strategy | The MarketFarm

Sailing and business: #3

If you stare hard enough, you’ll see whatever you want to see.

Sailing at night is disorienting. You lose sense of direction, depth perception and perspective. A white light on the dark horizon might be a high-powered navigational beam on a tower 20 miles distant – or it could be an 8-watt bulb on the transom of a boat 100 yards away.

Navigational charts do what they can to remove such quandaries. For example, if you’re sailing toward an area of rocky, shallow waters, the chart will tell you how it’s marked – by a buoy, perhaps, with a red light that flashes every four seconds.

That’s simple enough; just look for the red flasher and steer clear of it.

But if you’re sailing near shore, there will be lots of lights, of varying intensity and color. There may be other boats in the vicinty – each with its own set of red, green and white running lights. And there may be dozens of lighted buoys marking a variety of other nearby hazards and inlets. Plus there are lights on shore.

Talk with sailors from any large city and they’ll be able to tell you about some unfortunate soul who ran aground after mistaking a 4-way stoplight for a navigational aid.

So if you’re looking for that red 4-second flasher to steer around, you’ll put the whole crew to the task of identifying it. And they’ll stare at it until every light starts to look red and seems to be flashing at roughly 4-second intervals.

At that point, if you’re lucky, someone will pop their head up from below deck and see things more clearly. This is the person who will usually point and say, “There it is,” while everyone else blinks three times and echoes, “Oh yeah.”

What’s the lesson in business? You need to be aware of your surroundings. You need to look for problems when they’re still on the horizon and identify solutions as early as possible. But sometimes, the longer and harder you look, the tougher it is to identify the real solution among all the ideas and possibilities that exist.

Sometimes, it takes a fresh-eyed third-party to bring clarity to the situation. Or a brief respite from your search. Or failing that, simply turning the boat in a new direction to avoid the hazard altogether.

First things first: What game are you playing?

Strategy before execution. This should be simple.

But it’s human nature to jump right into doing stuff before sweating out the big questions.

For example, a couple prospective clients have put off small, closed-ended projects that I proposed to help them align operating strategy and marketing. This in turn would help them answer such daunting digital communications questions as how to deal with social media, and what capabilities does the website need to offer?

It’s my suspicion that what they’ll really learn is the organization doesn’t actually have a unifying operating strategy. But in both cases, the reason given for delaying the little strategy project is that they first have to devote all their attention to the big website project.

I understand that building a new website is daunting. But it’s even harder if you don’t know what purpose the new website is supposed to serve. It’s like getting ready to knock the ball in the hole without knowing whether you’re playing billiards or golf.

That’s why strategy always needs to come before execution. Strategy tells you what you’re trying to do. The website will help you do it. But only if you tackle them in the right order.

Image courtesy of James Barker/Freedigitalphotos.net

Sailing and business: #2

Win your side.

On days when the wind is shifty, the winner of a race usually comes from one side of the course our the other; rarely from the middle.

That means you have to choose which side you’re going to sail. No remorse allowed. Eventually, you may realize you’ve picked the wrong side; the winner is going to come from the other side.

What do you do? Experience teaches you not to cross the course and get to the other side. In doing so, you’ll probably end up as the last-place boat on the right side of the course.

Instead, focus on winning your side. If you do, the worst you’ll end up is in the middle of the fleet. And often, the winners on the wrong side still finish better than the losers of the right side. So there’s plenty of upside potential in just winning your side.

How does it translate to business? Back in the ’80s, IBM and Apple took opposite sides of the race course – IBM choosing a common platform (MS-DOS) on which to build its computers, and Apple choosing its own proprietary operating system.

IBM chose what turned out to be the right side, allowing it to build computers for the largest share of the desktop/portable computer market.

Since that decisive moment, dozens of companies on both sides of the platform debate have fallen away; even IBM has exited the PC businesss. Apple, meanwhile, won its side; it became the best among proprietary operating platforms.

As a result of its earliest decision, Apply may never become the largest producer of computers. But because it concentrated at winning its side, Apple today has one of the most admired brands – and P&L statements – in the business.

Sailing and business: #1

nice-start-reduced Never chase the wind.

In many racing conditions the wind is always changing – in both velocity and speed. The boats that are winning are probably those that find themselves in the best patches of wind.

When things aren’t going so well, it’s usually because you’re not in the good air. But if you see another part of the course where the wind looks better, it will invariably be gone by the time you get there.

The lesson is to find your way to the part of the course where the wind is going to be – not where it is now.

It’s the same in business. When your toughest competitors leap ahead of you, you can’t catch up by simply doing what they’re doing.

Instead you need to figure out the next thing a good company should be doing. When you figure it out, you don’t need to set your course for where your competitors already are; you can set it for where you want to be.