Hardball and Curveball Strategies
Brian Siegel
Hardball and Curveball
Lessons Learned
Don’t get hit in the head with the ball and Change ups
Gotta love the sports analogies! Like sports, in business it is being suggested one “plays tough, and don’t apologize for it”. If you don’t develop all of your talents, angles, and areas of your “game”, you may be subjected to “losses”. Having intensity, playing smart, improving your skills, play “withing the rules, but outside the lines”, get your nails dirty, and stay driven in the face of all adversity. Playing tough in itself can be a competitive advantage. One must track and analyze costs, and outliers that may be causing their team to get “flabby”, slow, and not achieve superior results. Being lean is not a trend; it’s a requirement for playing “hardball”.
Similar to judo strategy, it is suggested to not attack your opponent directly all the time. Utilize your competitions weaknesses and leverage them to your advantage. One needs to harness the energy of their team to fuel a focused vision. Maintaining this attitude is key to advancing your team, not allowing complacency, and having a sense of urgency are pertinent to success. One must aggressively pursue opportunities, but without compromising integrity and customers. As long as customers and your business benefit from your actions, and you can react to your competitor’s retaliation strategy without incurring large costs to your business, one should proceed with the game plan.
Lessons Learned from Hardball
Flood the market with advertising, cut prices
Knowledge is key, as are strong responses with proactive actions
Emulate or “steal” good ideas, improve upon them, don’t become complacent or base entire strategy on them, continuously improve
Find out what the consumers want, and give it to them
Deceive the competition like a “head fake” in basketball, or a fake handoff: keep them off balance, but don’t fake so much to where the competition foresees your moves
Provide fast, quality, up to date, awesome service
“Go big or go home” – if you’re going to make a anti judo move, and go with full force, make sure the move is precise, planned, focused, and concise, utilize strengths, exhaust resources
Simple: provide better products, with better quality, with better service no matter the cost
Pricing war: playing on deception, utilize game strategy to undercut or get rid of costly customers
Expect suppliers and vendors to team up with similar cultural hardball moves and attitude form the “hardball playbook” if you’re expecting it from yourself, expect no less from “partners” (ex. Wal Mart)
Instead of hard nosed “hardball” and delivering impact like a linebacker with an open shot at a quarterback, why not integrate some judo and dance moves with a slider, change up to a knuckleball, then a fastball? Keeping competition on their toes is as art just like delivering a focused maneuver against competition. With proper planning, strategy, and attitude towards a vision, one can leverage their resources to strike out competitors with various combinations of actions.
Deceiving competitors with tricky pitches to get them to strike, swing, or move is not the only plan of action when playing hardball or curveball. It becomes more involved, yet simple, with articulating the direction you want your team to head in, getting "coaches" involved, and your players to buy into the strategy. It can even get to the point of how the pitcher is standing, where he or she is looking, and what type of weather you may be having. One can affect the weather and temperature of competition with strategic pricing, as mentioned in hardball. It's a combination pitch of "blue ocean, judo, and curving hardball" strategies. Controlling and affecting everything from advertising costs, distribution channels, inventory, automation, and allocating labor all affect weather your strategy will be a functional one that fits or not.
· You must get the batter out of the box or "comfort zone" and keep throwing more pitches at your competition
· Utilize all your resources to do things such as turn service techs into salesman while on jobs, and get into all the territories you can where you can, when you can
· Build relationships with the strong and growing customers, and deceive your competition into acquiring your costly customers that are detrimental to economies of scale
· Reward and provide incentives that are beneficial and motivational towards the strategy you and your team are establishing
· Do not become the "bragging jock" at the pitchers mound, and handle your homeruns gracefully
· Cockiness only inspires your competition to retaliate with more force. Leveraging all your business units, departments, and forming strategies that adapt to change and influence you in positive directions are simple "algorithms" of combining the "blue ocean, judo, curve, and hardball" strategies. Keep it simple
· Adapt to change, assess where you are and where you want to go, listen, provide high quality services and products, and treat your most valuable assets (people) with the utmost standards. Within those realms, find what "algorithm" fits to your internal and external necessities for success, and start implementing your infrastructure
· Be relentless with process improvement, providing customer satisfaction, and improving capabilities of your resources
· Monitor and improve costs where you can without compromising integrity and quality
· Lower turn around times, and improve utilization
· Let companies think you are some mediocre or even sub par company while your critics become just that, critics
· Let your consumers speak for your success, and let your competitors duke it out over sales leads, analysis, and the mystique of your higher level and quality actions will speak volumes
Chew, digest, and swallow where you truly stand, and don't let the "weather" dictate your performance, but rather your performance dictate the "weather". Exploring creative pricing strategies, dissipating away costly customers to grow revenue with profitable ones (odd, get rid of customers to improve sales, hence: curveball), leverage and utilize all resources to the maximum efficiency, and customer connection are key.
