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155. Bart Vanderhaegen on Flow: Transcending Organizational Barriers to Progress

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We all seek progress: at the individual level, the team level, and the company level. Flow is the term for the experience that we feel when we are making progress on challenging activities through our own actions. Flow is high productivity and high achievement. It is the sensation you have when making progress is “winning” over being distracted or frustrated. Organizational structure is often a barrier to flow. Bart Vanderhaegen tells Economics For Business how to transcend the barrier.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Learning and change are good for people and organizations, but very hard to implement.

Management books, management gurus and consultants are all for change to established ways of doing things. But the business landscape is littered with failed change and transformation projects. It’s not people who resist change, it’s processes and established practices and organizational structure. In many ways, structure is the biggest barrier to change, and the enemy of learning. Even when change projects re-make a business’s structure, it’s still there, just in a different configuration.

What if it were possible to transcend structure?

The secret lies in motivation.

Austrian economics reveals the secret of motivation: every individual seeks better circumstances for themselves, trading one set of conditions that’s unsatisfactory for another set that they prefer. That’s an intrinsic motivation — it comes from inside the individual.

Most business systems rely on extrinsic motivations, what Bart Vanderhaegen calls carrot and stick. The firm metes out rewards in the form of awards and bonuses and promotions for behavior it wants to encourage, and withholds them when there is unapproved behavior. The firm takes a positivist or behaviorist view of the world: people can be “nudged” into approved behavior patterns.

Rewards have many flaws. They rely on predictions — setting future targets — that can never be reliable. These predictions are often fixed, unresponsive to changes in the environment, and usually set without much discussion with the individual who is to be motivated by the target. If the target is met or not, the individual finds it hard to know exactly how their actions contributed to the result.

There is a third kind of motivation: FLOW.

It is possible to harness a third kind of motivation that is neither carrot nor stick, and relies on neither reward nor punishment. It can provide autonomy and freedom to individuals to pursue what they find valuable. They can see their own activity as a contribution to a greater end or purpose for themselves. This kind of motivation comes from FLOW.

FLOW is your absorption into an activity performed well. It’s the enjoyment of performing an activity to the extent that you are actually experiencing that you are good at it, while you ae doing it. The activity itself creates the motivation for it. FLOW easily wins the internal competition between getting distracted or diverted versus making progress on the activity.

We are progress-seeking creatures, and FLOW gives us the greatest sense of progress.

FLOW is practical, and can be harnessed, practiced, and linked to work and organization.

There are three conditions for being in FLOW, or getting back to FLOW when you fall out of it.

1) A clear and specific goal for the activity.

This is not to be confused with aspirational goals like a corporate vision, or target goals like the year-end sales volume target. This goal is at the level of action. For the specific activity, what represents completion? In what time specific frame? What problem will have been solved when the action is complete?

2) Capture immediate feedback from the activity.

The activity tells you if you are making progress. Measurement is in the activity itself — there is no outside judge. If you’re not making progress, the activity can steer you back to it. Bart Vanderhaegen uses a tennis analogy: if your shots are going in, you’re making progress; if not, you can adjust your action.

3) The activity must have a challenging but solvable level of difficulty.

To make progress requires taking on challenges that can elevate our skills. FLOW requires overcoming difficulties (an insight that is contrary to the old adage of “keep it simple”).

For those who are quantitatively minded, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the founder of FLOW studies, measured the appropriate degree of difficulty as 10-12% harder than one’s current ability — a kind of Goldilocks number of not too hard and not too easy.

This has profound implications for organizations engaged in motivation. They must present ever-increasing levels of difficulty to their employees and teams, as they learn to perform better and better in the flow of taking on challenging tasks.

4) Organizational structure is a barrier to FLOW and to its power to solve complex business problems.

FLOW can solve complex problems. When the overarching problem to solve is how to deliver customer value — which is a problem that cuts across all elements of corporate structure — a FLOWing team can succeed, because value is a clear goal, and learning by taking on difficult challenges provides a pathway to the goal. The customer doesn’t care how the firm is structured.

