Recently I hunkered down to think deeply about company direction. (My own company is “pivoting,” preparing to leverage what we already have to accomplish something new and amazing for business owners and managers.)

Here’s the bottom line for your company.

The Now of Wow

One thing is utterly clear: to succeed any more you can’t just be good. A strategy or direction change can’t just be another type of business as usual. It has to radically push limits, “shock and awe,” make great things happen.  You have to be “Wow” in anything you do. 

To accomplish that, you need to define and refine your strategy in a big way. You have to ask (and answer) a lot of questions.

New ventures or directions especially need to “Get to Wow” from the start. If it isn’t wow, it isn’t worth doing.

Example: Twylah. I signed up for an invite to a new visual Twitter service. The next day I was told that my new Twylah page was ready. Here’s what I saw: http://twylah.com/kcren

That was AUTOMATIC with no help from me. It just worked, brilliantly, visually, from my Twitter feed. (Visual is king now.) A couple of clicks later and I saw I had control over the web site (I can own the site name and the traffic), I can pin major topics, etc. So I started to pin some topics and stopped myself. Twylah worked so well out of the box that I didn’t want to interfere with it. I wanted it to keep working its magic, to see what it would come up with next instead of me doing it all. Talk about a timesaver.

“If it isn’t wow,
it isn’t worth doing.”

Not Perfect, Just Wow

But “wow” doesn’t mean perfect. (Perfect is the enemy of fast, and you need to be fast.)

Example: LastPass. LastPass is kinda annoying to use sometimes; sometimes it’s hard to figure out (and I’m a techie at heart!) But after one year of using it in the enterprise, I panicked when renewal was debated. There was simply NO WAY I would dream of operating without it. The pain it relieves is just too great.

“Wow.”

There are many possible “wow” factors. You don’t have to do them all, at least not at first. But you’ve got to have at least one big “WOW” or it won’t fly.

Getting to Wow

So where’s the “wow” in your company, new strategy, or project?

Here’s how to wow:

• Involve the whole team in the process.
• Brainstorm.
• Ask the hard questions.
• Creatively tear down anything that isn’t wow.
• Distill it to its absolute simplest form.
• Require a minimum 10:1 benefit over the current way of doing thngs, AND minimize or eliminate the change required for new users. (See this HBR article.)
• Clear time to make room to do it right. (Tip: Use this time management system [mine].)

It’s lurking there somewhere, just around the corner. You can probably feel it. You just need to precisely define it in a few words—whatever your wow factor is—so the investors and clients see it like a hammer hitting them over the head.

When you finally have a 10:1 or 20:1 advantage over the current way of doing things, only then have you found “wow.”

Only then can you or I be a huge success.