There is no set formula for a company to win in the market. Luck is always a factor. Nothing worth doing rarely goes as planned. This is especially true when it comes to your offerings. On the other hand, there is a set formula for failure. It’s when you ignore what matters. The worst thing you can do is to not focus on what matters most right now.
An offering is a product, service or a combination of both that you choose to sell in a market. In other words, an offering is a solution that you sell to a type of customer, in a region against the competing choices. There is always another choice to what you chose to sell. Customers will pay for what you sell or they won’t. It’s that simple. The brutal truth is that most offerings will fail. You can’t just want to survive. You need to focus on both value creation and success to win. If you don’t play the game to win, why are you playing?
If you do not see, share and do what matters right now. Then you can not create value and succeed. You must focus on the need to get the right things done now. You must adapt.
Offering Focus is different than strategy. It’s not long term planing. It is about getting you to see, share and do what matters the most right now. It is about you having an offering that creates value and succeeds. This is the end game for any leader that wants to win.
Focus means that you commit to see, share and do what matters most right now. With focus you prioritize what matters and ignore what doesn’t. When you don’t have focus, you lose track of what is in front of you. Without focus you can’t create value and succeed.
‘Know thyself’ only makes sense when you can see, share and do what matters. If you think you can see what matters but can’t share it with the people that matter and do something about it, it’s useless. The more you see, the more you see what you don’t know.
It’s hard to win with your offering if you don’t think things through. First, you have to see that your offering is the atomic unit of value creation and success. Next, you need to be able share what you see with the people that matter most. Then you need to commit to do what matters right now. It is an adaptive loop. You need to believe to achieve. It is not true that believing is just seeing. Believing is seeing, sharing and doing what matters right now.
Other people often know more about what is going in your your head than you do. This means that clarity can only exist when you have a consensus with the people that matter.
You need to have a clear mental picture of how your offering will win. This is the only way that you can consistently create value and succeed. When you can clearly see how your offering will win, you can share that picture. Then you will do what matters most right now.
Focus provides you with a clear picture. A picture of what is important, what you need to share and what you need to do now. With focus, you will see, share and do what matters as well as ignore what doesn’t. It doesn’t matter if the picture is complete. It just needs to be coherent, communicable and actionable. An incomplete picture is better than nothing.
