Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets

by Al Ramadan

A product and a company exist inside a category. If you don’t take charge of the category, someone else will, and then you’re royally screwed. Position yourself or be positioned.

The company that defines the space is best positioned to dominate it.

New categories are nonconsensus.

listening to customers leads you to constantly build better, but never to build different. And different is what creates new categories.

Better leads to a faster horse; different leads to a Model T.

Amazon’s rubric of “from customer needs to our skills” or “from our skills to new customers.”

looking at the same time for both technology insights that come from inside the company, and for market insights that come from the views the company has on the external world.

In every school or office or organization in the world, there are unique problems waiting to be solved or age-old problems being solved in ways that are no longer effective. The best way to start a category and make yourself its king is to find one of those problems, concisely define it, and make sure others see it as you see it.