Internal structures of departments and functions and conflicting goals and rules can present a major barrier to FLOW and to customer value generation. A problem-solving team representing many departments and focused on the goal of customer value can transcend the barrier, and transcend corporate structure.

Therefore, Bart Vanderhaegen recommends not to spend time and effort creating a new structure when the current one is problematic. Create FLOW over structure.

5) How to put FLOW into action.

Like everything that has value, FLOW is a subjective experience. But there are some application actions that can help to generate team FLOW.

  • Organize a problem-solving network on top of the structural layer.It’s an organic network that crosses departments and regions and functions and all other structural boundaries.
  • Give each team in the network a mandate.A mandate is a problem to solve without specific direction on how to solve it. The team figures out what the solution will look like and how to get there.
  • Make the problems as open as possible.The problem may be to define what are the most important problems to solve.
  • Create transparency (via a software platform) on the problems, ideas and progress.Everyone “taking the pen” themselves.
  • Make sure the goals are linked to actions.For the most open problems, goals can be set for a small number of steps: let’s get to the next milestone in 30 days (e.g., generating a first set of preliminary ideas).

Through criticism and testing, teams will be able to FLOW to new levels of comfort in solving the most difficult of problems. They become more and more capable. And the problem-solving network is scalable: it can become bigger and bigger and solve harder and harder problems.

Additional Resources

“The Value-Creating FLOW Process for Business Problem-Solving” (PDF): Download HERE

Bart Vanderhaegen’s TED Talk: Mises.org/E4B_155_Video

PactifyManagement.com

The Pactify Podcast: pactifymanagement.com/podcast

FLOW: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi: Mises.org/E4B_155_Book1

Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi: Mises.org/E4B_155_Book2

154. Henrik Berglund: Entrepreneurship As Design

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For entrepreneurs, design is not just lines and shapes and colors and decoration, and it’s not just the look and functioning of a website or a building or another object. It’s a process of advancing from an idea or concept to marketplace realization as a customer-desired new service PR product. In fact, according to Professor Henrik Berglund, entrepreneurship is design.

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

Entrepreneurs advance from idea to implementation via a process of design.

How do entrepreneurs exercise judgment? How do they advance from an imagined idea or business concept or anticipated value to implementing their project in the marketplace and making sales to customers?

It’s a creative process. Some call the domain design science, although we Austrians would think of it in a more subjective framework as human design. In general terms, design provides the bridge from the internal environment of the firm (its capital, its capacity, its skills, its resources, etc.) to the external world of customers and the marketplace. Design facilitates the fit between the two. It’s a goal-driven process of getting to the right design: a value proposition design that attracts customers, an effective value network design for assembling all the components, a business model designed to deliver the value, and pricing and cost choices that result in profit.

The steps in the design process take the form of design artifacts.

Design is not abstract. It’s action. The action takes the form of constructing design artifacts: things like sketches and flow chart diagrams and network maps and templated value propositions and business model designs and business plan spreadsheets, prototypes, landing pages and A/B tests.

There is a design pathway from more abstract and conceptual to more substantial and closer and closer to a marketable product, service, or business. The artifacts are not arranged in any specific order, but they are characterized by the progress from abstract to functional and detailed.

Most importantly, the design artifacts are measurable and testable, so that entrepreneurs can get more and more information about how well the design fits with the real world — customer assessments and feedback, simulations, beta tests and other feedback loops serve to make the design more substantial and the entrepreneur’s level of confidence higher.

Experimentation is one kind of design pathway.

Professor Berglund described experimentation as a design interaction with an existing real-world situation, where the testing process is to assess how well the entrepreneurial vision works in that world. Is there demand? Will customers find the proposition useful, and will they buy? Through repeated and experimental testing, entrepreneurs measure their way to the best-fit adaptation of their concept to the market.

He used as an example of experimentation an early step in the development of Dropbox, in the form of a video that carefully described its function and benefits, and sought feedback from the market in the form of requests to join a beta test. The video was successful in attracting a beta test audience, reassuring the designers of the potential use case.

Transformation requires a different kind of design approach.

Transformative ideas do not have an existing market — a “real world” — in which to experiment. There is no identifiable demand at the outset. The process is co-creation, with potential users and customers, of a new world or a transformed world. The design path is not the use of carefully constructed measurable artifacts, but of another kind, which Prof Berglund describes as mutable and transformable.

