Be Different or be dead

November 29, 2010

Why competitor knowledge is really important to your career success

Source: Pexels

Why competitor knowledge is really important to your career success.

One of the critical components in developing a business plan for any organization is HOW you intend to compete and WIN given the competition in your space.

The challenge is to decide what its strategic uniqueness is relative to the competition that is targeting the same customers you have chosen to SERVE. A detailed assessment of your target customers’ critical priority needs and desires must be made along with the internal competencies that line up with satisfying them.

And you need to know your competition at a granular level - strengths, weaknesses, performance, value proposition and business strategy.

Know your competition at a granular level in order to build a winning career strategy.

The internal world of an organization where you are fighting for career success has similar competitive dynamics and it’s critical to understand the competition for the jobs you want.

Here are 7 questions to consider as you evaluate who you are up against for those few precious leadership opportunities:

1. Who are the players in the organization that are considered to be high potential and promotable now?

2. How would you rank them in terms of probability of success? Who are the top three and in what order? What skills do they have that you don’t? What strengths do you have that they don’t?

3. What currency does each of your competitors have in the organization? Currency describes the amount of influence you have on the decision making process in the organization. People with a high level of currency are typically asked for their opinion on matters of importance; they are consulted when exploring the pros and cons of various courses of action and are in on the final decisions.

Persons with lower currency are not regularly consulted on important matters and rarely are asked to participate in task force teams quickly assembled to address a critical issue.
You can observe high currency factor individuals in meetings. They are always engaged in the conversation going on and people look to them to voice their views; they are valued by the organization and represent intense competition for you.

4. What is your currency factor? Where do you rank relative to the top 3?

5. Do you have specific strategies to build your currency in your career game plan?

6. What is your competitors’ overall career strategy? How does it compare with yours?

7. Does your plan put you in a stand-out position relative to them or are you merely catching up to them? Beware of copying what others do, however, as benchmarking has pitfalls.

Knowing who else is in the game is critical to you developing your career strategy.

Do your homework.

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

• Posted 11.29.10 at 12:00 pm by Roy Osing
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November 25, 2010

Why your business plan should focus on 3 limited things

Source: Unsplash

Why your business plan should focus on 3 limited things.

If you try to boil the ocean you’ll lose; if your business plan focuses on 3 limited things, success awaits.

So, here you are. You have completed your business plan for your new business and now you must determine the tactics you need to see your brave idea turn into reality.
You start with a clean sheet of paper and decide to brainstorm on all the things you need to do to implement your new plan.

Good idea? Well, it can be, or it can create a lot of activity but little movement forward.

It’s ok to create a list of possible actions that you feel should be taken, but then you must purge the list down to the critical few actions to focus on that you believe have an 80 percent chance of achieving the results you want.
You simply don’t have enough resources and bandwidth to do an effective job on 25 things you have on your brainstorming list.

Multitasking is deadly when you are trying to implement the game plan of your ‘new baby’

If you can’t define the critical few actions necessary to achieve progress towards your business plan goals, it indicates that you really don’t understand your strategy and the specific execution levers are necessary to get you going.
Spend time debating this issue because if you merely throw possibilities at the wall and then try to implement every one of them, your energies will be spread too thin and you will be unable to move forward.

Determine 3 things (or maybe 4 or 5, but not a dozen) that will produce 80% of your business plan results and get on with them — Roy’s Rule of 3

Spend time on Roy’s Rule; it will pay off handsomely for you.

Beware of Yummy

Once you’ve defined the few critical things that you believe will get your startup off the ground, be prepared for distractions that will pull you away from your game plan. This always happens as you learn more about what your strategy means, and when others find out what you’re up to and present you with added opportunities.

If you have more than three priorities then you don’t have any — Jim Collins, Author

For example, you’ve decided on the customer group you want to target and out-of-the-blue comes someone who is not a target customer reaching out to you to ask for your attention.

