Piccadilly Circus at one time was the most famous address of a spy organization in the world, leading to the building housing the secret military intelligence unit to be nicknamed ‘The Circus.’
Today they no longer perform those duties from that building, and yet old hands in the intelligence community will still occasionally refer to the industry of spying as being a ‘circus’ complete with high intensity performance artists, dangerous beasts, and ring masters guiding your attention wherever they deem it necessary to.
The modern spy world is very different than it was back in the fictional days of James bond, of course. Technology has made the job of human intelligence gathering considerably more challenging, and also considerably more vital. After all, it’s relatively easy to overwhelm someone with bad intelligence as much as it is to accidentally provide them with treasure troves of valuable intelligence in databases and cloud accounts.
In business, there are very similar issues that we face as well. Top-heavy, often nepotistic bureaucracies, frequently disconnected from the work being done, assign metrics of achievement goals that relate poorly, if at all to the true objectives of the work that is assigned to accomplishing them. Those metrics and objectives are often based on either very bad intelligence/information and data, or they are based on established metrics originally designed by 1st generation leaders or consultants that no longer relate to the work as it has evolved over time. It’s the best they knew at the time, but though they now use totally different work flows, technologies, and relationships, the same metrics that were originally a ‘make-do’ scenario never evolved with the work and the people doing it.
When you look to the competitive environment, the same thing is true. What you think you’re measuring often has little direct value to how you can compete better, and ultimately often results in self-destructive competitive initiatives more often than productive and helpful ones.
Truly competitive organizations track industry standard metrics, but they definitely go considerably farther than that by identifying metrics that modern organizations in their industry and with their competitive advantages and disadvantages would really want to know.
You can always compare your total sales to someone else, but are you comparing your percentage growth rates of your market share of your Avatar Clients or are you comparing sales in aggregate? Honestly you don’t care about the aggregate numbers; what you care about is your growth rate in adding and retaining your Avatar Customer Base because they’re the people who cost you the least to keep them happy and who are most likely to keep buying from you in the future.
You can measure your projects by thousands of dimensions, but which ones will truly tell you what you need to know to manage them better and get better results time after time? I promise you, the industry standard metrics will not do that as well as custom tailored metrics for your teams and projects.
How do you then compare your results to industry standards? How do you compare your results to your competitors? Should you even try?
These kinds of questions are precisely what transformational organizations do well, adapting to what their markets’ needs, demands, and constraints actually are instead of what institutional investors use to line their bird cages with.
That’s why it’s a ‘Circus’ in search of a Ring Master who can help you avoid the traps and pitfalls, and transform your organization into the adaptive, insightful, and innovative organization it needs to be to survive, thrive, continuously keep growing.
Chris Cayer has over 30 years of experience in working as a Competitive Intelligence Specialist working for Fortune 50s to Fortune 5 Million size organizations, individuals, and governments, helping them avoid calamities, recover from disasters, and transform their worst challenges into their most exciting opportunities. His strong suit is in transformational innovation, leading teams to challenge their understanding of a situation and leverage resources they didn’t recognize they had access to so they can turn potential and current disasters into active achievements that drive successful long term results.
Chris Cayer is building new organizations with new leadership that are designed specifically to help transform your business or organization into stronger, more innovative, and more adaptable entities that not just respond but lead market and industry trends through applying better intelligence, metrics, planning, and execution at every leadership level in your organization. If your Circus needs a new Ring Master, this is definitely the program for you.
- The Ring Master Program
- Circus Definition
- Circus Investigation
- Circus Intervention
- Circus Design
- Circus Management
- Circus Innovation Development
- Ring Implementation Squads & Ring Retention Program.