Be Different or be dead

July 18, 2016

15 proven ways to have a real competitive advantage

Successful competitive differentiation doesn’t happen at the 50,000’ level; separating yourself from your competition in the clouds is aspirational at best.

15 proven ways to have a real competitive advantage.

It makes you feel good to have the objective, but little happens to turn it into a reality.

Why is successful competitive differentiation difficult to achieve?

Attention and focus need to be applied to the detailed specific performance drivers of differentiation.

The aspiration is easy, but if you don’t bear down on the detailed elements that in harmony produce a believable differentiation claim, you will merely have a “wish and a prayer” that will never happen.

These action items will help you to successfully differentiate you from your competition.

▪️Create a business plan with a strategic context that defines what your competitive claim should look like and the organizational capabilities that should be given priority.

▪️Create your ONLY statement to answer the question “Why should I do business with you and not your competitors?”

▪️Avoid perfection; trying to get your competitive claim exactly right. Pour your soul into execution; learn and refine it as you go.

▪️Have a direct line of sight between all employees and your differentiation strategy to ensure each individual knows their role in execution.

▪️Repel mass anything. The herd believes in mass marketing. Sustainable differentiation is the result of focusing on individuals, not mass markets.

▪️Go for premium prices. Provide remarkable value to command higher prices than your competition. Low prices = low value = commodity = no differentiation.

▪️Resist copying. Copying “the best” is a non-starter for differentiation. You may get operational improvements from copying but you will never stand-out strategically.

▪️Align internal systems. Internal infrastructure - policies, compensation, service strategy, reward programs, IT, web and social media - must all work together to deliver your differentiation claim. Inconsistency in delivery renders your claim not believable.

▪️Cultivate leaders ask “How can I help?” rather than “Do this!” as the vehicle to clear roadblocks and enable execution. Successful differentiation = servant leadership. Period.

▪️Shed the impulse to control everything. Empower people; trust customers (eliminate policies intended to control the dishonest few).

▪️Surprise customers with what they don’t expect. This shows you care about delighting them and is a bold move to move away from the commoners.

▪️Think tops down; let growth targets drive the essence of your differentiation strategy. The more bold the growth goals, the more aggressive and creative your strategy.

▪️Cast off the notion of customer service in favour of serving them. You service computers; you serve people. Subordinating your organization to the client leads treating your customers in an exemplary way which cannot be easily replicated by competitors.

▪️Hire for goosebumps. Recruit people based on their proven ability and innate desire to serve others. Their stories are heartwarming and emotional and give you goosebumps. Goosebumps = a human organization = competitive advantage.

▪️Renew your strategy annually. Successful differentiation today is quickly erased by the actions of an aggressive competitor.

If you are diligent in creating an organization capable of implementing this action plan, you will not only successfully differentiate yourself today, you will also sustain in for the long term.

It’s not rocket science; just hard work.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 7.18.16 at 05:01 am by Roy Osing
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July 4, 2016

Why should we immediately stop copying best practices?

Why should we immediately stop copying best practices?

Benchmarking is viewed as a necessary process for most organizations. There are benchmarking consultant experts and courses you can take to learn how to benchmark proficiently and gain the maximum benefit.

In my view, benchmarking is a simple concept as is its process:

▪️Identify the organization that excels in some aspect of your operations that you believe requires improvement — customer service, business planning, customer engagement, sales management, accounts receivable, advertising planning and so on;

▪️Map (understand deeply) their system or process to understand exactly how they perform the operation;

▪️Define the actions you must take to incorporate their operating system into your operation with the objective of replicating their level of efficiency.

Benchmarking might help you improve your operations efficiency but it won’t make you stand-out from your competition.

Benchmarking can be problematic on several levels:

1. Benchmarking is copying

It’s ‘sucking up’ to an organization or individual recognized (by someone presumed to be the thought leader) to be the best at performing a particular function and is therefore the organization you should aspire to be.

It doesn’t make you special. It may help you improve your position in the crowd of hungry competitors by being more efficient at something, but it won’t help you stand out from them by being more relevant or unique.

Copying is the enemy of being different. The maximum benefit you can achieve by copying is best in class levels of performance which may return better operating results than previously obtained but unless you vault beyond these levels true differentiation won’t happen.

