Don’t Focus On Your Product. Focus On This Instead To Get Results

Exponential growth is available to all of us in varying capacities. We don't get there by focusing on the product or service alone. To realize significant positive gain effectively and predictability, it requires a process. You might be inspired by the process (although you might not be). You might be confronted by the process (although you might not be that, either). But regardless of how you feel, it’s a way to deliver consistent results. 

We all go through cycles and processes in life. They’re all around us and we’re in the middle of them. Whether we’re present to it or not. There are big cycles of life and death. Day and night. Business cycles like paying people every two weeks or annual reviews every year. And even personally. Doing laundry every week. Brushing your teeth a few times a day (hopefully).

We either create or take part in these cycles all around us and these cycles make us who we are. In aggregate, they make us who our businesses are. What’s more, cycles are giving us the results that we have. If we want a significant positive gain, why wouldn’t we create a process to realize that??

Warren Buffett said: An idiot with a plan can beat a genius without a plan. Even better, an idiot with an innovation cycle will beat a genius with even the best idea. 

These cycles are observable inside any company and are what makes companies great. Or not. As cliche as it is, Amazon has made innovation, or maybe better said their innovation cycle infamous with their 5-page decisioning process. The details are less important than the fact that there is a declared process to create significant positive gain that they repeat. Everyone thinks it’s their technology that’s running the show. But it’s their innovation cycle that’s creating the observable result. 

If you’re watching a world-class athlete win a race, it’s easy to get enthralled with the result. If you wanted the same result, you wouldn’t just copy his shoes, jersey and haircut. That would be ridiculous. You’d get really interested in training methods, diets, coaches, etc. — the process to yield that result. 

As silly as it sounds, that’s how most businesses perform and it’s how we’re programmed to think. We see Google create a new functionality. Apple unveil the next great design. Our competitor come out with a new service. A neighbor see some success selling things online. And our immediate response is to copy. But when we back up, trying to copy their business is just as ridiculous as copying the runners shoes and haircut. We cannot just copy and paste something that’s not ours. If there’s anything to copy, it’s the system, the cycle, the structure or the process that yielded that result.

The truth is, just copying what someone else is doing isn’t really the game to play anyway. The game is to see what new value can be created and the continually refined process that gets you to ever-higher levels of delivering on that value. 

The ironic thing is that we’re all going through the same steps to create, we’re all human. We can observe those steps inside Amazon, your closest competitor and even inside of you. There’re the same steps that have given Amazon exponential growth and our clients 11x faster decision making. They’re also the same steps that have led to the last company to go bankrupt or your latest failure. Oftentimes we’re just not effectively articulating or using the steps. Or we skip pieces we're not even aware that we're skipping. 

By first articulating an improvement cycle (the innovation cycle) and then constantly re-evaluating, we can realize significant positive gain inside of anything. It’s not where your product or service starts that matters. It’s how does your innovation cycle works to get it to where it needs to be.