How to easily win
If you are going to be serious about winning, you need to create the conditions under which people see, think and act like winners.
Category outperformance, for any business, is actually rather easy.
All that you need to do in order to achieve higher-levels of market share growth, in comparison to your competitors, is to see, think and coherently act at a better strategic level than the other players in the arena.
The objective is to constantly be:
- (1) 'Seeing' what's happening in the world - what's changing, what's emerging on the horizon, what's being ignored.
- (2) 'Thinking' about these changes in a holistic way. Hunting for patterns, trends, the insights that can be drawn from them and making better sense of the opportunities / risks they are a symptom of.
- (3) 'Acting' coherently in response to the insights. Positioning the organisation appropriately to take advantage of this conscious awareness.
See | Think | Act
All while being aware of institutional bias and your own limited mental models that can easily create cultural potholes to progress and the emergence of 'what is as yet to come'.
This 3-part strategic harmony needs to happen constantly...on a loop. It requires a driving cadence that never rests; never settles.
More broadly this translates into: Research, ordering, selection, strategy, communication, marketing and feedback - all of which form an integral part of this system of innovation.
Easy.
But perhaps before, yet another program, is forced on an organisation - the organisation needs to take a set back and reconsider their purpose.
Most classify themselves as 'operators', rather than 'innovators'.
They have a head 'office' (which BTW is a place traditionally where administration is conducted) - hardly the right term for a place where 'proactiveness' emerges from.
They have 'staff' (a historical term for people who take orders from all-knowing senior managers) - not really the label you would give to a team of professionals who are tasked to dominate a category.
How to win
If you are going to be serious about winning, you need to create the conditions under which people see, think and act like winners.
People need to adopt the mindset of a winner, before they can begin to be a winner.
Treating people like they are children, or passive-aggressively indicating that they are just salaried workers there to comply with their KPIs is a guaranteed way to ensure the continuation of lower levels of performance.
Winning is easy under the right conditions.
The right conditions can be created if there is a clear framing that enables a clear view of what those conditions should be.
Just like trying to grow lilies in the desert, without optimal conditions for success, no amount of tender care is going to give you the result you want.