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Make Room for Innovation: “Kill Your Company”, with Lisa Bodell
A lot about what I talk about in Kill the Company…. We talk about getting rid of, and I think that can be a very positive and cathartic experience for people.
You can do it on an ongoing basis. There’s always a good time to get rid of, especially if you feel like your company is at a stalemate; it’s standing still; you’re not able to be very innovative; the culture is not very innovative. But it’s really powerful just before your annual strategic planning. Because what you’re doing is kind of cleaning house before you start adding on more. And what you do with Kill the Company is you get the heads of your business units and you break into small groups and you ask each of those groups to focus on who their number one competitor is. You can decide as a group how to do this or if you have a mixed group each table can decide, but you have to pick who your number one competitor is. That company that you envy the most or are most threatened by.
And then you actually start to take on that competitor’s persona and look back at your own company and try and kill it over the next 30 minutes. What you want to do is take a look at every part of your business and where it can be attacked. From procurement, from operations to the products to the management and figure out where are you weakest. And then what you do is in the second half hour or hour that you have, look at that list, pick your top five that you think are the most critical, important, easiest to do and turn them back onto your competitor. So what you’re doing is identifying your own weaknesses and figuring out how to get rid of those and then also figuring out how to turn them back onto your own competition. There’s ways that you can also organize the results you get from killing your company on a continuum from least likely to most likely to figure out what you should focus on first.