The single best trick for both innovation and brand building is to find the metric your competitors have neglected, and to build strategy on 'why and how we think' rather than constant data — because all data comes from the past and leads competitors to converge on each other.

28:37which is if you insist that every single decision is based on data, all your decision-making has a status quo bias because all your data comes from the past. There isn't any data about the future. The second problem that happens is that the the things you tend to focus on tend to be the same things that all your competitors are focused on. Which means that you, unwittingly perhaps, become more and more similar to

29:01every other business in your category, which means you become more and more indistinguishable and less and less distinctive, which effectively means you get involved in a kind of race to the bottom. You create kind of red water competition. And one of the things I would say is an almost unfailing trick to innovate, both to innovation and to brand building, actually, is to find the metric which your competitors have

29:27neglected, which they don't even bother to measure, or which is difficult to measure. Quite often it's an emotional metric rather than a, you know, a time, space, cost, price, distance metric. >> What's an example of that? >> Well, Apple. Uh in that everybody was asking the question, "What can a computer do?" in Silicon Valley at, you know, in the 1970s. And Steve asked the question, "Yeah, but what does it feel like while

29:52you're doing it?" He asked aesthetic and emotional questions in an industry where everybody was focused on technological questions. But another example, the Uber map is an example of that, where riding in an Uber is more or less the same as riding in any other taxi. What Uber completely transformed was the experience of booking and waiting for a taxi. And by the way, [clears throat] at the other end of the journey, the experience

30:18of paying for it. So, the Uber map, whether this was intentional or whether it was just some software guys thinking it'd be a cute thing to do. When you booked a taxi by telephone, you rang up having no idea of what the likely availability or wait time would be. In many In many cases they say, "Yeah, we'll have a car for you in 10 minutes." You kind of go, "Oh,

30:36it's too early." You know, you had no idea. You had no expectation of car availability. And then when you'd booked the car, you had no idea when the car was going to show up, and you'd have to hover around on the sidewalk, you know, waving at any likely-looking car passing car that appeared to be looking for your address. Suddenly, Uber changed all that because it gave you an estimate of