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You want a leadership team or part of a team where you’re trying to balance the present and the future, where if you spend too much time in the present, you’re not creating future growth.
The problem can be that you get down the line, and people come tapping at your door.
If you’re someone who’s got that awful feeling of, “You know what, I’m spending too much time doing this and not enough time doing that,” we’re going to talk about the right time to create the foundations for future growth.
Traditionally, the MBA dudes, let’s call them that, have talked about the product life cycle where they’ve said, you know, over time, you would bring a product to market. You would spend money on marketing that product.
Each growth would look like something like this, and it would kind of tail off over time.
What would happen is that competitors would enter that market, consumers tastes may change, other things may go wrong in your company that means over time, that product starts to tail off. What’s being shown is when it does tail off, it often drops off really fast.
This used to happen over, interestingly enough, this used to happen over 20 years. Now, you’re looking at, for a lot of startups, you’re looking at 12-month cycles. The thing is, is that a lot of leadership teams, they assume that this trajectory will continue forever. When we’re riding the curve of success, we often don’t really want to even think about failure, but it’s been shown over and over again that most products will follow that curve over time because it’s not about what you can control. It’s about the external environment,
- Consumers
- Competitors
and the fact that taste changes and competitors come in and take market share, so when do you think is the right time?
If you leave it too late (B), you’re going to be already on that downward cycle, and it’s too hard to catch up. The best time is when you’re just at the top or just before (A).
And what you’re aiming for is to turn this curve into what they call the sigmoid curve where it flattens out here (C), and then it takes off up again. That little piece there (C), that’s what all the MBA dudes, as I like to call them, that’s what they call innovation, which is looking at the way you serve that customer and looking at a new way to be able to create value for them so that your curve doesn’t drop down. It actually takes a new leap.
For you as a team and for you as a leadership team, when‘s the right time for you to invest in thinking about the future?
I argue that for many people, they leave it too late because they get into a bit of a comfort zone. Think about doing it just before you reach the top and thinking, how could we innovate this product so that we could create a new upwards trajectory?
I hope this has been useful for you and your leadership team. The toughest thing is now going out and implementing this.
If you need help with that, let me know.
See you next time on The Reason and the Road.
