Be Different or be dead

January 16, 2023

Why a competitive edge is not good enough to beat your competitors

Why a competitive edge is not good enough to beat your competitors.

If your business plan talks about achieving an edge over your competitors, it’s falling short.

Words like ‘edge’ and ‘advantage’ to describe your competitive intent lack the visceral dimension to create lasting success.

Let’s talk about crippling the efforts of your competitors and prevailing over them.

Being better isn’t good enough.

Sustained success comes from assaulting the competition with the sole purpose of dominating them.

Here’s why:

1. Incremental thinking gets incremental results. An edge to me connotes being slightly better; it is simply not good enough. It implies that you are inches ahead when you really need to be miles ahead to assure longer term success.

2. Bold outcomes need to be achieved to survive. Set a bold goal and you have a better chance of achieving significant progress. Set a weak goal and unfortunately you may achieve it.

3. ‘Dominate’ and ‘assault’ represent a state of strategic mind. A way of thinking. They challenge us to gain quantum leaps. Our customers, employees and owners have a right to expect such outcomes.

4. A domination outcome requires customer value creation of a different scale than a competitive edge strategy. To dominate, HUGE value must be created for customers constantly in unrelenting fashion. A casual approach will not work.

5. The ‘word’ drives organizational energy. How much juice is created with mild milk-toast intent? An adrenalin rush inside your warriors is needed to execute your strategy. ‘Lets go get an edge!’ is not likely to arouse the passion as much as ‘Lets go dominate and cripple them!’ No energy = No execution.

6. True competitive spirit comes through emotion not the intellect. You can’t intellectualize yourself to beat your competitors. You need people who will go to war to create customer loyalty and prevent the hordes from entering your turf. Language IS strategic. Words that appeal to the right brain will help drive the behavior needed.

7. Sustainable differences are needed. Long term success comes from a relentless, constant strategic push. Domination implies a long time horizon. Edge doesn’t even come close.

My reader might say that such strong words are inappropriate; they’re ‘not dignified; they’re ‘unbecoming’ and ‘unprincipled’.

To this I say we, as leaders are charged with the responsibility of creating customer VALUE in the market to ensure people have meaningful and fulfilling work and to ensure that owners get paid.

Tough task. Horrendous roadblocks.

It requires toughness, a high pain tolerance and a strategy that WINS over the long term. If the language that goes along with achieving this purpose offends some, so be it.

Cheers,
Roy
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• Posted 1.16.23 at 12:00 pm by Roy Osing
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January 2, 2023

3 bold ways to turn your resolution into unexpected results

Source: Unsplash

3 simple ways to turn your resolution into amazing results.

Resolutions rarely are achieved because they are aspirations at best.

Think about your challenge as creating a game plan NOT declaring a resolution.

A game plan to achieve your goal by the end of the year. A declaration with sufficient granularity to define specifically WHAT needs to be done to get to where you want to get to.

I am not a fan of resolutions.

“I resolve to…” is merely an aspiration; a dream that more often than not lacks the precision to achieve it

You may have the will; but unless you define the steps to achieve it, it is unlikely to happen.

My resolution is to get physically fit this year fit isn’t particularly helpful in terms of actually doing it; “I intend to join a gym by Feb 1st and workout at least twice a week.” Is much better because it’s operational.

Here are 3 suggestions that might help move you forward in terms of having a Resolution that actually yield results:

1. Keep it simple — What’s complicated doesn’t get done. Try for the binary thing: on or off; do it or not. Easy to measure.

You either want to get a new job or not. “Doing better” is a non-objective. Clap trap goals are meaningless. Too wishy-washy. Too vague.
“I intend to go on a vacation to Tahiti by September”. Nice. Simple.

2. Keep it focused — on your most pressing priorities. Just because the herd wants to go gluten-free you don’t have to.

And only include something if you are serious about doing it. What do you “itch for”? What do you crave? Ignore the rest of the universe. What do YOU want?

3. Keep it to three —Many scattered complicated declarations don’t work. Few promises get kept. Frustration creeps in. Your personal plan isn’t a To Do List. It’s not a list of possibilities.

What 3 things would make your life so much better? Travel? Education? Health? Career? Family?

Pick your top 3 and get on with it.

Good luck…

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

Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

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• Posted 1.2.23 at 05:43 am by Roy Osing
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December 12, 2022

How managers who love holding on to the past can be eliminated

Beware of managers who are stuck in the past and refuse to move ahead.

Creating strategy is just as much about letting go of the past as it is about taking on new things.

Eliminating non-strategic activities, projects and programs in fact is critical to creating the bandwidth to take on the new things required.

You simply don’t have sufficient time, energy and resources to take on new stuff while continuing to carry on with past activities.

Of course there will be managers in your organization that really like the past direction and don’t want to be part of executing on a new course.

For many, the past is familiar and comfortable and relatively stress free. Why would they want to give it up for the anxiety, risk and uncertainty of going a new direction?

Their preference is to continue to manage the irrelevance that gives them satisfaction and security.

It is essential to identify these custodians of the past and to act on them.

If not, they will infect others in the organization by attempting to convince them not to embrace the new strategic direction.

Here’s a process to follow.

▪️determine the CRAP, or non-strategic activities and projects that are no longer appropriate given your new strategy. Make the list long. Avoid being persuaded that everything associated with your old plan is relevant to the new.

▪️identify the people associated with the CRAP.

▪️develop an action plan for each person who is engaged in irrelevant activities. Don’t assume a single solution will work for everyone. Each person will be different and will require a personalized solution.

▪️reassign those who want to go to your brave new world and give them all the training and development support they need to succeed.

▪️exit those who are either not qualified to take on the new challenge or who refuse it.

Either way, they need to go to prevent the inertia virus from spreading!

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

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• Posted 12.12.22 at 01:00 am by Roy Osing
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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.

Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 12.5.22 at 05:54 am by Roy Osing
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