Roy's Blog: January 2005
January 14, 2005
LEADERS. BREAK. MOLDS.
đĽ Audacious Move of the Week
LEADERS. BREAK. MOLDS.
Breaking the old leadership mold means rejecting conventional leadership practices and replacing them with approaches that actually produce extraordinary results.
Forget conventional leadership.
Forget the textbook formulas and endless lists of behaviours supposedly shared by âgreat leaders.â
I never built a billion-dollar business by following a leadership recipe.
I learned that leadership is about doing things that produce results.
Sometimes those things are unconventional.
Sometimes they make people uncomfortable.
And sometimes they run directly against what the leadership herd says you should do.
I call these my 7 Mold Breakersâ˘.
đŻ Mold Breaker⢠#1 â Be The ONLY Oneâ˘.
Most leaders study what successful organizations and leaders are doing.
Then they copy them.
That might make you competent.
It will never make you remarkable.
Mold Breakers⢠Create. Donât Copy.
They carve out their own path and refuse to blend in.
Your job isnât to become a better version of someone else.
Your job is to become The ONLY Oneâ˘.
⥠Mold Breaker⢠#2 â Be Imperfect FASTâ˘.
The traditional leadership world worships the perfect plan.
I donât.
While youâre polishing the plan, the world is changing around you.
Mold Breakers⢠move.
They put something into play. See what happens. Learn. Adjust. Revise.
Execute. Learn. Adjust.
Perfection doesnât win.
Movement does.
đ¤ Mold Breaker⢠#3 â Serve Aroundâ˘.
Leadership isnât about sitting at the top issuing instructions.
Itâs about getting into the organization and helping people execute.
I call it Serving Aroundâ˘.
Get out of your office.
Spend time with the people doing the work.
Ask them:
âHow can I help?â
Youâll discover barriers, Dumb Rules⢠and execution problems youâll NEVER see from the executive suite.
Donât command from above.
Serve execution from within.
đ Mold Breaker⢠#4 â Micromanage Strategically.
âNever micromanageâ is one of those leadership clichĂŠs that makes absolutely no sense.
Of course you shouldnât stick your nose into everything.
But some things are simply too important to delegate and disappear.
Identify the few things critical to strategy execution and get intimately involved.
Not because you donât trust people.
Because they matter too much to leave to chance.
đ Mold Breaker⢠#5 â Strip The Dragâ˘.
Every organization accumulates things that slow the flow of value to the customer.
Rules. Policies. Approvals. Processes. Touch points.
Mold Breakers⢠relentlessly Strip The Dragâ˘.
Simplify processes. Reduce touch points. Remove unnecessary approvals. Cut The CRAPâ˘. Get rid of Dumb Rulesâ˘.
Anything that gets between what the customer craves and your ability to deliver it is drag.
Strip it out.
Make value flow.
đ Mold Breaker⢠#6 â Create Line of Sightâ˘.
A strategy sitting in a PowerPoint deck is worthless.
Execution happens when every person understands how what they do every day contributes to the Strategic Game Planâ˘.
Thatâs Line of Sightâ˘.
People need to see the direct connection between their job and the strategy.
Not vaguely.
Specifically.
When Line of Sight⢠exists, strategy stops being something management talks about.
It becomes something the organization does.
đ§ Mold Breaker⢠#7 â Head Westâ˘.
Traditional planning says define the destination precisely and then chart the route.
Real life doesnât work that way.
Markets move. Customers change. Competitors surprise you.
So Head Westâ˘.
Establish a direction.
Start moving.
Learn from what happens.
Let execution reveal opportunities you couldnât possibly have predicted when you started.
The destination becomes clearer because youâre moving.
Donât worship the plan.
Ride the Executionâ˘.
đĽ BREAK THE MOLD.
These are my 7 Mold Breakersâ˘.
I learned them in the real world, building an organization from a startup to more than a billion in annual sales.
