September 23, 2020
Who would you like on your executive board today?
No, it’s not fantasy football, but today’s challenges force us to think about who’s handling them best – and we have to admit, we spend some time daydreaming too. “Business as usual” is pretty far away, there are very few moments of comfort, and we all agree that complacency is generally a recipe for disaster. If normalcy is a distant dream, let’s engage in a little dreaming!
- • Mr. Donald Bren – Chairman
- • The late Zig Ziglar – Sales
- • The late Steve Jobs – Director of Marketing
- • Carly Fiorina – CEO
- • Elon Musk – Chief Engineer
- • Sheryl Sandberg – COO
- • Mark Cuban – CFO
- • A retainer of Harvard Law’s brightest attorneys – Legal
Our compensation program and benefits might not be quite enough to sway this level of talent, if we were even graced with a return phone call in the first place. But it would be phenomenal to sit in on the meetings and learn how we would change the world over the next workweek.
Even More Questions
To whose example do we look next to help us reach our goals? Are our greatest assets already here on our team, or do we need to look outside? Tracking down real brilliance requires more than just fantasizing about what we would do with the aforementioned famous names on our side. We need to do the research – look at what other companies are doing and translate their success into ours.
So, who will help us see these opportunities and how do we seize them? A mirror might reveal your best shot at success. An August 19, 2020 presentation by Andrea Simon called, “Change Matters: Finding Your Blue Ocean Strategy,” provided some valuable insights:
- Push into new market spaces
- See things in ways not seen before
- Focus on unmet needs
- Search for non-users
- Create demand
- See the opportunity in difficulty
Can’t Afford to Hit Snooze
This is a wakeup call out of the dulling stupor of pandemic panic, and perhaps it even sparks a flicker of hope. In our quest for the light at the end of the tunnel, we asked a few of our highly-respected clients the following questions:
- What are the top ranks of management focusing on today?
- What are you doing differently now?
- What new needs might we be able to resolve for you?
- What are you searching for right this moment?
We can wish on as many twinkly stars, birthday candles, and plummeting meteorites as we want, but sadly they will never give us the ExPro All Stars (don’t get any big ideas, we have officially called dibs on that team name) listed at the beginning of this blog post. Thankfully, a month of R&D to create offerings that fill in the blanks for our customers seems to work better than relying on Lady Luck. A great first step (and a great icebreaker at the networking events we’re not currently allowed to have) is to ask the client what’s going on for them today, this very second.
