How Blowing Up Your Business Can Drive Innovation
Last week I pounded on folks for being wimps and not making decisions. Out of fairness, many of you want to move your organizations forward but might not have all the tools or resources to do so, Given that, I’d like to provide you some explosives.
These are the good kind of explosives. The kind that enable you to blow up your business model and find innovative new ways of doing things. Too many times we get trapped by our routines. Have you ever tried to change your personal routine? Uncomfortable and difficult, right? Now multiply that by the number of people in your organization and you have a sense for why nothing ever changes.
Sometimes the only way to change things is to (mentally) throw away everything you’re doing and declare a “do over.” In doing so, new opportunities might pop out and innovative ways of doing things can emerge.
Far too often, we wave our arms at innovation. We spew consultospeak like “think outside the box, push the envelope, and break the paradigm” with absolutely no clue what those words mean or how to do pursue those tasks. For those of you who know thoughtLEADERS well, we see it as our charge to provide you practical tools for taking action (shameless plug: we teach classes on this stuff too).
Enough blathering – here’s how you can (constructively) blow up your business and find potentially innovative new ideas:
When we talk about blowing up the business, we look at three kinds of explosives: blowing up the business model, blowing up your revenues, and blowing up your costs. The methodology requires you to simply ask yourself some expansive yet difficult questions. The rules of good brainstorming apply (no judging, no holding back ideas, and make the brainstorm time-bound or you’ll never stop generating ideas).
At first blush, these questions will look ludicrous. It’s deliberate. They’re expansive. They’re designed to knock you out of the land of incrementalism and into a broader, more innovative space. Here are a few thought starters you can use:
Blow Up the Business Model
– If you had a “do over,” what would you build differently? Why?
– If you moved this business to India or China (both customers and operations), how would you restructure to be more profitable?
– How would you double profits within 2 years?
Blow Up Your Revenues
– Who could create more value with our customer base than we can? Why?
– How would you triple revenues within 5 years?
– What are the 10 products we aren’t offering our customers that we should be?
Blow Up Your Costs
– How would you run this business with 2/3 fewer people?
– How could you eliminate your job?
– What is the most wasteful thing we do and why haven’t we stopped doing it?
We’ve identified many other questions along this vein. This is only a start. As you answer these questions, new ideas should emerge. Challenges to the status quo should spring forth from these conversations. Those ideas are the heart of innovation.
These questions should make you feel uncomfortable. If you’re doing it right, they should feel like crazy talk. The bottom line is, until you start challenging your everyday routines and pushing hard to change them, you’ll NEVER make the huge strides you’re looking for in innovation.
Every organization needs an occasional hard shove to break out of its comfort zone. Sometimes the market gives you that shove (which is always unpleasant). Sometimes that shove comes from within. Consider this post a good, hard, constructive shove.
What questions have you found useful to ask to drive change in your organization? How do you generate innovative solutions?
Great questions. Here's another one: How could our competitors put us out of business? How could a new entrant put us out of business?
I like to think of a business model as the leadership team's current theory about how to deliver customer value and company profits. But it's just that — the current theory. The environment continues to change and so the business model must also evolve. Enjoyed your post. Thanks.
Great post! These are some excellent questions. Another thought is to think three years into the future and image your business is down 50% and on the brink of bankruptcy. What happened? It's a way of using the "hindsight is 20/20" rule in advance. I always find this is a good exercise in understanding the need to change. I wrote a post a while back called "Defending the status quo kills companies" (http://www.retailshakennotstirred.com/retail-shaken-not-stirred/2009/07/defending-the-status-quo-kills-companies.html) to point out the urgent need to keep innovating. In my experience, without such scare tactics resistance to change is often too high to actually succeed in innovating.
What if the question you should ask is the result of good news? What would you do if your sales suddenly jumped by 2 or 3 fold?
This is a great post. Organizations need to recognize that the only thing that is constant is change and market evolution. Trouble is change is the hardest think for most of them.
Leaders should not focus on anything that happened more than 5 minutes ago and must always look forward.
Teams need to be asked what have they done to improve the organization. They must recognize that one great idea can lead to revolutionary change.
Words like don't shouldn't, can't should be removed from all discussions. Don't talk about why something can not be done, talk about what can be done.
Anyone can talk about what the issues or problems are, challenge your team to come with solutions, two or three that can be developed.
The current market has forced change, look at the landscape, those who were unable or unwilling are gone.
All great comments and additional questions folks. I love the positive spin of "what do you do if your business just tripled?" Could create some very interesting perspectives!
I liked your comment 'Far too often, we wave our arms at innovation. We spew consultospeak like "think outside the box . . .' In October, 2009, I set up the Frame of Reference blog to focus on the innovation space and various solution strategies that exist in the marketplace. The goal is to expose problem solvers and thought leaders to techniques that will help them to be more effective. There are enough problems for everyone. As thought leaders we need to increase our awareness about real-world technologies that help us to be more effective at solving them. Ergo blog.