Lesson 52: Nuance

One of my favorite gifts as a kid was the Star Wars Millennium Falcon LEGO set. This set had 7,541 pieces so I had to learn about the subtle but important distinctions between each piece to assemble it. I monopolized our kitchen table to spread out the pieces. The instructions came as a lengthy booklet detailing which pieces and in what order to assemble the parts. In fact after assembling the Star Wars Millennium Falcon, I put it on the shelf and spent less time playing with it than actually putting it together. I had more fun learning about the nuances of each piece than playing with the finished product.

Nuance can be your competitive advantage. Similar to assembling the Star Wars Millennium Falcon LEGO set, you create the most value when you understand the subtle but important distinctions across your company. My uncle owns a distribution and design company that sells LEGO parts, pieces, and instructions through brickbuilderspro. As an investor, I appreciate the business model of high margin products such as instructions for LEGO sets. As an operator, I value his expertise for LEGOs. He collected LEGOs for years and his passion enables him to incorporate his knowledge of the consumer into the product. That competitive advantage creates value for his business and his consumers.

I am in a class called Consumer Behavior with Dan Bartels learning about the competitive advantages of understanding the consumer. Economists would argue that consumers rational and know what they want on every dimension of a product and how much they would pay for it. However, experience tells us that we do not always know what we want; in fact, sometimes we make choices that do not align with our interests. For example, if I wanted to lose weight, why would I put Oreo cookies in my grocery basket? In Dan’s paper entitled “Connecting Cognition and Consumer Choice,” he references a study that shows “bad choices derived from representations of the decision environment that were incongruous with its true dynamics.” Meaning people sometimes make decisions because there is a gap between how they think things work and how they actually work. Therein lies the importance of appreciating nuances.

In my first 12 months of publishing Nuance, I learned about the nuances of Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition. The next 12 months will be an application of these nuances. Like the pieces of a LEGO set, the components of a search must fit together to make something as great as a Star Wars Millennium Falcon. The only way for the pieces to fit together is understanding the important role each piece plays. 

My mission is to increase representation for Black leaders at the executive, investor, and board level. Each of these roles has subtle but important distinctions for leading a business. When we sit in that seat, we must bridge the gap between how we think things work and how they actually work to create value.

This is Lesson 52: Nuance. Next week is Lesson 53: Assumptions.