2. Benchmarking keeps you in the herd

The herd is a place where organizations go to blend in with others; to conform with what others do and to lose the DNA attributes that make them special.

Even if you are the ‘best of breed’ you’re still in the herd. It’s just that you execute a process better than any other herd member; you’re still rubbing shoulders with your sameness brethren.

And because you’re tagged ‘the best’, you have no motivation to break away from the herd; you find consolation in it.

The world is becoming a home for best practice addicts and as a result it’s boring and benign.

3. Benchmarking robs you of your individuality

Benchmarking results in conformance; it sucks any unique thinking you may have out of your system and replaces it with the need to capitulate to the leader of the herd.

Rather than look for a unique solution to your problem, you look for another herd member that has put in the work to create a solution that works for them and you assume you can boilerplate it and it will work for you.

When you copy someone or something, you relegate — subordinate — yourself to them. You roll over, put your ‘paws in the air’ and subsume yourself to the leadership of someone else. Looking up when you’re lying on the ground isn’t a very liberating place to be.

4. Benchmarking won’t make you special and differentiate you from your competitors

It has no strategic value in moving the organization to a position in the marketplace that ONLY you occupy.

“What are our competitors doing?” is often asked when organizations are thinking about improving how they conduct business, and the benchmarking process ensues — adding zero space between them and their competitors.

And, of course, if you’re chasing another organization, you’re adding nothing to the kitbag of things that make you ‘special’ in the eyes of your customers and encouraging them to spread your word to others and attract new business.

If you copy someone, all you do is lower the bar.

5. Benchmarking is the enemy of innovation

If you’re a copycat, you’re not an innovator. Benchmarking does little or nothing to stimulate innovation and creativity which seem to be values organizations covet in today’s world of uncertainty and constant change.

In fact benchmarking kills real innovation because it has performance improvement using the standard of another as its end game as opposed to revolutionary changes that determine new strategic outcomes.

We need to get our thinking straight.

Few organizations today stand out, which is sad; few are deemed to be really special by their customers.
Being remarkable isn’t a strategy on the radar of most, or if it is, it’s an elusive goal because leaders allow people to use traditional tools — like benchmarking best of class — to do their jobs.

Uniqueness, remarkability and being special come from being different than your competitors, not copying what they and others do, even if they perform certain functions more efficiently than you do.

We need to change our ways and stick copying where it belongs.

Let’s:
— Start thinking about being different than best in class, not copying best of breed;
— Covet being ‘different than breed’, not best of breed;
— Think about doing what others are not doing, not looking to other’s successes;
— Go in the opposite direction that others are going, not following in their footsteps.
— Define best in class to be the highest bar to be different from, not emulate;
— Purge boilerplates from our toolbox and break new ground (and maybe be the author of a new boilerplate).

Copying is the enemy of being special and remarkable.

And as leaders, let’s change the conversation in our organizations; purging the notion of benchmarking and copying as ways of achieving strategic progress by asking these types of questions of our teams:

▪️”What can we do to be different from the crowd of competitors?”;
▪️“How does what you’re proposing make us stand out from the competition and be special to our customers?”.
▪️“What crazy ‘insane’ thing is a different business to ours doing and how can we use the basics of the idea to morph it into a special idea for us?”

Benchmarking is absolutely the wrong thing to do when the end game for most organizations seems to be uniqueness and remarkability, but there are ways to ‘bend the curve’ and go in the right direction.

Start the change now, though, because time is not your friend.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 7.4.16 at 05:53 am by Roy Osing
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June 27, 2016

10 simple ways to make your business plan execution great

Source: Pexels

10 proven ways to make your business plan execution great.

Amazing results don’t come from the eloquence of your plan; successful performance depends on how well you execute.

Most organizations are challenged to execute well; these rules will help turn your “brave idea” - theory - into a “crude deed” - practice.

Rule #1 — Loosen up on strategy development (get your strategy just about right) and tighten up on strategy implementation.

You can’t execute if you spend all of your time trying to perfect your plan. Every hour you spend trying to fine tune your direction reduces your ability to get anything done.
Spend the extra time you would normally spend on your plan on detailing what has to be done to “breathe life” into your strategy.

