Strategic Value: What Do You Bring To The Table?

A few months ago I started using the tagline ‘solves the tough[est] prob­lems’. The use of a brand­ing tagline is not the story. Com­pa­nies have been at this for cen­turies and peo­ple have earned them since the begin­ning of time… think John the Great. What inter­ested me dur­ing the devel­op­ment  and test­ing process was how peo­ple grav­i­tated towards ver­sions that included a ‘pro­vide answers’ aspect. This isn’t shock­ing for every­body wants answers — often ‘the’ magic answer — to their prob­lems. So much so that it is busi­ness ten­ant num­ber one, fill a market’s need or solve it’s problem.

Design think­ing… what is that?

The value behind an answer is the sys­tem­atic approach used to iden­tify the solu­tion, like design think­ing.  Design think­ing con­sists of four key elements:

1. defin­ing the right prob­lem to solve
2. cre­ate and con­sider many options
3. embraced a promis­ing hand­ful of promis­ing and give them the chance to grow, no mat­ter how obvi­ous the solu­tion may seem
4. pick the win­ner, execute

The Secret Sauce

This sug­gests that instead of the wor­ry­ing over the right answer one should be focused on ask­ing the right ques­tions. Answers, in iso­la­tion, are rigid. Ques­tions, or more pre­cisely a process of using key ques­tions to pro­duce answers, is an approach that can yield the right answer no mat­ter the cur­rent environment.

5 Sec­ond Pitch

So does this mean that when peo­ple ask me what I do I’ll launch into my solu­tion process talk­ing about busi­ness mod­els and how I help orga­ni­za­tions exploit their assets? Not on your life, I tell them the value I bring and to whom…create mean­ing­ful results for media and enter­tain­ment con­cerns who have to nav­i­gate dis­rup­tion and want to turn­ing change into oppor­tu­nity. How­ever, don’t rule out ‘ask the tough ques­tions’. Irre­gard­less of what­ever five sec­ond flash head­line I give, as a con­ver­sa­tion matures peo­ple find com­fort in know­ing that there is sub­stance behind the glitz.