Hey, happy Monday,
What did you learn this past week?
What are your priorities this week?
I’m not asking because you so much want to get my business. Although it always makes me happy to feel the pulse of the community, to know what projects they are working on, the challenges they are facing, and to allow me to design more useful content and experiences for everyone, such as our STRTGY Meeting.
I ask because, probably, no one is asking you.
I realized that even before motivation, what is lacking is clarity.
Knowing the direction you are going and at what speed you are moving, as long as it is clear to everyone what the starting point is, is the only information you need to get your bearings. Yet everyone is having a hard time paddling, but no one is clear about the course to follow.
The wrong label
Have you also noticed that every new project immediately gets the label “innovative”?
Most of the time it is not.
Opening an e-commerce is not innovative.
Turning forms and procedures into a series of forms is not innovative.
Making a blog and presiding over social channels, is not innovative.
A showcase site, even if it wins an Awwward, is not innovative.
Doing Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Funnels, Remarketing, are not innovative projects.
All of these are evolutions. These are incremental improvements. It is the way businesses have to adapt to survive. You remember what Darwin said, don’t you?
This is what big companies, those with “good managers,” are exceptionally good at. They get the best technology, increase their product performance, margins, prices, and market share… until someone comes along who really innovates, and by then it’s too late.
Innovation means changing the rules of the game.
Solving a problem that does not yet exist.
Offer something radically different that at first satisfies a small a handful of nerds doing volumes too low to fit into any business plan, but then the whole world will want.
And when that happens, there is no evolution that holds; those who have only incrementally evolved and not radically innovated are destroyed. In fact, what I just described to you is the concept of Disruption, in the top 10 words spoken out of turn in meetings around the world.
Evolution or Innovation?
They are not alternatives. One does not exclude the other. One, however, transforms into the other.
Evolution capitalizes on the moment, operational efficiency, the top end of the market that wants a well-defined product and is willing to pay more for higher performance.
Here the rules of the game are known, the cost of technology becomes lower and lower, and sooner or later competitors acquire the capabilities to produce the same products at a lower cost.
That is why it is important to invest in innovation. To create the next, momentary competitive advantage.
However, innovation has a big problem: it is not compatible with traditional management techniques.
So much innovation in fact comes from former employees of large companies who cannot find the right resources to change things.
See for example the story of Eric Yuan, who prior to founding Zoom was vice president of engineering at Cisco System, which in 2007 decided to acquire WebEx a video conferencing software, which today has improved so much but until recently was almost unusable.
Yuan, frustrated that in talking to customers he could not find one who was satisfied with the product, proposed that Cisco work on a new project aimed at integrating video conferencing into cell phones but his proposal was rejected and he left the company along with 40 engineers to found Zoom.
Cisco was, and is, focused on enterprise solutions, and it is understandable that it did not find Yuan’s project attractive, which not only required substantial investment but more importantly was not of interest to large customers already using WebEx.
So it was reasonable to ask why invest in a high-risk, low-margin project. Does this mean that Cisco had bad managers? Far from it, rather it is an example of how good management, which protects the interests of large customers, margins, and stakeholder value, is unable to intercept new opportunities.
Conversely, for an agile 40-person company to move into the consumer market and with a simpler solution with fewer features, but at the same time cheaper and easier to use, that same opportunity was too great to pass up.
The advantage of innovation is that in the eyes of big business, the innovator is doing something that makes no sense at all to do! But only momentarily because the technical and process debt, when the market is mature, will become too great to be filled.
Strategic Alignment
Whether you are evolving or innovating the way you and your customers do business, strategic alignment is a critical factor in deciding how to allocate resources and intercept new growth opportunities.
To help you get real and support you and your team in getting the operational focus you need, I invite you to discover this simple framework that I have developed for the purpose of relating the NorthStar Metric, OKRs, and continuous experimentation processes typical of Growth Hacking.
I first presented it in our STRTGY Meeting with Pedro Clivati, Head of Growth at GrowthHackers.com and it will be part of the Accelerator Program in Design STRTGY for Business Innovation in the November edition.
I invite you to watch the Replay and to apply it to your work. Should you need support, do not hesitate to write in the Facebook group.
Good work!
Make yourself heard.
