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July 17 - July 23, 2020
Having managers who are engaged, every day, in reinforcing the company’s Values and Purpose through their decision-making is the most important routine of the eight.
Every time you praise or reprimand someone, tie it back to a Core Value or Purpose.
We’ve found that managers and CEOs can repeat Core Values endlessly without it seeming ridiculous, as long as the Core Values they’re using are relevant and meaningful to their employees and they make connections to real situations.
getting the Core right and using it to drive the business makes great business sense besides creating a great place to work.
When you nail your strategy, top-line revenue growth and fat margins come almost effortlessly.
“more companies die from indigestion than starvation.”
it’s helpful to think about strategic planning in terms of two separate and distinct activities (and teams): strategic thinking and execution planning.
Select no more than three to five people to meet for an hour or so each week to discuss each of the Strata
It’s not sufficient to schedule strategic thinking time once every quarter or year.
Grab a copy of Collins’ Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... And Others Don’t
Jobs spent most afternoons engaged directly with customers,
Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World,
Here are the 7 Strata: 1. Words You Own (Mindshare) 2. Sandbox and Brand Promises 3. Brand Promise Guarantee (Catalytic Mechanism) 4. One-PHRASE Strategy (Key to Making Money) 5. Differentiating Activities (3 to 5 How’s) 6. X-Factor (10x – 100x Underlying Advantage) 7. Profit per X (Economic Engine) and BHAG® (10- to 25-year goal)
It’s a fun and useful exercise to think of well-known brands (and your competition) and discern the words they own.
If you want to hurt a competitor, steal its word, as Google did with Yahoo, becoming the “search” engine of choice.
Since 87% of ALL customers (business, consumer, and government) search the Internet to find options for purchasing products and services,
The key is owning words that matter — the ones people think about and use to search for your products and services.
The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly. As author David Meerman Scott
“You are what you publish.”
Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less.
“Your Career Success Hinges on One Word: Do You Know It?”
The key is picking a niche and owning (or creating) the words in the minds of the people you want as your core customers.
Robert H. Bloom and Dave Conti’s book The Inside Advantage: The Strategy That Unlocks the Hidden Growth in Your Business,
Rick Kash and David Calhoun’s book How Companies Win: Profiting From Demand-Driven Business Models No Matter What Business You’re In
There are four key decisions to make on stratum 2: 1. Who/Where are your (juicy red) core customers? 2. What are you really selling them? 3. What are your three Brand Promises? 4. What methods do you use to measure whether you’re keeping those promises?
there is a niche within any industry that represents no more than 10% of the total customers but holds a disproportionate percentage of the profit — what are termed profit pools.
Once you know more specifically Who they are, it’s much easier to know Where to find them.
the primary mistake companies make in describing What they sell is to focus on the benefits and features. All sales are emotional, initiated through the heart (“No one was ever fired for buying IBM”) and then justified logically by the head.
the What must encompass a 100% solution.
Most companies have three main Brand Promises, with one promise that leads the list.
A promise has no weight if you don’t keep it, resulting in lost customers and negative word-of-mouth publicity.
Jim Collins’ Harvard Business Review article “Turning Goals Into Results: The Power of Catalytic Mechanisms”
It needs to hurt to break a promise; otherwise, it’s too easy to let the moment pass.
The Brand Promise Guarantee also reduces customers’ fear of buying from you.
Frances Frei and Anne Morriss’ book Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business
The first three Strata — owning mindshare, making and keeping promises, and backing them up with a guarantee — are expensive to accomplish. Making matters worse, in trying to address ever-increasing customer demands, the marketplace ends up “want, want, wanting” your margins away as the competition ramps up the “feature set and added services” war.
This is why it’s critical to identify your One-PHRASE Strategy. This phrase represents the key lever in your business model that drives profitability and helps you choose which customer desires to meet and which ones to ignore.
great brands don’t try to please everyone. They focus on being the absolute best at meeting the needs/wants of a small but fanatical group of customers, and then dare to be the absolute worst at everything else.
competitors, in striving to be the best in everything for everyone, actually achieve greatness in nothing — and end up as just average players in the industry.
It takes real guts to ignore or even alienate 93% of customers, focusing instead on the 7% of the market that is fanatical about you and willing to put up with the trade-offs.
Michael E. Porter’s classic 1996 Harvard Business Review article titled “What Is Strategy?”
it’s at the “activity” level of the business where true differentiation occurs and the business model is revealed.
Competitors can pursue owning the same words, make the same Brand Promises, and offer the same guarantees. However, it’s HOW you deliver on your promises where differentiation occurs.
Kevin Daum, author of ROAR! Get Heard in the Sales and Marketing Jungle: A Business Fable,
“a true differentiator can only be defined as something your competitor won’t do or can’t do without great effort or expense. Often these can take years to develop since if it can be done cheaply, easily and ...
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The key is to choose HOW you go about delivering your products and services in your industry in ways that are nearly impossible for your competition to copy.
establish a set of activities — “how” you run the business — that is different from the norms of the industry, helps you drive profitability, and blocks the competition.
As Porter summarizes, “A company can outperform rivals only if it can establish a difference that it can preserve.”
Verne’s Fortune article titled “The X-Factor”
The key for Sullivan turned out to be an unusual compensation plan (think “differentiated activity”).
