Posts tagged business strategy
How do you develop a strategy when the target keeps moving?
Apr 28th
I was watching a basketball game between a bunch of 8-year-olds the other day. The “red” team was winning 18-0, an insurmountable lead at that age. The “blue” team was exhausted and disheartened from the pummeling.
But within a heartbeat, blue’s luck changed. A speedy player intercepted a pass and steamed down the court, for a wide open lay-up.
The crowd held its breath as the young player effortlessly flipped the ball up and into the hoop. Of the wrong basket.
The crowd gasped. Tears welled up in the stunned player’s eyes as he realized his team’s humiliation was complete. He had scored a basket for the other team.
This sad little episode seems an apt analogy for one of the costliest mistakes you can make in a business: Having brilliant execution against the wrong goal.
When I first started out in business, my company actually required us to create five-year plans. That seemed like a difficult exercise back then and today that is simply impossible. And yet, it is easy to get locked into annual goals and work beautifully against them, never realizing they’re already out of date.
Business today is not like a basketball player trying to shoot at the right goal. It’s like a basketball player shooting at a goal that is moving.
I think this problem is especially acute for small companies and start-ups. I once had an entrepreneur tell me that the nature of his company changed every three months. It’s true. Simply adding a new employee or a new customer can radically alter the direction of the company. The nature of my work has changed dramatically in the past 12 months.
If you are still heads-down, working like crazy without taking the time to assess the world around you, you might be making a deadly business mistake. Here are five questions to reflect on:
- How am I spending my time today compared to a year ago? If there is a dramatic change, why? Is this a sign that the market is changing or have I lost focus on what makes me profitable?
- What is the biggest internal threat to my business? Is it resources? Keeping up with change? A lack of focus? Turnover?
- What is the biggest external threat to my business? New competitors? New expectations? Problems with the economy?
- How have my competitors changed? Do I even know who my competitors are right now?
- What are my customer’s under-served or un-met wants and needs? Do I think I know, or have I really asked them?
Spending just a little time reflecting on these questions could save you months of heartache down the road. What do you think? How are you coping with the constantly moving target of your business?
This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
The Three Words for 2013
Jan 3rd
I first saw Chris Brogan use this technique a few years ago — distill your annual goals into three focused words. C.C. Chapman explained this process in his nifty book Amazing Things Will Happen
As I had some down time over the holiday, I reflected on where I needed to grow and it did seem to distill into three themes. Here are my words for 2013:
Journey
No, not the rock band (Although I do love “Wheels in the Sky”). What I mean by “Journey” is enjoying the trip as well as the destination. And I literally mean the trip!
I travel a lot for my job and life on the road wears me down — the crowded airports, the delays, the seemingly endless hours of wasted time. It’s stressful being away from my home and family. Travel also disrupts my healthy eating and exercise habits. I dread it.
Yet travel is an unavoidable part of my career path right now. In 2013, I need to make changes to make travel less stressful, more productive, and more enjoyable. Any ideas?
Conversational
I have worked really hard to make the content on this blog great. But the bar is raising every year as the information density on the web explodes. How do I stay relevant and conversational? If I provided excellent content in 2012, how do I really “WOW” my readers in 2013? What would you like to see? How do I create a blog that people adore, posts that are creating conversations all over the web? How do I up my game in writing, public speaking, and teaching to get people talking?
Centered
This is very rewarding business but a really weird business. The more you succeed:
- Your ability to connect, engage, and be helpful declines precipitously. Yet, these are the very traits that made you successful!
- A mantle of “celebrity” is thrust upon you. This is extremely uncomfortable for me, yet unavoidable.
- You are increasingly brought into petty fights and targeted by “haters.”
Once in a while I get caught up in the BS of social media. I get knocked off center by attacks and can be irritable and even short with people who are fakes, spammers, and trolls. I get weary from the unrelenting barrage of strangers who want to “pick my brain.”
These undesirable consequences will undoubtedly intensify as more people consume my blog, books, classes and speeches. I realize that I am a very blessed individual and that I need to handle the negatives with grace, kindness, and patience no matter what is coming at me. That is who I want to be under all circumstances.
I think if I focus on these three words I’ll have a happier and more productive year. What do you think? What are your words for 2013?
The link to Amazing Things is an affiliate link.
The Business Case for Irrelevance
Dec 13th
By {grow} Community Member Paul Mayze
Algorithms are the magic of the Internet.
Cloaked in secrecy, they invisibly control big chunks of our personal and professional online lives while quietly collecting, dissecting, and electing what we do and see. Algorithms are the most closely guarded secrets of the internet giants.
Suppose I Google “elephant.” (Don’t ask why I’m Googling “elephant” — it was the first thing that came into my head.) My top four results are a UK car insurance company, a 2003 movie, and a multiplayer online game. Oh, and Wikipedia’s definition of an elephant, which common sense might have expected to come out at the top. Try it yourself. Chances are that you get something quite different. (Try it and let me know!)
On Facebook, I get every status update from the friends I’m close to, and yet the platform also decides that I should hear about weddings being planned, babies being born, and sandwiches being eaten by more remote connections.