He used the example of the iPhone, transforming from the functionality of a phone — with a use case of intermittent 2-way communication events – to the concept of a handheld device with continuous use for a multiplicity of purposes aided by integration with software apps and internet connectivity. The vision was never precise, as it can be with experimentation. Apple outlined a more vague vision of possibilities and soft boundaries, and invited individuals and communities of software developers to join, collaborate, make specialized local contributions, and synthesize a new, emergent system over time.

Firms will typically employ a mixture of experimentation and transformation in a portfolio of projects.

Experimentation and transformation are “ideal types” of design, not always as clearly differentiated in the real world as they are in theory. Nevertheless, it’s important for entrepreneurs to differentiate between them, and to maintain a portfolio of projects that instantiates both types.

Professor Berglund and Chalmers are engaged in a new synthesis of entrepreneurial theory and practice.

Prof Berglund observes in a book chapter called “The Artifacts of Entrepreneurial Practice,” that entrepreneurship scholarship has not always been very useful or helpful to practicing entrepreneurs. Now this is changing as researchers move closer to “the real-time doings and sayings of practitioners involved in entrepreneurship”. In the spirit of transformation, there’s a new synthesis of theory and practice that is being co-created. That synthesis is one of our guides at Economics For Business; we hope to gather from business entrepreneurs their evaluations about which elements of theory and research are of most use in practice.

Additional Resources

“Opportunities as Artifacts and Entrepreneurship as Design” by Henrik Berglund, Marouane Bousfiha, and Yashar Mansoori (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_154_Paper1

“The Artifacts of Entrepreneurial Practice” by Henrik Berglund and Vern L. Glaser (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_154_Paper2

HenrikBerglund.com

Chalmers.se

152. Laura and Derek Cabrera: Building An Entrepreneurial Business Culture With Systems Thinking

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Why do entrepreneurs start businesses in the first place? They have a vision for the future and seek to work with other people to bring it about. Those other people may be colleagues and employees, directors and investors, suppliers, and customers. Organizing this multivalent work is hard. Thinking of your organization as a complex adaptive system yields new understanding and a new approach to organizing that results in improved goal achievement.

Laura and Derek Cabrera of Cabrera Research Lab are dedicated to sharing research findings that enhance the capability of any organization to reach business goals. They join the Economics For Business podcast to do some sharing with the E4B community.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Systems Thinking resolves the mismatch between the way the real world works and the way firms think it works.

World hunger is a wicked problem, yet there is enough food to feed the world. We don’t have the right mental model to account for all the social, economic, political, motivational, and cultural issues that shape the problem.

In the same vein, systems thinking in business is about building mental models that better align with the real world. Laura and Derek Cabrera provide an introduction in Systems Thinking Made Simple, and they mentioned some of the important changes in thinking that businesses must embrace to enter the new world of possibilities that systems thinking opens up. The first step is to recognize that LAMO thinking is inappropriate for a VUCA world.

The real world is agnostic about human endeavors

VUCA WorldLAMO Thinking
The real world is non-linearbut we think in linear ways.
yet we tend to look sat things through a human-centered (anthropocentric) lens.yet we tend to look sat things through a human-centered (anthropocentric) lens.
The real world is adaptive and organicyet we tend to think mechanistically and the metaphors we use reference machines (e.g., a universe like clockwork; mind is a computer).
The real world is networked and complex with a sprinkling of randomnessyet we think of things in ordered categories and hierarchies.

All businesses are complex adaptive systems. We have no choice in the matter. An organization is a living, breathing thing, organic — lots of individuals dynamically making decisions that roll up into the complex system. It’s not a machine.

An implication is that business executives and managers can’t operate on outcomes directly (e.g., via business “planning” or business “strategy”). Outcomes are emergent from the system and can be worked on only indirectly.

The traditional mental model for business organization is flawed.

Laura and Derek capture the traditional mental model for organizational management in the acronym PCCU: Plan, Command, Control, Utilize.

