Ok so I will fully admit I had every intention of posting part 2 of this blog post series last quarter. But client engagements got busy and here we are like 5 months later. Still busy over here, but feeling like I need to get back on track!
Anyway, refer back to Part 1 of this blog post series giving my perspective about Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't by Jim Collins for a memory refresher—or just to read it first before you read this second post.
Friendly reminder that the book itself was researched and published in 2001 so this was done before social media was a thing or smartphones existed and many of the companies featured in the book as great companies are either falling apart or gone. To me it's not the example companies that Jim Collins gives that matter here, it's the principles he walks through that do. They are fundamentally how I have always thought businesses should run and are instinctually how I approached building business, brand and marketing strategy—even before I knew how to articulate it.
So what makes this book so great (pun intended)? I have way too many thoughts to make a single blog post about it so am breaking it up into 3 parts. This is part 2 of 3 and will be focused on disciplined thought, which to me is more about applying a disciplined process to really get to the heart of things.
Disciplined Thought
This one is one of my favorites because it puts a process of sorts in place to drive towards a strategy. And strategy is my sweet spot so naturally it's where I live most of the time. As I always say when speaking to clients or potential clients, there are so many people who have amazing big ideas, but getting those big ideas to fruition requires having the disciplined process and focus to get there.
Confront the Brutal Facts
First things first, is always the need to be brutally honest about an organization's current reality in order to shape and evolve that reality. Here's the thing, though. Nobody in business wants to hear that their baby is ugly, that a decision made is affecting the company negatively or that they are conducting business in the 'wrong' way. There is this weird obsession with pretending perfection to the point of blinding yourself to reality. But every business has challenges. Every business has strengths to build upon and weaknesses to work through.
What makes a company strong is to confront that reality, identifying and laying all the puzzle pieces out on the table in an open and transparent way. This also includes listening to all levels in the organization to uncover what is working and what is not. After all, what challenges an executive sees from their 50,000 foot view are always going to be far different than the challenges facing a worker bee who is managing the nitty gritty details of any given issue. And then instead of burying one's head in the sand, leadership should address it all, head on.
To me, this step is not only to address any potential issues head on, but is also the first step to get to solutions and strategy that strengthen or focus the organization and strengthen the brand. After all, if you can cut through the bull$h!t and get really crystal clear on what your core strengths are today and what other crap is unnecessary distraction, you can build upon it moving forward.
Said another way, your business is its own unique thing - you can't put together a complete picture of it if you don't have all the puzzle pieces identified. And you can't determine which puzzle pieces make up the picture you are aiming for and which ones don't belong if you can't see all of them. Take the time to identify the puzzle pieces, even if you don't know if or where they fit yet.
Find Focus with the "Hedgehog Concept"
Next up is the Hedgehog Concept - I use an adapted version of this in almost every strategy engagement with clients. In order to get focused, an organization needs to be able to answer these three questions:
What are you deeply passionate about?
What can you be best in the world at?
What drives your economic engine?
Being able to dial in to these questions after you've identified your core strengths from the brutal facts actions will allow you to home in on what your special sauce truly is and build consistency and disciplined action around it.
Now I always add in one more question because I think it is a pretty important one to consider—what does your customer want and truly need? After all, they are the ones who purchase your products or services so they are kind of an important stakeholder and should probably have a say in all of this.
Once you have all of those elements agreed upon, it's much easier for an organization and all its people to move forward with intention. In other words, once your team knows what the organization's focus truly is, then everyone can get laser focused on how to build on it and drive it forward together. Having worked for an organization that was this dialed in, it was so easy to know exactly what I needed to focus on and what else needed to be ignored.
How Does this Framework Apply to Marketing?
I'm often asked what a business strategy framework has to do with brand and marketing. After using every ounce of energy to avoid rolling my eyes or screaming in annoyed frustration since Marketing is such a vital part of any business, my response to that is two-fold:
Having a clearly defined business strategy is mandatory in order to build a strong brand strategy. They are inextricably linked. If your business strategy is all over the page and you're trying to be everything to every one, your brand does the same thing which means you appeal to no one. Conversely if your business strategy is tight, your brand strategy is also clear and audiences know whether you are for them or not.
Building on that whole audience thing—just as not everything is or can be your strength as a company, not every consumer is meant to be your customer. That's why I insist that the Hedgehog Concept include an answer to the question of what does your audience want. It helps to refine who the ideal audience is, which ensures branding, messaging, visuals and campaigns resonate with those who truly value the brand’s strengths.
In other words, to build a focused Hedgehog Concept for your organization only to ignore it when it comes to branding and marketing is counterproductive and will always be costly.
Conclusions
I could also go on and on about why this disciplined strategy process is so important for focusing a business and building a brand. There are a million different frameworks out there to use. I'm not saying any of them are wrong and they probably work great for others. In fact, I'd say as long as you have some sort of structure and focus around your business, you're doing better than a lot of companies out there!
I just find that in my 20 years of doing this, that this framework is the absolute best one to ensure that the business strategy is strong and that the brand strategy is built from it. Business and brand go hand in hand, so why not depend on a framework that can easily tether them to each other from the jump?
This is part 2 of a 3 part blogpost series focused on Good to Great. More to come.
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