Perception is Powerful — Discover Your Asymmetric Advantage
The following is adapted from Asymmetric Advantage by Jason Van der Schyff.
When you read the name “SquidWorks,” does it ring a bell? Probably not. SquidWorks was a small tech company that built electronics and performed mechanical engineering and injection molding. They were a company made up of three guys who worked alone in a warehouse. But even though they were a much smaller company, they won a pretty big client over a big, scary defense contractor, one that was endorsed by a former shady vice president.
And we’re not talking just any client here. We’re talking about the US Air Force — specifically, the Space and Missile Defense Command, which is important to note because it sounds way cooler.
The Space Command needed a rock, or something that resembled a rock, to serve as a covert weather station. Sometimes they needed to send a small patrol of Army-Marine-SEALs to a site in Afghanistan, so they needed a device that could ensure they wouldn’t accidentally fly a helicopter into the Taliban. Sending six or more special forces soldiers anywhere is a pretty expensive endeavor, not to mention dangerous. They needed something that could be installed (just once); wake up on demand or on a schedule; measure wind speed, wind direction, and the proximity of lightning; and send that information through a satellite network to the Department of Defense. And do all of that in a way that wouldn’t attract the attention of the enemy.
Space Command went to one of the big companies — you know, the ones that make a killing off of war — and was like, “This is what we need. Make it happen.” The WarMonger company ten-foured that information, but the product they designed was basically a weather boulder instead of a rock — it simply wasn’t practical. The air force needed to be able to transport this weather station inconspicuously; they wanted something handheld. They lost multiple millions of dollars on that project.
Cue SquidWorks, who had some experience in space communication. Space Command presented them with WarMonger’s failed project and said, “Can you fix this in three months?” The engineers at SquidWorks charged this gratuitously funded government program a mere $150,000 to do the whole project, and they thought that was pretty good because $150K split three ways is still a year’s salary for some people.
After doing some investigating, SquidWorks was like, “Is a rock really the best thing? What if we made this into a camouflaged cylinder that goes on a tripod? You don’t want to measure weather on the ground, anyway; you won’t get an accurate reading on the wind.” They connected with a company in Silicon Valley that had built the world’s smallest lightning sensor. WarMonger tried to use a sensor to measure lightning to the nearest meter, but SquidWorks knew it didn’t need to be that specific. The air force just didn’t want to be surprised by lightning in a helicopter; they just needed to know, “Is there lightning around?”
Because they had money and a larger workforce, WarMonger divided the work and pieced everything together at the end, which is why they ended up with a boulder instead of spy hardware after nine months and millions of dollars spent. SquidWorks made a product that the client was, ultimately, all the more satisfied with — because they approached the problem precisely the opposite way.
Discover Your Asymmetric Advantage
WarMonger should have been the better candidate for the air force’s project. They had more manpower, more clout, and more resources. You would think that all those great minds would have produced a satisfactory product. But it’s exactly because they had such a big team that they missed the mark on the portable weather station. They broke the project up into smaller tasks and assigned those to specialists, who then did not communicate well enough with one another. SquidWorks, on the other hand, nurtured an intimate space conducive to sharing ideas and communicating the results of failed experiments.
To any onlookers, SquidWorks’s team size would have been considered a disadvantage, especially when compared to WarMonger’s resources. But this alleged weakness is exactly what enabled them to succeed. This is what I call an asymmetric advantage.
You can turn any disadvantage into an asymmetric advantage if you shift your mindset about it. Perception is powerful. You’ve probably heard the saying, “If you think you can’t, then you can’t,” and that’s cliché at this point, but clichés enter our vernacular for a reason: they’re true.
WarMonger wasn’t open to a different perspective. We’re told what to do and how to do things a lot in our lives, and sometimes you have to break those assumptions to come up with something that actually does the job. That sometimes requires that horrible “think outside the box” advice that we’ve all heard before, but how do you make yourself think outside the box? To me, it requires tenacity. If you accept the status quo, that’s fine, I guess, but you’ll never see outside the box, let alone embody that mindset to make real, lasting change in your business. But if you reject the status quo and embrace tenacity, you can start doing more impressive things in your line of work.
You need to understand that you do not need to mirror the tactics of lizard people like Mark Zuckerberg or some other thirty-under-thirty member. Specifically, you should not do this. It will not work out for you — not because your team is too small or you don’t have enough money or whatever, but because your business is not Facebook or Google. What works for Facebook and Google is all good and fine, but they had to discover what worked for them and what didn’t, just like you’re going to have to do for your own business.
To help you stop asking yourself, “WWSJD?” (“What Would Steve Jobs Do?”) you have to discover your own asymmetric advantage.
Here’s a list of all the things that could supposedly keep you from succeeding in your business:
- Your teeny team size
- Lack of formal education
- Inexperience
- Sporadic résumé
- Low (or nonexistent) funds
- Too many good ideas (and poor focus)
Ultimately, these things boil down to three categories: people, money, and experience. Your team is made up of people; the culture depends on people; your leadership lords over people. Experience can be understood in the traditional sense or come in the way of education. Money is a dark cloud over everything, waiting for you to do a rain dance. And, of course, some people have to dance harder than others.
For more advice on how to create strong leadership in your business, you can find Asymmetric Advantage on Amazon.
Jason Van der Schyff is the COO of SoftIron, a venture-backed company that creates exceptional appliances for scale-out data centers. With experience that includes R&D engineering, as well as sales and marketing, Jason specializes in helping technology startups navigate their early stages and leverage their unique advantages. Jason started his own ad agency at nineteen and later became an oil field diver, transitioning to the business side of the industry after realizing his potential impact in equipment manufacturing and technology. He and his wife live in Los Angeles, California.