Plan: Businesses create plans for the future, often in great detail, with rigorous discipline, and lots of numbers and projections. But the real world is changing too fast, and outlining detailed steps to reach a goal amidst rapid change introduces biases that can occlude opportunities for rapid and profitable adaptation to change.

Command: Hierarchical organization designs assume a military metaphor of command. Organizations are much more organic in the real world, tempered by social influence, compliance, resistance, and rebellion. Better to think of then organization as a network and a culture.

Control: Management likes to feel like it is in control, but the control paradigm is both unrealistic and unresponsive to organic change.

Utilize: The most detrimental organizational construct is the Human Resources department. Treating people like resources to be utilized is unsustainable. People are independent agents in the system who wish to co-evolve to a place where their individual goals and those of the organization are well-aligned.

The mental model for how complex adaptive systems work is Simple Rules.

The great insight from complex adaptive systems thinking is that organizational behavior isn’t directed by leaders, but driven by followers. What are they following? Simple rules.

We can think of an organization as a superorganism. It self-organizes by following simple rules that guide the actions of individual agents in variable contexts. Autonomous agents follow simple rules based on what’s happening locally (that is, around them), the collective dynamics of which lead to the emergence of the complex, system-level behavior we observe: adaptiveness and robustness.

The simple rules for successful adaptive organizations are summed up as V-M-C-L.

Vision: A seeing thing. Something we all see in the future, where we are headed. Not a tagline, not a statement on a website, not a corporate word salad. A vision is a shared mental model that everyone in the organization can see and articulate and align with. It’s in their hearts and minds. It gets employees excited and connected.

Mission: A doing thing. A mission is something that you do repeatedly over and over again to bring about the vision. It directs the work in the organization, with clarity about who does what. It’s clear, concise, easily understood and measurable.

Capacity: The organization must have the capacity to do the mission: the energy, the resources, the skills. Capacity is a system of systems all connected and working together, focused on, and directed towards doing the mission.

Learning: Learning is critical to expand capacity, reinforce mission and refine vision. It is the adaptive function. Organizations must love learning – seeking unvarnished feedback from the outside world as input into making the changes that are needed for improvement. This means loving reality and being brutally honest about the current state. Learning means improving mental models, and embracing the possibility that your current model is wrong.

In their book Flock Not Clock (see Mises.org/E4B_152_Book), where there is a detailed exposition and explanation of V-M-C-L, Laura and Derek cite the example of the app My Fitness Pal.

Vision: Healthy living is the new normal

Mission: Facilitate and motivate healthy behavior choices

Capacity: Build mission-critical systems: design, engineering, R&D, sales, and marketing, etc.

Learning: Feedback on whether living healthy is getting easier, whether more people are making healthy choices, whether more people are feeling joyful and powerful as a result.

Think of the elements of V-M-C-L as a pyramid you can construct from first principles: Thinking drives Learning, which drives Capacity, which drives Mission, which brings about Vision.

The emergent result of V-M-C-L is culture.

Laura and Derek talk about training people to think in order to be able to learn. The first step is often unlearning the misleading mental models we’ve been taught to believe. When people start to think about mental models, they can recognize their own and those of others, and make comparisons, make changes, and find common ground.

If your mental model about your current situation is real — “brutally honest,” as Derek put it — then the chance of changing that situation for the better is good. You’ll be able to identify a path out.

Culture can be built around the simple rules of vision, mission, capacity, and learning, by purposely constructing the four mental models of V-M-C-L. There is enormous organizational and economic power in the new understanding of complex adaptive systems and how they work in getting a group of disparate people to work together towards a goal as if they are a single unified organism.

Additional Resources

Sign up for Laura and Derek’s Vision-Mission Bootcamp:  Go.CabreraResearch.org/VMBootcamp

Visit Cabrera Research Lab online at CabreraResearch.org and on LinkedIn (Mises.org/E4B_152_LinkedIn).

