whether that's sales channels or maybe certifications or whatever, it may happen to be service.

Service channels. Yeah.

Yep. Yeah. Whatever it is. So boom. It could be franchising. All right, so a level three company is one that starts to.

Sell its ip, maybe apifies the business, create an API and can collect data and sell it or resell it. But it's metered transactions.

So it, it may not add any additional overhead. A level four would be like, Apple's a great example. Amazon's a great example. So Apple being the most popular, valuable company in the world right now, they've got phones, computers, they sell, they've got a credit card, they're a bank, they sell music.

I mean, your medical service, you know, the, you know, I mean, they, they have 10 more things than the government will allow them to have which bypass the medical system. You know, because, you know, the, the, you know, the American Medical association, you know, the, the main lobbying group for the doctors for the md. Yeah, they can't stand this thing. They said, how are they going to use the knowledge when they don't have. They're not paying us, you know, how can you know? And they say, well, why don't we find out how they use their knowledge? Why don't we just let them have the knowledge and we'll find out, you know, you know, without her. Without our approval. You know, without our approval.

And I said, wah, wah, wah. That old routine doesn't last long.

And what that means for Apple is there now, I think they're the number one jewelry company in the world. They certainly are by far the biggest watch manufacturer in the world. A useful watch. Now, if you look at Amazon, they're a logistics warehousing company. They sell their aws, they originally design their own tools, and then they're like, why don't we just create a subscription service?

Why don't we just sell the tools? Yeah.

And, and so, you know, why are they. Now, they just took a, a massive dump in terms of value recently. But I wouldn't bet against Amazon in the long Run.

But yeah.

So their problem is that de globalization is happening very, very quickly, you know, and they have aced the fact that they can access source.

And transportation is very, very cheap and transfer transportation. I mean, inflation. I mean, if there are. I mean, I think there's political, partisan, political aspects of inflation. But the moment you make transportation twice as expensive.

You can't avoid inflation because the reason why it's been so cheap is because of the transportation.

Yeah, well, I know. I was reading, I believe it was in Peter Zion's most recent book that in the 1700s, the cost of transportation contributed 99% of the cost of the product. And now it's like. Yeah, not even 1%.

Yeah, 1%. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And even now, after.

That's why you had the luxury age in kingdoms, because the only thing that was worth shipping and worth the trip and worth the risk were jewelry and expensive perfumes and expensive, you know, expensive spices. Luxury items. I mean, the only thing that paid for itself were luxury items. So you had this luxurious, you know, you had, you know, the Versailles court. Well, the reason why so wealthy, because that's the only thing that could be actually accessed and shipped around the world, you know, was. I mean, you know, you know, you know, you wouldn't be doing Kleenex. Well, Kleenex would be worth a fortune in the. Yeah, but anyway. But interesting. It's very fascinating. But the thing. The thing, you know, I mean, usually when people talk about blue oceans, they're kind of talking about the blue part of an overall ocean, but I think the free zone, you actually create new oceans.

Yeah, well, and dirty oceans can be super valuable too. So the beauty of name a problem and create a incentive to pay for it. I'll give you one more that just popped into my head. When you think about Elon Musk, what's one of the ways he created a vast fortune? Well, one is he started selling rockets to NASA. That hadn't been done before. He started making money from tax credits. Okay. He found a lot of loopholes, a lot of shortcuts to getting a lot of money that didn't necessarily involve selling his tech. He got on the right side of, or the right side of thinking about how to take advantage of incentives on a massive level that no one else had the ability to do. And in the process is right now, not by a little, but by a lot, the most efficient car manufacturer in the world, but probably one of, if not the most efficient manufacturers in the world.

The other thing is, yeah, he took.

Advantage of a resource that nobody was really taking advantage of us is that no bureaucratic organization in the world can have a lower budget next year than the one they have this year.

And so he says, well, I'll take your excess budget off your hands right now so that you qualify for a bigger budget next year, you know, and yeah, but the big thing I will tell you is that he lowered the cost of rocket launches by 90%. And when you look at the future, the future of the world and over the next 50 years.

That is an amazing game changer.

Yes. There was.

A piece that I watched.

And it was, Charlie Epstein sent this to me. So it's an Elon Musk interview at the Ron Baron conference. It just took place like a week ago. And one of the things that Elon talked about, I'll get this sent to you. So you have it. But it's a fascinating interview. And basically Elon was talking about, he got prodded a little bit and he was careful about what he said and didn't say. But you know, all the space agencies right now can't come close to competing at the speed and rate that they're doing. And again, when you think through the heavily iterated.

Testing he can do, it's cost effective for him to create a lot of rockets all at once because he can profit from the testing by putting Starlink up, which Starlink now being able to provide, you know, Internet access pretty much almost for the entire planet, cost effectively. And because they're such tiny sats, they're not dependent. Like, you know, probably 40 to 60% of them could fail and it'd still keep on working and they're super easy and fast to replace. And so he just said, I'm creating a lot of enemies because no one can compete with this right now.

Yeah.

And it's going to get that. That same with Apple. And now that they're manufacturing their own processor chips, they don't need intel any longer. And they've got so many different ways. I mean, there's the efficiency and cost effective side of what they've done will be virtually impossible to catch up to in the future.

So the other thing that Musk has done, which is very interesting, and everybody says, you know, he's going to lose his shirt with.

Twitter. Twitter. And I said, no, no, because we're about three years away where the United States is going to ban.

TikTok in the United States.

And if you are allowing it in your country, you can't deal with the United States. Okay. So the United States has a couple Hardballs that they can out hardball any other country. So they.

Completely eliminated the exporting of microchips into China.

Weeks ago. And they said, if you're an American and you're working in China, you've got a choice. You can continue on with your job at the cost of your American citizenship.

Yes.

And like in 48 hours, everybody was out of China. And so that's a weapon. The American citizenship is a really big, I mean, a lot of people say American, you know, it cost me a ton to have American citizenship. And I said, yeah, but give it up and watch what happens to your future, you know.

Give it up.

Yeah. And so I think he's going to do is he's going to replace Tic Tac with a Twitter, Twitter Deluxe. And you know, it's mostly just algorithms. I mean the algorithm is. And everything else. And he gets the market because everybody's habituated to it, you know, and we don't, we don't really care who owns TikTok. We don't really care who owns anything, you know, but we don't want to have our use of anything like that cut off, you know, and.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think in his case, you know, I've, I've talked to a number of people and they're like.

Shite talking him. And I'm like, don't ever underestimate that guy's ability to innovate. Even though as of right now, his blue check subscription got dunked. They've had, you know, a lot of people have exited, they fired a lot of the staff. Here's what he's not afraid to do. He's not afraid to rapidly iterate and be wrong and take the punch. Just like when he came out with the cyber truck and he threw the steel, the ball, whatever, the.

The shot put basically at the window and it shattered and he's like, whoops, that wasn't supposed to happen. But you know what? So he gets up and says, we know what, we know what went wrong.

We know how to fix, you know, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he's not afraid to bring in, you know, right now he's got the smartest, best AI engineers in the world working for him. Will probably replace the vast majority of the people who left who were more interested in sleep, nap time and their.

Whatever the hell timeout rooms than actually getting real work done.

Canceling other people and canceling.

Yeah, yeah.

Sa.