Younger businesses are better at telling their story.
If your business is a new idea and you’re the founder, you’re still excited enough about it to tell everybody why you began: where it came from, why it exists, who it’s for. But ten, twenty or thirty years after the business was founded, when the leadership team aren’t the founders any more, how often does that story still get told?
And does everybody working in it understand its purpose?
I’ve been thinking about that alongside the most quoted line in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War:
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Chapter III, Attack by Stratagem, translated by Lionel Giles (1910)
How well do you know yourself?
When I say yourself, I don’t just mean you as an individual or you as a leader, although that matters too. I mean your business. Its very reason for being. The people it was originally set up to help. The market it serves.
Which brings me to the enemy. I’d argue your market is your biggest ally. You might say your enemy is your competitors, and that may be true. Maybe your business has no enemies at all. So let’s take Sun Tzu’s teaching from a slightly different angle.
Know your stakeholders
Who are the stakeholders you need to understand? The better you understand the people around your business, the more successful your business will be.
That means understanding your team, your fellow leaders, your suppliers, your customers and your prospects, and everyone who has significant contact with your business. How well do you understand them as individuals, as people, as well as business entities?
The deeper your understanding of everything, yourself included, the easier it is to be successful.
Get your AI to interview you
So how do you figure all that out? One great place to start is to open your AI of choice and get it to ask you questions.
Ask it to interview you as if it were a journalist writing a detailed piece for a business magazine about your organisation and where it comes from. Get it to interview you about who your ideal customers are, and see how well you really understand them. Get it to ask you about your success stories and the things you want to create more of in the future.
The better you get at prompting your AI and using it to sharpen your thinking, the quicker it will help your business evolve.
One last thing. Use it to sharpen your thinking. Don’t use it to think for you.