They want to explore adopting your product solution and of course they have questions that they need answers to which will take time and effort on your part to accommodate — they will drain your scarce resources.

This happens all the time. A client of mine decided to focus on the Vancouver market where access was easy and market growth was attractive. Then they received a call from an organization in South America who found out about their innovative solution and wanted to explore partnership opportunities with them. Clearly not on strategy. But oh so tempting to chase!

‘Yummy incoming’  is the over-the-transom stuff that comes up that we are tempted to chase

Another client developed an innovative wireless technology for a particular application in the security market segment. When other companies learned of their plans, they reached out and presented them with other potential applications for their technology.

The CEO was delighted with the additional interest and decided to evaluate these new opportunities but in doing so diffused the efforts of his team and reduced the focus on building the security solution. The end result after about a year of toiling over at least a half dozen applications was nothing advanced. The security opportunity faltered and investors pulled their funding. Yummy was the instrument of their demise.

What do you do when Yummy appears and has the potential of pushing your business plan off the rail?

How to beat Yummy

Here’s how to keep Yummy from diluting the effectiveness of your business plan:an action plan to consider.

— Give yourself one day — no more — to do a quick and dirty evaluation on whether or not Yummy has any potential. It’s important that you maintain the discipline to not burn endless resource cycles on the possibility that there could be a significant opportunity vis-a-vis your current focus but you have to make the call fast so the impact on your current momentum is minimized.

— If you decide to chase Yummy, go back and review your business plan. If Yummy looks like it has potential, change the focus of your business plan.
If you decide to try and have it both ways — trying to stay on your original path and also chase Yummy — you won’t succeed in execution your business plan and you probably won’t do a decent job chasing Yummy. 

You can’t have a handful of number one priorities as a fledgling company. Multitasking is bad news for most organizations but it’s deadly for startups. And don’t for even a moment think you have the luxury of taking on additional resources to implement Yummy. You don’t.

— Explore whether or not the organization representing Yummy is prepared to contribute resources to evaluate the potential of their idea and to help implement it if it turns out if it offers as much value as your current strategy. They may be willing to partner with you in the development of their idea and in the go-to-market action plan in return for a piece of the action.

Remember, every minute Yummy consumes your time is a minute less you have to spend on the focus you’ve decided on to execute your overall strategy so resist the temptation to deviate from it without compelling evidence that you will be better off doing so.

Chasing stuff is not healthy. Busyness may be comfort food, but remember that you created a game plan to avoid eating it

Successful businesses focus on limited priorities in their business plan and don’t chase things that are interesting and cool but are clearly off strategy.

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

• Posted 11.25.10 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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November 15, 2010

Why learning all the time will make your career insanely successful

Source: Unsplash

Why learning all the time will make your career insanely successful.

Are you a continuous career learner?

Or, have you assumed that your formal education and job experience - previous and current - have generated all the intellectual property that you need to help your organization reach greater levels of performance and as a result enhance your career?

Career learning is an imperative. Many don’t take the time to do it so it represents a critical component of personal differentiation. It involves acquiring completely new levels of knowledge outside of what you now know and what your jobs have taught you.

A career learner makes a difference to the organization and develops its immunity to survive.

Career learners determine what is important to the organization and they are constantly learning about topics that can help.

Consider this strategic learning as opposed to more casual learning where you focus on a subject that only interests you. Hopefully you can satisfy both objectives: learn something that interests you and also benefits the organization.

But your priority should be to focus on an area that will provide benefits to your organization. If marketing effectiveness is an issue, for example, go find out what the sales pundits are saying about the subject and what direction they are advocating.
Learn about the options; determine which one is appropriate for your organization and modify it to fit your unique circumstances.

Strategic learning

Here’s how the strategic learning process worked for me:

— List the top three challenges your organization faces. For example, let’s assume they are: declining customer loyalty and market share, reduced product margins and virtually no marketing innovation.

— Determine the learning competencies that you need to adopt. In my case it was marketing

— List your subject matter expertise categories - finance, problem solving, mathematics.

