I have been a follower of Simon Sinek for many years and make a regular habit of watching his TED Talks and lectures. One of his most famous talks focuses on the premise that “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”. As I watched this video, several times; I was curious as to how this applied to my my work. I spent many sleepless nights thinking about this concept and trying to really define what “I believe” and how that drives me in my approach to innovation. I was able to narrow my “Why” into three specific beliefs that I have about my approach to business:
I believe data is the most important asset of every business.
Often times businesses neglect one of the most important assets they have at their fingertips – their data. Data provides the business with all the information about their sales, customers, demographics, trends, financials, what works and what doesn’t. Without proper ingest, storage, security, analysis, visualization and eventual purging; this data is an opportunity lost.
I believe that business is most successful when it can spend as much of its time and resources focusing on its core business.
Whether you are a product or service oriented business, it is important to your business and its future that you focus your efforts on your core business and not on ancillary functions. In today’s “Everything as a Service” economy, you should be looking at your non-core functions as a commodity and consume them as such. At the end of the day, that function is someone else’s core business and they can do it better, faster and more cost effective than you can.
I believe that innovation is the catalyst for growth and success.
Every business is only as successful as the product or service they offer. Every one of your competitors is working every single day to take away your market share and to make their product or service better that yours. Innovation is the engine of relevance and long term viability. In today’s technology driven economy, those who innovate achieve and those who don’t stagnate.
Innovation requires more than just taking an idea from concept to market, it requires an understanding of the customer and how they would benefit from using your product or service. Likewise, selling a product or services requires more than just telling the customer what it does and how it works. Understanding and being able to effectively communicate the “Why” is often the most important selling point.
Have you thought about your “Why?” It’s a great exercise in thinking about your business in a new way.