What is Progress? Every month or so, I like to share interesting things about strategy and innovation. I hope you will like this issue and learn something new and useful.
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1. Marketing & Strategy 🚀
Hot off the press: The Opportunity Lenses
What's new: Finally, after 500+ days of work, the Opportunity Lenses is available in pre-release!
What is it about? When we want to start a new venture or grow an existing company, we make the mistake to look for **ideas**. But what’s really important is the **opportunity**. In The Opportunity Lenses, I address this issue and shares useful tools (the lenses) to spot and select your next big business opportunity.
What’s up: Procrastination is our great capacity at putting off something until later.
Urgent vs. Important: It’s inherent to every long-term meaningful undertaking. We have this (often useful) ability to prioritise what feels urgent over what’s important. I can’t count the number of times when it felt more pressing to answer my emails rather than continue to write The Opportunity Lenses (or this newsletter).
Avoiding: Coach Greg Faxon calls it “creative avoidance”. With that phrase, he makes the useful distinction between simply being distracted and avoiding creative tasks because of this internal discomfort generated by the act of creating something new.
The theory: In the 1960s, Theodore Levitt, a professor at Harvard Business School, shared a theory that he called “marketing myopia”. He unveiled how too many companies define themselves through their product category rather than the needs and desires they serve. It’s one of the theories I built upon in The Value Mix.
An example: Theodore Levitt demonstrated how major railway companies missed on big opportunities (e.g., buses, cars, and trucking) due to their total focus on trains, not transportation.
A great read: What Is an Entertainment Company in 2021 and Why Does the Answer Matter? This is a long article that dives into the future of that industry. It explains why distinguishing among movie, comics, toy, and video game companies isn’t a good idea. And it shows the implications of a bad sequel strategy for such companies.
A quote: “At its core, an entertainment business does only three things:
- Create/tell stories
- Build love for those stories
- Monetize that love”
What quotes are for: Quotes are powerful statements that capture some insight of life. They’re useful to emphasise a point or let your readers ponder. They can also be a great starter for discussion. We often use quotes in presentations, articles, and books.
What's the issue? If you’re not new to these columns, you know my cautiousness regarding misinformation. One of the most commonly spread kinds of misinformation is quotes.
Yep. There are two kinds of falseness: fake quotes and misattributed quotes. Either the whole thing is fake. Or someone got the author wrong.
A solution! When in doubt, there’s a place where I go for veracity check: Quote Investigator (QI). The team at QI does a great job at researching the origin and sources of quotes. Besides making sure that a quote is true, I sometimes browse their content. I find their investigation process interesting to observe.
Another project:
I recently launched Double-clic sur la Mode, a French podcast about how the behind the scene of the fashion world and how it has been transformed over the last decade.
If you want to read previous issues of Progress, click here.
What this is: Progress is a monthly newsletter about strategy and innovation.
It's sharp. I try to keep it as thought-provoking and concrete as possible.
Hot off the press: The Opportunity Lenses
What is it about? When we want to start a new venture or grow an existing company, we make the mistake to look for **ideas**. But what’s really important is the **opportunity**. In The Opportunity Lenses, I address this issue and shares useful tools (the lenses) to spot and select your next big business opportunity.What's new: Finally, after 500+ days of work, the Opportunity Lenses is available in pre-release!
Where to find it: Leanpub (Kindle, epub, and PDF) – Apple iBook – Kobo