Aug 14, 2017
SPOILERS AHEAD
We finally got there guys! A dragon in the middle of a battle!!! I would find it hard pressed to believe that this wasn’t the big moment all GOT fans had been waiting for. I found it a bit hard this week to bring together a topic that linked three things but after chatting with my GOT mad colleagues we saw a lot we could learn about competition. Here are the three lessons we garnered from GOT S7 E4
Don’t be caught off-guard by your competitors:
Credit for this one goes to Stu Carr from Publicis Media, one of our avid readers! (please feel free to send me ideas if you have them as well) The point here is we have Jamie Lannister, arguably the best leader of an army and possibly the best army in Westeros completely caught off guard by a new-to—Westeros aggressor. The parallel to the business world, you should always expect a disruptor or expect your competitors to be concocting the next best thing/product/service that that may blow you out of the water. You should always be investing heavily in either improving your current offering or be the disruptor yourself and take your industry to the next level. The Lannisters were feeling pretty good about themselves. They had their gold, had easily beaten the Tyrells, the Dornish were out of the game and they had outmanoeuvred the Unsullied. They then they took their foot off the pedal. Apathy and resting on your laurels is a dangerous way forward.
Don’t bring a sword to a dragon fight:
In GOT S7 E4 I think this one is relatively self-explanatory but we all saw how overwhelmed the Lannister army was in the face of a Dothraki horde and a full grown dragon. Now we can give them some credit as they had developed their dragon killing crossbow but they grossly underestimated the damage dragons could do, they really should have had about 20 of them!! So the point here, always be over prepared going into battle. This battle in business can be anything from a new business pitch to an internal stakeholder meeting or could be coaching your team. Basically, there are lots of situations that you want to ensure you come over prepared. Don’t turn up to that new business pitch without an innovative and exciting presentation. Don’t go to your internal meeting with your sales team without having the proper tools to help that sales team sell your product. Definitely, don’t try and coach your team without the proper preparation or it will just be a waste of time. The Lannister’s were nearly ready but needed to go that extra mile, expect the unexpected!!
Don’t underestimate your competitors:
So this one is similar to the above but with a slight twist and is relating to Arya and Brienne’s epic fight. I’m looking at how startups can disrupt an industry. Just because you are a huge corporate, highly successful and a market leader doesn’t mean that you won’t be the next Blockbuster. Arya is easily the most bad-ass character we have left in GOT, not my favourite but definitely double cool. As viewers, we all knew what was going to happen, even if Brienne and Sansa did not. I was very intrigued to see how Arya would go in this fight, I mean Brienne beat the Hound! So, the small, quick, nimble and young Arya bested possibly the best warrior in all of Westeros, if not the North. We’ve seen so many examples recently of start-ups completely changing the landscape of an industry, think Uber, Netflix, Airbnb and more. In GOT S7 E4 we can assume that no one is going to be underestimating Arya anymore and you should not be underestimating your competitors no matter how great a business you have. Dom Price, Work Futurist for Atlassian recently spoke at our SAP Knowledge Share Group event and spoke about this exact point. Atlassian isn’t bothered about the competitors they know about, they are bothered about the one person band setting up in their bedroom coming up with the next big thing.
Update on Joel’s season 7 predictions:
Finally, where are we up to with Joel’s predictions for season 7 after watching GOT S7 E4?
- There has to be an Ice dragon at some point! – according to my sources, this is pretty likely soon
- Jorah will kill Dany – no news this week
- Bran has allowed the white walkers to follow him through the wall – emo-Bran, he knows everything, so bloody tell someone something useful!!
- Jon and Dany become the power couple of Westeros – that moment in the cave……..
- Jamie kills Cersei – is he even going to make it out of the lake? I would say so and we’ll have to see how this develops.
