10.20.09
He Should have Armed Himself
In the 1992 movie, “Unforgiven”, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, there was a typical Clint Eastwood scene. He enters a bar and gets the drop on all in the room, including the Sheriff. The Clint Eastwood character asks who the proprietor of the bar is. A man steps forward and the Clint Eastwood character shoots him dead. The Sheriff then says, “You shot an unarmed man!” The Clint Eastwood character then answers, “He should have armed himself.”
The Sheriff had some notion that there were rules to be followed. Every fight should be a fair fight. It would be villainous to just shoot someone without giving them a chance. Translate this to the business world. Competitors should fight fair. If one is planning a great new product, it should let its competitors know so they would be prepared.
I worked at a bank several years back that developed a product that was primarily intended to go into grocery stores to guarantee checks. This would reduce the tremendous cost of bad checks being written. For a customer to use this self-service device, they only needed to sign up for an account and receive a plastic card with their identification information. It would work on any bank account.
If you are not aware, banks are very cordial to one another and most new products are not new at all. They are usually just a repackaging of existing services. Competition for the retail market is usually by the location of branches and the corporate market is usually by relationships and the size of loans that can be made.
When the bank introduced this check guarantee service, it was a great success. It was installed in grocery stores and other large retailers. Everyone was happy except the other banks in the city. They did not understand why they were not in on the planning. Why were they not able to get some of the business? They were given no chance to arm themselves. Why would they be shot this way? Senior managers of the competing banks tried to get the manager that launched this new service fired. The “good old boys” were not happy.
There are those that would like the business world to be fair with rules of competition as expected by the banks in this story. But, that is not the real world. Competition keeps our economy moving to new levels of benefit for all of us. It can also have great rewards for those that are first with a new idea.
Having a strong Enterprise Architecture is an important weapon to have when fighting competition. It can lay the foundation for an agile enterprise that is not only able to innovate and deliver greater value to their customers, but they will also be able to quickly respond when their competition introduces new innovations. So, do not be caught without arming yourself. There are those that do not play by the Sheriff’s rules.
Dan Waldron said,
October 20, 2009 at 8:16 am
Great post. I will read your posts frequently. Added you to the RSS reader.