Algorithms determine all this. The argument in favor of algorithms is that without them we would drown in a sea of irrelevant information. Instead, we tread water in a sea of (supposed) relevance.
The thing is, I’m not sure that “irrelevance” should be a dirty word. In fact, I think we could do with more of it in our lives.
A call for more irrelevance
My life as I know it has been created by “irrelevant” events.
- When my parents bought me my first home computer, it was irrelevant to my existing hobbies.
- When I took a job in advertising, it was irrelevant to the degree I’d actually obtained.
- And spending a year in Paris studying French was irrelevant to everything that happened before and since, but no less influential.
If I’d stuck with what was relevant, I’d still be playing with a Fisher Price telephone.
Irrelevance powers professional performance
Professionally, some irrelevance is crucial to our performance. A breakthrough approach to, say, social marketing will not come from searching in the same places as everyone else. And yet, our focus is usually on relevance, right? I’m personally awful at letting irrelevance in at work. I cut off water-cooler chat with action lists for the day. I sigh noisily when people engage in small talk. In some respects, I’m being counter-productive.
I’m missing out on what Matt Ridley brilliantly describes as ‘ideas having sex’. Surrounding ourselves with what’s “relevant” is the equivalent of asexual reproduction. We’ll end up doing the same thing over and over. And that’s no good for our work.
Is irrelevance a waste of time?
I’m not about to argue that we should break out of our so-called “filter bubbles“ and stop using Google and Facebook. But recently I’ve challenged myself to increase my exposure to things outside of my day-to-day comfort zone. Reading posts on topics I know nothing about – and which ordinarily wouldn’t interest me. Even writing on topics I would never normally write about.
Sure, I’d like to think this has made me a bit more rounded (it’s almost certainly improved my water cooler chat) and provided new angles on existing problems. However, the greatest benefit has been that most precious and enabling professional resource: more energy. And if something is having that effect on me, well, I figure that’s got to be relevant.
How do you let irrelevance into your life? Or do you feel we have to deal with too much irrelevance already? Looking forward to a discussion about this. Oh, and feel free to go off-topic ;)
Paul Mayze blogs irrelevantly at Howwwl.com, the new publishing and content discovery network that he co-founded. Follow Paul on Twitter @howwwl
Sometimes not having a strategy is the best strategy
Dec 20th
The importance of strategy is woven into the fabric of every consultation and class I teach. I shout it from the mountaintops. And yet, sometimes I break my own rules … and with good reason. In a fast-changing competitive marketplace, sometimes not locking into a strategy is the best strategy.
I have an entrepreneur friend who said that his start-up company has a different direction every three months. On the surface, that may seem extreme, but when you are a small company, even something like gaining a new customer, hiring a new employee with special skills, or a sudden move by a competitor can dramatically create a course correction.
One of the most costly mistakes you can make in business is brilliantly executing an obsolete strategy.
In my particular field, the dynamics are changing tumultously. Right now, building a competency in social media marketing is barely-controlled chaos.
2011 was really a year of “wait and see” for me. And I’m glad I took this approach. It was uncomfortable in some ways but I needed to just let things unfold to see what monetization opportunities would emerge. Here’s what happened:
Although I have been teaching at the college level for several years, the demand for my services shot through the roof in 2011. I was flexible enough to embrace opportunities that didn’t exist at the beginning of the year.
My consulting business shifted dramatically from multi-million dollar companies to multi-billion dollar companies. I think this is where I am more comfortable, but it means I would have to risk more by taking on fewer, larger clients. And can I find the right resources to help me scale in this way? Some big strategic decisions will have to made for 2012.
The speaking schedule also shifted quite a bit in 2011. I evolved and matured as a public speaker and learned that I am very good at this. Do I want to grow the speaking side of the business? The trade-off with travel — is it what I want? I’ll have to bring focus to this area in the next year.
The Tao of Twitter, was released in February 2011 and was a surprise hit (at least to me!). My second book will be released by McGraw-Hill in March and the publisher is expecting big things. This is going to throw me into a new public spotlight and undoubtedly open up more writing opportunities. Should writing books be an emphasis going forward?
And then there is {grow}. Blogging is the favorite part of my job but I have done a poor job monetizing the property, at least directly. I have a new video series coming out in January and a few other ideas but I have definitely sub-optimized these opportunities.
This is a round-about way of saying that it was a very good strategy to NOT have a strategy in 2011. None of these opportunities would have been fully available if I had decided early in the year to wed myself to one defined path.
Now, I need to be clear that although my strategy was in flux, being fully aware of my core competencies and points of differentiation were not. That’s an important distinction. In a dynamic marketplace, remaining open to strategic shifts is OK but it only works if you are clear about how you uniquely create value.
So I’m going to spend a little quiet time over the next few weeks assessing my opportunities, combining them with my passions, and defining the best monetization path and focus for the next six months. Even now, I don’t think I want to lock in completely. Is there even such a thing as a long-term strategy any more?
That’s the way things are playing out for me. What is the role of strategy in your company? How has that changed with the increasing speed of business? How do balance the need to stay numble with the benefit of a strategic plan?
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