Yearly Archives:
2012
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In business school, you learned Michael Porter’s generic business strategies: cost leadership, differentiation, and market segmentation. And cost leadership is stupid1. My brain conflates differentiation and market segmentation into what I call – for lack of a better word - differegmentation2.
In the November THRIVEcast, Tim Williams said that differegmentation is not enough. According to Tim, you need to hyperspecialize, ultra-differentiate, and uber-brand.
In the financial markets, “energy futures” refer to that elusive breed of investment instruments known as derivatives. The idea is that you can buy a contract now, for a set amount of energy (say, fuel) in the future. It’s what gave Southwest Airlines the leg up in the early 2000′s and allowed them to keep their prices so low for so long – energy futures, a good thing (potentially).
In a converse, but no less elusive, way, the same holds true for the actual future: it’s made up of the energy from today. The energy you expend today is shaping your tomorrow. Which means that to change your tomorrows, you have to change your todays. The future isn’t powered by, “Well I’d like to do that one day.” It’s powered by, “I’ll do this now, for my later.”
I fight confusion in working with business owners all over the country. It’s a confusion I’ve fought in the past. That confusion is this: how business owners lead their team and delegate their work. More specifically, business owners seem to think it is necessary that they know everything going on internally with their company, and externally with their customers. It’s shocking when I tell them that there will be more and more things that they do NOT know about in their company as they grow their team. It doesn’t dawn on them that they must lose some Control if they ever want to grow.