EP198: Pruning the Unnecessary to Focus on Strengths

Corey and Chris continue their discussion about inertia and constraints. How can leaders identify hidden constraints shaping their strategy? What fosters innovation: centralization or decentralization? Can classic texts offer counter-cultural wisdom to elevate leadership today? Pulling insights from ancient to modern thinkers, Corey and Chris tackle these questions and more. They argue consolidation often hinders progress while decentralization promotes healthy competition. Chris advocates "divisionalizing" to optimize strategy. They explore conquering inertia, maximizing strengths by pruning the unnecessary and structuring for change. The curiosity continues in part two of this engaging conversation in this episode, "Pruning the Unnecessary to Focus on Strengths."

 

Full episode transcript below:

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There's been, yeah, I think with this concept of innovation in limitations, it leads to [00:33:00] I think a natural progression to the next piece that Rami had spoken about was finding customer limitations. And he had three, and you talked about one earlier that you find customer limitations through the customer eyes, through the market's eyes, and then through the product size. 

Corey Frank (00:33:22):

And so what are your thoughts on that? Because as a sales, a leader here and as an entrepreneur, [00:33:30] certainly sometimes, and he says in order too, it should be customer market and product. But as you know, and we've talked about many times too, Hey, I built the product so I'm going to start from the product. If I build it, they will come. Because many customers don't understand the limitations. They can't foresee the reality of a product without this limitation before connect and sell came around. Certainly folks didn't complain about [00:34:00] the real limitations because they didn't know a reality without the limitation of, wait, I just press a button and I don't have gatekeepers and everything else. Or the Henry Ford, if I asked the customer what they wanted, they'd all be still driving or still riding horses. So what do you think about that with customer market and product and as far as a blueprint, if you will, to find customer limitations for innovation? 

Chris Beall (00:34:26):

Well, I always think of it in terms of what's the unit of change? What's the cost of change? What's [00:34:30] the probability of change? So the unit of change, you got to know what's the unit of change. The customer got to change their mind, their business, their point of view, the value that they're hoping to get, what's going to change there? The market always interesting. The market is going to say, Hey, here's some alternatives. Here's ways of looking at this. Whatever my way is, they're going to have some other ones. So the unit of change is they don't go with me, they go with somebody else or they do [00:35:00] nothing. Which is the most common one. The product is the most interesting one in this regard. You can design products for change or you can design products for perfection, for great fit. And they're two different things. 

Chris Beall (00:35:14):

So the whole idea of software is so to speak, all software products are designed for change. This is why software is eating the world. You can do tricks with software. Think of the Tesla. Teslas download new software [00:35:30] all the time, and they keep getting smarter. It's not that the car was delivered to you smart. It's that the car's getting sitting out there charging in your garage right now. So Elon Musk identified a unit of change. It was super valuable, and customers are delighted in it because it's like, wow, look at that. Well, how does the car show that it's smart? It has a big whole screen and it can show you new things on it so it can make its new smartness obvious. [00:36:00] So designing for change is hard. Nobody in design classes teaches design for change. When you're writing code. Th