“20-Point V-M-C-L Checklist” (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_152_PDF1

“Constructing the VMCL System” (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_152_PDF2

Flock Not Clock: Align People, Processes and Systems to Achieve Your Vision by Derek and Laura Cabrera: Mises.org/E4B_152_Book

151. Mark Packard On Entrepreneurial Imagination: You Can’t Do Business Without It

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Imagination is the first stage of any value generation journey — starting a development project, enhancing the customer experience, embarking on innovation, or building a business for the next year or the next decade. Imagination might sound like a fuzzy concept, but it’s a robust business tool, the engine of the entrepreneurial design process. Mark Packard joins the E4B podcast to put imagination into a business context and describe the possibilities it opens up.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Imagination is central to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, and to innovation and advance in all aspects of business.

We see business through mental models, as a kind of a movie our minds play for us. In this movie, we remember result and experiences from the past (which requires imagination) and we create images of what might have been, or, in the future, what might be. We know these images are not real, but they play through our mental model of business reality. They inform our plans and projects. We imagine cause-and-effect relationships between imagined concepts and ideas, and between actions and outcomes.

From new product development to efficient administrative processes, every aspect of business involves — and requires — imagination.

We can use imagination in simulating possible results.

Not only do we employ imagination in our regular business activity, we also use it for advanced complex modeling. We add new inputs to what we have constructed in our imagination — in the form of “what if” queries – to create a new mental model that’s different from the current one: a prospective reality that we can plan for and try to achieve.

As we try to achieve that prospective reality, we receive feedback in various forms, which we use adaptively to further adjust and improve the mental model we hold in our imagination. Imagination is dynamic, always changing.

Customers are also imagining, and entrepreneurs must imagine what they are imagining.

We’ve highlighted in earlier episodes, the Value Learning Cycle that customers complete in the process of learning what to want and what to value (see Mises.org/E4E_44). The cycle begins with predictive valuation — consumers predicting to themselves how much value they’ll experience from the product or service a business is pitching to them. That’s imagination at work. If they buy and consume, value is an experience that results — and experience is a mental representation that includes imagination. Then in their post-experience valuation, customers adjust their mental model based on their new value knowledge. Future predictive valuations will be imagined with this updated knowledge.

Imagination is central to customer expectations of value and to customers’ decision-making.

Businesses use three kinds of imagination to make a value proposition.

Businesses develop value propositions for customers, utilizing 3 kinds of imagination: creative imagination (imagining the design of a future product or service that will deliver a valued customer experience); empathic imagination (imagining how the customer will feel as a result of the experience); and predictive simulation (imagining what the world will be like after pursuing the contemplated action).

Creative imagination is a combination of needs knowledge (what customers want) and technical knowledge (what can be produced with available resources). In both cases, more knowledge is an aid to the imaginative process.

Similarly, empathic imagination can benefit from more knowledge about the customer’s mental model, developed through relationships and conversations.

Predictive simulation is aided by rapid learning from testing and prototyping and developing design artifacts (like landing pages and A/B tests) that enable interim simulations of customer responses.

Imagination can’t be shared but visions can.

When we work on a team or in a firm, it’s productive to be aligned on the imagined future at which the group is aiming and is working towards. Strictly speaking, we can’t share imagination. Everyone’s imagination is subjective and individual. You can’t imagine what I’m imagining.

What can be shared is a vision, because it can be described in words developed from a shared language. Of course, every individual may interpret the meaning of the words differently, but with repetition, explanation and persuasive presentation, the group can get closer and closer to shared meaning. The vision becomes a cultural artifact — how we think in this firm, what we aim for in this firm, how we see the future in (and of) this firm.

Similarly, in selling value propositions to customers, businesses are trying to get those customers to share a vision. We persuade them with storytelling, whether it’s in the form of advertising, or PR or social media or the words printed on a package.

Rhetorical skills — being able to communicate in a way that enable other people to see and share a vision, and to adapt it to their own vision — are key to successful entrepreneurship.

Some people are better at imagination than others — but you can work on the skill set.

Many business icons are or have been symbols of great imagination at work, such as Steve Jobs in the past and Elon Musk today. They’re better at seeing the future than others.

But everyone who understands imagination at the foundational level, as Mark Packard explained it in the podcast, can get better at it, and train others to get better at it, too.

Imagination is a simulation run through our mental model based on knowledge we possess. One important step is to improve the knowledge set available for the simulation — better quality knowledge, more accurate knowledge, more detailed or intimate knowledge.

