The Creative Monopoly
nytimes.com
The Creative Monopoly
1–10 of 25 posts
Re: The Creative Monopoly
#2What an awful way to phrase a simple concept.
Rather than compete in someone else's market, create your own market. Manufacture, or identify a need that has not been met, and, having been first mover, use that to build an insurmountable lead over any possible competitors.
Whether it's mint toothpaste, or portable digital music players, this has been done for generations.
"Creative Monopoly" is a bizarre term for it.
Re: The Creative Monopoly
#3What an awful way to phrase a simple concept. Rather than compete in someone else's market, create your own market. Manufacture, or identify a need that has not been met, and, having been first mover, use that to build an insurmountable lead over any possible competitors. Whether it's mint toothpaste, or portable digital music players, this has been done for generations. "Creative Monopoly" is a bizarre term for it.
I agree it is a strange term.
I do think however the article is well written and quite insightful based of course on Peter Thiel's ideas.
Inovation always wins, those that focus on just competing will lose. A country has to foster inovation. the countries that innovate in education could be the big winners.
To be fare to the US, some of there big colleges do that, but it does seem at the grass roots of the system it needs change and that applies to a lot of countries.
Re: The Creative Monopoly
#4What an awful way to phrase a simple concept. Rather than compete in someone else's market, create your own market. Manufacture, or identify a need that has not been met, and, having been first mover, use that to build an insurmountable lead over any possible competitors. Whether it's mint toothpaste, or portable digital music players, this has been done for generations. "Creative Monopoly" is a bizarre term for it.
Greed. Torture. Monopoly. Everything that was once a sin or a crime in America is now excused, reinterpreted, and finally praised.
Re: The Creative Monopoly
#5What an awful way to phrase a simple concept. Rather than compete in someone else's market, create your own market. Manufacture, or identify a need that has not been met, and, having been first mover, use that to build an insurmountable lead over any possible competitors. Whether it's mint toothpaste, or portable digital music players, this has been done for generations. "Creative Monopoly" is a bizarre term for it.
My issue was more about how many paragraphs the writer wrote to explain what you just did in a sentence (or two).
Kudos.
Re: The Creative Monopoly
#6Years ago, I worked briefly for The Southern Company, which is the largest publicly held electric utility in the U.S (Georgia Power, Alabama Power, and a bunch of other ones).
While there was certainly a lot of expertise in electric generation and transmission there, it rapidly became apparent to me that their true core competency was maintaining and exploiting their legal monopoly.
It wasn't a pretty sight.
Re: The Creative Monopoly
#7"Thiel argues, we often shouldn’t seek to be really good competitors. We should seek to be really good monopolists."
A better way to put this is to say that the starting point of competitive strategy is to start with a sustainable competitive advantage. "Competition Demystified" by value investing guru Bruce Greenwald covers this point in its first chapter (available free on Google Books -- http://books.google.com/books?id=NZYuAyW8M-sC&printsec=f... and summarized by me in a series on political strategy, where the concept also applies -- http://joshuaspodek.com/north-korea-strategy-primer-strategy and with an important diagram here -- http://joshuaspodek.com/the-first-step-in-strategy)
Finding a sustainable competitive advantage doesn't require creativity, so Brooks's essay went astray at that point. But having a sustainable competitive advantage gives you the local monopoly he alludes to that allows you to avoid competing and, in business, charge higher margins without getting stuck competing on price and efficiency.
I highly recommend "Competition Demystified" to understand strategy.
Re: The Creative Monopoly
#8Both things are competition. One is competing with established rules while the other is competing creating or changing the rules.
Re: The Creative Monopoly
#9OK, so I should choose my battles, great. I thought this column had very little insight or utility.
Re: The Creative Monopoly
#10What an awful way to phrase a simple concept. Rather than compete in someone else's market, create your own market. Manufacture, or identify a need that has not been met, and, having been first mover, use that to build an insurmountable lead over any possible competitors. Whether it's mint toothpaste, or portable digital music players, this has been done for generations. "Creative Monopoly" is a bizarre term for it.
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