NATIONAL BESTSELLER How to DRIVE Your Competition CRAZY CREATING DISRUPTION FOR FUN AND PROFIT AUTHOR OF THE MACINTOSH WAY AND SELLINC THE DREAM Guy Kawasaki FOREWORD BY SCOTT ADAMS, M M How to Drive Your Competition Crazy Also by Guy Kawasaki Hindsights Selimg the Dream The Macintosh Way Database 101 The Computer Curmudgeon How to Creating Drive Your Disruption for Competition Fun and Profit Crazy Guy Kawasaki with Michele Moreno HYPERION New York Copyright © 1995 Guy Kawasaki All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission ofthe Pub lisher. Printed in the United States ofAmerica. For information address Hyperion, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011. Excerpt from "We Will All Go Together When We Go," © 1958 by Tom Lehrer. Reprinted by permission of Tom Lehrer. Haiku by William Warriner excerpted from 101 Corporate Haiku, © 1994 by William Warriner. Reprinted by permission of Addison- Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kawasaki, Guy, 1954- How to drive your competition crazy : creating disruption for fun and profit / by Guy Kawasaki with Michele Moreno. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7868-8163-1 1. Industrial management. 2. Technological innovations. 3. Competition. I. Moreno, Michele. n. Title. HD31.K347 1995 658—dc20 95-10151 CIP Book design by Richard Orioto 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 To my son, Nicodemus Mathias Kawasaki. May he drive the competition crazier than his dad ever did. ... at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write C o n t e n t s Acknowledgments xi Foreword by Scott Adams xv Chapter 0 Read Me First xvii Part One: Lay The Groundwork Chapter 1: Mighty Opposites 3 Chapter 2: Know Thyself 11 Interview: Chin-Ning Chu 19 Chapter 3: Know Thy Customer 24 Interview: David Kairys 33 Chapter 4: Know Thy Enemy 40 Interview: Allen Kay 50 Part Two: Do The Right Things Chapter 5: Focus on Your Customers 59 Interview: Jim Olson 70 Chapter 6: Concentrate on a Decisive Point 74 Chapter 7: Turn Customers into Evangelists 89 Interview: John Spencer 98 Chapter 8: Make Good by Doing Good 101 Interview: Steve Scheier 108 Contents Part Three: Do Things Right Chapter 9: Establish Brand Loyalty 113 Chapter 10: Make Mountains Out of Molehills 123 Interview: Jay Levinson 132 Chapter 11: Make the Competition into a Friend 136 Chapter 12: Carry a Slingshot 156 Interview: Bob Curry 157 Part Four: Push The Envelope Chapter 13: Carpe Diem 167 Chapter 14: Draw Outside the Lines 178 Interview: Stephen Wynn 193 Chapter 15: How to Drive Your Boss Crazy 199 Interview: Charles Sampson 205 Chapter 16: Preserve and Protect 209 Interview: Harry Eto 217 A Word Before You Go 221 List of Works Used 227 Index 231 Acknowledgments A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions (1879) Behind every successful author stands an amazed research assistant. Michele Moreno is the amazed research assistant standing behind me. If you like the examples in the book, credit her. If you don't, blame me. In any case, she did a splendid job despite the handicap of my vague and ever-vacillating direction. The greatest gifts an author can receive are "good readers" and "good opponents" who force him to rethink what he has written and Acknowledgments actualize what he has not. Bill Meade is such a reader. Thank goodness he found me, because he possesses one of the finest marketing minds I have ever looted. Speaking of looting, I did a number on Raleigh Muns, because I got the answer to an exercise in this book as well as many references and confirmations. He got dim sum. To this day,the identity ofthe"fatherofMacintosh" is a controversy. Jef Raskin started the project, and Steve Jobs finished it. In the same sense, Steve Roth came up with the idea for this book, and I finished it. WithoutRaskinand Roth, Macintosh and How toDrive Your Competition Crazy might not exist. Julie Livingston and John "I'll do it for a Performa" Michel are like family to me. At times supportive, at times demanding, and at all times humbling, they forced me to improve the form, function, grammar, and content of this book.Also, ifJohn and Julie are like family members, then Jon Winokur is like a coach. He helped me to keep going when I was driving myself crazy writing this book. Behind every successful author also stands an amazed editor. Rick Kot is the amazed editorstanding behindme. Without his faith, I might be self-publishing this book. Without his content editing, I might be embarrassed by it. Withouthis advance,I might be working for Microsoft. He deserves my thanks for acquiring this book before it was real, mid- wifing it through delivery, and breast-feeding it while it was young. Behind