Alan Mulally turned around Ford from losing $17B in 2006 to being the #2 car manufacturing company by 2014. One of the key things he did was to jettison, Jaguar, Aston Martin, Volvo, Land Rover as this expansion of breadth violated the original vision and strategy to democratize the automobile. Subsequently and paradoxically, Ford chose to do less and grew substantially and profitably because of it.
Lou Gerstner did something similar when he turned around IBM. He sold off the PC business among other things to focus on being a consulting company.
Steve Jobs did the same with Apple 2.0. He cut the nearly two dozen product lines down to 4 on their way to becoming the first trillion-dollar company.
What do all of these have in common?
Each reduced the “and” for growth – choosing to do less in order to be more. Improbably, each of these focused strategies of shedding revenue-generating business lines spurred unprecedented growth for each organization.
It is a siren song of growth to do more things in order to grow. The insidious result of this is that it often works in the short term reinforcing the behavior but over time these decisions slow the company down or worse.
“And” can be a trap when it comes to strategy. It paralyzes us. Focusing on what you can’t have versus what you are building. These seemingly intelligent decisions at the time can slow or stop progress.
It also can cause you to build a camel – a horse built by committee – by adding many more features, etc. than are necessary for healthy and profitable growth.
You try to accommodate everyone versus delighting your most loyal and profitable customers. As I have written about before, your best customers are often 16X+ more valuable than the rest!
Here is a previous exercise I have shared to help you understand them better so you can sell more things to them and find more like them.
When it comes to strategy, choice is key and choosing what not do unlocks the door to profitable growth, engaged team members and delighted and profitable customers.