Be Different or be dead

December 5, 2022

Why great leaders scream about being different on Friday

Why great leaders scream about being different on Friday.

Friday – The Day for Leaders to Change the Conversation.

In 2015 I wrote an ebook titled A Weekly Calendar for Leaders. The idea was to highlight the things an audacious leader must do every day of the week if they are to build an organization that consistently delivers superlative performance.

This post talks about what the great leaders should do on Friday.

This day is all about language.

What is said; talked about in the organization. When people discuss issues, what do they say?
What words come out of their mouths?
Language expresses what people view as ‘what’s important around here.’
Vocabulary paints the picture of the journey that employees see the organization taking.

This day is focused on changing the conversation in the organization.

Moving away from discussing what needs to be done to improve; to incrementally change the organization.

And muting the conversation about the practices of best in class organizations and what is required to copy them.

Rather, introducing the conversation around how to BE DiFFERENT; how to stand-out from others in the market.
▪️“What do we have to do to leave the herd; to distance ourselves from the common crowd?”
▪️“How can we stand-out not blend in; breakaway from the common direction that everyone else is taking?”

This day involves meeting with team leaders throughout the organization; across all responsibility areas.
BIG NOTE: this applies if you have 1,000 employees, 10 or 3. The point is to engage with people who represent the various functions you have defined for your organization.

This day the leader declares that the BE DiFFERENT conversation will define the new culture of the organization.
And it will drive the new mindset that should pervade every nook and cranny of it.
What ‘the spoken word’ needs to be to drive success.

This day the leader has a simple agenda when meeting with team leaders.
Look introspectively. Dissect the conversations that are common. What topics do they most engage in? What words are used? What questions are asked?
Then disrupt the conversation with questions around divergence not compliance.
▪️“What are we doing to create space between our organization and others?”
▪️“What breakaway projects with new innovative thinking are we pursuing?”
▪️“What NEW boxes are we building to play in?”
▪️“What breakaway opportunities have we identified that will take us in a different and new direction than the rest of the market?”

Far too many organizations and people think success is fitting in; conforming; being the same as everyone else; going in the direction of the industry.

This is lazy and deadly thinking.

A recent LinkedIn post captured—under the concept of Strategic Convergence—the downside of doing what every other organization is doing. I liked it!

“Strategic Convergence means that over time most firms end up in the same place. 
This is what happens if you all read the same books, watch the same Ted talks, hire the same consultants and use the same case studies.  This is accelerated if you use benchmarking which involves watching what your competitors are doing and copying them.
Emulation gets you to parity. But when everyone does it it gets you to strategic hell.”— Herman Singh, CEO

Success has been and always will be a function of being different in some way.

”You don’t become indispensable merely because you are different. But the only way to be indispensable is to be different.” — Seth Godin, Linchpin

The next time a proposal is brought to you, ask “How does this make us DiFFERENT?”
Avoid asking what others are doing and how the proposal conforms.

Call your head of marketing and ask what they are doing to move away from flogging products and services to offering packages of value to market segments of one? What are they doing to meet the needs of ’ME’ markets?

Sales: what are you doing to build a unique brand in the market based on building deep and intimate relationships with your clients?

Collections: how do you intend to distance yourself from virtually all other organizations that impose unfriendly and ‘dumb’ credit and collections rules and policies on their customers? The collections experience in most organizations is generally one level above pain and suffering.

Human Resources: How are you trying to attract the skills and competencies needed to drive amazing performance in a way that others don’t? Are new courageous practices that no one else is using being put into place to position your organization as the ONLY place to work?

Internal Audit: What is being done to simplify processes that touch the customer? Yes, control is important but it must be balanced with serving the customer in a hassle-free caring way.

And follow through to ensure that the BE DiFFERENT theme gets driven into the strategic game plan process and becomes a critical beacon to follow.

Cheers,
Roy
My 50+ Podcast Shows that will change your life.

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• Posted 12.5.22 at 05:54 am by Roy Osing
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December 4, 2022

Why the ability to communicate is critical to get A BILLION in sales

Why the ability to communicate is critical to get A BILLION in sales.

There were many actions I took as a leader to take an early stage internet company in the telecom space to A BILLION in annual sales, but I haven’t talked much about the importance of communication as a critical element of my journey.

