Be The Hunter: A Business Strategy For Exceptional
Your best strategy may be to just wait
“Let’s wait and see”.
Not the stuff of corporate slogans.
But it might be the shrewdest strategy you can execute.
In the summer of 1998, I asked Steve Jobs a question. I said, “Everything we know about the PC business says that Apple cannot really push beyond a small niche position. The network effects are just too strong to upset the Wintel* standard. So, what are you trying to do in the longer term? What is the strategy? In response, he just smiled and said, “I am going to wait for the next best thing.”
— Excerpt from The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
*(Microsoft Windows + Intel)
You aspire to be a category leader. You aspire to be exceptional.
(I like master investor Reese Duca’s definition of an exceptional business: a business that gets to a point decade after decade, where customers are fanatically reliant on what they deliver to them).
Your product and business teams are not idle or incapable. They’re talented. They’re busy. Tirelessly executing on products, partnerships, projects, initiatives, features, roadmaps. But all this hustle is not translating to leadership or exceptional.
You’re seeking different. You need to do something different.
You want to get off the treadmill of good enough.
So get off the treadmill.
And become the hunter. One with highly discerning taste.
This requires lying patiently in wait for extended periods of time. For exceptional or “the next best thing”. Not idly. But not by filling one’s time with average or slightly above average either.
Most companies and teams are incapable of this as their bias for action inevitably drives them to lots of (marginal) activity, to grab at what’s immediately in sight.
The discerning hunter channels this bias very differently. By freeing space and time — to observe, study, analyze, be curious, think and form/test hypotheses for where exceptional might present itself or what it might look like.
(Is this the most impactful thing? Could this represent the highest point of our contribution? Is this the highest path available to us? Do we have an unfair advantage here? Can we build an unfair advantage? Is this addressable? Are we the only ones seeing this? Why? How do we test this?
Just some of the types of questions to incessantly ask and seek answers to).
This is what waiting patiently for the “next best thing” actually looks like.
Exceptional (unlike average) won’t arrive frequently or on a timetable. You’ll need deep patience to meet it.
You will also need to be highly discerning and have the courage, clarity to say no to a lot of (unexceptional) things.
This isn’t seeking perfection. This is hunting big game.
And when the opportunity finally arrives, when you see/identify something with great asymmetric odds, you move with overwhelming force. Quickly and decisively.
This applies as much to business as it does to life and career.
“You have to be a combination of very patient and very aggressive. You have to sit patiently, waiting, watching, surveying, hunting and pounce very occasionally. You get a few pounces in a lifetime that really work big time.”
— Charlie Munger
Don’t miss the big time because you are chronically chasing marginal.
Cultivate being “very patient and very aggressive”.
Enjoy the hunt.
I manage Artsgy, a strategy consultancy built on ideas like the above.
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