3 Business instincts to avoid

 Culture  No Responses »
Oct 312011
 

To dominate an industry and outperform your competition, you have to be different. You have to be different in a meaningful way. What you don’t always need to be is the best.  

(NB – this post continues my thoughts from Why you should stop trying to be the best.)

Last week I heard brilliant Harvard Professor Youngme Moon present and she suggests that if you are committed to being different you’d better eliminate these 3 long-standing business instincts from your culture:

  1. Paying too much attention to the competition - in Youngme’s word’s “who cares what they are doing!”.  
  2. Over-listening to customers – the advice you get from customers will always be to improve, not to be different. 
  3. Over-commitment to excellence - there’s no need to be excellent at everything. Different nearly always involves being brilliant at some things and weak at others. To be different, stop trying to be well-rounded. 

There’s a striking similarity between Youngme’s point 2 and and lesson 2 that Guy Kawasaki taught us from his time working with Steve Jobs.  Remember “Customers cannot tell you what they need” from this article?

To be different, you have to think different and create an organisation that is committed to being different.

Why you should stop trying to be the best

 Culture  No Responses »
Oct 272011
 

Is your business either a) the best or; b) going to be the best in your industry? Most businesses describe themselves as one or the other. Me too, I used to want to be the best. It’s a nice goal. But is it worth it? Being the best just doesn’t seem to have the same benefits that it used to. Here’s why..

What happens when you become the best? You will have a target on your back. Everyone else will immediately be trying to knock you off the no.1 spot by being faster, better and/or cheaper. And then they will. And the cycle starts all over again. Striving to become the best at anything is an expensive treadmill that never ends.

Instead of trying to be the best, why not focus on being different?

Now I’m not talking about being just a little bit different, I’m talking about a meaningful difference between you and your competitors. Like Ikea is different from every other furniture store and Google is different from every other search engine. I’m talking about being really freaking different!

Becoming different is nearly always much cheaper than becoming the best. It’s also heaps more fun, more memorable and more sustainable.

How different are you from your competitors? Not just different in your eyes, different in your customers eyes.

PS – This post was inspired by Youngme Moon’s book, Different. Check it out here.

PPS – Right now I’m fascinated by this concept of being different. Stay tuned I think I’ll have more to say on this..