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Editor’s Note: This post was written by Greg Marshall

The ability to think differently is a trait held in high esteem in our culture. When all the evidence or all of the popular thought goes one way, it often pays to be a contrarian.

Amarillo Slim (Thomas Preston), the late great poker player extraordinaire, was always looking for an edge, a way  to hustle someone.  He once beat tennis player Bobby Riggs, himself a world class hustler, in a game of table tennis. The key? Slim was given the right to choose the paddles.  Slim chose skillets!  Amarillo Slim also beat Minnesota Fats in a game of pool by insisting they play with brooms.

An overused but once cutting  edge term is “think outside the box.” I used to like this term but thinking outside the  box has really come to mean to think differently, which is far less impactful than flipping something on its head.   Changing the game is not just thinking outside the box. Changing the game is substituting a circle for the box and looking at an opportunity  from a totally different perspective.

For example, if most people wanted to challenge Bobby Riggs to table tennis, they may watch video to try to detect a weakness of his (“He has no backhand!”). Or hire the Chinese national champion to give them lessons. Or limit all of their practice to one element of the game, like developing a killer serve.  But skillets?  Skillets! 

Southwest Airlines has been an industry darling for many years. Southwest’s success was based on an outstanding “change the game” strategy. They decided that rather than follow the traditional strategy and compete with other airlines they would compete against cars. What?!  Their mantra was “the speed of a plane at the price of a car.”   They challenged the traditional spoke and hub model that the major airlines had followed for years and radically altered the short haul airline industry by directly targeting mid-size cities. As you may recall, one of the ways Southwest kept costs low was to only fly one type of airplane. This minimized training time for itspilots and made repairs much less expensive. Thus they were able to undercut the competition. If you were going from LA to Phoenix, it was the difference between 45 minutes to fly or 6 hours to drive one way. Roundtrip:  an hour and a half vs. 12 hours. Clearly this made sense to a lot of people!

And look at Uber.  Their mobile app based transportation network upset the entire taxi industry. Their “shared resources” philosophy will also have a major impact on car ownership in the not too distant future.

My favorite example of changing the game comes from Star Trek.  The “Kobayashi Maru” is a Starfleet training exercise that is designed to be unwinnable. But James T. Kirk “cheated” by reprogramming the computer and winning because, as Captain Kirk said, “I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.”  

Too many time we look at what’s being done and then copy it. Of course, this can be effective too. But the big rewards go to the game changers. So step outside the rules. Take a walk where no man has gone before!

Good luck!

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