Dude – Business Sucess is Innovation and Marketing + Delivery (that is valued and done to “standard”)
Sometimes I like to sit and think. Other times to just sit.
What recurs are simple ideas.
If your business is not growing, bro, it is stagnating. And by growing I mean in the biological sense.
Throw out a little sprout on the tree. No new shoots means you are made of old, dead wood. And decay is coming.
And when you get a nice sprout going on – unless the right people know about it, understand it as much as they need to, value it, desire it or need it – it will not draw the “sunshine of the money” to sustain it.
There are the extra shoots on your existing branches – product improvements, variations, extra options colours and flavours. And there are the new branches. And there the seeds that your success sperms across into new markets.
In my yard I have nutgrass. It is by definition a “weed”. But is has my admiration. It has the goal of total domination of my yard. It defends the areas where it is market leader, and it sends continual military forays into the areas it does not dominate. It is ruthless. It is focused. Is is winning.
My insight today is that unless your business has the clear, no fuss, no doubt, no choice mission that it is to ultimately DOMINATE whatever sandpit you define as yours – your strategic choices will be underwhelming in their success. Not matter what squishy guff you write on your documents about visions and missions and blahblahbabldioo – you have missed the point unless you the apply the Nutgrass Turbo.
It is only by deciding to DOMINATE – that the full power of strategy is able to be used.
Why nutgrass? Nutgrass is there to dominate. Everything it does is designed to ensure domination. It has these little “nuts” that it creates relentlessly. They are underground. If you pull this plant out – and miss just ONE little nut – it will come back at you. Again and again, until you give up.
Then – as well as these nuts – it has designed itself to quickly produce a missive number of seeds on a glorious stem. Hmm. Force Multiplier effect? Bring a second powerful tactic into your domination arseonal and you more than double your expansion power.
Lately I have been re-reading a lot of Deming. And thinking about processes and systems. And how there is a “code”, a set of programming under each of the experiences in our circumstances. And one of the key insights is that what happens at the beginning of a process – has a greater weight on the results. Deming said of systems to “define the first 15% of each level, 3 levels deep. Others say that this first 15% delivers up to 85% of the potential value of the sysem. I would love to see some data on this claim – but it seems a good theory to test the hell out of.
Let’s pretend just for now that the underlying programming that creates the success of your business – let’s call it your “strategic plan” – is turned on.
More soon.