The Entrepreneur’s Bookshelf: The Power of Unfair Advantage

What is the power of unfair advantage? How does the entrepreneur create and build upon this advantage so that he or she can create a successful enterprise? If you have found the inspiration from some entrepreneurs on starting up, here is the review on “The Power of Unfair Advantage by John Nesheim” is the answer to give you details on how you can build your new business enterprise.
The term unfair advantage is coined by John Nesheim, CEO of the Nesheim Group in Carmel, California. He defined it to be an enduring but overlooked dynamic and a crucial aspect of any successful endeavour. Cutting it from an academic’s angle, my interpretation of the term is synonymous with terms like unique selling point and blue ocean strategy, and captures all of these terms. John has written an earlier book, High Tech Start Up which is happened not to be available in the Singapore bookstores.

There are two parts in this book. The first part of the book sets a young entrepreneur from turning a business idea into a business enterprise. John introduced a simple model for any entrepreneur to follow: Concentrate on your core competency, outsource everything which you are not good at and create a barrier of entry for your competitors such that they cannot copy your idea/product/technology. Using these central tenets, Nesheim demonstrated cases of unfair advantage over examples in marketing, sales, engineering and operations which basically covers the second part of the book. It is much more than that, he also showed how you can apply the concept of unfair advantage over a few areas. He demonstrated with surfing disruptive technology waves, the failure of MNCs to crush new startups and even how venture capital firms exploit their advantage over entrepreneurs for their startups. Singapore was mentioned in this book for two examples, the rebranding of NUS Business Schools to engage its competitors and also the Singapore Airlines.

The book is balanced with the theory and the practicals. One chapter which I particularly like, and it summarize most of the modern theories of business strategy by Christensen, Drucker, Porter and Prahalad and fuse together with Clausewitz’s famous classic “On War”, which details the principles of military strategy. He has broken it down to four based on Ries and Trout’s “Marketing Warfare”. Of course, it is one interpretation of strategy which I think that young entrepreneurs will find it easy to adapt to.

Of course, on a personal note, although I have never met John in person, I find him a very amicable person to correspond over email. I thought it might be a tribute to put this review on the American Independence day. Others have flattering comments on him, for example, Bjorn calls him his “jedi-master”. I will leave this review with a “interesting” picture done by Justin, which I highly recommend my students to pick up and start reading this book if they want to be part of the enterpreneurship movement.

If you like to know more about John Nesheim, you can check out his blog as well.

About John Nesheim (from his blog): John Nesheim is an engineer and veteran of Silicon Valley. Since 1976, he has focused his research on how to improve the process of converting an idea into a world-class new enterprise. Mr. Nesheim teaches entrepreneurship for Cornell University and other schools in Asia and Europe. He is founder of the Nesheim Group, coaches CEOs of new enterprises and consults on entrepreneurship for corporations and governments.
His research findings led to discovery and documentation of the process “14 Steps to IPO” which are documented in his best-selling book, High Tech Start Up. Translated into four languages, it is used around the world by entrepreneurs, investors, governments, universities, corporations, and Wall Street to increase understanding of entrepreneurial effectiveness.

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