I believe a good life is like a good sentence – we craft it in the active voice, not the passive. Act on the world, rather than have it act on you. As we consider 2025, here are 3 questions for doing that in a company context:
1. What Assumptions Will You Prove False?
It’s so very easy to accept historical assumptions about an industry. When I’m speaking in front of a new audience, I’ll often begin with an exercise that asks them to think about solutions for an industry that they’ve probably never worked in, and still the answers are so traditional. Yet a simple change in reference to shake their assumptions then creates totally different options.
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What can you do to let go of your old assumptions? A few suggestions:
– Look at how your industry functions in a totally different country, or at how an analogous industry works (for example, large hospitals can look at large banks and vice versa).
– List out assumptions and play with which ones you can reverse.
– Imagine you were an entrant into the industry starting from a totally different place (Amazon, a start-up, etc.) and think about what you’d do.
– Really stand in your customer’s shoes and consider all the different ways they might get their jobs done.
Assumptions box us in, and they’re so powerful because they’re so invisible. Making them explicit is a critical way to defang them.
2. What New Advantage Will You Create?
We spend so much time focused on maximizing the advantages we have. That’s great, but it leaves a great deal unexamined. Do you really think that your industry will function the same way 20 years from now? What new advantages might spring up to reshape the playing field? What can you do today to foster those?
As Clay Christensen chronicled extensively, industry giants aren’t usually toppled by other Goliaths. It’s David, competing asymmetrically, who knocks them out. How can you be David?
3. What Will You Walk Away From?
Companies – even, admittedly, boutique consulting firms like the one I lead – find it so hard to STOP doing things. Yet, no matter the level of our ambition, we just can’t do it all.
Be disciplined about finding things to halt. What takes a lot of attention or resources, looks like a continued struggle, and has few surprises yet to deliver? You can’t start great things if you don’t cease doing others.
ACTIVE VOICE. It’s a philosophy of living and a strategy of managing. Let’s make 2025 a year of being ACTIVE.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Stephen Wunker, Managing Director of New Markets Advisors and Author of The Innovative Leader.
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