Construir alternativas onde ninguém as vê

Primeiro ler "Be Competitively Unpredictable!", não pela referência à concorrência mas pela referência à imprevisibilidade:

"At the same time that the window of opportunity is narrowing, competition overall is becoming more and more unpredictable. Your competitors are using open innovation to uncover more market opportunities and the results are starting to show. And new competitors are coming out of nowhere and perhaps from different industries to completely disrupt your market and destabilize your industry.
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You’ll also need the right culture and people in place, along with a structure for pursuing innovation that supports the goal of being competitively unpredictable. In fact, you may need to completely rethink how your business pursues innovation. This is hard work. But if you succeed and become truly competitively unpredictable, the rewards will be many and long-lasting. And given the pace of change, what other choice do you really have?"

Depois, apreciar "How the Very Best Strategists Decide":

"About half of the 884 strategies entered in each industry were chosen by two or more people; some were picked by two dozen. We’ll call these the popular strategies. The other half were chosen by only one per­son. They are the loner strategies.
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If the wisdom of crowds applies to strategic thinking, popular strategies should out­perform the loners. If it doesn’t, the loners should outperform the crowd.
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I ran a billion simulations and saw that the crowds’ strategies worked pretty well. In general, the more people who chose a strategy, the better the strategy performed. (The largest crowds, though, rated about average.) The simulations also showed that loner strategies usually performed below the crowds’ popular strategies.
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But the strategies that performed the very best were also loners.
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If you want to outperform the crowd, you’ve got to do something the crowd isn’t doing. That means learning two key skills:
To do something the crowd isn’t doing, you must think something the crowd isn’t thinking. You can generate ideas by broadening your decision frame.
No one proposes a strategy thinking it will fail, so you must be able to tell the difference between good and bad loner strategies. You can evaluate those ideas by embracing critical thinking.
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It’s not bad, wrong, or lazy to pick a popular, crowd-approved strategy. Those strategies are good, safe bets, and there’s a reason most loner strategies are so lonely. On the other hand, you can build your skill at developing good loner strategies if you can improve your ability to think strategically. With skills, processes, and tools to generate and evaluate ideas, you can spot risks worth taking."

E acredito que muitas vezes é isto que consigo fazer no meu trabalho, muitas vezes não ao ritmo que gostaria mas ao ritmo que cada projecto permite. Ainda ontem citei uma das minhas frases preferidas:

"Nunca é tarde para aprender, às vezes é demasiado cedo" 

Ajudar a construir alternativas onde ninguém as vê, fomentando o pensamento estratégico, fugindo da concentração no que se faz e focando-se nos resultados, nas experiências que se permitem atingir ou viver com o que o cliente faz com o que compra.