Every time a guy with a dream decides to open a new big-city restaurant, the old joke goes, “Good thing nobody else has thought of that.”
This problem is ALWAYS with us, all this Covid-19 stuff has done is make it EVEN MORE pronounced. We live in a world of oversupply.
And even the businesses that do survive, with or without Covid, most of these enterprises- i.e. the vast majority- are vulnerable to somebody coming along and offering to build a better mousetrap. Harry makes a damn fine $2 pizza slice, but it’s just a matter of time before the Sal down the street offers a comparable slice for $1.
And it’s not just true with dollar pizzas. It’s true with $400 chainsaws. Or $5,000 refrigerators. Or $100 million jet fighters.
The answer, of course, was best articulated by Apple in the 1990s: “Think Different”.
If you’re thinking differently, that means you’re thinking about stuff that hasn’t occurred to the competition. Which allows you to make moves the latter would never think of. Or, paraphrasing Rory Sutherland, having the insight that data and logic will get you to the exact same place as your competitors.
If you can grapple with that then you’ve got the good news. The bad news is you don’t just wake up one morning and start “thinking different” right out the gate. Like everyone else, you’re stuck with the same brain you went to bed with the night before.
What you can do is do what David Ogilvy did: acquire the habit of hiring “different:- i.e. mavericks and non-conformists- and let them go wild (within reason). It’s what powered the tech industry these last 60 years, and judging by the stock prices of some of them, it worked.
We have taken key messages that drive collaboration, innovation, and inspiration and designed them into virtual backgrounds. The idea is you can select and theme meetings, triggering discussion, and connection about the norms, outcomes, behaviors, and deliberately inform the conversation and focus for your virtual meetings.
It is a simple culture-building tool that will allow you to have more influence over the tone of your meetings, focus people on what you want them to work through, and is based on established social science., written extensively on by Bob Cialdini in his work in Pre-suasion, and BJ Fogg's behavior modification, Marshall Goldsmith, Benjamin Hardy, and others.