Rick Kotstands David Cashion and the rest of the Hyperion team: Angela Palmisono, Simone Cooper, Lisa Kitei, David Cohen, and Richard Oriolo. I'm sure I wasn't the easiest author they've ever worked with, but I bet I was the fastest. Every author should be so lucky as to work with people as good as David, Angela, Simone, Lisa, David, and Richard. My thanks to all the readers and information sources who gave unselfishly of their time and expertise: Richard Barlow, Louise Bates, Chris Calande, Dan and Pam Chun, Vicki Clift, Sam Decker, Howard Getson, DebraGoldentyer, Helen Gracon, JohnHolland, SteveKopp, Steven Long, Terri Lonier, Bill Lutholtz, Will Mayall, Dave Millman, Wayne Muromoto, Adam Robinson, Bobbi and PeterSilten, KennethSobel, Harry Somerfield, Todd Spare, Michael Stein, Anne Taylor, Richard Theriault, Stephanie Vardavas, Elizabeth Williams, and Marcia Yudkin. Special thanks also go to Susan Bright Winn, who transcribed the interviews. Readersunaccustomedto computersmay find this strange, but I want Xll Acknowledgments toacknowledge Dialog Information Services. Thisisanonline information provider—enabling me tosearch hundreds ofbusiness andnews publica tions without leaving my desk. A book like this could have been written without Dialog (and Raleigh Muns), but only by a masochist or an idiot. My thanks to Pat Bechelli and the staff at Bechelli's restaurant in the Marina district of San Francisco. I spent many hours there working on this book—sometimes coming inforbreakfastand staying longenough to have lunch. Some authors need scotch to write—I need the Bechelli's granola special. Finally, I wish to thank mywife Beth for putting up withmewhile I wrote thisbook. Do youreally wanttoknow how todrive yourcompetition crazy? Marry a terrific woman. Xlll F o re w o r d HOW ABOUT A PtUG? J WHtftf DO YOU WANT IT? Every day I get letters from people who ask how they can become a syndicated cartoonist like me. I usually tell them to forget car tooningand enter the dry cleaning profession. Mylogic is that I don't need morecompetition incartooning, but I would liketoseemorecompetition in dry cleaning so my bills would decrease. It's been my observation that most people are clueless, including me. You probably shouldn't assume you already understand how to be competitive. If your idea of competition is limited to stuff like pricing, channel development, and market segmentation, then you'll learn a lot by reading How to Drive Your Competition Crazy. I did. After I finished reading Guy's book, I started developing plans for squashing the cartoonists who compete against me on the comics page. My plan is to define them as being bad for the environment. I've noticed that most of my competitors use a lot of ink in an attempt to be artistic. Foreword While this is all fineand dandy from an aesthetic standpoint, I'll bet you didn't know it's destroying the rainforests. In contrast,my comic "Dilbert" employs a planet-friendly three-panel format and an economical approach to ink usage. Moreover, I recycle many of the jokes found in "Garfield" so as not to deplete the earth's precious reserves. (In case you're wondering, I did read the part of the book about ethics. Then I read the chapter about thinking "outside the box." You might want to read those parts in the reverse order.) For some reason, many people fail to recognize that they live in a competitive world. I'm not complaining; as long as my competitors con tinue to seek my advice there will be plenty of places to take my dry cleaning. Still, I feel some social responsibility to help people become more competitive. That's why I recommend that you read How to Drive Your Competition Crazy. It can help you succeed in business. But, more importantly, while you're reading it, you can't practice cartooning. Scott Adams Authorofthecomicstrip "Dilbert"™ XVI Chapter 0 Read Me First We must not hope to be mowers, And to gather the ripe gold ears, Unless we have first been sowers And watered the furrows with tears. It is not just as we take it, This mystical world of ours, Life's field will yield as we make it A harvest of thorns or of flowers. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Perseverance" Gotcha! Given the usual title of "Introduction," only a few people would read this chapter. I hope that a peculiar title like "Chapter 0" will have a profoundly different result. This book celebrates the use of clear thinking, shrewdness, guts, and hard work to drive one's competitioncrazy. Here are three samples of the ideas we will examine: How to Drive Your Competition Crazy / A pizza chain entering the Coloradomarket offered a two-for-one promotion to anyone who brought in the Yellow-Pages ad of its competition.