Search, Seek, or Stalk – How Do You Find Growth?

Search, Seek, or Stalk – How Do You Find Growth?

Growth is the lifeblood of any organization, and the quest for growth opportunities is not just a strategic imperative. It is a fundamental necessity because the ability to identify and capitalize on opportunities is a game-changer for companies wanting to achieve sustainable success and stay ahead of the competition. 

The challenge, however, is that not all opportunities are the same – some are head-smackingly obvious, while others are like trying to nail down JELL-O.  Yet companies take a “one size fits all” approach to finding, developing, and capitalizing on them.

SEARCH when need to transform

What do you do when you need information but don’t know precisely what you need and certainly don’t know where to find it? You Google it or, in less-branded terms, you search for it. 

When searching for growth opportunities, you’re looking for something but don’t know exactly what you need or where you’ll find it.  Finding opportunities requires you to go beyond traditional market analysis and adopt a learner’s mindset to see ways to disrupt the status quo, challenge existing paradigms, and create new value propositions for your customers.

Searching is a creative process that entails investing in R&D, fostering a culture of intrapreneurship, and experimenting with new technologies. It requires a culture of creativity, experimentation, and agility to adapt to changing market dynamics.  You have to be willing to be wrong on your way to being right, to move slowly so you can act quickly, and to throw out the timeline to harness the game-changing opportunity.

SEEK when you need to innovate

What do you do when you know what you need and generally where to find it?  You seek it out – you go to where you think it will be, and, on the off-chance it’s not there, you pivot to Option B.

When you’re seeking growth opportunities, you have a target in mind but are not 100% sure how to hit it.  Maybe you know you want to enter a new geography, but you need to figure out how to do it successfully and avoid the mistakes of previous entrants.  Maybe it’s a new industry or category, but you must understand if and how to do it without disrupting your existing business model.

Seeking is both creative and analytical.  You look for data and market intelligence, interview experts and individuals, analyze industry trends and explore untapped segments. It also requires you to stay open to surprises and new possibilities and take calculated risks to capitalize on emerging trends or consumer preferences.  Like searching, it requires patience.  Unlike searching, it respects a deadline.

STALK when you need to improve

Just like a lioness stalking a wildebeest, you do this when you see an opportunity and know exactly how to capture it. Yes, there will be zigs and zags along the way, and an unexpected competitor may pop up. But this is who you are and what you do. 

When stalking opportunities, you bring the full value and power of your experience, expertise, resources, and capabilities to bear on an opportunity.  This may happen when you’re operating and improving your core business.  It may also occur after you’ve searched (and found) an opportunity, sought (and decided on) a strategy, and now you have the confidence to launch and scale.

Do Your Approaches Align with Your Goals?

Most companies say that they want to transform. Still, very few have the patience or intestinal fortitude to search because there is no Google for Transformation that produces the exact plan you need to transform successfully.

Companies also tend to stalk when they want to innovate, leaving opportunities to change the game and build sustainable competitive advantage on the sideline because they’re too uncertain or take too long.

Growth requires all three approaches – search, seek, and stalk – but only happens when your chosen approach aligns with your goals.

5 Lessons from the Death of the Apple Car

5 Lessons from the Death of the Apple Car

In 2014, rumors started to circulate that Apple was developing a self-driving autonomous car to compete with Tesla.  At the end of February 2024, rumors circulated that Apple was shutting down “Project Titan,” its car program. According to multiple media outlets, the only logical conclusion from the project’s death is that this decision signals the beginning of the end of Apple.

As much as I enjoy hyperbole and unnecessary drama, the truth is far more mundane.

The decision was just another day in the life of an innovation.

As always, there is a silver lining to this car-shaped cloud: the lessons we can learn from Apple’s efforts.

Lesson 1: Innovation isn’t all rainbows and unicorns

People think innovation is fun.  It is.  It is also gut-wrenching, frustrating, and infuriating.  Doing something new requires taking risks, which is uncomfortable for most people.  Even more challenging is that, more often than not, when you take a risk, you “fail.” (if you learned something, you didn’t fail, but that’s another article). 

What you can do: Focus on the good stuff – moments of discovery, adventures when experimenting, signs that you’re making life better for others – but don’t forget that you’re defying the odds.

Lesson 2: More does not mean success

It’s been reported that Apple spent over ten billion dollars on Project Titan and that over 2000 people were working on it before it was canceled. With a market cap of over two trillion dollars, a billion dollars a year isn’t even a rounding error. But it’s still an eye-popping number, which makes Apple’s decision to cut its losses downright courageous.

What you can do: Be on guard for the sunk-cost fallacy.  It’s easy to believe that you’ll eventually succeed if you keep working and pouring resources into a project.  That’s not true, as Apple experienced.  And in the rare cases when it is, executives are often left wondering if the success was worth the cost.