The ability to communicate was incredibly important to my audacious leadership role because we were faced with making breakaway moves away from the traditional ways we conducted telephone company business in the past and adopting new ways necessary in a highly competitive internet world where customer power was a dominant force.

We had to:
▪️Add a stronger marketing and customer service focus to the engineering strength that had served us well in the past as a regulated monopoly telco.
▪️Replace order-taking with serving customers.
▪️Learn how to be proactive with customers in the sales game and place more emphasis on selling solutions as opposed to ‘flogging products’.
▪️Build a data and internet culture from the largely voice oriented culture that had existed in the past.
▪️Create the ability to achieve extraordinary growth rather than more linear growth that was normal in days gone by.

Communications was the key element in building a new organization and achieving lofty growth goals.

How did I use my communications skills?

As the leader, there were many ways I used my communications skills to build an amazing team and achieve miraculous performance:

Calendar management — My week was replete with communications ‘sessions’ with employees, discussing what we were trying to achieve—our Strategic Game Plan—and what action needed to be taken to make us successful.

Bear Pit Sessions — I held informal workshops (with no accompanying entourage) with multifunctional groups to understand what was working and also what was preventing us from executing our Game Plan more effectively.

Frontline focus — Given my focus on Game Plan EXECUTION, I spent huge amounts of time with the frontline teams across my organization asking “How can I help?”.
I needed to know what they needed to enable them to do their jobs more effectively and also it gave me the opportunity to thank them for the fantastic job they were doing under arduous circumstances.

Line of Sight translation — I personally led workshops with the various functional teams—marketing, sales, service, accounting, credit etc.—to define what, specifically, the Game Plan to A BILLION meant to each and every one of them.
They needed to understand the new behaviours they had to adopt (with new expedited outcomes) and the old ones that were no longer appropriate.

Do I have a personal strategy that guides how I communicate with others?

My BE DiFFERENT or be dead brand provides the context—and the anchor—for how I choose to communicate.

My overall approach is to BE DiFFERENT from how everyone else—the ‘speaker crowd’—does it.
My logic is that if my message is to be listened to and followed by my audience, it must be incomparable, it must stand out from others , it must be inspiring to the listener and it must evoke action.

I observed how others did it and chose another way that was consistent with my personal audacious leader brand.
Quite frankly, I Ignored ‘textbook thinking’ or commonly espoused practices, approaches because if I copied someone else’s methods I would surely NOT be different and would merely increase the speaker herd by 1.

What are some of the things I do to make my presentations DiFFERENT?

First and foremost, my prime objective when speaking to any audience is to create a memorable experience for everyone attending, and to do so I think about it as a PERFORMANCE.
It’s not just about the information you’re delivering, it’s about how you make people feel when they receive your information. People will remember some of your content but they never forget how you make them FEEL.

I am emotionally connected with my content—I’ve been described as a passionate speaker—and I try to convey it with as much energy as I can muster.
“Energy up!” is what I say to myself before every performance; it has always served me well as the push to keep me up and pumped.

I think about myself as a content expert and storyteller NOT an orator. My ‘job’ is to lead and deliver unmatched performance; it isn’t to be a great speaker.
But I’ve discovered that audience reaction is a function of content+emotion not following the ‘practices of oration’ and this is best served by bringing your content to life through storytelling.

To be an audacious speaker, your content must ‘flow from your veins’.

How does a person start to be audacious at communicating?

There are 3 things to think about if you intend to walk the audacious path of lighting fires in people when you speak.

#1. Be the ONLY one — You need to own your own unique place in communicating.
Study how others practice their art and determine how you can be different from the rest.
Figure out your ONLY brand to separate yourself from the speaker crowd.

#2. Be a performer — Treat every presentation as a performance where your objective is to DAZZLE every person in your audience.

#3. Know your content better than you know your own name. — You can’t stream your content if you’re fighting with it, if you can’t recall what words you want to use to express your ideas.
Remember, your content is the least important ingredient in a mind-blowing performance.

An audience expects the speaker to be competent in their subject matter, but they are rarely treated to a performance that leaves them breathless. Fill THAT void.

You don’t want them satisfied, you want them blown away, crushed, ‘goosebumpy’ and awestruck with how you made them FEEL.

