In 1971, 3 partners from Seattle, Washington: Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegel, and Gordon Bowker opened up a store that sold high-quality coffee beans and home brewing equipment. In 1982 an entrepreneur named Howard Schultz joined the company and suggested they sell brewed coffee and espresso drinks along side the beans. He was overruled and left the company to start his own thing in 1985 and eventually bought the coffee bean chain that he left in 1987.

The company he bought was Starbucks. And today Howard Schultz, the Chairman of Starbucks Coffee is a very rich man running a company with over 13,000 locations worldwide. Schultz had a vision of expansion and he approached the coffee business in  a way no one had done before: create a comfortable experience outside of your home. It worked (and not just because it happens to sell an addictive substance: caffeine).

Jerry Baldwin had an idea too. And although he isn’t doing half bad either (He currently works for Peet’s Coffee, which he and his original partners bought in 1984, his success is in a less grand scale. Neither man did it wrong. Rather, one man: Schultz capitalized on an idea that happened to be right for the times.

Marching to the beat of your own drum is easier said than done. And trailblazing can be tough when you don’t know where you are going. And having a vision and making it a successful reality is not always easy. What happens when you aren’t a small operation in Seattle that answers only to one man? What happens when you have shareholders to think about?

Let’s talk about a man named, Satoru Iwata. Iwata is the 47 year old CEO of a tiny little Japanese company named, Nintendo. When chief rivals in the video game industry (Sony and Microsoft) made plans to unleash a new level of gaming performance to the marketplace, Iwata and Nintendo took a different approach. When the Playstation 3 and the Microsoft XBox 360 were talking about GHz processors, Nintendo was talking about Mghz processors. This was not because Nintendo wanted to cheap out. It was because when it came to the priority of realism to the “fun factor”, Nintendo chose the fun.

It seems so simple and obvious now. Being that the Nintendo Wii is a worldwide hit and is still outselling the PS3 and XBox 360. Bring fun back into videogames and players will forgive the lack of high-definition graphics.

Iwata took a chance on an idea and won big. He didn’t have to. He could have  offered a gaming system that competed directly with his rivals and would probably still have units sitting on shelves. Instead, he is producing 1 million Wii consoles a month and are selling out immediately.

An article in Fortune magazine on the success of the Wii sums it up best by talking about the Blue Ocean Strategy:

Two years ago business professors W. Chan Kim and RenÈe Mauborgne published a book by that title. It theorizes that the most innovative companies have one thing in common - they separate themselves from a throng of bloody competition (in the red ocean) and set out to create new markets (in the blue ocean).

So when you have an idea that differs from the others, do you sell the beans or do you sell the experience? When you have to differentiate yourself from the competition do you fight fire with fire or do you roast marshmallows? Are you a Jerry Baldwin or a Howard Schultz?

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