Managing Oneself: Identify Strengths
It takes far less energy to move from first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity.
You can learn to identify your strengths by using feedback analysis. This is a simple process in which you write down every one of your key decisions and key actions along with the results that you expect them to achieve. Nine to twelve months later, check the actual results against expectations. After two to three years of use, you will know your strengths by tracking those decisions and actions where actual results fell in line with or exceeded expectations. Once you have identified your strengths through feedback analysis, you can use this knowledge to improve performance and results. You can make this happen in five ways.
First, concentrate on your strengths. Second, work on improving strengths. You may need to learn new knowledge or to update old. Third, recognize disabling habits. The worst, and most common, one is arrogance. Oftentimes poor performance results from an unwillingness to pursue knowledge outside one’s own narrow specialty. Fourth, remedy bad habits and bad manners. All too often, a bad habit such as procrastination or bad manners makes cooperation and teamwork all but impossible. And fifth, figure out what you should not do.
Managing Oneself: How Do I Perform?
Performance that violates your values corrupts, and it will ultimately sap and destroy your strengths.
Just as different people have different strengths and weaknesses work and perform in different ways. For example, some people reading, others by listening. And few readers can become successful listeners or vice versa. Learning style is just one of several factors that go into making up a person’s work style. There are other questions that must be answered. Do you work best when cooperating with others, or do you achieve results when working alone? If you work best with others, is it usually as a subordinate, peer, or supervisor? Do you need a predictable, structured work environment? Do you thrive under pressure?
You also have to consider your personal values: are they comparable to or at least compatible with your strengths? If there is any conflict between your values and strengths, always choose values. Performance that violates your values corrupts, and it will ultimately sap and destroy your strengths. These are just some of the questions that must be answered. What is important is to figure out your unique work style.
Hitting Them Where They Aren’t
“Hitting them where they aren’t” outflanks the by creative imitation.
Here, the innovator doesn’t create a major new product or service. Instead, it takes something just created by somebody else and improves upon it. This is imitation. But it is creative imitation because the innovator reworks the new product or service to better satisfy customers’ wants and needs. Once the innovator succeeds in creating what customers want, it can achieve leadership and take control of the market.
The prefect example is how IBM became the leading producer of PCs in the 1970s. Apple invented the PC. When the Apple appeared, it was an instant sensation. IBM set to work to outflank the Apple. It asked, “What are Apple’s shortcomings?” Within eighteen months IBM had on the market a PC that did everything the PC customers needed and wanted but had what the Apple lacked: software. And within another year IBM’s PC had become the market leader worldwide; it held that position for more than ten years. And Apple had become marginal. It almost went under and only turned itself around into a respectable niche player twenty-odd years later, in the late 1990s.
Entrepreneurial Judo
Entrepreneurial Judo turns what the market leaders consider their strengths into the very weaknesses that defeat them.
The Japanese Judo master looks for the strength that is his opponent’s pride and joy. He assumes, and does so with high probability, that the opponent bases his strategy in every fight. And then the judo master figures out where this continuing reliance on a particular strength leaves the opponent vulnerable and undefended. Then he turns his opponent’s strength into the opponent’s fatal weakness that defeats the opponent.
Businesses, like judo fighters, tend to become set in their behaviors. And then Entrepreneurial Judo turns what the market leaders consider their strengths into the very weaknesses that defeat them. For example, the Japanese became the leaders in one American market after the other: first in copiers, then in machine tools, then in consumer electronics, then in automobiles, and then in fax machines. The strategy was always the same. They turned what the Americans considered their strength into a weakness that defeated the American companies. The American saw high profitability as their greatest strength. And thus they focused on the high end of the market and left the mass market undersupplied and underserviced. The Japanese moved in with low-cost products with minimum features. The Americans didn’t even try to fight them. But when the Japanese had taken over the mass market they had the cash flow to move in on the high-end market, too. And they soon came to dominate both the mass market and the high-end market.