If a leader can’t communicate effectively, strategy execution fails and magical performance doesn’t happen.

Let my practical experience in ‘lighting fires’ in people to achieve A BILLION IN SALES be your guide.

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

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 12.4.22 at 04:32 pm by Roy Osing
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November 28, 2022

My top 5 tips to make a successful entrepreneur

My top 5 tips to make a successful entrepreneur.

The mortality rate for new businesses is extremely high—chances are you won’t make it—and you absolutely must avoid these 5 mistakes if your new brave idea is to survive and thrive.

1. DON’T EVER move forward with an idea that is not different from your competition. — Ultimate success will be determined by staking a unique claim in the market that clearly distances you from everyone out there.

If your idea is the same as, or similar to something already out there, it will be invisible. It won’t attract attention and no one will buy it.

If you can’t come up with an idea that is different from someone else’s, STOP!

2. DON’T EVER move forward if you don’t clearly identify who the potential customers are for your new idea. — Winning is all about targeting your idea to very specific groups of people and giving them a reason to buy from you.

It’s not about flogging your idea to the masses and hoping it will stick to some of them.

If you can’t define your potential customers, STOP!

3. DON’T EVER move forward unless you have people around you with strong marketing and customer service backgrounds. — Ultimately, the success of your idea will depend on go-to-market effectiveness. Better have people on board who have experience in serving customers and providing value-based solutions to people.

Technology and finance expertise are needed as well, but in a supportive role. People responsible for customers must be your anchor.

If you can’t put together a team of people with customer experience, STOP! until you find them.

4. DON’T EVER rely on cool technology to sell itself. — It’s not about a product or service. It’s about how your idea makes a difference to people’s lives or business.

People don’t buy technology, they buy what the technology creates for them. Happiness. Joy. Pleasure. Solution to a problem. Make it easy.

If you’re not looking for a way to deliver happiness, STOP!

5. DON’T EVER start chasing new applications for your technology. — Stay focussed on the one you feel will capture the imagination of your potential customers. After you’ve proven your idea works there, then consider other applications.
Chasing numerous applications at once will distract you and stop you from making progress.

You burn energy cycles and money dealing with potential opportunities proposed by associates and colleagues in businesses who would like a piece of your action.

These 5 mistakes can kill your startup; avoid them at all cost.

Cheers,
Roy
40+ Podcast Shows I’ve done that unpack my work.

Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 11.28.22 at 05:48 am by Roy Osing
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November 21, 2022

How the competitive herd runs and why it will destroy you

How the competitive herd runs and why it will destroy you.

Competition, regardless of the industry, is increasing with blazing speed. Fuelled by disruptions caused by the internet and hard-technology innovation, the number of competitors entering ANY space is increasing at a breathless rate.

You would think that in the face of relentless competitive pressure, organizations would get more proficient at carving out a differentiated position in their market. Creating a Value Proposition that is crystal clear and unique.

But, it is not happening. In fact the opposite is occurring.

Un-differentiation is the norm.

Business is infatuated with copying.

Best in Class and Best of Breed are targets for comparison.

Benchmarking is the key driver of ‘innovation’.

Follow the Leader is played with the belief that somehow a Stand-Out competitive claim will evolve. It just does not happen.

Products and Services end up on most organizations’ infatuation list. Me-too capabilities are promulgated in the market with the hope and prayer that a miracle will happen and THEIR solution will end up being the winner.

Product features and benefits are stressed as the panacea to the customer’s wants, desires and cravings.

Mass markets are catered to, driven by a one-size-fits-all marketing mentality.

Product corners are rounded, believing that incremental changes will make the product appeal to more people. Problem is, this strategy results in the product appealing to no one.

Businesses rush to offer lower prices than their competition. Everyone is in this game to a degree. It seems to be all about a race to the bottom on price for The Herd.

The Bottom line… The world is burning with a growing competitive flame yet organizations are NOT very good at establishing a clear, relevant and unique claim that clearly distinguishes them from their competitors; that makes them Stand-Out from everyone else.

The solution?

Build your business around my Strategic Game Plan process and use The ONLY Statement to carve out your unique position in the markets you choose to serve.

Cheers,
Roy
40+ Podcast Shows I’ve done that unpack my work.

Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 11.21.22 at 03:17 am by Roy Osing
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