Enabling Yes

Businesses that thrive lead, not follow. I believe it was Wayne Gretzky who espoused the notion that you need to focus on where the puck is going to be, not where it is in this moment. This is great advice in business as well.

I attended an off-site retreat with a client in Canada this past week. It struck me that one of the great challenges for a company on the way up in the world is to enable “yes.”

Enabling “yes” means being able to support the range of use cases across the entire value chain, not just subsets of that value chain. You don’t want a client to think “this is it–this is all they do. We’ll have to develop or find another solution for this use case.”

It is not necessary to support the entire value chain on day one. It is, however, critical to validate the customer need through on-going dialog and then, if and when it makes business sense, extend your solution if that is what your customers are going to need.

Thought for the week:

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.” –Steve Jobs