Fast Company:

Fast To Market

Staying Beneath the Radar

Creating and Perfecting New Products and Services in Secrecy

Staying Beneath the External Radar

If you fish to get to market fast and/or first, you must be able to act in secrecy. All fast-to-market companies demonstrate the ability to create and prefect new products in secrecy to stay beneath the radar of their competitors and to gain a competitive advantage over them.

In their book It's Not the Big That Eat the Small... It's the Fast That Eat the Slow,¹ Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton argue that only the swiftest of corporations will thrive in the 21st century. They then outline a program, based on best practices developed by contemporary speedsters like Charles Schwab and AOL that readers can work into their own businesses by similarly focusing on "commerce, resource deployment, and people."

Its four parts examine ways to create environments that anticipate the future, reassess operations and personnel and make appropriate adjustments whenever necessary, launch a "crusade" while "staying beneath the radar," and maintain velocity through institutionalization and close customer relationships. "This book will show you how to think and move faster than your competition," they write, adding that "being faster doesn't mean being out of breath. It means being smarter."

 Case in Point  Hotmail

Hotmail, the first web-based free e-mail server, was built around a simple idea. Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, the founders of Hotmail, realized that before long the same idea would occur to many other people.

They had to raise venture capital without revealing the real idea of their business.

"I turned over every stone looking for money. Anyone who would listen, I'd talk to. I pitched friends, colleagues, classmates, partners, anyone, anywhere, anytime. I pitched a Texas multimillionaire, an oil magnate, a real estate person, and even a venture capitalist who funded gas stations," says Sabeer Bhatia. But he would only reveal the big idea after he was certain he wasn't being rejected for some irrelevant reason: "All potential investors got the same pitch – for Java Soft, another program we'd played with. If the person I started to sell started spouting reasons that I believed were silly ones for rejecting us, they never got to hear about the real idea. Eventually only 4 people knew about our real plan."

Sun Tzu's "The Art of War": Planning

• Warfare is one thing. It is a philosophy of deception.

• When you are ready, you try to appear incapacitated.

• When active, you pretend inactivity.

• When you are close to the enemy, you appear distant... More

Staying Beneath the Internal Radar

In the world of business, most innovations have to pass through some kind of deliberate gatekeeping process that identifies the likely winners and kills off the variations that serve no useful purpose. Successful gatekeepers can gather enough resources to provide “air cover,” allowing the innovation to reside under the radar screen by protecting it from too much scrutiny during its critical early phases.²