— Determine your learning gap - marketing

— Target the subject matter experts to fill your learning gap - there are numerous sources - authors as well as consulting organizations - that specialize in the topic of service quality. Find one or two that you find potentially productive. My mentor is Seth Godin.

— Gather relevant reading material, attend conferences, contact service quality consultants and start learning.

Hand-in-hand with learning is the application of new knowledge to enhance organizational performance. If knowledge is not applied to drive better results it really has little value.

So, as you are engaged in the learning process, always be thinking about how you could possibly apply it or some version of it to make it useful to your organization.

If knowledge isn’t applied to drive results it has no value - it’s about execution

Early in my career the telecom industry was transforming from a virtual monopoly to an intensely competitive business. With more competition coming, the competitive battle was going to be won or lost over the customer and the winner would be the company that did the best job of understanding and responding to customer needs.

The big picture was marketing.

My formal education was mathematics and computer science and my previous jobs had contributed systems & productivity analysis experience. There was much to learn if I wanted to gain any proficiency in marketing and make myself of value as the company moved forward to do battle in the competitive arena.

I was infatuated with marketing and read everything that I could get my hands on concerning the topic.

Within a year and a half I felt that I had at least a modicum of intellectual competency that would make me a viable consideration for future opportunities when they came available.

Obviously I needed to get into a position where I could practice marketing and show my stuff, but the first task was to be able to discuss and demonstrate that I understood marketing principles and concepts enough to earn the right to practice them.

The result of my career learning’s in marketing were gratifying, leading me to the VP position then on to Senior VP and later in my career to EVP & Chief Marketing Officer.

I was often asked how I managed to get on this career path since I only had a math and computer background and had no formal education in marketing.

The answer: a passion for career learning in marketing and the courage to apply new marketing ideas.

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

• Posted 11.15.10 at 11:59 am by Roy Osing
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June 9, 2010

1 proven way to keep your job during organizational change

Source: Unsplash

1 proven way to keep your job during organizational change.

There are many external uncontrollable and unpredictable events that impact our organizations, and success and survival in challenging circumstances requires an individual to be unique and standout from everyone else around them.

— Stiff internal competition is at play among the high potential and promotable now group, who are all vying for the few top jobs available;

— New leaders are brought in to address key challenges that the organization is facing, introducing change, uncertainty and causing risk for incumbents;

— Numerous and inconsistent messages clutter the internal environment resulting in uncertainty around the values and priorities of the organization;

— Hiring managers are unclear on the critical skills and experience required for a particular position, bending the requisites to suit a favored candidate. Often, people like to hire in their own image and ignore established job requisites;

— Outside influences complicate internal organizational dynamics as Board members, key customers and other external stakeholders influence the decision making process;

— Internal politics influence who gets selected and who does not for the key positions;

— Expense reduction programs are implemented to improve economic results thereby reducing leadership layers and the number of opportunities available;

— Decision making inconsistencies can be observed among leaders in the organization often making it difficult for upward mobile people to get a clear picture of what they are expected to do in order to succeed;

— Demand for the plum positions - the number of people available - in any organization always exceeds the number of positions available, resulting in intense rivalries and at times dysfunctional leadership behavior;

Your success in advancing to leadership levels in the organization depends on your ability to stand-out and be noticed in the crowd of people all vying for the same positions.

Your challenge is to develop a career plan and strategy that clearly spells out clear, relevant and compelling terms why you, and ONLY you should be placed in a position to lead your organization and to create the value necessary for it to successfully perform and survive.

You don’t necessarily have to be better than your internal competition, but you have to be different.

You have to possess the uniqueness that will capture the interest of the decision makers in your organization.

You need to stand out in the crowd of possible candidates as the one who has the experience, skills and currency to do what the organization requires.

You need to be perceived as the natural selection choice for the key roles.

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

• Posted 6.9.10 at 01:00 pm by Roy Osing
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