Since children have tried to push us to be the best, to compare ourselves with the leader and try to overcome it. These teachings accompany us throughout our lives, and permeate our way of understanding the world or our place in it, whether in the sphere of business or personal. Always trying to be better.
Trying to improve is something very positive that helps us get the best out of ourselves and strive every day to grow. But the problem is that we usually do not use it as a reference to ourselves, but to the leader. On a personal level we try to be better and look like the strongest, the most handsome or the most popular … and inevitably that ends up leading us to reproduce the same behaviors in our business life.
Because we measure the progress of our company depending on how far or near we are from the leader of our market, obsessed by each and every one of the movements he makes. If you get a new product line, and it has a good reception in the market, we do the same … but trying to make it “better”.
Our product always washes “more” white, is “better”, has “more” functionalities or is “more” cheap: more and better. The problem is that these insidious adverbs are the ones that are inadvertently taking us slowly to disaster, and perpetuating our role as “followers”. Reacting to what the segment leader does not only brings us to the market with months of delay, but pushes us to artificially introduce improvements that justify us doing more of the same … without stopping to think if the customer really needs such improvements. And of course, the results are usually poor.
This way of understanding life was acceptable a few years ago, in which the main problem of the companies was to satisfy the demand and where it practically did not matter what you produced, the customers bought it … but the good times ended.
“And nowadays that way of competing is the fastest and safest way to end up in the cemetery of the elephants”
So let’s forget our competition. Let’s put aside the benchmarking, that elegant way of copying what the leaders of the segment do, and look for our own voice. That means going back to our origins, remembering what we do better for US.
What is the point of trying to be stronger than the class leader if what we are good at is mathematics?
We must take a step back, and look for what makes our company different, not what we do just like the others … and empower it. Stop using the leader of the segment as the north of our compass, and focus on the most important part of our business model: the client. Why is it he who has the answers, not the competition.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?