Rule #2 — Don’t repeat the same mistake twice. Learn what works and what doesn’t work from your execution tactics.

Rule #3 — Don’t try to boil the ocean in terms of the projects and tactics you undertake. Focus on the critical few things that will achieve 80% of your strategic goal and do them well.

Rule #4 — Stay focused on the direction you have chosen. Avoid getting sucked in to Yummy Incoming: the over-the-transom work that comes to you and is a distraction but is not on strategy. t’s fun to chase Yummy, but progress eludes you when you do.

Rule #5 — Cut the Crap. You can’t execute if there are internal barriers in the way. And if you are busy with activity which may have been important in the past, but is no longer relevant. Cleanse your environment of the non-strategic!

Rule #6 — Ship lot’s of imperfection fast. Be ok with no getting it exactly right; chasing perfection is a waste of time and prevents you from getting anything done.

Rule #7 — Use what you learn from execution to inform your next steps. Don’t take your next step without incorporating what you’ve learned from your last step.

Rule #8 — Get every function - marketing, sales service, operations etc. - in the organization to determine the critical three things they must do to achieve the top 3 organizational priorities. Make this task non-negotiable. If every department in your organization doesn’t have direct line of sight to your overall strategy, people will tend to march to their own drummer and effective execution doesn’t happen.

Rule #9 — Build execution deliverables into every employee’s annual performance plan. If you don’t make it a personal matter to every individual, it won’t get done.

Rule #10 — You need a voice for execution - The Strategy Hawk - in an organization to ride herd on execution. To monitor progress. To kick ass when things are not proceeding as planned.

Build execution as a core competency of your organization and you will definitely stand out from the herd.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 6.27.16 at 04:58 am by Roy Osing
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June 20, 2016

Why an outrageous goal is necessary for a winning career

Source: Unsplash

Why an outrageous goal is necessary for a winning career.

I had a bold audacious goal very early in my career.

It was to be the VP Marketing before I was 40 years old.

You may not think this was bold, for today there many CEO’s and executives much younger, but in the day working for a monopoly telephone company with the executive ranks replete with mainly engineering professionals, it was very ambitious.

Marketing was, at that time, thought to be a fluffy discipline. The company decided what it was going to provide its ‘subscribers’ and the prices that were to be charged and that was it. Very little market research; no competitive pressures to worry about.

Therefore the Marketing VP position was not viewed as one of great strategic value to the organization and was typically filled by one of the engineering brethren.

So my goal was not only a stretch, it was ‘impossible’ given the circumstances of the day.

But that’s what I wanted, so I declared it (to myself) without any idea of how I would achieve it.

I had no plan. I just ‘put it out in the universe’ and went about my duties as Group Product Manager.

I knew, however, that if I were to be successful in achieving my objective I would have to consciously deviate from what I had been doing in the past.

I had to step up my game if I were to successfully break through the engineering glass ceiling, be noticed and win the prize.

That was my plan — Step up. Step out. Raise my game. Be a force to be reckoned with.

My intent was to make my move to VP so compelling to the executive leadership team that when the opportunity availed itself there would be no other logical conclusion that I would be the ideal candidate. I would be the ONLY logical choice.

My outrageous goal drove the strategy that was necessary. A huge challenge demanded a revolutionary approach. An incremental more modest approach would not yield the outcome I coveted.

I looked for opportunities to be different. To do things differently than others. I did more of what was required. I did the unexpected. I went in the opposite direction to the thinking and trends of the time.

I voraciously learned what had to be done to make the move from a monopoly telephone company to a highly competitive enterprise.

And I talked up internally the moves we had to make in marketing new services that would enable us to stand out from other competitive suppliers and in customer service where we had to lose the tag of treating customers with a monopolist’s attitude derived from being the only game in town.

I stuck to my game plan.

The regulatory rules changed and competition arrived in the telecommunications business.

Marketing and customer service became key components of our competitive strategy.

A new marketing VP was required.

I competed against many external candidates.

I won.

I was 39. I beat my ‘impossible’ outrageous goal.

My message to young professionals is to declare what you want.

Let the outrageousness of your goal be your guide to achieving it.

Keep it in your consciousness. Do big things.

Do different things.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 6.20.16 at 05:34 am by Roy Osing
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