Give your category a kick up the arse!

What would you do if you could start again from scratch? 

“Think like a startup” has been my mantra for 25 years. Everyone at big fish is sick of me banging on about it, in fact. However, it’s served us well and, when our clients have taken that approach, it’s shown significant results. 

The world has just been given its greatest opportunity to re-boot, which leaves the door wide open for entrepreneurs and brave leaders to think and behave like startups and change the rules of any category they choose. Consumers and employees will never be more open-minded to new ideas, as is the case with investors. Businesses that embrace innovation and strive to be the next generation of entrepreneurs will thrive. 

However, as businesses rush to the short-term issue of “survival”, they quickly forget about the most important thing: “thrival.” Furloughing, lay-offs, redundancies and pay cuts are all grim but essential, survival tactics. However, leaders must look beyond the short-term pain as they navigate this massive storm in a bloody big teacup, and think about what happens on the other side within their category. They need to set brave new directions if they wish to thrive rather than merely survive. Now is the time to look really hard at your category, not just your business, and ask yourself this question:

“What would I change about my category if I was given the chance to start it all again from scratch without the burden of conventional wisdom?”

Once you’ve given yourself that challenge, just crack on and do it! If you believe in thinking like a startup, even if you’re an established category leader, then now’s the time to bring that belief to the top of your boardroom agenda and ask your teams to do the same. Why? Because insurgent ‘startup-mentality” businesses generally win and leave their competitors on the starting blocks wondering what just happened to their market share. Don’t take my word for it. Just take a look back at history. We all know what happened to Blockbuster, HMV, Kodak and thousands of other business fossils. I wonder which leaders are sitting at their desks today, thinking…

“my business will be the next 'Blockbuster' unless I do something big, quick and brilliant”

Liberating yourself from the tyranny of tradition, conventional wisdom and category rules is really hard to do. I was talking to a QC friend of mine discussing the fact that, thanks to Zoom, people will probably realise that standing around waiting for men in wigs to appear in a physical court isn’t the perfect way to see justice carried out quickly and efficiently!

Another of our mantras is “ always think like a consumer!”…

When you look at the world through your shareholder’s eyes you’ll generally find that short-term thinking is favoured over longer-term initiatives. However, when you take a consumer-eye-view of your category and represent your most disgruntled consumer, then opportunities present themselves in abundance.

Try spending a day as your most disgruntled consumer rather than your most loyal fan and you’ll see opportunities, not problems.

In a world where millions of people have been locked up and given time to reconsider their lives, choices and the impact their behaviours have on the world, there’s no better time to develop direct relationships with those people. Now is the time to ask them what they really think and help them make better choices. Consumers have just gone through an epiphany and will be coming out of this thinking very differently about life and how they interact with it. Ignore that at your peril.

‘That all sounds very easy, but what about the practical realities?’, I hear you say. ‘What about our leases, the vast amounts of stock in our warehouses, our huge payroll commitment...?’

There’s no doubt that tough decisions are getting tougher. Leaders need to balance short-term pain with long-term sustainability. Simply supporting broken businesses and papering over the cracks is only putting off the inevitable. So, don’t start there. Start by looking at your category, asking yourself what you’d do if you were a startup in your category. Remember, as an incumbent, you may have disadvantages that slow you down, but you have unfair advantages too. Most of the issues that prevent bigger businesses from behaving like startups are found in the boardroom, not on the shop floor or in the warehouse. Fortune favours the brave!

If you want to be the next Netflix, Spotify, Apple or Tesla, then you need to adopt a brave, intelligent new mindset today and provoke your teams to think differently and keep an open mind at all times. Challenging conventions in your category starts with a blank sheet of paper and no preconceptions. Experience is often the most important quality in execution, but sometimes the most destructive when it comes to innovation.

Many years ago, an interviewee told me a (possibly apocryphal) story about an experiment which illustrates how institutional memory can have negative effects…

Scientists ushered ten chimps into a room within which there was a pole with a banana tied to the top. As the chimps entered the room, they immediately tried to climb the pole to get the banana. However, they were prevented from reaching it thanks to the men in white coats violently hosing them off with a high-pressure water jet!!

After a while, the poor, soggy chimps gave up and just ignored the still uneaten banana. The scientists then introduced a new chimp into the room and took just one of the original ones out. As the new chimp entered, it started to climb the pole to get the banana but was pulled back down by the soggy chimps who wanted to prevent him from being hurt. What the chimps hadn’t noticed though, was that the scientists had removed the threat of the hose and were not trying to prevent him from getting the banana.

Eventually, the new chimp succumbed to peer advice and stopped trying to reach the banana. One by one, the scientists replaced the original soggy primates with new ones, none of whom had experienced the brutal water jet. Eventually, there were ten new chimps sitting at the bottom of the pole, all ignoring the banana, yet none of them realised that it was there for the taking without fear of failure. The threat was gone, yet they ALL behaved as if it was still there, despite none of them being present at the original hosing.

We use stories like this a lot in our start, transform and grow workshops in order to provoke leaders and their teams to think hard about their internal behaviours. We also use it to help them look at their category and their consumer’s behaviours. Combining this kind of thinking with an insurgent startup-mentality has never been more important or relevant.

NOW IS THE TIME TO THINK LIKE A STARTUP!

So, when it comes to your next board meeting or team get together, why not simply ask everyone in the room to grab a post-it® and write down what bananas they can see at the top of your category pole and what’s preventing you from grabbing it? Do the same exercise through your consumer’s eyes and compare notes. You’ll be amazed at what you find. And, if you feel things would be even better with others in the room, give us a call and we can add you to one of our workshops.

P.S. For those of you who want to stand on the sidelines watching others do the game-changing, watch this space, but please switch off the lights on your way out. 

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photos: chimp by Dominik Scythe, banana by Louis Hansel, both via Unsplash