The Business Brickyard

A recent print ad for IBM Business consulting asks 3 questions in the voice of a business CEO/owner?:

"How can we be an agent, not its victim?"

"How can we spur innovation to create true differentiation?"

All excellent questions.

It finishes with the tagline: "The Other IBM" and a mention of what they do for Procter & Gamble and Credit Suisse. You lost me at P&G.

Any company that can afford to buy from IBM already knows they are on the short list of consultants to call.

The constant refrain I hear from almost every business owner I meet is "Get us to the next level."

Ah.. the illusive "Next Level" and the very real feeling of stuck.

What it means is different for every business but many of the factors that block reaching it are surprisingly the same.

The answer, as usual, is not some "magic bullet." Instead, the elements that had fueled earlier growth have run out or been forgotten. The business has hit a wall. Your Business has Bonked.

Somewhere in your business life someone told you that you had to use a PowerPoint for every presentation. Despite efforts from many to help you make them better by making them shorter and more interesting, 98% of them are unbearably boring to watch and even more painful to create (Not a coincidence).

So rather than try to slightly improve the genre, how about taking a look at an approach that turns the idea of a "supporting visual" on its head?

The late, great Johnny Carson once said about comedy... "If you buy the premise..you buy the bit."

It seems to me that when you dig all the way down, so much of the discussion on sales, marketing, buzz, tipping points, etc.. come down to figuring out a highly efficient way for people "buy the premise."

The key is to hone that premise so that it allows people to buy into it as personally, quickly and easily as possible.

Imagine if a comedian opened his routine with the equivalent of...

-A 40 slide PowerPoint or

Ideas pouring in from every direction, internal/external problems to solve, the drive home filled with ideas/plans and a continual burning sensation that you should be doing more things to grow the business.

Every business owner (including me), at some point, has had all or most of these feelings. It always reminds me of that circus act where a clown is spinning plates. He has to give each one just enough attention so they all stay spinning. Not a lot of progress...Just nothing dropping. Sound familiar?