- Be The ONLY Oneâ˘.
- Be Imperfect FASTâ˘.
- Serve Aroundâ˘.
- Micromanage Strategically.
- Strip The Dragâ˘.
- Create Line of Sightâ˘.
- Head Westâ˘.
You donât produce extraordinary results by faithfully following the leadership practices everyone else follows.
Break the mold.
Do what works.
đ Want more Audacious Movesâ˘?
đď¸ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION⢠for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business.
âđť Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.
Extraordinary businesses arenât built by ordinary decisions.
Theyâre built one Audacious Move⢠at a time.
Now go make yours.
Cheers,
Roy
- Posted 1.14.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
- Permalink
January 13, 2005
NORMAL. NEVER. WINS.
đĽ Audacious Move of the Week
NORMAL. NEVER. WINS.
Learning how to BE DiFFERENT and stand out in business and life starts with deliberately refusing to think, act and execute like everyone else.
Stop trying to fit in. Start practising how to stand out.
Most people donât have a differentiation problem.
They have a conformity habit.
Theyâve spent years learning what everyone else does.
- What the experts recommend.
- What the latest textbook advice says.
- What competitive colleagues are doing.
- What conventional wisdom says is âbest practiceâ.
And then they wonder why nobody notices them.
You donât BE DiFFERENT by declaring it.
You BE DiFFERENT by behaving differently.
And behaviour can be practised.
Here are 6 Moves Iâve used over my career to escape the gravitational pull of the herd.
đ˛ 1. SURPRISE PEOPLE
Predictability is comfortable.
Itâs also forgettable.
Iâve always looked for opportunities to give people something they didnât expect.
Not necessarily something expensive.
Not necessarily something huge.
Something thoughtful.
Learn something about them. Remember it. Then use that knowledge to create a moment they never saw coming.
Most people deliver whatâs expected.
BE DiFFERENT people create the unexpected.
Thatâs what gets remembered.
đ 2. CHANGE THE QUESTION
When people encounter a problem, they typically ask:
âHow do I solve this?â
I ask:
âHow can I solve this DIFFERENTLY?â
That one word changes everything.
It forces you away from the obvious answer.
âď¸ It challenges assumptions.
âď¸ It opens possibilities.
âď¸ It makes copying harder.
If you ask the same question everyone else asks, donât be surprised when you get the same answer everyone else gets.
đ 3. PULL A 180
When everyone is running east, I get curious about west.
I call it the 180 Move.
Take conventional wisdom and turn it upside down.
Ask:
âWhat would happen if I did exactly the opposite?â
You wonât always use the answer.
Thatâs not the point.
The point is to break your brain out of its normal pattern.
The herd has enormous gravitational pull.
Sometimes you need a violent change in direction to escape it.
đ 4. PUT THE TEXTBOOK DOWN
Iâm not anti-learning.
Iâm anti-worshipping theory.
Business and career textbooks are full of neat models created to explain a world that is anything but neat.
The real world is messy.
Customers are irrational.
Competitors are unpredictable.
Plans go sideways.
Shit happens.
So learn the theory.
Then get your ass into the real world and figure out what actually works.
Performance beats intellectual elegance every time.
𤎠5. STOP GARGLING GOOGLE
Want to know what everyone else is doing?
Google it.
Want to create something nobody else is doing?
Close the damn browser.
The more time you spend studying competitors, the greater the temptation to become a slightly modified version of them.
Different logo.
Different words.
Same stuff.
Iâd rather create something imperfectly original than perfectly copy what somebody else has already done.
Your weird idea might fail.
Good.
Learn from it and create another one.
đŁ 6. TAKE BABY STEPS
This might be the most important Move of all.
You donât wake up tomorrow and suddenly become radically different.
You practise it.
One decision.
One experiment.
One contrarian question.
One surprise.
One 180 Move.
Then another.
And another.
Thatâs how differentiation becomes part of your DNA.
