Is your business’s status quo not working as well and/or as fast as you want it to?
Does your industry abide by rules that, if broken, could expose opportunities for you to serve your customers better or achieve your goals faster?
Does your industry . . .
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Only sell through (or never use) distributors?
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Not collaborate with competitors?
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Not sell through Amazon?
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Generally serve all markets as opposed to specializing in one?
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Not provide “services” to help a physical product better serve customers?
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Not outsource non-core activities? (i.e. outsourcing manufacturing so you can better respond to customer needs.)
This Week:
Get your leadership team together. Have each member make a personal list of the rules that most of your competitors follow. Then have them pick one of their rules that, if broken, would be the most disruptive. List the top picks on a white board and pick one to work on.
Ask:
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What might it look like if we broke that rule?
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How might resources be freed up to respond better and more innovatively to customer needs?
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What costs could we get rid of?
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How might we scale faster?
Be sure not to kill the discussion by over thinking how difficult breaking that rule might be.
Sessions like these are how innovation happens in small business. Think of these as inexpensive thought experiments. The key is to not over-operationalize ideas too soon.
By the end of the session, the most compelling ideas will reveal themselves. Be sure to assign the idea to a member of your team for further investigation and set another meeting within the next 7 days to discuss.
Do you have a Big Strategy?
Our three-minute Big Strategy Assessment is designed to get you thinking. To get your team talking. To begin to answer the question “How do we create better growth?” Take it here and get the conversation going.
~Tony