Which strategy is right? Should you be customer focused or employee focused? Should you go for government contracts, or be privately funded? Should you go left or should go right?
Often what matters most is not what your strategy, or your business philosophy, actually is, but whether you have a philsophy/strategy at all. Most often organizations fail when they’re jut wandering and drifting. Organizations, like people, are more interesting and compelling when they have a point of view.
When Apple announced that they were launching a new device to fit between the laptop market and the smart phone, they were roundly criticized and called crazy. Just google it up and you’ll see there are hundreds of articles with the theme of “it’ll never happen”, “it just won’t work”, “Apple is gonna lose big”. A year and a half on now, it looks like such a slam dunk that everybody else in high tech is trying to put our their own tablet, based on Apple’s concept. All of them have pretty much tanked on the market level. But Apple succeeded. Apple has a perspective, a point of view that they are passionately pursuing.
Now along comes Kindle Fire which, according to the Wall Street Journal, is going to be a success this Christmas season.
The thing is, Amazon’s Kindle Fire is a different kind of tablet, they’re headed in a different direction. They aren’t making a computer device to compete with your laptop, they’re making something that you can use to watch/read content that you’ve bought from Amazon and off the internet. They’ve pushed all the heavy storage to their cloud and decided you can’t save much on the machine. It’s different. Amazon has a point of view. In fact, they’ve always had their own unique perspective and business philosophy.
What do Amazon and Apple have in common? A unqiue point of view.
Most of the world will tell you to take the edges off to fit into the market, to fit into the denomination, association, etc. But a unique point of view, perspective on your work will be a big help to you.
What do you believe? What is your strategy? What are you doing that is different?
David Curry
