Recently, Petra Coach presented a webinar, “Break the Bottleneck: The X-Factor for Exponential Advantage” with Barrett Ersek.

This content arms you with the potential to revolutionize your industry and reach a 7-10x advantage over your competitors. For more on the subject, check out Barrett’s Harvard Business Review article, “Break Your Industry’s Bottlenecks.”

You can find the full recording here.

Top Takeaways

Ask the right questions:

  • Ask not what it, but what could be

Understand the difference between Execution vs. Innovation:

  • If you focus on execution, you are not going to get that exponential leverage
  • Carve out a small amount of time for innovative thinking and you will scale the company

Quarterly Plannings use:

  • 90% of planning on execution
  • 10% on innovative thinking

5 Diagnostic Levers

  • Eliminating Expense
  • Customer Buying or usage experience
  • Customers’ psychological barriers
  • Winning hearts and minds
  • Eliminating negative externalities

Examples:

RedBox

  • Put Blockbuster out of business
  • They have 7-10 x’s more copies of movies than their competitor
  • 7-10 x’s more kiosks than stores – they also don’t have the real estate and labor costs
  • They disrupted the industry and grew like crazy

Little Caesars

  • The Hot-N-Ready kiosk
  • Ready-made pizzas that you just need to put in a code and grab your pizzas
  • All without having to be in contact with a person

Both of these used a synthesized modification of a vending machine

Yellow Tail

  • Approachable, easy to find, easy to buy, fun to share
  • They don’t use complicated or confusing descriptors

Appletree – Dream On Program

  • Granting dreams for employees and changing their lives
  • Improved the quality and culture of the companies employees
  • Won the hearts and minds of their frontline employees

O2E Brands

  • A brand under this is 1-800-JUNK
  • They got really good at guerrilla marketing
  • Low cost marketing

Find your industry bottleneck and then transfer that into a metrically driven question = The Essential Question. Then, turn that into a 7-10x multiplier.

Y5 – Ask five times ‘Why is This a Problem?’ to break it down.

Summary

Like what you see? Register for our upcoming workshops & webinars today!