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Adam Morgan is the author of Eating The Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders, the international best seller that introduced the concept of challenger brands to the world of marketing. His ideas have been widely cited as a key influence by a new generation of successful entrepreneurs and business leaders around the world. He is founder of eatbigfish, a renowned marketing consultancy that works with clients to develop their own breakthrough strategies, from Helsinki to Hanoi.

Mark Barden runs the west coast business for eatbigfish in the US. Over his career he’s won the Platinum Award for direct response marketing, taken a dot com public, warmed up a crowd for Ellen De Generes, and played a Buddhist monk in a Kleenex commercial. His advice on how to create breakthrough thinking with outsize results is much sought after. He is a popular speaker, world-class facilitator, and occasional coach.

A Q&A With Adam Morgan and Mark Barden, the Authors of A BEAUTIFUL CONSTRAINT

What inspired you to write this book?

A real curiosity about the idea that, while in some domains, constraints are seen as beneficial  (i.e. the haiku or sonnet in art, the 24 second shot clock in basketball, and even Ramadan or Lent) most people feel that constraints are limiting and to be avoided at all costs, in their own lives – personal or professional. We knew from our own work with challenger brands that there are often ways for the challenger to turn a constraint into a powerful competitive advantage, yet this capability is not widely understood. Even we didn’t fully understand it! The book allowed us to get clearer about the mindset, method, and motivation required to make constraints beautiful, and gave us the opportunity to lay down the process so that others can get started. To our knowledge, no one has done this before.

A second piece of inspiration came from the sense that this capability needs to be much more widely acknowledged than it is today. We deify our innovators – Musk, Jobs, Zuck, etc. – and rightly so, but in a world of increasing constraint at a personal, professional, and planetary level, we all need to get better at embracing constraints. We want to promote an everyday inventiveness for everyone, and we firmly believe that many more people are capable of thinking this way.

Does the world really need another book about innovation?

No, probably not! That is why we have used the term, “inventiveness,” throughout this book. Innovation has become an annoying buzzword with useless associations; it’s either about whiz kids in Silicon Valley out to change the world, or it’s about big initiatives in big companies. We wanted to just get away from that a little, and write about ordinary people in agriculture, education, and healthcare, as well as the business and marketing world. We wanted to present this process as something anyone can do with just a little more awareness and understanding. We’ve even found that this outlook can be helpful in our roles as parents and spouses, simply because it allows us to reorient our relationships with constraints to possibilities, not problems. Losing power during a storm becomes a source of adventure rather than frustration. It’s obvious, but it’s often overlooked. We’re trying to shine a light on this idea that constraints are opportunities in disguise.

In your book, you describe four different kinds of constraints. What are they?

• Constraints of Foundation – things previously regarded as essential for success in a given area. The Food Truck movement has proven that one doesn’t need a brick and mortar place to start a restaurant, for example.
• Constraints of Resource – money is the most obvious one. Sailor Jerry grew to be bigger than Captain Morgan, despite having no traditional advertising budget at all.
• Constraints of Time – these come in many guises, like the US government’s CAFE standards that force competitive auto companies to collaborate to meet fleet fuel efficiencies by a given date.
• Constraints of Method – IKEA routinely challenges its own established manufacturing practices, in order to drive its costs even lower.

Describe the three stages people go through on the journey to making constraints beautiful.

It’s an oversimplified model, but it can be useful to help people grasp the fact that there’s always a journey – in this case, from Victim to Neutralizer to Transformer:

• Victim – someone who lowers ambition in the face of constraint.
• Neutralizer – someone who maintains ambition, but finds a way to work around the constraint, or a different way to deliver on the ambition.
• Transformer – someone who finds the opportunity in a constraint, and maybe even increases their ambition as a consequence.

In the early stages of research, we thought these might be three different types of people; but some of the people we met, particularly those who spend a lot of time in the Transformative Stage, told us that more often than not, they start as Victims each time they are presented with “an impossible brief.” These are stages, not types. If famous designer, Michael Beirut, goes through the stages each time, let’s acknowledge that and be reassured. What matters the most is that you believe it is possible to make constraints beautiful, that there are certain things to do in order to get started, and that you won’t succeed if you don’t have the right motivations to fuel persistence through tough times.