Not through one gigantic act of courage.
Through hundreds of small acts of defiance against the way things have always been done.
⥠THE REAL MOVE
BE DiFFERENT isnât a positioning statement.
It isnât a marketing slogan.
And it sure as hell isnât something you paste on the wall.
Itâs a habit.
A way of looking at every problem, every opportunity and every decision and asking:
âWhat could I do here that nobody expects?â
Practise that question long enough and something interesting happens.
You stop trying to BE DiFFERENT.
Different becomes the way you operate.
đ Want more Audacious Movesâ˘?
đď¸ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION⢠for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business.
âđť Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.
Extraordinary businesses arenât built by ordinary decisions.
Theyâre built one Audacious Move⢠at a time.
Now go make yours.
Cheers,
Roy
- Posted 1.13.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
- Permalink
January 12, 2005
BUSINESS. SCHOOLâS. OUT.
đ Audacious Move of the Week
BUSINESS. SCHOOLâS. OUT.
Business schools and traditional business textbooks teach students the accepted rules of business.
But if you want to succeed in todayâs brutally competitive marketplace, BE DiFFERENT or be dead teaches something far more important: how to win when following those rules makes you look and act like everyone else.
Put down the conventional business textbook; pick up one written from the battlefield.
I have a problem with the way we educate people for business.
We teach them what is already known.
Established models.
Accepted methods.
Proven formulas.
Case studies describing what somebody else did in circumstances that no longer exist.
Then we graduate students into a world that is changing by the hour and expect them to figure it out.
Weâre preparing them to explain business rather than WIN at it.
Thatâs why I believe BE DiFFERENT or be dead should be the business textbook students actually follow if they want to succeed.
Thatâs a big claim.
I can back it up.
đ Business School Teaches What Already Happened
My textbook wasnât born in a classroom.
It was born while I was helping build a startup into a business generating more than $1 BILLION in annual sales.
There was no professor standing beside me.
No answer at the back of the book.
No tidy case study telling me what happened next.
We made decisions with incomplete information.
We screwed things up.
We tried things respectable business thinking might have considered ridiculous.
And we discovered something business education has fundamentally backwards:
Knowing what has worked is not the same as knowing what to do.
That gap is enormous.
đ Real Business Doesnât Come In Chapters
Traditional textbooks necessarily organize business into neat subjects.
Strategy over here.
Marketing over there.
Customer service somewhere else.
Leadership gets its own chapter.
Sales gets another.
Real business doesnât arrive like that.
It arrives Tuesday morning at 9:17 disguised as a pissed-off customer, a competitor cutting your price, an employee doing something stupid, a technology shift nobody anticipated or a plan that suddenly isnât working.
There is no Chapter 7 telling you what to do next.
You have to move.
Thatâs what BE DiFFERENT or be dead teaches.
Not how to admire someone elseâs success.
How to create your own.
Not how to apply a fashionable formula.
How to think when the formula breaks.
Not how to become âbest in classâ.
How to make the class irrelevant.
Not how to reduce uncertainty until everyone feels comfortable.
How to make a call when certainty is impossible.
And certainly not how to copy the organizations business schools have decided are worthy of case studies.
Copying yesterdayâs winner is a lousy way to become tomorrowâs one.
đ The Market Doesnât Give You An Exam
Business schools arenât useless.
They can give students valuable knowledge.
But knowledge isnât the finish line.
The test comes when the market punches your beautiful plan in the mouth.
What do you do then?
Thatâs where my textbook begins.
It contains the Audacious Moves we actually made.
Some worked spectacularly.
Some needed fixing.
Some violated conventional wisdom.
But they were forged in the only laboratory I ultimately trust: the marketplace.
Thatâs the fundamental difference between BE DiFFERENT or be dead and the traditional business textbook.
One teaches you about business.
Mine teaches you how to survive and win in it.
đ¨ Learn The Rules. Then Stop Thinking Like Everyone Else.
