Thrive Strategy

In late October, as part of the launch campaign for his newest book,?This Is Strategy, Seth Godin wrote an article for?Harvard Business Review?titled, “How to Avoid Strategy Myopia.” A prolific writer, marketer, and business intellectual, Godin’s thinking often turns fundamental concepts upside down, and this article struck me as particularly prescient. “Strategy is not a plan,” he writes. “A plan might come with a guarantee: ‘If we do this, we win.’ A strategy, on the other hand, comes with the motto: ‘This might not work.’ Strategy is a philosophy of becoming, a chance to create the conditions to enable the change we seek to make in the world.” Strategy is a philosophy of becoming?might be the single greatest line I’ve ever read when it comes to strategy. What he means is that strategy emerges from the process of identifying our aspirational state and understanding the change we want to drive within our organization. And while I hadn’t thought of strategy in those terms until I read Godin, I now see that his definition gets right to the core of what strategy is—a vision, a recalibration of self, a view on what we want our organizations to become. Michael Porter, who wrote the?seminal work?on strategy, says, “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” And what not to do, according to Godin (and?Roger L. Martin), is plan. Instead, we animate our philosophy. https://lnkd.in/gcKHdzbt

During a recent presentation titled, “Moving Toward an AI-First Future: Embracing an AI-First Mindset to Drive Business Transformation,” I began by taking an informal survey of the audience. “By a show of hands,” I asked, “how many of you have used ChatGPT?” Most of the hands in the room went up. “That’s great,” I said, scanning the faces in front of me, wondering how far along in their?AI?journeys they were. “Again, by a show of hands—how many of you pay for a ChatGPT subscription versus only using the free version?” Quite a few hands went down until there were only about a third of them left. It was one of the trends I’d seen repeatedly over the last two years—lots of people had experimented, but few had gone as far as committing to the twenty-dollar-a-month license. I walked to the other side of the stage, stopped, and briefly locked eyes with a woman in the third row. “Finally,” I said, “how many of you have used one of the other frontier large language models—like Claude or Gemini?” All but three hands went down. I nodded my head. “That tracks,” I said, turning to the screen and advancing the slide with the remote in my hand until it landed on a graph. “Generative AI has been adopted faster than both the internet and the PC at the same point in their lifecycles, with over 100 million users within the first two months of its release. Yet, ironically, it still seems to me like most companies are just getting started.” I looked out at the audience, at the sea of faces looking back at me. Half of them seemed interested. Half of them bored. But all of us, I knew, were in the midst of a once-in-a-generation disruption, whether we chose to acknowledge it or not. https://lnkd.in/gBTQj6MZ

As companies grow increasingly interested in leveraging artificial intelligence, it’s become clear that a structured approach to AI transformation is crucial for success. Whether your organization is in the early stages of exploring AI or advancing from piloting use cases to scaling them, understanding what you’re striving for is the key to finding impactful, long-term outcomes. https://lnkd.in/gnSu5VDu

AI is evolving at a pace that makes predicting its trajectory difficult, especially beyond a year. However, it’s worth making a few predictions anyway. This is because over the next six months, AI will play an even bigger role in shaping successful organizations—across every department. Here are five key predictions to keep in mind as you navigate this rapidly evolving landscape. https://lnkd.in/gjjhMVwh

As Tim Hillegonds has taken businesses through each of Thrive's AI services, there have been five themes that have surfaced time and time again. https://lnkd.in/gejvDg-t

Market segmentation is a phrase that gets tossed around a lot, but rarely explained. On the surface, it seems fairly easy to understand. A market, at least the way that I’m using it, refers to a broad industry category. A market segment is a subsection of that market. But identifying markets and market segments, and getting the people in your organization to think about and refer to them in the same way, takes a little bit of work. And while it may seem like I’m splitting hairs here—because I’m sure you have a general idea of what these terms mean—it’s worth putting them under a microscope momentarily, because the rigor it takes to define these terms for everyone on your team can provide a substantial unlock in your organization. As an agency positioned around a specific market, I’ve had to wrestle with these definitions quite a bit over the last dozen years or so. Is construction a market? Is manufacturing? What about heavy construction? Or light construction? Or industrial construction? How about heavy haul? Or specialized transportation? What about crane and rigging? Is that a market or a market segment? And if it’s a market segment, is it a segment of construction, or heavy construction, or industrial construction, or none of them? You can see how quickly the exercise can spiral. But if we take a step back from defining the market and market segment from the?company’s point of view, and instead focus on the customer, things quickly become much clearer. And?marketing—and sales— become much, much easier. https://lnkd.in/grqNinsc

Thanks to?Jakob’s Law of Internet User Experience, we know that user spend most of their time on websites other than yours, which means they prefer your site to work like all the other sites they already know and visit regularly. This doesn’t mean that your site needs to be exactly like every other site you come across, but it does mean that the design, copywriting, and overall function of your site needs to be similar. The purpose of your website isn’t to be different. It’s to be clear. Which means you must design for patterns to which users are accustomed. And what?users?are accustomed to is engaging with the content on your website that appears above the fold (the portion of the webpage that is visible to users immediately upon landing.) https://lnkd.in/gn5qhm_v

Generally defined as the system of rules, practices, and processes that guide how an organization manages and oversees its use of AI, AI Governance looks different at every organization. https://lnkd.in/gm_rAAAp

Before you can get a large language model (LLM) to write for you, you must first write for it. Initially, this may seem like a small distinction, an insignificant variance in the order of operations. But it’s ultimately the factor that decides?what sort of experience you’ll have with an LLM. It’s almost always the difference between average and excellent, or generic and specific. As these models get bigger, faster, and more capable, it’s easy to think of them as the solution to everything. After all, there’s not much they can’t do at this point. You can shape them to be strategists or data analysts or venture capitalists, and they will respond as such, in ways that are truly incredible. But if you can’t write clearly and capably, or if you’re unaware that there’s some skill and tact required to prompt, then you’re at a real disadvantage. For most people, having an LLM?write content?is the easiest use case to deploy—and the fastest. Perhaps your organization has always wanted to have a robust content strategy, and you see frontier models as the realization of your goal. You can ask an LLM to write a 600-word blog post on nearly anything you can think of, and it’ll do a pretty good job without a whole lot of direction. What you’ll realize, though, at some point, is that the content is missing one vital component: your perspective.

Ready to operationalize AI? Check out Tim's latest post on mapping ROI to ROO.