January 2, 2005

BUSY. ISN’T. GROWTH.

                   

🚀 Audacious Move of the Week

BUSY. ISN’T. GROWTH.

Business growth doesn’t come from working harder at running the business you already have. It comes from deliberately creating, operating and leading the business you want to become.

Here’s my challenge to business leaders:

Do you REALLY want to grow?

Or do you just want to get better at running what you already have?

There’s a BIG difference.

Most leaders I meet are incredibly busy.

They’re buried in operations.

Solving problems.

Attending meetings.

Chasing numbers.

Responding to customers.

Putting out fires.

They’re working their asses off IN the business.

But growth demands something different.

It demands that you occasionally get the hell OUT of the business and work ON it.

Because BUSY. ISN’T. GROWTH.

And doing more of what you’re already doing—only harder—is rarely the answer.

🎯 CREATE IT.

Growth starts with making choices.

HOW BIG do you want to be?

WHO do you intend to SERVE?

What do those people CRAVE?

And most importantly:

HOW will you COMPETE and WIN?

Not by copying your competitors.

Not by adopting so-called “best practices” that everyone else is adopting.

Not by trying to be everything to everybody.

You need to create a Strategic Game Plan™ that gives people a compelling reason to choose YOU.

Your challenge?

Define The ONLY ONE™ you intend to be.

What can you deliver that people CARE about that your competitors aren’t?

If your answer sounds anything like what everyone else is saying, you haven’t finished the work.

Growth starts where copying stops.

⚙️ OPERATE IT.

Creating a different strategy isn’t enough.

You have to bake it into the organization.

This is where many growth plans die.

They become PowerPoint presentations.

Strategy documents.

Leadership speeches.

Then everyone goes back to doing exactly what they were doing before.

Growth requires turning differentiation from a strategy into an operating principle.

Every process.

Every customer interaction.

Every employee decision.

Every rule.

Every Dazzling Moment™.

Everything must reinforce the organization you said you wanted to become.

And you won’t get it perfect.

Good.

Be Imperfect FAST™.

Execute.

Learn.

Adjust.

Doing it is ten times better than talking about it.

🧭 LEAD IT.

This may be the toughest challenge of all.

Growth requires leaders who are prepared to disturb comfortable organizations.

To question yesterday’s successful formula.

To Call the Audible™ when circumstances change.

To get out of their offices and practise Leadership by Serving Around™.

To create Line of Sight™ so every person understands exactly how what THEY do contributes to the Strategic Game Plan™.

And sometimes to say:

“I Don’t Know™.”

Because pretending you have all the answers doesn’t create growth.

Creating an organization capable of finding them does.

💥 So here’s the challenge.

Stop confusing activity with progress.

Stop measuring leadership by how full your calendar is.

Stop assuming that because the business is running, the business is growing.

Carve out the time to work ON your business.

Then ask three uncomfortable questions:

What do we need to CREATE differently?

What do we need to OPERATE differently?

How do we need to LEAD differently?

And then choose ONE Move.

Not ten.

One.

Do it.

Learn from it.

Then make the next Move.

Because extraordinary growth rarely begins with a massive transformation.

It begins when a leader decides that running the existing machine isn’t enough anymore.

BUSY. ISN’T. GROWTH.

Different is.

🚀 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 1.2.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

January 1, 2005

BLUE. ISN’T. FOUND.

                   

🚀 Audacious Move of the Week

BLUE. ISN’T. FOUND.

Creating uncontested market space isn’t about searching for a mythical Blue Ocean—it’s about building a differentiation strategy that makes you The ONLY One™ for the customers you choose to serve.

Bold Decisions Create Extraordinary Businesses.

I hope it helps you create yours.

Stop searching for a Blue Ocean. Create one.

Blue Ocean Strategy has always bothered me.

Not because the aspiration is wrong.

Who wouldn’t want to operate in “uncontested market space” where competitors are irrelevant?

Sounds wonderful.

My problem is what happens Monday morning.

You’re running a business surrounded by competitors. They’re discounting. Copying. Launching new stuff. Technology is changing the game. Customers want more and expect to pay less.

You’re swimming in a Red Ocean.

And someone tells you:

“Go find a Blue Ocean.”

That’s like telling someone struggling in shark-infested water:

“There’s an island somewhere. Go find it.”

Interesting idea.

Not terribly useful.

🦈 We Didn’t Go Looking for Blue Water

When we were building an internet business from startup to more than a BILLION in annual sales, we didn’t escape competition.

We were surrounded by it.

Big competitors.

Aggressive competitors.

Competitors with resources.

Competitors perfectly capable of copying what we did.

So we didn’t waste time trying to find a market where they didn’t exist.

We created a piece of the market they couldn’t own.

That distinction matters.

We started with a brutally practical question:

HOW BIG?

What revenue growth did we want over the next 24 months?

Then:

WHO to SERVE?

Which customer groups had the potential to deliver that growth?

Only then did we go hunting for something most organizations barely understand:

WHAT do they CRAVE?

Not what they need.

Needs are crowded.

Needs are obvious.

Needs are where competitors congregate and eventually look alike.

We wanted the emotional itch beneath the need.

What did these people desire, covet, lust for?

What experience would cause them to choose us and keep choosing us?

That became the raw material for differentiation.

And then came the question that changed everything:

HOW will we COMPETE and WIN?

Our answer had to make us The ONLY One™ who delivered something our chosen customers craved.

Not better.

Not cheaper.

Not “one of the leading.”

ONLY.

That was our Blue Ocean.

And we created it while standing right in the middle of the Red one.

🔥 Change the Question

Don’t ask:

“Where is there a market with no competition?”

Ask:

“What can we own that makes comparison with competitors less relevant?”

That is a completely different strategic conversation.

It moves you away from searching for some magical uncontested market and toward creating a unique place inside the market you already occupy.

Your ONLY Statement™ puts a stake in that ground:

“We are The ONLY Ones who…”

Finish that sentence with something meaningful your chosen customers CRAVE and you have the beginnings of your own market space.

But there’s one nasty little detail.

⚡ You Actually Have to Deliver It

Declaring yourself The ONLY One™ doesn’t make you one.

Your organization has to prove it.

Every day.

Your people.

Your processes.

Your customer experience.

Your leadership.

Your operating systems.

Everything has to conspire to deliver the promise.

Otherwise your Blue Ocean quickly turns red again.

That’s why differentiation can’t live in a strategy document.

It has to become an operating principle.

🎯 Create It. Don’t Find It.

Stop looking over the horizon hoping you’ll discover some pristine piece of blue water where competitors can’t touch you.

Stay where the sharks are.

Choose WHO you intend to serve.

Discover what they CRAVE.

Create something ONLY you own.

Then build your organization around delivering it.

Don’t FIND your Blue Ocean.

CREATE it.

🚀 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 1.1.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink