I recently attended a Masterclass with Steven Bartlett of the Diary of a CEO fame. He has actually been getting a bit of stick recently especially about some of the guests on the podcast, and particularly those relating to health claims. I must be honest and say I don’t really watch any of those relating to health or relationships, and only watch those relating to business, strategy and sport, and all of these I still find really insightful. During a few recent long car journeys, they have been very good to listen to because they are long form and up to a couple of hours long and so you get to hear much more of a detailed discussion, rather than just sound bites. The ones I’ve listened to recently include Daniel Priestley, Walter Isaacson and Daniel Ek.
Anyway, back to the business masterclass I attended that was all on message and business and strategy related, and I found it really interesting.
These are some of the points he made in his talk:
Some of the reasons businesses do not succeed include the following:
– The curse of the entrepreneur – death by opportunity and spreading time too thinly trying to work on every opportunity that presents itself
– Working ‘in’ the business and not ‘on’ the business
– Not properly understanding your target audience
-Trying to be all things to all people
-Not pricing correctly
-Lack of efficiency in the business
-Thinking too small – thinking as a small business, rather than a bigger business
- Steven referred several times to the book ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ by W.Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. Incidentally it is a book I am currently reading and will feature as a future book review. The book is all about operating in blue oceans with differentiation and creating new market spaces and demand. If you are operating in a red ocean you are competing on price and marketing in the same place, grabbing market share from each other and products just become commodities. I will report back with a full summary when I produce the book review.
- Look outside your industry for ideas. It is all too easy just to see what your industry is doing.
- Call out what you are ‘not’. You can’t be both Carlsberg and Brew Dog. You have to be one or the other.
- You are always in the recruitment business. Always be on the lookout for exceptional people.
- A players hire more A players, but C players hire more C players.
- Steven spoke about one of his interviews with Andrew Bustamante, who is an ex-CIA agent. He spoke about something called RICE when recruiting:
R = Reward – motivate through reward, i.e. the carrot
I = Ideology – values and beliefs
C = Coersion – the stick i.e. guilt, shame or threats – least effective methods
E = Ego – the image we hold of ourselves and that we project to others
- Beware giving yourself a label as it can become self-fulfilling.
- Increase the rate of experimentation. Kill the guessing. Bartlett hired a ‘Head of Failure’ to push more and more experiments. He sees the failure rate as simply your teams speed of learning and development. Therefore, track the number of experiments and do more of them.
- Sweat the small stuff. 1% marginal gains become huge and collectively these things matter. Empower people for the 1% gains.
- Make more decisions and make them quicker.
If you want to read more about Steven Bartlett and his business ideas and methods check out his books Happy Sexy Millionaire and The Diary of a CEO book.