Andy Lykens

Innovating and operating through growth

strategy

Little things

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In marketing, there’s a concept called ‘positioning’ which is how consumers perceive a brand. It also informs how the brand is marketed by the company. It’s the difference in your mind between BMW and Mercedes, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, Nike and Golden Goose. Each of those brands holds some position in your mind, and those brands work hard to make sure they maintain that position.

Positioning can also apply to how we’re perceived in relation to others. Are we trusted and judicious? Speedy and efficient? Methodical and engaged?

Whether you like it or not, everything little thing you do builds on how you’re positioned in the minds of those you interact with. Taking the call, making the time, sharing the win. Even choosing not to interact with people affects your positioning.

I’m not suggesting you be everything to everyone – what kind of position would that be anyway? But if everything we do can make a difference in how we’re perceived by others, it’s worth being judicious with even the little things.

Negotiations

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If you have a job, you’re a negotiator. Here are some examples:

  • Vendor contracts & relationships
  • Product sales
  • Performance reviews
  • Starting a new initiative
  • Cross-functional projects
  • Scheduling time on the calendar of a high-level person

Some of these negotiations are easy and some are hard, but they’re all scenarios where 2 or more people have different contexts and are seeking outcomes that may coincide a little, a lot, or not at all.

Being a good negotiator requires preparation and strategy. It means knowing what you want ahead of time. It means understanding what the other person wants and figuring out how to align their goals with yours. It requires being a great communicator – actively listening, precisely articulating, and diligently executing.

If you go unprepared into a situation that looks like a negotiation, don’t be too surprised if things don’t come out exactly as you’d hope (unless your goals overlap almost perfectly with the other negotiating parties).

Luck and shortcuts

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Between the origin and the destination, shortcuts are an oasis in the desert. They’re a sleight of hand. A prestige.

Luck is a tailwind. It’s a cloud when the sun is hottest. A mist when the climate is driest.

When you take shortcuts, you wind up needing to start over again and retracing steps. Shortcuts require you alter your course. They’re a distraction from the end goal.

When luck shows up, it enhances what you’re already doing. It’s encouragement to keep moving boldly ahead. It’s unexpected and welcome.

Neither luck nor shortcuts are dependable.

When you set out to do something, it’s not so crazy to believe you might get lucky, but watch out for shortcuts.

Unlocking Success: Navigating Nuance in New Endeavors

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When we’re trying something new, it’s important to remember that it’s new to us. New to us doesn’t mean new to everyone and so it may behoove you to look around, ask a few questions, challenge some assumptions, and understand whether you may have access to an expert who can help.

Missing Nuance

It’s easy to forget that being new to something means we don’t know all of the nuance. We think about the thing at a high level and understand the basic components of it, but it’s not until we do a thing over and over again until we start to appreciate all the nooks and crannies.

Let’s take playing a board game for example. You can really only understand a game at a high level at first, usually just enough to be convinced to play. Maybe you’ve heard your friends talk about Settlers of Catan and that it’s “kind of like Monopoly but more complicated.”

Then when you sit down to play, your learning experience starts with friends describing the activities in the game. You have your resource cards, the resources are used to build roads and towns, you can trade your resources, and so on. But at this stage it’d be a mistake to assume that you understand the strategy of the game; you don’t have a real shot of developing a strategy that achieves a desired outcome. It’s possible you’ll win, but that would largely be luck.

The same is true when you’re trying something that’s outside of your direct area of expertise. You understand at a high level what you’re hoping the outcome will be, and you may understand some rules and activities. But if you’re not an expert in the thing, chances are you’re going to make mistakes and your strategy will not get you your desired result. When this happens, we often seek to start doing the thing over again with our same rudimentary understanding of how to do it. That’s a mistake as long as what we’re doing has been done before.

How to improve your outcome

Your job at this point is to figure out what problem you need to correct for, not to immediately start the process of correction. This is especially true if you’re still learning the game. If you’ve already been operating on assumptions and an over-simplified understanding of the strategy, there’s a great chance you can’t pinpoint where your strategy went wrong without the help of someone who knows better. You’re right back where you started.

A common error is to think you made mistakes because you moved too fast. While it is very possible you moved too fast (because you were overlooking nuance), it’d be worth questioning whether you were going in the right direction in the first place.

You can move at great speed building a car engine if you leave out a bunch of steps like screwing on all the bolts or attaching the carburetor, but if you do the same thing next time just slower, your engine still won’t run.

A better way forward

Your best bet isn’t to start making corrections based on the same assumptions that got you to where you are now because you’ll still be left with an engine that doesn’t work. Your best bet is to start back at the beginning and look for your actual mistake.

