There are many businesses that start out filling a need for a specific type of customer. Sometimes this leads to the creation of a new industry or segment that was ignored or unserved by incumbents.
If the business does everything right, they will be the leader for that new category, segment or industry. The problem arises when that leader stops paying attention to what started it all: the customer.
I’ve had many meetings with principals in large organizations and companies who say, “I am worried my business will be completely replaced by some Silicon Valley startup. How can I build something to counter that?”
Every organizations lives and dies by its strategy. What makes a good strategy? The best strategies are simple and answer 5 fundamental questions: who, what, where, how and why.
Still, developing a strategy is hard. There’s a tendency to make it a very complex activity, which I believe drives most organizations to fall for many traps; one being the the copy-paste approach.
Startups, by their very nature, do not fall for this trap. But this doesn’t mean their path to victory will be easier; but much more harder.
in Strategy
What’s the best strategy book I’ve read? Not specifically business strategy, but strategy in general.
A friend asked to borrow one of my books on my Kindle yesterday. While I was scrolling through my books I stumbled on Richard Rumelt’s masterpiece Good Strategy Bad Strategy; this is the best book I’ve read on strategy.
At both of my ventures, Better and Netek, we operate by many key principles, one of them is avoiding stupidity; which is to avoid bad decisions. So instead of asking ourselves,”how do we make good decisions?; we ask: how do we avoid making bad ones?
in Innovation, Strategy
Businesses have always relied on various forms of advertising to promote themselves. It’s still holds true in the digital world we live in today. But the internet changes everything because today every business is a digital business or a dead business.
We live in a fast moving, complex and uncertain society where industries lines are fading. It’s always been this way, but the accelerating adoption and integration of technology somehow makes it more pronounced and obvious that everything is indeed connected. In this environment, people and companies that survive and thrive are those who know how to learn; fast.