In 2018, Only The Paranoid Will Survive

"Be The Wall Breaker, Not The Wall Broken."

Creative disruption initiated inside your business is the fastest gateway to competitive advantage on the outside. Aggressive internal disruption must be declared and heavily focused on accelerating consumer consumption for your brand, products and services. It must be designed to unshackle sleepy business assets to fuel forecasts. It must also ensure increases in productivity will deliver increases in profitability realizing new market opportunities. New market growth is always achievable.

From experience, positive tension through business hallways is in itself market muscle. To unleash creative disruption for any product or market category we must start with smart destruction and reconstruction of our own internal disadvantages. Call me a business paranoid, or perhaps just call me an aggressive market survivor, but frankly, I admire successful paranoid market leaders. Surely it is the fear of losing that drives their determination to win; to break through the torrid competitive walls of market opportunity. They break it down just to build it back up. Just to gain profitable market share. Just to ensure their refulgent team will win again and again.

If you do not have a competitor, consider inventing one immediately. Perhaps create a new sub-brand designed to compete with your own core offering. This tactic can open viable opportunities for market expansion, and also opportunities to deliver a two brand “choice not chance” strategy. If you already have several formidable competitors, I suggest you first attack and potentially reconstruct internal tactics before you attack externally in the market. Always go on the offense, internally and externally.

I strongly believe that if we are not forcing our own obsolescence, our competition is doing it for us. As both risk and opportunity never sleep, this applies whether you’re a manufacturer, retailer or distributor. Paranoia, our most viable competitive weapon, takes on greater meaning as we collectively troll through the rough-and-tumble, ever-commoditizing CE business.

With smart paranoia powering our demand to succeed, here are seven simple principles designed to engage, disrupt and compete effectively:

1) Study your competitors’ advantages to prevent your disadvantages and to build your advantages.

2) Establish a disruptive “war room” to dissect and evaluate every significant touch point of your competition and of your own internal team.

3) Attacking yourself, not your competition, is your best defensive strategy. It also ensures your potential fear of losing becomes your tested reality based upon the dignity of knowledge for the right strategy and tactics for winning.

4) Consider that only the market leader can play defense. Develop a strong formidable and highly creative offense.

5) Establish and share impactful, relevant knowledge. Be sure to relate, debate and smartly inflate these insights to your team, to your customers, to all and any who can help support your most important quest to become the market leader.

6) Treat your customers as you wish to be treated. They will, in turn, treat you with the reward you seek: profitable market growth.

7) Breath and promulgate robust, impactful creativity across every touch point of your business, across every department, work group: across your enterprise.

Business paranoia ensures your company will be the “wall breaker” as opposed to the “wall broken.” It defines and enlists tectonic foundations that can out muscle competitors’ profitable intentions. These principles may demand change in your team’s focus, operational charters, but is worth the disruptive effort. Engage and audit these principles inside your organization and then prosper from the impact of your team’s knowledge and determination to break through your competitors’ granite walls.

"Remember, in business, only the paranoid survive."

Peter is the author of Green Reign Leadership