"Starve the Problems, Feed the Opportunities"

Do you perform an annual assessment of your firm’s strengths and weaknesses? Most of the organizations in this habit have a similar way of interpreting the results: they breeze right past the strengths and instead focus laser-like on areas for improvement. In extreme cases, managers ignore the findings regarding strengths altogether and quite literally obsess about the company’s shortcomings. 

This is precisely the wrong reaction. The late great Peter Drucker got it right when he observed that most professionals are so busy working on yesterday’s problems that they have no time to work on today’s opportunities. He famously taught the idea that we should “Starve the problems and feed the opportunities.” 

It's human nature to concentrate our energies on fixing "what's wrong" instead of optimizing "what's right," which makes strengths-based leadership a rare quality. It's the companies with the perspective and the will to concentrate on opportunities instead of problems that produce the most innovative new products and services.

The misguided pursuit of across-the-board excellence

The idea of a “balanced company” that’s good at everything is no more realistic than a balanced employee who’s good at everything. As strategy practitioners Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi observe, management teams in most firms are almost always fixated on addressing too many objectives. “It is all too easy to continually shift your focus—to deal with exigencies and never quite build the capabilities you need,” they note. “You gain a right to play in many markets, but a right to win in none.”

After decades of social science studies on the subject, it’s now understood and accepted that changing the basic habits of working professionals is infernally difficult if not impossible. As adult humans, we are pretty much who we are, and even the most fervent coaching is likely to produce only a modest change in daily behaviors. Experience has shown that the same is largely true for companies and their cultures. 

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t address serious violations of company policy or inappropriate personal behavior. It’s just that we expend so much of our energy on “problem people” and “problem clients” that we leave no time for business model innovation, development of new services, or creation of new competencies.

Capitalizing on strengths to develop new competencies does not mean importing capabilities that already exist elsewhere. Copying is easy. In professional services, it mostly just involves hiring the necessary talent from another firm.   Copying only keeps you at parity, which is likely not your long-term ambition. 

So many opportunities, so little time

Innovation — true innovation — requires initiative and hustle. It also requires the kind of dedicated time that most professional managers seem to lack. The place to find the time is in Drucker’s admonition to “starve the problems.” Firefighting isn’t leadership.

If you only offer services that clients need today, you’re pursuing a strategy rooted in the present and the past, but not one that will take you successfully — and profitability — into the future. We need to embrace and celebrate the areas where our company excels and use these strengths as the proving ground where we can develop, test, and deploy new offerings and competencies. By obsessing over opportunities instead of problems, we’re able to march upstream in the value chain, anticipating the unmet and unsatisfied needs of our clients.

Contrast this with the luckless approach of the majority of firms who feed their revenue machines from the opposite end of the spectrum: by offering overdeveloped services that are widely available from a variety of other sources. If this is the approach you’ve chosen — consciously or otherwise — you’ll need to retool your firm in the shape of a low-cost provider, because that’s what wins in perfectly competitive markets.

But assuming that’s not where you want to play, you must proactively invest your time and energy in developing and delivering high-value offerings in specific markets where you can create uncontested value. This is the “blue ocean” where no one else is sailing. 

Strengths are everything

There’s a reason we’ve never heard the phrase, “Leverage your weaknesses.” Instead, the advice of people who have studied organizational behavior encourages us to “Make the most of our company’s strengths and neutralize its weaknesses.” Weaknesses contribute nothing to your organization; only strengths do, so ask your strengths to contribute even more.

Remember that the success you’re enjoying today is largely the result of yesterday’s investments. The most powerful predictor of tomorrow’s success is a mindset that is centered on your strengths and opportunities, not your weaknesses and problems.

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Tim Williams leads Ignition Consulting Group, an international consultancy that advises professional service firms in the areas of business strategy and revenue models. Tim is the author of several books, including "Positioning for Professionals: How Professional Service Firms Can Differentiate Their Way to Success." Tim also writes a monthly blog, Propulsion, and shares insights on Twitter @TimWilliamsICG.