141: Kaihan Krippendorff — Use the Fourth Option to Disrupt and Out-Think the Competition
With a breakthrough strategy, you can actually out-think your competition and do something bold – but how do you get there? Today’s show dives into a repeatable process you can implement in your company and culture to naturally create those “aha” moments.
Kaihan Krippendorff is the founder of Outthinker, a former McKinsey & Co. consultant, and has written four books on business, strategy, growth, and transformation. Kaihan is committed to helping organizations and individuals thrive in today’s era of fast-paced disruptive technology change.
Kaihan has always been fascinated by strategy. When you think about it, good strategy comes down to being a disruptor. How can a group of people come together and create a strategy that will disrupt, rather than be disrupted? How does someone create ‘The Fourth Option,’ as Kaihan likes to call it?
There are always great ideas that pop up within a company, but for some reason or another, they do not get pursued. Most of these reasons were not based in fact or strategy, or even in analysis. Great ideas were getting shot down through naysaying from someone on the team or even from the founder.
To be a disruptor, it means you hold a belief that is inconsistent with the way business is run in your industry. If you’ve been in your industry long enough, you start developing these rules and beliefs of what will and won’t work. And, people will always choose to hold onto their beliefs, even if it’s to the detriment of the company.
This is where the fourth option comes into play. It is really a metaphor and it means that there’s a point in the process where people stop looking for options. What a disruptor does is recognize that their competition has stopped looking — stopped thinking — and looks for a fourth option that will surprise people. Kaihan lays out a simple process on the show to help you easily pinpoint and discover what that fourth option is.
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Scaling Up is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and our team for Gazelles Coaching, on how the fastest growing companies succeed where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up business podcast and a leading Gazelles Coach. Gazelles is the term we use for fast-growing companies.
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