A major thought going through all entrepreneur’s minds right now is, “what is the best way to survive and flourish coming out of this lockdown?”
Well, it’s my opinion that reactionary marketing is never good for a business to create growth and especially to scale. Granted, right now it would be great to do a marketing campaign that could generate some quick financial wins for the business. And I believe now is the perfect time to do that WHILE you are building your company core values. I’ve talked to several of my clients about this right now: quick wins – let’s create a campaign with an offer to your current database, this saves on ad costs; core values – can get you, the business owner, and your team focused on the heart and meaning of why your business does what it does.
This is super powerful in getting you back on purpose, fired up with your passion to serve and help. Moving forward with focus around your passion versus the bottom line allows you, as Simon Sinek strives, to way up inspired, feel safe where you are, and end the day fulfilled by the work you did.
And companies with a sense of purpose, outperform others by 400%. You now have a message and a way of doing business that is unique to you and helps you stand out because these are your company core values – and these are something new customers/patients can relate to, get behind, and want to experience for themselves.
Simon Sinek, best known for his wildly popular 2009 TED Talk around being an inspirational leader by getting to your WHY, wrote a new book last year in October 2019. The new book is titled THE INFINITE GAME, and I find it powerfully motivating as the key mindset to push us up and out of this 2020 lockdown.
Below I have used his five short YouTube videos of The 5 Practices of The Infinite Game, to help you grasp the essence of this concept to ignite your spark to uncover your WHY and your passion to help create fulfilling success for your business… and your life.
Marketing has become about sound bites and taglines, and contagious platitudes. You can not build success on a platitude or a tagline. Consumers are hungry for authenticity and can pick out a fake immediately. There is no ‘tricking the system’ here, it’s about taking the time to go in deep and pull out those things that make your company, YOUR company. Doing this will beat out your competitors and attack the customers/patients that WANT what you have.
“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” – Simon Sinek
1 – JUST CAUSE. [3:25 mins] Here Simon states an organization must have a Cause so Just that their employees would be willing to sacrifice their own interests to advance it.
And this has nothing to do with the products you make or the services you sell.
2. TRUSTING TEAMS. [9:16 mins] He states; leaders are not responsible for results, they’re responsible for the people who are responsible for the results. We can all tell the difference when someone is being genuine or working on commission.
“Leadership is a lifestyle. And the purpose of that lifestyle is to produce teams that take care of each other, who love each other, and feel valued and valuable in the organization where they work.”
3 – WORTHY RIVAL. [5:03 mins] A worthy rival is another player in this infinite game that’s worthy of comparison. They are necessary because they help to reveal our weaknesses, which are opportunities to improve ourselves.
You get to pick your rivals, they don’t even have to be in the same industry. However they are people you respect, you don’t have to like them, but you respect that they are better at certain things than you are, which shows you where these opportunities are for improvement.
4 – EXISTENTIAL FLEXIBILITY. [6:19 mins] If you’re not willing to blow up your own company, the market will do it for you. You must have the capacity to make a profound strategic shift in order to advance your Cause. He shares a successful example with the MacIntosh Computer. And failure examples with Blockbuster and Kodak who insisted on playing with the Finite Mindset instead.
He’s not talking about shiny-object type changes or daily changes that happen to run the business. Simon is referring to major strategic changes that will advance your Cause. You must know your Cause first and this is also why it’s important to have Trusting Teams.
5 – COURAGE TO LEAD. [13:41 mins] To build and lead with an Infinite Mindset and to keep a Just Cause in mind as the guiding principle is unbelievably hard… because so many of the pressures are pushing us to make the short term, finite decisions.
Sometimes we are striving so hard to make those arbitrary month-end goals, we will abandon our values in order to make the sale. This is incredibly hard to retain this lifestyle of leadership, to create an environment in which our people can work at their natural best. It’s so much easier to hire and fire and drive the numbers.
He states an amazing example with CVS choosing to match their Just Cause of Helping people on their path to better health, and deciding to stop selling cigarettes costing them billions of dollars.
Business owners who embrace an Infinite Mindset are the ones who will lead the rest of us into the future.
As Simon started to understand the difference between finite and infinite games, he started to see that many of the struggles that organizations face exist simply because their leaders were playing with a finite mindset in an infinite game. These organizations tend to lag behind in innovation, discretionary effort, morale, and ultimately performance.
The leaders who embrace an infinite mindset, in stark contrast, build stronger, more innovative, more inspiring organizations. Their people trust each other and their leaders. They have the resilience to thrive in an ever-changing world, while their competitors fall by the wayside.
For you to rebuild a business that prospers beyond COVID and into the future, you will have to establish and commit to an Infinite Mindset Game. When you then strategically market this message correctly, you will far surpass your competition and create lifetime patients.