Differentiate or Die, Jack Trout

With enormous competition, markets are driven by choice. The customer has so many good alternatives that you pay dearly for your mistakes. Your competitors get your business and you don't get it back easily. Companies that don't understand this will not survive.

What Is Not A Differentiator?

• Creativity is NOT a differentiator
• Price is RARELY a differentiator
• Breadth of line is a DIFFICULT differentiator

What Is A Differentiator?

• Being FIRST is a differentiator.
• Attribute Ownership is a differentiator.
• Leadership is a differentiator.
• Heritage is a differentiator.
• Market specialty is a differentiator.
• Preference is a differentiator.
• How a product is made is a differentiator.
• Being latest is a differentiator.
• Hotness is a differentiator.

Once you've established what makes you different, your next assignment is to reflect that difference in everything you do. This single-mindedness will influence not only your customers but your own employees as well.

The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen

• Read Chapter 8, How To Appraise Your Organization's Capabilities and Disabilities for a summary of the thesis.  Especially the Resources-Process-Values framework.

• In the start-up stages of an organization, much of what gets done is attributable to its resources - its people.

• Over time, however, the locus of the organization's capabilities shifts toward its processes and values.  As people work together successfully to address recurrent tasks, processes become defined.

• And as the business model takes shape and it becomes clear which types of business need to be accorded highest priority, values coalesce.

• Once members of the organization begin to adopt ways of working and criteria for making decisions by assumption, rather than by conscious decision, then those processes and values come to constitute the organization's culture.

• Culture enables employees to act autonomously and causes them to act consistently.

• But when the capabilities have come to reside in processes and values and especially when they have become embedded in culture, change can become extraordinarily difficult.

Paradigms The Business of Discovering the Future, Joel Barker

• A paradigm is a set of rules and regulations (written or unwritten) that does two things: (1) it establishes or defines boundaries; and (2) it tells you how to be behave inside the boundaries in order to be successful.

• And sooner or later, every paradigm begins to develop a very special set of problems that everyone in that field wants to be able to solve and no one has a clue as to how to do it.

• A paradigm shift, then, is a change to a new game, a new set of rules.

• When a paradigm shifts, everyone goes back to zero.
  

• So who changes the paradigm?  The short and unsettling answer is that it will probably be someone who is an outsider.  Someone who really doesn't understand the prevailing paradigm in all its subtleties (sometimes they don't understand at all!).

• The four categories of paradigm shifters:

Category 1: A young person fresh out of training.

Category 2: An older person shifting fields.

Category 3: The maverick.

Category 4: Tinkerers.

• You don't have to be a paradigm shifter to get all the advantages.  Just being a paradigm pioneer [or early adopter -- emphasis mine] is sufficient.

• You manage within a paradigm, you lead between paradigms.

• I have seen an interesting pattern of choices that occurs during a paradigm shift.  It is really an oscillation between shifting paradigms and changing customers.  Here are 3 patterns in order of ascending impact:

Keep your paradigm; change your customer.

Change your paradigm; keep your customer.

Change your paradigm; change your customer.

Million Dollar Consulting, Al Weiss

1. People you meet on airplanes, no matter how cordial or at what level, virtually never hire you.
2. Acquisition of clients is the bedrock of success.
3. I'm concerned that the key to my ability to help that client demonstrably lay in refusing to allow myself to fall into a single preconceived role based on what I've been told.
4. It doesn't matter at all -- not all all -- what your billings are or how much you make.  The only thing that matters is how much you keep.
5. The best consultants strive to establish special relationships with clients, irrespective of their products, services, techniques, and other offerings.
6. "In matters of taste, swim with the current; in matters of principles, stand like a rock."  Jefferson
7. When buyer commitment is low, a low fee isn't the answer to create the sale you need because the result is indifference.

                            

8. The most important transition period is escaping the thinking that confines you to small successes.
9. Eight secrets for retaining Key Business as you grow [or change]:
• Involve the client in the change ans seek feedback
• Present the changes as opportunities, not threats
• Don't explain the changes ans raise your fees simultaneously
• Request ongoing feedback
• Introduce the change to clients as a group
• Offer to "grandfather" or otherwise safeguard the services being phased out
• Time your explanation with a client to coincide with a successfully completed assignment
• Be prepared to move a client who simply will not accommodate your evolving business approach to Category 3
10. Base fees on value, not time or tasks.
11. First impressions will influence whether an executive feels the relationship should exist at his or her level or at a lower one.
12. Always, always, always provide the prospect with a choice of 'yeses'.
13. READ Chapter 8 : ESTABLISHING FEES

Execution, Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan

Here is the fundamental problem.  People think of execution as the tactical side of the business, something leaders delegate while they focus on the perceived "bigger" issues.  This idea is completely wrong.  Such leaders are building houses without foundations.