Play to Strengths

As everyone probably knows by now, I am a big fan of Verne Harnish. Following on from a great conference I attended in mid Feb, one of the messages I kept hearing was that people should play to their strengths rather than their weaknesses. I know that this is obvious but not many people do this.

Many people and companies invest the time and $$$ into the areas that aren't going so well to improve their position and offering (which is obvious and important). The amount of time and money they put into their weaknesses to improve the service/process/offering is huge but the pay off isn't very much, when you compare this to the pay off when you invest further in your strengths – which can be HUGE.

Take a swimmer for example. They can swim strong freestyle, ok backstroke and poor butterfly. Should they invest the time and energy into becoming strong in backstroke and butterfly to be the world's best in the medley, which would be very difficult and painful, or do they sacrifice that dream and say freestyle is my strength, lets invest all my time and energy into freestyle and be the world's best freestyle swimmer.

This is something that has never been more apparent to Unique World than now. 12 months ago where we did Information Management, web site design, SEO, custom .NET, EPM, BI and any other technology that our people could potentially learn. Now we just do one thing - Information Management. (FULL STOP).

I know that many would be scratching their heads, but it has made so much sense and the company has never been so focussed and our clients have really appreciated that. Now it's time to further focus around engagement model, client type, industry, etc…. This should never stop I think.

We will select our strengths and invest further in them so we can become the best in the world (part of the hedgehog concept – thank you Jim Collins) in Information Management. Or in layman's terms, we assist organisations cleaning up their information mess.

I know the future will be challenging, but at least I know the journey will be paved to focus on our strengths.