When trying to grow your business, there is plenty of advice out there. Henry Ford once said: “If I gave people what they wanted, we’d have built a faster horse.” Steve Jobs said: “People don’t what they want until you show them.”
This goes against all marketing wisdom and logic, where seasoned marketers will tell you that detailed research and analysis is the best way to chart the organizations strategic direction and grow your business.
However, this common, conventional wisdom is anything but common. We would not have millions of App’s available to us if we used conventional marketing wisdom. We would not have a world with autonomous cars, smart clothing, close to 50 billion devices connected to the web… And the list goes on and on…
Strategies to Grow Your Business
There are some key strategies for business growth. One of them is to be more innovative than any of your competitors and explore the unexplored. Be disruptive. Develop products or services that no one else has ever even dreamed about.
How do you do that? Here’s what I suggest to help grow your business:
- Hire whacky people. Rest assured, I do mean people that are values and purpose aligned. However, these are the people who think so differently that you may wonder aloud: “What color is the sky in their world?” Whacky, out-of-the-box thinkers are precious. They are not in any way grounded in reality and are usually not detail, operations focused. However, if you are going to explore the unexplored, you need them.
- Have an innovation ‘hack-a-thon.’ I.T. security firms have been having hack-a-thons for years. Why can’t you put it out there to your community or team to have a weekend where you start on a Friday evening and work (if the teams want to) throughout the night and the whole next day dreaming up what has not been thought of before? Winning ideas would be handsomely rewarded.
- Build an innovation lab. Innovation Labs are separate teams and facilities where members only job is to think up the never been done before. Don’t worry about implementation, as there are people way better suited for bringing ideas to reality (providing they have a mindset for taking the untried and bringing it to life.)
- Push through failure. Of all the big, new shiny ideas out there, the landscape is still littered with the wreckage of failed ideas. If you are shooting for perfection 100% of the time, exploring the unexplored is not for you or your business. Fail often. Fail fast.
- Don’t let conventional thinkers anywhere near your Weird and Whacky team. Self-explanatory as whacky thinkers will be turned off by the negativity.
Robert Murray is a Vancouver, BC based Business Strategy Consultant, #1 Best Selling Author, and International Keynote Speaker. For further advice, insight and inspiration on how to unlock your inner leader, follow Robert on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
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Tags:
Business,
Business Culture,
Business Goals,
Business Strategy,
Growth,
Marketing Strategy,
Values