So if youâre studying business, study the conventional textbooks.
Learn the language.
Understand the principles.
Know what everyone else is being taught.
Then open BE DiFFERENT or be dead and learn something considerably more dangerous:
how NOT to think like everyone else.
Because your future wonât be determined by how well you can recite what business already knows.
It will be determined by what you do when what business already knows isnât good enough.
Thatâs the textbook I wish Iâd had when I started.
So I wrote it.
đ Want more Audacious Movesâ˘?
đď¸ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION⢠for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business.
âđť Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.
Extraordinary businesses arenât built by ordinary decisions.
Theyâre built one Audacious Move⢠at a time.
Now go make yours.
Cheers,
Roy
- Posted 1.12.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
- Permalink
January 11, 2005
PLANS. MEET. REALITY.
đ Audacious Move⢠of the Week
Business leadership demands the ability to adapt strategy when conditions changeâwithout losing sight of where the organization is going.
The best leaders know when to abandon the play, respond to a Point of Inflectionâ˘, and Call the Audibleâ˘.
Plans are useful. Until reality decides otherwise.
There comes a point when sticking to the plan becomes more dangerous than changing it.
The market moves.
Customers behave differently.
Technology changes the game.
Results start heading in the wrong direction.
Something happens that challenges the assumptions you made when you created your strategy.
And the leader has a choice.
Keep running the play.
Or Call the Audibleâ˘.
In football, the quarterback walks to the line of scrimmage with a play already called.
Then they read the defense.
Something isnât what they expected.
So they change the play.
They donât abandon the objective.
They change how theyâre going to achieve it.
Thatâs exactly what audacious leaders do.
đ They read the field.
Too many leaders treat their strategic plan as something sacred.
They create it, align everyone around it and then execute it regardless of what happens around them.
Thatâs nuts.
A strategy is based on assumptions about customers, competitors, technology and the market.
And assumptions can be wrong.
More importantly, assumptions can become wrong.
Thatâs why leaders need to Ride the Executionâ˘.
Stay personally involved. Watch results. Listen to the frontline. Stay close to customers.
Look for Points of Inflectionâ˘âevidence that something significant has changed and the current play may no longer work.
And when you see one, donât defend yesterdayâs play simply because you created it.
đĄ SCAN. SHIFT. STRIKE.
My process is simple.
SCAN.
Read the field.
What are customers telling you?
What is your frontline seeing?
Where are results departing from expectations?
What assumptions arenât holding up?
SHIFT.
Change the play when the evidence tells you to.
Not because youâre bored.
Not because the latest management fad caught your attention.
And certainly not because someone yelled âPIVOT!â (I hate that word đĄ) in the boardroom.
Make the change the new circumstances demand.
STRIKE.
Move.
FAST.
Donât Call the Audible⢠and then spend six months studying the audible.
Execute the new play.
Execute. Learn. Adjust.
đŻ The destination doesnât necessarily change. The play does.
Calling the Audible⢠isnât strategic wandering.
The quarterback doesnât change the objective when they call an audible.
Theyâre still trying to score.
They change the play because what theyâre seeing on the field tells them thereâs a better way to get there.
Business leaders need the same discipline.
Stay relentlessly committed to where youâre going.
But never become emotionally attached to how you originally planned to get there.
Because reality always gets a vote.
And sometimes reality tells you: Change the play.
Thatâs when audacious leaders earn their keep.
They see what others donât.
They make the call others are afraid to make.
And they move while everyone else is still discussing what happened.
SCAN. SHIFT. STRIKE.
Call the Audibleâ˘.
đ Want more Audacious Movesâ˘?
đď¸ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION⢠for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business.
âđť Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.
Extraordinary businesses arenât built by ordinary decisions.
Theyâre built one Audacious Move⢠at a time.
Now go make yours.
Cheers,
Roy
- Posted 1.11.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
- Permalink
