January 22, 2005

Execution Gets 80%. Strategy Gets the Other 20%.

                     

🚀 Audacious Move™ of the Week

Stop Overthinking Strategy. Get Obsessed With Execution.

Bold Decisions Create Extraordinary Businesses.

I hope it helps you create yours.

Most organizations have growth backwards.

They spend enormous amounts of time trying to perfect their strategy—and then treat execution as something that happens after the planning meeting.

I learned to do the opposite.

Loosen up on strategy. Tighten up on execution.

On my journey from startup to more than A BILLION in annual sales, I learned that strategy without execution is merely an interesting conversation.

🎯 Get Your Strategy Just About Right™

You can’t create a perfect strategy.

Customers change. Competitors move. Unexpected opportunities appear. And occasionally the market delivers a body blow you never saw coming.

So stop trying to predict everything.

Get your strategy Just About Right™ and put most of your energy into execution.

Think roughly 20% strategy. 80% execution.

I call this Head West™.

Know where you’re going without pretending you can predict every turn along the way.

My Strategic Game Plan™ was designed for exactly that purpose. It answers four questions:

HOW BIG? — Declare your 24-month revenue growth objective.

WHO to SERVE? — Choose the Customer Groups with the potential to deliver HOW BIG.

WHAT do they CRAVE? — Discover what those chosen customers repeatedly care about and reward.

HOW will you COMPETE and WIN? — Create The ONLY One™ that separates you from the Herd of Sameness™ and addresses what your WHO cares about.

Now you have direction.

Stop planning. Start moving.

🔥 Ride the Execution™

Execution is where strategy meets reality.

It’s where assumptions get tested and the plan gets smarter.

Execute. Learn. Adjust.

That’s Be Imperfect FAST™.

Create Line of Sight™ so everyone understands how their job contributes to the Strategic Game Plan™.

Lead by Serving Around. Get close to the people doing the work, ask “How can I help?” and remove barriers.

Cleanse The Inside. Kill dumb rules. Simplify processes. Reduce touch points and friction.

Hire for Goosebumps™.

You can teach skills. You can’t train people to like people.

And create Dazzling Moments™ that surprise customers and give them reasons to stay.

🚀 What’s Your Next Audacious Move™?

Stop polishing the plan.

Get your strategy Just About Right™.

Then move.

Execute. Learn. Adjust.

And keep moving.

Because growth isn’t produced by the plan you write.

It’s produced by what your organization does with it.

🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?

🎙️ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION™ for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business.

✍🏻 Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.

Extraordinary businesses aren’t built by ordinary decisions.

They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.

Now go make yours.

Cheers,
Roy

• Posted 1.22.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

January 21, 2005

The Scaling Lie: You Can’t Cut Your Way to Growth

                   

🚀 Audacious Move™ of the Week

The Scaling Lie: You Can’t Cut Your Way to Growth

Bold Decisions Create Extraordinary Businesses.

I hope it helps you create yours.

There’s a popular notion about scaling a business that drives me nuts.

Grow revenue faster than you grow costs.

Revenue goes up 10%. Costs go up 5%. Congratulations—you’re scaling.

Technically, perhaps.

But that thinking puts the emphasis in the wrong place.

You don’t scale a business by obsessing over costs. You scale it by creating a revenue machine capable of pulling the right costs behind it.

My approach has always been revenue-first.

I’m not interested in nickel-and-diming an organization into prosperity.

I want to architect the business around creating unique value people are prepared to pay for.

Here’s what that takes.

🔥 Grow Customer Share™

Stop behaving as though growth requires constantly chasing new customers.

Your existing customers already know you. They’ve already experienced you. They’ve already chosen you.

Give them reasons to buy more of your products and services and choose you more often.

Customer retention is important. But Customer Share™ is where the growth opportunity really gets interesting.

🎯 Give People Something They CRAVE

Products are easy to copy.

Features are easy to copy.

Prices are easy to match.

The opportunity is to discover the Reward Signals™ of the Customer Groups you’ve chosen to serve—the things they repeatedly demonstrate they care about enough to reward.