Lesson 3: Pivot based on data, not opinions

At least four different executives led Project Titan during its decade in development, and each leader brought their own vision for what the Apple Car should be.  First, it was an electric vehicle with driver assistance that would compete with Tesla.  Next, it was a self-driving car to compete with Google’s WayMo.  Then, plans for fully autonomous driving were canceled. Finally, the team returned to its original target of matching Tesla’s Level 2 automation.  

Changes in project objectives, strategies, and execution plans are necessary for innovation, so there’s nothing obviously wrong with these pivots.  But the fact that they tended to happen when a new leader was appointed (and that Jony Ive caused an 18-month hiring freeze simply by expressing “displeasure”) makes me question how data-based these pivots actually were

What you can do: Be willing to change but have a high standard for what is required to cause a change.  Data, even qualitative and anecdotal data, should be seriously considered.  The opinion of a single executive, not so much.

Lesson 4: Dream big, build small

Apple certainly dreamed big with its aspirations to build a fully semi-autonomous vehicle and it poured billions into developing and testing the sensors, batteries, and partnership required to make it a reality.  But it was never all-or-nothing in its pursuit of the automotive industry.  Apple introduced CarPlay the same year it kicked off Project Titan, and it continues to offer regular updates to the system.  Car Key was announced in 2020 and is now offered by BMW, Genesis, Hyundai, and Kia.

What you can do: Take a portfolio approach towards your overall innovation portfolio (Apple kept working on the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro) and within each project.  It’s not unusual that a part of the project turns out to be more valuable than the whole project.

Lesson 5: ___________________________

Yes, that is a fill-in-the-blank because I want to hear from you. What lesson are you taking away from Project Titan’s demise, and how will it make you a better innovator?

The Positive Power of ‘Negative’ Emotions in Driving Change

The Positive Power of ‘Negative’ Emotions in Driving Change

You want to make life better for others. This desire is reflected in the optimism and positivity of your language – create value, love the problem, and delight the customer.  But making life better requires change, and, as the adage goes, “People want change, but they don’t want to be changed.”

You are confident that the solution you created will make life better and that the change people need to make is quite small and painless, well worth the dramatic improvement you offer.  Yet they resist.  No amount of explaining, showing, convincing, or cajoling changes their mind.  What else can you do?

To quote Darth Vader, “Give yourself to the Dark Side.  It is the only way to save your friends.”

“If only you knew the power of the Dark Side…”

The Dark Side is populated by “negative” emotions like anger, fear, and frustration, which are incredibly powerful.

Consider that:

Unfortunately, these are also some of the first emotions experienced when confronting change.   

Change requires people to let go of what they know in exchange for the promise of something better.  This immediately triggers Loss Aversion, the cognitive bias in which the pain of losing is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining. 

As a result, people won’t let go of what they know until the pain of holding on becomes unbearable.  When you point out the problems and pain of the current situation, you help people understand and experience the unbearableness of the current situation. 

“Anger, fear, aggression; the Dark Side of the Force are they”

Not every “negative” emotion elicits the same behavior, so carefully choose the one to tap into.

Fear motivates people to seek safety, which can be good if your solution truly offers a safer alternative.  It’s a motivator used well by companies such as Volvo, SimpliSafe, and Graco.  But lean on it too much, and people may feel overwhelmed and remain frozen to the status quo.

Anger motivates people to take risks, which can be good when the change requires bold decisions and dogged persistence.  It can be great when it bonds people together to achieve a shared goal or protect a common value.  Apple used this emotion to brilliant effect in its famous “1984” commercial announcing the launch of Macintosh.  But incite too much anger, and things can get broken and not in a helpful way like Apple’s ad.

Frustration, one of the emotions that often drives aggression, is anger’s polite little sister.  When people feel frustrated, they’re likely to act, persistently pursue solutions, and creatively approach and overcome obstacles.  But if the change is big, feels scary, and puts their sense of self at risk, frustration isn’t powerful enough to convince people to let go of the old and embrace the new.

“If you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.”

Yoda is incredibly wise, but he gets this one wrong.  Using the Dark Side to speak to people’s “negative” emotions doesn’t doom you to a life or career of fear-mongering or inciting violence.  Start here, don’t stay here.

Multiple research studies show that positive emotions, like hope and joy, are more powerful than negative ones in maintaining motivation and even enable more creative thinking and problem-solving.  By speaking to both negative and positive emotions, the Dark Side and the Light, you enable change by giving people a reason to let go of the past and a future worth reaching for.

When people stop resisting and start reaching to the future you’re offering, change happens, and you realize that Yoda was right, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.”