Here are steps to help diagnose your problem:

  • Start by challenging the assumptions you made in the first place. Ask yourself your level of expertise or what you may still need to learn more about in order to improve your result.
  • Look for someone who has done something similar or who has more expertise than you. Have them weigh-in on your idea and your approach. This could be as simple as asking around your organization or tapping your network.
  • Listen to the team members who worked on the last project. Ask them how it went, and weigh their perspectives. You also need to decide if you have the right people in the room. It’s best to do this in individual conversations to avoid groupthink.
  • Get clear on your expectations. What is your desired outcome? Is it clear enough? Is it too ambitious? Not ambitious enough? The better you can articulate your vision, the more people can get behind it.

Once you’ve laid out the moving pieces, considered new perspectives, and have the right people in the room, communicate your desired outcome to the group. Only after you do the work of understanding the problem will you be able to course correct.

The worst part about this process is that it feels slow and cumbersome. The best part? You won’t be moving fast in the wrong direction anymore.

The death of big growth

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An oak tree doesn’t promise how tall it’s going to be when it’s a seed. It doesn’t predict the number of branches it will have or how many leaves it will lose in autumn. It doesn’t promise the squirrels any certain quantity of acorns. It just grows. And while early on, the growth is very visible, no one expects a tree to keep growing until it’s as tall as a mountain. At some point a tree’s growth becomes invisible and simply regenerative. Then the growth stops.

As with all cycles, we’re coming around to a new period – one more affected each day by inflation, war, and possibly recession.

For at least as long as I’ve been working professionally, big growth companies (like tech giants) have enjoyed cheap debt and consumers whose idea of scarcity is waiting the full two years to buy the next iPhone.

The companies that middled (or worse) during this time are likely to be toast in the next year or 2. Their funds will dry up quickly and investors will turn their sights to something less shiny, more predictable, and ultimately familiar.

Companies that grew quickly will try to get that magic back because big growth is all they know. But if they’re not in a commodities business that can make a cheap offering to cost-conscious consumers, or find ways to normalize their operations, or choose projects to ignore while they focus on shoring up fundamentals, they will continue to have to make sacrifices to protect their margins and please their shareholders.

We can learn from the big growth folks who used to do pretty much anything that even looked like growth – hiring for hiring’s sake or spinning up new projects, spending money because money was cheap and seemingly endless.

Yes, there is still capital, and investors will need to deploy that capital, but they may be more hesitant. They’ll be looking more closely at the relationships and business models to vet opportunities with a new, more pragmatic lens.

This is good news if you’re pragmatic and thorough, if you’re thoughtful and patient; now is your time to shine. But don’t expect big growth. Those rules have changed.

Start small. Deliver exceptional products and services. Get a couple of people so excited about your work that they ask you solve more of their problems. Then figure out how to streamline those operations. Yes, seek growth, but not by ‘big growth’s’ rules.

This still works, it’s only in the necessity of big growth that big spending is required. Big growth incentivizes managers to ‘grow’ – not to build great businesses.

If you work very hard, and if you’re lucky, you may hit a regenerative phase. Just don’t start promising the squirrels how many acorns you’re going to produce.

Differentiation and statistics

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You would be hard pressed to go through a day in your life without bumping into statistics. Most products and companies you interact with are built because those companies are very good at figuring out what works for most people. Apple discontinues iPhone sizes because most people don’t want the small one.

But at some point we will be outliers within the realm of a given statistical model. Maybe you’re a size 15 shoe or you really like the idea of having a smaller iPhone. It’s at these times when we might feel frustrated. It’s hard to find shoes when you’re a size 15, especially if you live somewhere that people have statistically smaller feet. You’re stuck if they discontinue the phone that’s right for you because you have small hands.

At exactly these times, feeling seen is important. It creates the differentiation that we love about a product, a service, or a community. It gives people a chance with big feet or small hands a chance to get something that feels like its just for them. They probably tell their friends about how great it is too.

The catch is that as companies attract people by differentiation, they start to grow. If growth is a company goal, they need to tailor their offering to more and more people. More and more people who are less likely to have big feet or small hands.

Because as the company grows, they have to start making shoes in more sizes. This makes sense (because you can only sell so many size 15 shoes), and causes internal trade-offs. Designing those new shoes, marketing them, distributing them, providing customer service for them – all of this eats up resources that may at a previous point have been available for big-feet shoes.

And so the target market become outliers, and become dissatisfied, maybe moving on to a new differentiator or accepting something that is pretty good, instead of great. Certainly not telling their friends about it.

Who wins in this scenario? Probably not the people with big feet. Also probably not the people with “normal” sized feet because let’s face it, the new shoes aren’t for them either, they’re for everyone – just wearable enough by the most people possible. The company may win for a period, at least until new differentiators crop up and eat into market share.

The more growth-oriented the current players are, the more opportunity we have to create something that starts out as differentiated. But trying to balance differentiation while growing fast is the rub. It requires remembering that statistics aren’t the same as individuals, and that more growth isn’t the same as product-market fit.