Then build your ONLY Statement™ around delivering what they CRAVE in a way no competitor does.

That gives you permission to charge a premium rather than compete in the price swamp.

❤️ Make Loyalty an Operating Obsession

Deliver your core service flawlessly.

Create Dazzling Moments™ people remember.

And when you screw up—and you will—use OOPS! Service Recovery to recover in a way that strengthens the relationship.

Loyalty isn’t a marketing program.

It’s the result of hundreds of experiences delivered by the entire organization.

🧹 Cleanse The Inside™

Growth dies when your organization makes it difficult for customers to do business with you.

Reduce friction.

Simplify processes.

Reduce touch points.

Increase the viscosity of your value delivery systems so that the unique value you promise actually reaches the customer.

Differentiation must be baked into the way the organization operates.

Otherwise, it’s just another slogan.

👀 Create Line of Sight™

Every person needs to understand exactly how what they do contributes to the Strategic Game Plan™.

Not theoretically.

Specifically.

If people can’t see the direct line between their job and your growth strategy, execution fragments and scaling stalls.

🚀 Revenue Pulls Costs

This is the mindset shift.

Don’t begin with:

“How much can we cut?”

Begin with:

“What do we need to invest to deliver the unique value that will produce the revenue growth we want?”

Then make those investments ruthlessly.

Scaling isn’t about cutting corners.

It’s about building a revenue machine around value people can’t get anywhere else.

Create unique value.

Turn customers into loyalists.

Grow Customer Share™.

Cleanse the organization.

Align every person behind the strategy.

Then let revenue pull the costs required to keep the machine growing.

That’s how you scale without becoming another member of the Herd of Sameness™.

🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?

🎙️ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION™ for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business and having a remarkable career.

✍🏻 Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.

Extraordinary careers aren’t built by ordinary decisions. They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.

Now go make yours.

Cheers,
Roy

• Posted 1.21.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

January 20, 2005

Why AI 🤖 Should Mess With Your Head

                   

🚀 Audacious Move™ of the Week

Why AI 🤖 Should Mess With Your Head

Bold Decisions Create Extraordinary Businesses.

I hope it helps you create yours.

Most people are using AI wrong.

They ask it questions.

They ask it to write stuff.

They ask it to give them answers.

I use AI differently.

I use AI as my Collision Vehicle™.

I throw my ideas at it.

It pushes something back.

I challenge it. Reject it. Change it. Ask “What if?” Throw another idea into the mix.

And sometimes two ideas collide and something completely new emerges.

💥 Don’t Let AI Do Your Thinking

This is the danger with AI.

Ask it to do all your thinking and you’ll eventually sound like everyone else using the same technology.

AI shouldn’t replace your thinking. It should give your thinking something to challenge.

I bring my experience.

My judgment.

My ideas.

My intellectual property.

My point of view.

AI helps me pressure-test and improve them.

That’s a completely different relationship.

🚀 AI Multiplies What YOU Bring to the Collision

This is the key.

AI multiplies what YOU bring to the collision.

Bring experience, original ideas, a strong point of view and something uniquely yours—and AI can help you make it better.

Bring nothing original?

Don’t expect AI to magically make you different.

I use AI as a Thinking Partner.

An Editor.

A Research Assistant.

A Content Multiplier.

A Presentation Partner.

A Memory Bank.

And an Execution Accelerator.

One idea can collide with AI and become a sharper concept, an article, a presentation, a podcast, a social post—or something I hadn’t even considered.

But the original thinking is still mine.

The better the thinking you bring to AI, the more valuable the collision can become.

🔥 BE Imperfect FAST™ With AI

I don’t obsess over writing the perfect prompt.

I start.

AI responds.

I react.

I revise.

We go again.

Execute. Learn. Adjust.

That’s BE Imperfect FAST™.

And it’s exactly how I’ve learned to get more value from AI.

The more we collide, the better the outcome becomes.

🧠 AI Becomes Part of Your Strategic Learning System

This is where AI gets really interesting.

Used properly, AI accelerates the cycle between thinking, doing, learning and improving.

