What is Value?

Creating superior customer value is the core tenet of any good strategy.

I have often asked myself this question, what truly qualifies as value? If I were to translate value in some kind of natural attribute, what would it be?

Value (according to dictionary) is defined as - the importance or worth of something for someone. Also defined as, how useful or important something is.

Now measuring this worth is often very subjective and can have different dimensions but I wanted to see how we can bring some objectivity to it.

Now what are we as individuals really chasing? Or what would qualify as value for us? For me I will distil this to two simple things,

1. More time

2. Better time

1. More time

We always want to have more time to do things we like. And a lot of things around us that create value, help us do that.

• Car: It helps us get to places faster, so we have more time to do what we want instead of being on the road

• Self Driving Car: AI is promising to take off tasks from us and automate it further like self driving car, giving us further more time during the journey.

Before we go into this further, a short pause. More time itself can happen in two ways

a) Liberated time

b) Net new time

Liberated time is one that is freed without creating any additional new time. Like the example we discussed earlier of self driving car. It liberates time during the journey but that does add lifetime.

New time adds time to the life of an individual. This is usually done by industries like pharma, medicine, wellness etc. This time fetches more value vs displaced time.

Ideally one would think that creating more time will be valued much more than anything because in the end we are limited by it and it goes away with each stroke of this keyboard, but we humans are wired differently.

2. Better time

Creating better time is the other aspect by which value is created. What do we classify as better time?

Well, anything which makes the time enjoyable.

Movies, beer, coffee, meditation, yoga.

It could mean so much for different people but in the end, it is all about what makes you feel good.

Coca Cola - sugar water, but when one drinks it (for most people) it makes you feel good.

Tennis - playing it with a group of friends and you enjoy that ace you hit accidentally.

Now one thing to be noted, this “better time” might conflict with “more time”.

Drinking Coca Cola daily might lead to a lot of good times but it brings one closer to diabetes everyday, thereby maybe decreasing overall lifetime.

Alcohol and drugs are also similar examples. We are maybe biased to chase better time than more time because inherently most of us are aware (apart from the delusional billionaires) that no matter what we do, we cannot have infinite time. So quality triumphs quantity any day.

So this is how I think I will look at value creation as I go forward. Can we create more time or better time when we create a product or service for an individual or individuals?

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In the next post, we will test this concept for a higher unit – like a company or a country.

Do let me know your thoughts. What do you agree with and definitely what you do not agree with.

Hope reading this was “better time.” See you next week!!