Play Bigger with Chris Lochhead
Christoper Lochhead joined us in the podcast to discuss his new book “Play Bigger” (co-authored with Ramadan, Peterson and Maney) during my stay here in Silicon Valley. We discussed the concept of category kings and why the modern tech startups and companies need to embrace category design in addition to product & company design to play bigger. Last but not least, we discuss the interesting examples of category kings in Asia.
Here are the interesting show notes and links to the discussion (with time-stamps included):
- Chris Lochhead (@lochhead, LinkedIn),
- How did you start in your career? [1:21]
- Throughout your career, for example, Mercury & Orchestria, what are the interesting lessons you can share? [2:28]
- Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets (Amazon, Harper Collins) by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, Kevin Maney. [3:00]
- How did this book project came about? [3:23]
- Why is the book titled “Play Bigger” and its main thesis? [4:51]
- In your discussion on what makes a great company, you talk about the triangulation of three areas that shape a Category King: Product Design, Company Design & Category Design, how do you and your fellow authors define three areas and how do they lead to a category king? [7:41]
- How does one incorporate category design as they are building or scaling their companies? [10:36]
- What are the steps in your category design playbook? [13:38]
- How does one discover the category? [13:43]
- How does one put forward the strategy to dominate that category? [15:30]
- How does one mobilize people that moves the company towards the category? [16:27]
- How does one condition the market to welcome the company as a category leader? [19:12]
- Can you share examples of companies in how they establish themselves to be category kings? [20:44]
- Given that software is eating the world, how does a traditional company (and if it’s a category king) fend itself against a technology company moving into the same category from an asymmetrical view? [24:00]
- For a multi-national corporation, given that they have gone from nimble to slow, how do they ensure that they have a continuous process to make themselves category kings, even though the categories might shift and change? [28:11]
- Since the podcast is about Asia, have you seen any examples of category kings? (For example, Alibaba, Tencent with Wechat which Facebook is trying to clone?) [29:36]
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The show is hosted by Bernard Leong (@bleongcw) and are sponsored by Ideal Workspace (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) with their new Altizen Desk on Indiegogo (Twitter, Facebook, Medium). Also check out Ideal Workspace’s new standing desk, Altizen and sign up for their mailing list. Sound credits for the intro music: Taro Iwashiro, “The Beginning” from Red Cliff Soundtrack.
