Growth & Innovation

Was reading the book that I mentioned in the last posts. It was talking about restraints to growth. From another point of view, restraints are good because we are unlikely to sacrifice long term growth for short term growth if we work within restraints. For example, when we are growing, we need to consume resources in our businesses, so resource constraint to a certain extent will limit our growth. If our growth rate is too far ahead then what we can handle, quality may deteriorate and depending on the product or service that we sell, this could have devastating effect.

But sometime, instead of griping these restraints, sometimes these restraints can be trends that we can tap on to grow or create a bursts of innovation that could either further or create another competitive advantages. For instance in the book, Sam Walton's wife would not move into a big town, so Sam Walton only open his stalls in small towns, thus avoid agitating his rivals who are in the larger towns, and grow to a size that can challenge.

For innovation, challenge the rules, decide if they are outdated or not. Check with your customers, ask them what problems they have encountered using your product or even those of your closest competitors. Yes, do keep in touch with your customers often. Make feedback simple for them. Know their problem and try to solve it with innovation. In the book, they mentioned there was one potato chip company found that their customers like to dip their chips in sauces and they love to eat it with a lot of sauces, so in the end they cut their chips in wavy pattern so that it can scoop more sauces and such a simple innovation has help them secure a lot more customer loyalty.