More needs knowledge and more technical knowledge will improve creative imagination. Keep up with new technologies and with consumer trends and marketplace developments.

More customer knowledge will enhance empathic imagination. Spend more time with customers. Use qualitative research (such as the E4B contextual in-depth interview: Mises.org/E4B_151_PDF) to understand their mental model better, so that the empathic simulations you run through that mental model will improve.

Predictive simulation is an act of imagination that improves with learning about what works and what doesn’t. Run more tests and new kinds of explorations. Explore, explore, and explore more. Don’t take your own predictions too seriously; rather, expect to be wrong in ways you never imagined. Be humble, be adaptive, be agile, and recognize that you do have to predict in order to act. Triangulate with what others are doing because they’re imagining too, and they may have more and better knowledge than you. Try to reconstruct their mental models and assess whether they’d be helpful for you.

Additional Resources

Elon Musk’s Imagination (Video): Mises.org/E4B_151_Video

“Subjective Value in Entrepreneurship” by Mark Packard and Per Bylund (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_151_Paper

“Empathy for Entrepreneurs: How to Understand and Identify Customer Needs and Wants from Their Perspective” (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_151_PDF

“Mark Packard on The Value Learning Process” (Episode): Mises.org/E4E_44

150. Six Powerful Business Insights From Austrian Economics

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We’re highlighting six of our 2021 podcasts that have special value for value creators. We invite you to listen to the special year-end podcast, and to sample each of those we’ve highlighted here, review the Key Takeaways we provide as a summary for each one, and download the free tools that accompany each podcast.

Per Bylund explains that all successful entrepreneurs are Austrians.
Episode #143: Listen to the Episode
Resource: “Explore and Realize (and Keep Exploring): How Austrian Entrepreneurs Generate Value on the Path to Business Success” (PowerPoint): Mises.org/E4B_143_PPT

Mark Packard joins Per Bylund to explain how Austrian Value theory enables entrepreneurs to radically re-shape business thinking for greater value generation.
Episode #108: Listen to the Episode
Resource: “The Value Generation Business Model” (Video: Watch Video

Matt McCaffrey outlines the Austrian approach to business strategy: emergent not planned.
Episode #127: Listen to the Episode
Resource: “Emergent Strategy Process Map” (PDF): Download PDF

Mark McGrath orients entrepreneurs to purposeful adaptation to emergence via the OODA loop.
Episode #138: Listen to the Episode
Resource: John Boyd’s “OODA Loop Graphic” (PPT): Download the PPT

Ulrich Moeller provides the organization design model for the adaptive entrepreneurial firm: it’s boss-less.
Episode #133: Listen to the Episode
Resource: “The Future Of Organization Design” (PDF) Download PDF

Saras Sarasvathy pulls it all together in the form of The Entrepreneurial Method.
Episode #131: Listen to the Episode
Resource: “Better Lives and a Better Society” (PDF) Download PDF

149: Victor Chor: The Journey From Flipping to Global High-Tech Brand Building

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Entrepreneurship is fulfilling and exciting and inspiring. It’s fun. It’s learning. It’s a sense of achievement. It’s a journey. Economics For Business loves to spotlight individual journeys to illustrate what’s possible, provide learning about how to create and grow opportunities, and to inspire new entrepreneurship. This week, we are joined by Victor Chor, who leads us on a journey from a hobby of flipping on eBay to creating a brand and orchestrating a high-energy global value generation community.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

The journey starts with action — develop your “doing skills”.

Victor Chor started his journey via “flipping” on eBay: sourcing items to offer for sale, and using sales feedback (what sells, what doesn’t) to determine future offerings. He developed the “doing skill” (as opposed to a “knowing skill” that comes from formal business education) as he made more and more sales. Flipping was a hobby that became a business.

What’s the benefit? Well, it’s fun. There’s money profit. There’s a sense of achievement. And there’s learning.

Experimentation is at the heart of entrepreneurial success.

How do you find out what works? You experiment. Try this, try that. Learning results. Victor learned the products that sell best. He learned scaling, as a repeatable process yielding increasing returns. He learned the best feedback loops for adaptiveness — in his case inventory management and how to keep it low through accelerated sales.

