Rarely does a company, for no reason in particular, decide to push itself beyond its own status quo and take an innovative leap. Implementing a complicated new technology, for example, or expanding into a new market, or adding a revolutionary new product–all require huge learning curves and hours of training, and these changes are rarely undertaken simply in the spirit of “Let’s up our game!”
The fact is, these creative leaps are usually born of paranoia and panic, and nothing seems to trigger the impulse to innovate more quickly than discovering a competitor’s latest development threatening to put you out of business. That kind of pressure generates an all-hands-on-deck mentality—rallying intensive efforts for saving the blindsided ship from sinking. Here’s a historical example:
On December 7, 1941, the United States was reeling from the Pearl Harbor attacks. This event prompted unprecedented production of goods and hardware in support of our military efforts, and a countrywide mobilization of knowledge, manpower and natural resources poured into our industries. Never before had our nation rallied so quickly and to such a great scale to meet the threats posed in the Pacific by Japan and in Europe by Germany, both whose innovative technology, by all accounts, was light-years ahead of ours. These efforts were best encapsulated by Japanese Naval Marshal General Isoroku Yamamoto, who said:
I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.
In business, and especially in sales, complacency (regarding one’s success) will insidiously (and inevitably) suck the life out of one’s incentive to remain ahead of the competition. There’s an effective tool for sparking innovation in your organization—a simple exercise called “Kill The Company.”
This approach was pioneered by Lisa Bodell CEO of Futurethink, and here’s how it works: Whether you run a large organization or are a solopreneur—gather as many individuals on your team as possible, and invite them to answer this question:
“If you were our competitor, what steps would you take in order to crush our business?”
Spend an hour brainstorming and identifying weaknesses, holes, oversights, and gaps, which you (the fabricated competitor) could feasibly exploit, resulting in the demise of your enterprise.
Note: You can modify this approach to examine/undermine a specific product or service as well.
When I conducted this exercise with a business owner, she identified a wide spectrum of challenges, ranging from obvious to obscure, from immense to miniscule. Here are a few ways she came up with for a competitor to threaten her businesses.
- Out-rank us on Google
- Recruit more and better-trained sales staff
- Offer a similar “niche” service at a lower price
- Flood the market with advertising
- Scale up their production quicker
- Hire full-time administrative and support staff
- Have a website that’s easier to navigate
- Implement mobile apps
- Offer e-commerce products
- Secret shop some of our newer employees (who would inadvertently give away proprietary information)
- Offer more (and better) equipment
- Open more locations
- License their brand and squeeze us out
By the end of your 60-minute discussion, your list might be massive. Using your industry expertise (and that of your team) organize your list into a hierarchy of threats—ranging from virtually no threat all the way to game-enders!
Once sorted, identify which dangers make sense to tackle first—the easiest to address, the potentially most damaging, etc.
Next create a task team charged with generating innovative ways to address the problem. (Here is a related article on brainstorming.)
Note: If you don’t have a team, consider asking trusted peers and colleagues for help with generating ideas.
This approach is both provocative and insightful. Periodically implementing this strategy to identify blind spots can supercharge your businesses with creativity. Most importantly, it keeps you ahead of the game before someone changes the game on you!
For more on the topic of business innovation, I recommend the book Kill The Company, by Lisa Bodell and Ordinals: How Nonconformist Move the World, by Adam Grant.