In the book, you discuss Mindset, Method, and Motivation a great deal. What led you to discover the importance of being strong in all three areas?

It comes mainly from the insight that people – human beings, in all their glory, with all their flaws and potential – are doing the work, NOT the process, and that we need to address their psychology if we are to be successful. We need to acknowledge two important truths:

1. If the people don’t start with the right mindset and belief that they can do this, they will stumble very quickly.
2. If people don’t care and/or don’t have the right motivation to succeed, then the kind of creative tenacity needed for success won’t emerge.

We go into some depth about the full spectrum of emotion that can be in play in these kinds of processes, and how a leader needs to be deft in how they embrace these emotions to full effect to keep their people fired up, going back again and again to find the solution.

A lot of fascinating companies and organizations are featured in your book. How did you choose who and what to highlight? What stood out to you?

There was some method and some madness. Often, we’d spot examples ourselves, of course. And they are everywhere, once you’re tuned in to this idea. There was also plenty of serendipity. Mark was called out of the blue by a Captain from the United States Navy, who wanted some strategic advice. He very quickly engaged Mark in a conversation about the invention of the aircraft carrier, and all the path dependence and Can If thinking that surrounded its development. So, we put that story in the book. Another conversation with a hospital architect led to an interview with Katherine Gottlieb of the South Central Foundation, who is a MacArther Genius Award winner, about embracing constraints in Alaskan healthcare – that’s an amazing story. In the cases of Nike, Unilever, and IKEA, these have all been clients, so we were familiar with some of the constraint-driven innovation happening in these companies. In those cases, we already had access, which helped us get under the skin of what’s going on culturally. Those three, in particular, were really important to our overall thesis, because we needed to present our argument not as a series of one-off moments by unique people, but as an ingrained part of our culture. This gave us the confidence to suggest that old dogs can learn new tricks, and that the ideas we are promoting are transferable to other, larger organizations, the kinds that arguably need to change the most.

Did you find that there were any constraints during the writing process? What constraints did you impose upon yourselves?

We personally generate a significant percentage of the revenue of our business, so taking time out to write represents a big financial hit. Thus, we researched the idea mostly in our spare time, and then gave ourselves a few writing months and some very stiff deadlines to hit. It was intense, but as all writers know, there’s nothing like a pub date to focus the mind. Given the subject matter, it would’ve been ironic (to say the least) if we’d allowed ourselves to miss that deadline. Having two writers, though challenging at times, was a benefit in disguise. Because one writer is in London and the other is in San Francisco, the book was essentially being written 24 hours a day. And our workdays don’t overlap much, so there wasn’t a lot of sitting around and chatting as a way to procrastinate. The time zone constraint really worked for us.

Your firm, eatbigfish, has particular expertise in the field of “challenger brands.” How would you define a challenger brand?

A challenger brand has ambition beyond its resources, and a willingness to embrace the implications of that gap. There’s a lot to this, but that information can be found in Eating the Big Fish. The connection here is that in 16 years of working with the challenger, we’re often in situations where we are disadvantaged in some way – lacking the know-how, lacking distribution, or lacking something considered fundamental to success in a category. The key is to have the challenger introduce new criteria of choice into the category; to redefine the category in a way that allows them to win. Surf, for example, introduced fragrance into the laundry category, because they could not afford to compete directly on cleaning power. This is about using the perceived disadvantaged to promote fresh thinking and embracing constraint. It’s been at the heart of our work since the beginning of eatbigfish.

In your opinion, what is the most important thing your readers can learn from A Beautiful Constraint?

That rather than seeing constraints as sources of asphyxiation, learn to see them as sources of inspiration. Look for the upside in them, rather than avoid them. There is very often a large reservoir of growth and opportunity waiting to be discovered, and that is incredibly exciting!

http://eatbigfish.com/