It doesn’t just help you produce things faster.

It can help you think better while you’re producing them.

That’s why I see AI as part of my Strategic Learning System™.

Not the thinker.

Not the strategist.

Not the boss.

The Collision Vehicle™.

🚀 What’s Your Next Audacious Move™?

Stop asking AI to think for you.

Bring it something worth having AI challenge.

Your experience.

Your ideas.

Your point of view.

Your uniqueness.

Then collide.

Challenge.

Learn.

Adjust.

And create something neither you nor AI would have created alone.

Don’t use AI to replace your brain.

Use it as your personal “test of reasonableness” to make your brain more valuable.

Don’t ask AI to make you different. Bring something different to AI.

🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?

🎙️ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION™ for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business and having a remarkable career.

✍🏻 Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.

Extraordinary careers aren’t built by ordinary decisions. They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.

Now go make yours.

Cheers,
Roy

• Posted 1.20.05 at 06:30 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

January 19, 2005

Innovation Doesn’t Need More Ideas. It Needs Leaders Who DO.

                   

🚀 Audacious Move™ of the Week

Innovation Doesn’t Need More Ideas. It Needs Leaders Who DO.

Bold Decisions Create Extraordinary Businesses.

I hope it helps you create yours.

Innovation has become another leadership buzzword.

Everyone wants more of it. Everyone talks about it. Everyone claims it’s a strategic priority.

But innovation doesn’t die because organizations run out of ideas.

It dies because leaders fail to turn ideas into action.

In today’s chaotic, fast-moving world, leadership isn’t about fancy declarations, inspirational posters or endless planning.

It’s about DOING.

Here are four Audacious Moves™ leaders can make to turn innovation into results.

🔥 1. DIFFERENTIATE

Forget CLAPTRAP declarations like “We’re better” or “We’re the best.”

And forget narcissistic mission statements that sound impressive but give customers no compelling reason to choose you.

The end game is ONLY differentiation.

What makes your organization special in a way that matters to the people you’ve chosen to serve?

Are you The ONLY One™ who does what you do?

Define it. Own it. Operate it.

Differentiation isn’t about being everything to everyone. It’s about being something unique to the people you’ve chosen to serve.

Because “better” keeps the competition in the conversation.

⚡ 2. EXECUTE

Stop trying to create the perfect plan.

It doesn’t exist.

By the time you’ve polished it, analyzed it and held another meeting about it, the world has probably changed.

Aim for Just About Right™ planning⁠.

Then move.

Execute. Learn. Adjust.

That’s Be Imperfect FAST™.

And make sure everyone understands how what they do every day connects directly to your Strategic Game Plan™.

That’s Line of Sight™.

Without it, strategy stays in the boardroom while the organization carries on doing what it has always done.

The challenge is to bake your Strategic Game Plan™ into the way your organization actually operates.

🤝 3. SERVE AROUND

Leadership isn’t practiced from an ivory tower.

Get out. Get close to the people doing the work.

Ask one simple question:

“How can I help?”

Leadership By Serving Around™ means discovering what prevents people from executing and removing those barriers.

Not micromanaging.

Not issuing instructions.

Helping people get shit done.

That’s how leaders build execution muscle.

💥 4. DO THE CRITICAL STUFF YOURSELF

Delegation has become another sacred cow.

Sometimes leaders should not delegate.

I call it Strategic Micromanagement⁠™ .

There are things that are simply too important to hand off.

Defending your strategy.

Selling it relentlessly.

Recruiting Human Being Lovers™.

Architecting the customer experience.

Protecting what makes you The ONLY One™.

Less delegation. More doing—where doing matters most.

Innovation doesn’t need another brainstorming session.

It needs leaders prepared to turn ideas into organizational behaviour.

Differentiate. Execute. Serve. DO.

And keep doing.

Because One Audacious Move™ is NEVER enough.

🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?

🎙️ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION™ for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business and having a remarkable career.

✍🏻 Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.

Extraordinary careers aren’t built by ordinary decisions. They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.

Now go make yours.

Cheers,
Roy

• Posted 1.19.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink