7 Ways to Build Your Own Toll Booth

Build Your Own Tollbooth Part 2

“Yamazumi Your Life!” is all about applying lean production strategies to eliminate bottlenecks and deliver maximum performance in your life. The aim is to “elevate” your constraints.  Let’s be clear. The idea of building your own toll booth is not about deliberately building bottlenecks into someone else’s process. It is about designing a system, a business process that automatically generates a dividend. It’s like building a lean manufacturing system from scratch.

So here are seven hot ideas for building your own toll booth. Each one will be explained in more detail in future blog posts.

1. Become Indispensable

If you have industry or even firm-specific knowledge, the market may not be able to supply an alternative to your skill-set. You are now in a symbiotic relationship and can seek compensation to match.

2.    2. Become a Priest

Not literally. I am referring to the power of blessing that a professionalised elite has over certain areas of economic activity. If you want a legal document witnessed and stamped, you need a notary. If you want to buy a house, you need a surveyor. If you want your accounts signed off, you need an auditor. The professions are a natural bottleneck, due to selection criteria at point of access, the training process and above all the funnelling effect as the hordes of trainees are winnowed out into a tiny pool of partners. In the UK, the top law firms are known as the “Magic Circle” and partners earn millions of pounds for in effect, providing a package of fairly standardised services. But you see, they hold the keys to the kingdom.

3.     3. Esoteric Knowledge

This can work, but this route can be dangerous. Experts on synthetic credit derivatives such as “CDO Squared” went from lucrative specialists to the ranks of the unemployed when the credit markets imploded. Equally, the general trends towards information being cheaper and widely available through electronic media have devalued the value of information generally.

4.     4. Aggregate

The chaos and complexity of information has left people in need of a map. The theory is that everything is out there, if only we know where to look. Google is the most famous aggregator. Wikis are becoming a powerful aggregating force. People like timesavers, short-cuts and summaries. Appeal to natural laziness will never fail :-)

5.     5. Transform

Some of the greatest opportunities to add value are at the boundaries between disciplines – the application of a physics model to finance led to the Black-Scholes model, and a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. While this blog is highly unlikely to be reviewed by the Awards Committee of the Sveriges Riksbank any time soon, it operates on a similar basis - taking ideas from one field (lean production) and applying them to another (personal development).

6.     6. Clone

Ideas, goods and services that are commonplace in one field may be ground breaking and innovative elsewhere. Fortunes have been made in simply taking an established concept and applying it in another country. Californian smoothies was brought to the UK by Innocent; classified photo ads of cars by AutoTrader. The global success of reality TV show formats such as “The Apprentice”, “Pop Idol” shows how good ideas transfer between jurisdictions and cultures. If a concept appeals to universal human desires, it will work well across borders.

7.    7. Chase the Long Tail

The excellent book “The Long Tail”, Chris Anderson explains how the internet has opened up a vast, unsatisfied consumer market with infinitely diverse taste in music, books etc who have been ill-served by formulaic hits of the past. There is an untapped market that the traditional media industry has not yet served. Find your audience.

Seven ideas to be getting on with, then – enjoy!

(c) WestOcean 2009