Hardball and Curveball
Lessons Learned
Don’t get hit in the head with the ball and Change ups
Gotta love the sports analogies! Like sports, in business it is being suggested one “plays tough, and don’t apologize for it”. If you don’t develop all of your talents, angles, and areas of your “game”, you may be subjected to “losses”. Having intensity, playing smart, improving your skills, play “withing the rules, but outside the lines”, get your nails dirty, and stay driven in the face of all adversity. Playing tough in itself can be a competitive advantage. One must track and analyze costs, and outliers that may be causing their team to get “flabby”, slow, and not achieve superior results. Being lean is not a trend; it’s a requirement for playing “hardball”.
Similar to judo strategy, it is suggested to not attack your opponent directly all the time. Utilize your competitions weaknesses and leverage them to your advantage. One needs to harness the energy of their team to fuel a focused vision. Maintaining this attitude is key to advancing your team, not allowing complacency, and having a sense of urgency are pertinent to success. One must aggressively pursue opportunities, but without compromising integrity and customers. As long as customers and your business benefit from your actions, and you can react to your competitor’s retaliation strategy without incurring large costs to your business, one should proceed with the game plan.
Lessons Learned from Hardball
Flood the market with advertising, cut prices
Knowledge is key, as are strong responses with proactive actions
Emulate or “steal” good ideas, improve upon them, don’t become complacent or base entire strategy on them, continuously improve
Find out what the consumers want, and give it to them
Deceive the competition like a “head fake” in basketball, or a fake handoff: keep them off balance, but don’t fake so much to where the competition foresees your moves
Provide fast, quality, up to date, awesome service
“Go big or go home” – if you’re going to make a anti judo move, and go with full force, make sure the move is precise, planned, focused, and concise, utilize strengths, exhaust resources
Simple: provide better products, with better quality, with better service no matter the cost
Pricing war: playing on deception, utilize game strategy to undercut or get rid of costly customers
Expect suppliers and vendors to team up with similar cultural hardball moves and attitude form the “hardball playbook” if you’re expecting it from yourself, expect no less from “partners” (ex. Wal Mart)
Instead of hard nosed “hardball” and delivering impact like a linebacker with an open shot at a quarterback, why not integrate some judo and dance moves with a slider, change up to a knuckleball, then a fastball? Keeping competition on their toes is as art just like delivering a focused maneuver against competition. With proper planning, strategy, and attitude towards a vision, one can leverage their resources to strike out competitors with various combinations of actions.
Deceiving competitors with tricky pitches to get them to strike, swing, or move is not the only plan of action when playing hardball or curveball. It becomes more involved, yet simple, with articulating the direction you want your team to head in, getting "coaches" involved, and your players to buy into the strategy. It can even get to the point of how the pitcher is standing, where he or she is looking, and what type of weather you may be having. One can affect the weather and temperature of competition with strategic pricing, as mentioned in hardball. It's a combination pitch of "blue ocean, judo, and curving hardball" strategies. Controlling and affecting everything from advertising costs, distribution channels, inventory, automation, and allocating labor all affect weather your strategy will be a functional one that fits or not.
· You must get the batter out of the box or "comfort zone" and keep throwing more pitches at your competition
· Utilize all your resources to do things such as turn service techs into salesman while on jobs, and get into all the territories you can where you can, when you can
· Build relationships with the strong and growing customers, and deceive your competition into acquiring your costly customers that are detrimental to economies of scale
· Reward and provide incentives that are beneficial and motivational towards the strategy you and your team are establishing
· Do not become the "bragging jock" at the pitchers mound, and handle your homeruns gracefully
· Cockiness only inspires your competition to retaliate with more force. Leveraging all your business units, departments, and forming strategies that adapt to change and influence you in positive directions are simple "algorithms" of combining the "blue ocean, judo, curve, and hardball" strategies. Keep it simple
· Adapt to change, assess where you are and where you want to go, listen, provide high quality services and products, and treat your most valuable assets (people) with the utmost standards. Within those realms, find what "algorithm" fits to your internal and external necessities for success, and start implementing your infrastructure
· Be relentless with process improvement, providing customer satisfaction, and improving capabilities of your resources
· Monitor and improve costs where you can without compromising integrity and quality
· Lower turn around times, and improve utilization
· Let companies think you are some mediocre or even sub par company while your critics become just that, critics
· Let your consumers speak for your success, and let your competitors duke it out over sales leads, analysis, and the mystique of your higher level and quality actions will speak volumes
Chew, digest, and swallow where you truly stand, and don't let the "weather" dictate your performance, but rather your performance dictate the "weather". Exploring creative pricing strategies, dissipating away costly customers to grow revenue with profitable ones (odd, get rid of customers to improve sales, hence: curveball), leverage and utilize all resources to the maximum efficiency, and customer connection are key.
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