Experimentation is a learning loop: experiment, gather feedback, learn, improve, run more experiments.

Adopting customer centricity is a further advance on the journey.

To a large extent, Amazon, with its “customer obsession”, led the way in making customer centricity the norm for e-commerce and internet selling. They not only continuously raise the bar for customer service excellence in terms of quality, speed, convenience, availability, and range of choice, they also introduced wide ranging competition between 3rd party sellers on their platform. Competition is a virtuous circle for customer satisfaction: if one firm establishes an advantage or a superior offering to which customers flock, then competitors must improve their offering even more to re-qualify for customer acceptability.

In this environment, entrepreneurs learn about continuous improvement and the need to create a unique customer experience that can establish some sustainable advantage. The ability to grow in sales revenues morphs into the design of unique customer experiences.

A further advance in the mastery of customer centricity is to engage customers in product and service development — what we’ve been calling co-creation of value. Through surveys and e-mail marketing and just hanging out and talking with customers, Victor’s team has developed an acute understanding of customer wants, needs and preferences.

And the technology field lets us all think like customers. Victor points out that he and his team are all customers for the products they take to market. They’re all looking for quality and convenience and technological excellence, all experiencing what inconveniences customers, and therefore even better able to serve their market.

The next level of advance on the journey is brand building — imagining, designing, assembling, and marketing a differentiated branded offering.

There is a transition point where a project can become a brand. A project to develop and deliver a high-function technology product can cross into the branded perception and branded experience area. Branding is the ultimate power in delivering uniqueness. A brand can establish a sustainable and unassailable perception.

Victor Chor advanced into brand building through building his community. The people he hired into his growing business has ideas for establishing and growing a brand. Wholesaling and distribution and manufacturing partners contributed both ideas and capacity. Victor developed a very original concept of a brand as a representation of all the people involved together in the venture. His image for a brand is that “it’s a ballroom”: set it up and throw a party in which many can participate and all are welcome to help shape new products and the future of the brand.

Infinacore is the brand name around which Victor and his team have assembled their community. It’s focused on wireless charging and related high-tech convenience: the brand mission refers to “making the wonderful world we live in as simple as plug and play”. This is a brand platform with unlimited future potential, based on how customers define simplicity and plug-and-play in the future, and how they judge what they find to be wonderful.

Reaching out more and more widely expands opportunity and opens up new avenues.

Early in his journey, Victor utilized the services offered via Alibaba. He made contacts, built up a buddy list, engaged in chat on the platform, and used the network to source products. Many of his contacts in manufacturing and trading companies stayed in touch over time. Some of them started their own venture and their own factories. Long term relationships developed, and links to capability and capacity multiplied and grew stronger.

Everyone in this network is on their own journey, feeling what Victor called the “shared vibe” of connection and collaboration.

Alibaba proved to be a catalyst for learning — for example, learning a shared language, learning to negotiate, learning to communicate, and learning working practices like minimum order quantities — and an opening of new avenues, such as contacts with factories that could provide white labeling opportunities and technology improvements for original products.

Ultimately, Victor was able to develop a leadership skill in entrepreneurial orchestration: pulling together and integrating resources, people and processes in a value network dedicated to the shared pursuit of high-tech brand building.

The journey is arriving at a new peak, but never ends.

There’s a new product / wireless charging system launch coming up for Infinacore. It represents a new peak in both technology and brand, a unique original design with new benefits. The Infinacore community has advanced to a new higher level.

The company has refined its vision and mission, not simply as communication, but as a picture of the future around which everyone in the community can gather and in which all can invest their effort and emotional energy. It’s ingrained. There‘s shared passion and shared emotion.

This is the step that removes the anxiety of uncertainty. When the vision is shared and the mission — what the community does repeatedly every day to make progress towards the vision — is clear, then the future is not a scary unknown, but a goal towards which there is continuous advance. There’s no fear.

Additional Resources

“The Evolution Of A Global High-Tech Brand” (PDF): Download PDF

Visit Infinacore.com

Follow Infinacore on Instagram: @Infinacore