Imagination good investment.
“In today’s world, there are two kinds of companies: The quick and the dead!”
– Al Dunlap, turnaround specialist and former CEO of Sunbeam Corp.
A strategic mindset is at the core of being an entrepreneur. Businesses that are strategically focused and embrace innovation are the businesses that will prosper.
Furthermore, implementing strategic changes within your enterprise will only succeed when everyone in the business – employees and stakeholders alike – are encouraged to seek out new ways of doing their job. In other words, you must promote and present opportunities for your employees to succeed through failure. Yes, I said “failing!”
Consider these entrepreneurial mindset guidelines as you implement your strategies and manage your firm.
* See things from your customer’s perspective: We’ve all heard the cliché about looking outside the box and have constructed our boxes from which we view our customers. The challenge is for you to examine the customer from inside their box. Are your customers’ newlyweds? Just starting? Or are they harried, working parents where time is of the essence? Are they older customers with discretionary income but who are having difficulty getting around?
What can you do to enhance your customers’ shopping experience, considering their particular stage in the lifecycle?
Examining your business from your customer’s point of view will often result in creative new mental models for operating your enterprise. If they are flexible, these new models will assist you in adapting to the changing needs of your customers.
This will provide you with the opportunity to maintain your core focus while at the same time redesigning, resegmenting, or reconfiguring as required to differentiate your product or service. You will find ways to satisfy existing customers while drawing new ones through your door.
* Everybody plays: The entrepreneurial mindset is based on the premise that business is a team sport.
You may be the captain of the SS Enterprise, but rarely is one person brilliant enough to match the wits of the collective power of the competition.
Your team, which will consist of players both internal and external to your organization, must be confident that their ideas are welcome and will be taken into serious consideration. At the same time, team members must appreciate the limitations of the firm’s resources.
They must also be confident that a good strategy will be implemented and not just talked about. At the end of the day, it is the tangible results of strategic execution, and not the strategic analysis, that will make the real difference to your firm. Seeing is believing.
* Experiment intelligently: You cannot analyze your way into a competitive advantage. Time spent navel-gazing may be better spent undertaking strategic experimentation and refining your implementation strategy through trial and error.
Risk is integral to a business. Embrace risk, but make it a calculated risk and then aggressively, continuously initiate, select, pursue, and reject initiatives until you find the mechanism that will increase your organization’s value. Actively seek options that give you flexibility and the potential to learn as a hedge against risk.
* Exercise discipline: One of the hallmarks of a successful entrepreneur is self-discipline. Once measures for the outcomes of your strategies are established, you must be disciplined to use them with vigour.
* Spend imagination instead of money: Strategic thinking doesn’t have to be expensive. Your most inexpensive investment, one with the most significant potential for the highest return, might be the time you spend imagining and dreaming.
Frugality is wisely utilizing your limited resources. It is essential to the success of any enterprise. Efficiency is another key to business success. When you invest your money and resources, do it from an informed position. Ensure your stakeholders understand the fundamental difference between being cheap and frugal, and then they support your economic situation.
* Be ruthless with priorities: Establish a specific mission and goals and then aim for them. This is what Martin Luther King referred to as “keeping an eye on the prize.”
* Measure early and always: Units of measure serve as guides. They are your canary in the coal mine to forewarn you of impending problems before they become irreparable.
Your business objectives must meet the SMART test – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time Dated. For example, a business objective might be, “we will sell 50 more houses by noon on Friday this week than we did in the same week last year.” It meets the SMART test criteria, where “we will sell more houses than last year” does not.
* Allocate the necessary resources to reach these goals: Pay attention to the cost, not the failure rate. You will fail at some things, but failure is a learning exercise and can be beneficial. Small educational failures may very well prevent the overall failure of the business. Becoming comfortable with actual or potential failure is one of the most challenging jobs faced by an entrepreneur. If your management philosophy operates on the old mental model, where mistakes are viewed as wrong, the transition to an entrepreneurial environment may require some serious adjustment.
External factors over which you have little control may contribute to failuIt’sIt’s a price you pay to access new opportunities. What you can control is the cost of these failures.
So, be disciplined; validate your assumptions; be frugal in your operation; redirect and keep to your priorities.
Then, failure will be seen as an opportunity for growth and open future opportunities.
