The opening is the first stage of the game. Here, both sides develop their forces and create plans that will influence the proceedings throughout the contest.—Jeremy Silman, The Complete Book of Chess Strategy
The outcome of the opening determines or influences your strategic alternatives and tactical opportunities for many subsequent moves.—Ron Curry, Win at Chess!
People have been making maps for eons, but the golden age of cartography began after Columbus’s first voyage to the New World in 1492. Not quite eighty years later, Dutch mapmaker Abraham Ortelius published the first world atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World). His 1570 Latin edition consisted of seventy maps of regions of the world, including a global map based on earlier world maps by Jacobo Gastaldi (1561) and Gerardus Mercator (1569). Sixteenth-century scholars praised the Theatrum for its accuracy and authoritative rendering of world geography as it was known at the time. It may be difficult for twenty-first century readers to imagine the excitement Europeans must have felt four hundred years ago as the latest seafaring expeditions brought new discoveries and clarified the outlines and contours of the world. But in the sixteenth century, the latest editions of maps were prized possessions, and the Theatrum made Ortelius a renowned and wealthy man.
When the Theatrum was first published, John Speed, an eighteen-year-old lad from Cheshire, had just been admitted to the Merchant Tailor’s Company in London, where he worked as a tailor for the next twenty-eight years (in the process raising twelve sons and six daughters). In the few spare moments he had, Speed developed his real talent, cartography, and in 1598 was rewarded with a position in the Custom House, where he devoted his time to preparing county maps of England and Wales. These he later compiled into a highly regarded Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, but greater fame lay in the creation of world maps, and Speed completed his grand map of the world in 1627. Knowing how contemporary readers valued accuracy, he named it A New and Accurat Map Of The World and wrote, in florid script across the top of the map, Drawne according to the truest descriptions, latest discoveries, and best observations that have beene made by English or Strangers. In naming his map, Speed was conditioning the market—positioning his map as the latest and greatest, the most accurate yet created (modern marketers would no doubt have used the expression “state of the art”). He was trying to bias map purchasers to buy his map rather than older, less accurate maps or maps created by rival cartographers who lacked the “truest descriptions, latest discoveries, and best observations,” and gain market share from his Dutch rivals, who were among the foremost cartographers of the day.
Had Speed been a chess player, he would have been playing opening game, that first stage of chess where, as Jeremy Silman explains, “both sides develop their forces and create plans that will influence the proceedings throughout the contest.”¹ Of course in chess the opponents are engaged once the opening move is made, but the analogy with business development is still apt. In both cases, the opening designs are intended to create imbalances or predispositions that favor the player. Silman, an international chess master and author of more than thirty books on chess, argues, “The real purpose of the opening is to create imbalances that develop your army in such a way that your pieces, working together, can take advantage of them.”² This is true in business development as well. The aims of early positioning are to create imbalances or biases toward you among potential customers in your target markets that you can exploit when actual opportunities arise later.
In business development, opening game occurs before contact with a particular customer. Consequently, the positioning is largely indirect—done through product invention or selection, design, development, and differentiation; packaging and labeling; advertising and other forms of market communication; market segmentation, identification of target customers, and strategic account planning; and networking in the political and social environment of the markets you are targeting. Clearly, you can be in opening game with some prospective customers (whom you have not yet contacted) while in middle game or endgame with existing customers. In business development, opening game represents everything you do to position yourself in your markets and to prepare for customer contacts. These are ongoing activities, whatever your progress may be with particular customers. Opening game never ends. You are continually positioning or repositioning yourself in the markets you serve to achieve four goals:
1. Determine or reconfirm the business purpose and means that reflect your core values and beliefs, and build or maintain the resources and skills needed to accomplish that purpose.
2. Create or re-create a unique value proposition and the leadership, culture, and processes to deliver it.
3. Position yourself in the market in a way that conditions customers to think favorably of you and your products or services—and stimulate demand by informing potential customers of what’s possible.
4. Communicate your product and behavioral differentiation to the market so that you predispose customers to select you when they have a need you can fulfill.
In chess, the goals of opening game are accomplished by developing your pieces, controlling the center of the board, safeguarding your king, and hindering your opponent. In business, as we will describe next, the four goals are accomplished by ensuring that your leadership and management practices are aligned with your values, by building the resources and skills necessary to achieve your business purpose, by developing differentiated products and services that meet the needs of the customers in your target market segments, by branding and positioning yourself in the market, by advertising and otherwise communicating to your markets, by assessing and countering your competitors’ actions, by building political and financial capital, and by doing strategic account planning. As this list suggests, opening game involves a complex interplay of activities intended to position you favorably in your markets. Throughout all of these activities, you can create sustainable BD. We would argue, in fact, that if you don’t have BD in mind as you build market position, then it will be difficult for you to create such differentiation down the line. Behavioral differentiation isn’t a program you can overlay onto your operations later; it is rooted in the core of your business and grows out of solid behavioral foundations, principally in how you think of the stakeholders of your business—your customers, employees, suppliers, and shareholders.