General George Patton said, "Wars are not won by fighting battles: Wars are won by choosing battles." Thus highly successful people choose the areas of their expertise very carefully. The best performers channel their energy into the events that matter the most. For instance, in 2002, Lance Armstrong decided to stop racing in the U.S. – except for one or two special events. Also, Tiger Woods plays fewer tournaments over the course of the year than his PGA brethren and previous champions such as Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus.
Ones area of expertise need not be confined to narrow niches or focus on arcane issues. Some of the most successful people have carved our lucrative careers adding insights into the epicenter of the convergence of two large fields of pursuit. For example, some of the people we work with are experts in evaluating intellectual property in the context of mergers and acquisitions. Others help private equity funds manage and monetize the real estate involved in the companies that they acquire.
Whatever area of expertise you choose, you must make sure that your angle is timely and adds value to the furtherance of your clients’ goals. You cannot build a successful business on the kindness of others. Your service must be economically compelling for your clients. It is more important that the value proposition of your service yield the client profit than how competitively priced your service is against the competition. The better job you can do with differentiating your product, the less price erosion you will face. The economic rule is more powerful than the rule of law. If your service does not provide demonstrable value to the client, you will encounter problems collecting receivables.
Some of the criteria that enable successful people to find the right battles to fight include:
- You must enjoy the field of endeavor you choose. You will spend the majority of your waking hours pursuing your chosen profession. People who enjoy their work will be much more enthusiastic about it and confident in themselves. This enthusiasm and confidence will be detectable by potential clients. Your belief in yourself will spread to potential clients. According to some surveys, extraordinarily successful executives lead careers that fully leverage both their strengths and their passions more than six times as often as the average employee.
- Be prepared. Louis Pasteur famously remarked that “in the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.”
- Keep an open mind.
- Stay inquisitive, informed and know where to look for new ideas.
- Maintain broad, diverse circles of personal and professional relationships and respect the power of weak links. Weak links are relationships that you have with people on the periphery of your sphere of activity. The thinking is that the key players in any particular field are over-prospected. However, people on the periphery may have a greater need for the services you provide and may be able to introduce you to networks of people with whom you have not already been in contact.
- Trust your emotions and your instincts. People with many years of experience in an activity, do develop gut instincts. For example, baseball and tennis players cannot see the balls pitched and served to them when they are traveling at well over 100 miles an hour. However, they are still successful in making hits and returning serves. In many professions - such as futures trading, police and fire fighting work - there is simply not enough time to ponder every action.
Akio Morita, chairman and co-founder of Sony Corporation discussed how he made the decision whether or not to go into production with a new product concept. Akio has his designers and engineers make a presentation to him, and then he would go home and go to sleep. If he woke up the next morning and felt good, the product was a go. If his stomach was upset when he awoke, it was a sign to him that his gut was saying “abort”.
Akio’s track record was commendable. Between 1950 and 19080, Sony introduced many new products that were disruptive innovations, such as TVs, portable radios, VCRs, and the Walkman. Sony became an industry leader, and in many product categories managed to dethrone existing industry powerhouses.
Yet in the 1980s, things changed dramatically. Between 1980 and 1997 Sony did not introduce a single disruptive innovation. They continued to offer improvements to their existing products, but these were mostly styling and design innovations rather than disruptive technological innovations.
What changed was that in the 1980s, Akio withdrew from active management in order to become involved in Japanese politics. The company began to hire marketing and product-planning professionals who brought with them data-intensive, analytical processes for doing market research.
- Strategy should always be based on serving customers, not on defeating the competition.
- Internal battles should always be fought against a process, never against an individual. You may need that individual as an ally on another matter. You may also report to that individual later.
There should always be probing, researching and experimentation in the attempt to find new lucrative niches of opportunity. When deciding whether or not to develop a particular expertise or to engage in a particular business deal, you should consider the difficulty of extricating yourself from such endeavor. If you are merely spending a few weekends researching an idea, deciding not to pursue it will not entail significant termination costs. However, if you forge a partnership with other companies, it could be very expensive to abandon such venture. As Warren Buffett prophetically said, "It is easier to stay out of trouble than it is to get out of trouble." Nevertheless, when you are in a hole with no prospects for recovery, you should extricate yourself as soon as possible. While the action of removing yourself from a situation to which you have committed can be embarassing, you will have to make the decision at some point anyway. The sooner the decision is made, the less loss you will absorb.
Do not feel compelled to provide grovelling customer service as a matter of policy. Some customers will take advantage of your efforts to provide good service. In cases where they receive your products and services (such as buying dresses at department stores and then returning them after they are worn at a formal event) without paying for them is still a form of stealing. Some customers are so contentious that they are not worth pursuing. Simply ignore the 2% to 3% of humanity that will never be happy. These people are not worth turning into customers.
