And finally, this is the end of my review of the book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout. There's some career advice in this book that's some of the best advice I've seen anywhere. It's clear the authors have very deep experience in business and in life. Here it is:
Find a horse to ride.
Some ambitious, intelligent people find themselves trapped in situations where their future looks bleak. So what do they generally do?
They try harder. They try to compensate by long hours of hard work and effort. The secret of success is to keep your nose to the grindstone; do your job better than the next person, and fame and fortune will come your way, right?
Wrong. Trying harder is rarely the pathway to success. Trying smarter is the better way.
The first horse to ride is your company.
Where is your company going? Or more impolitely, is it going anywhere at all?
Too many good people have taken their good prospects and locked them into situations that are doomed to failure. But failure at least gives you a second chance. Even worse is the company with lees than average chances for growth.
No matter how brilliant you are, it never pays to cast your lot with a loser. Even the best officer on the Titanic wound up in the same lifeboat as the worst. And that’s if he was lucky enough to stay out of the water.
You can’t do it yourself. If your company is going nowhere, get yourself a new one. While you can’t always pick an IBM or Xerox, you ought to
be able to do considerably better than average.
Place your bets on the growth industries. Tomorrow-type products like computers, electronics, optics, communications.
And don’t forget that soft services of all types are growing at a much faster rate than hard products. So look at banks, leasing, insurance, medical, financial, and consulting service companies.
The second horse to ride is your boss.
If your boss is going places, chances are good that you are too.
The third horse to ride is a friend.
It’s not enough just to make friends. You have to take out that friendship horse and exercise it once in a while. If you don’t you won’t be able to ride it when you need it.
When you need a job, it’s usually too late to try that type of tactic. The way to ride the friendship horse is to keep in touch regularly with all your business friends.
The fourth horse to ride is an idea.
On the night before he died, Victor Hugo wrote in his diary, “Nothing, not all the armies of the world, can stop an idea whose time has come.”
Everyone knows that an idea can take you to the top faster than anything else. But people sometimes expect too much of an idea. They want one that is not only great, but one that everyone else thinks is great too.
There are no such ideas. If you wait until an idea is ready to be accepted, it’s too late. Someone else will have preempted it.
Or in the in-out vocabulary of a few years ago: Anything definitely in is already on its way out.
To ride the “idea” horse, you must be willing to expose yourself to ridicule and controversy. You must be willing to go against the tide.
You can’t be first with a new idea or concept unless you are willing to stick your neck out. And take a lot of abuse. And bide your time until your time comes.
“One indication of the validity of a principle,” according to psychologist Charles Osgood, “is the vigor and persistence with which it is opposed.”
An idea or concept without an element of conflict is not an idea at all. It’s motherhood, apple pie, and the flag, revisited.
The fifth horse to ride is faith.
Faith in others and their ideas.
The sixth horse to ride is yourself.
There is one other horse. An animal that is mean, difficult, and unpredictable. Yet people often try to ride it. With very little success.
That horse is yourself. It is possible to succeed in business or in life all by yourself. But it’s not easy.
Like life itself, business is a social activity. As much cooperation as competition.
Take selling, for example, You don’t make a sale all by yourself. Somebody also has to buy what you’re selling.
So remember, the winningest jockeys are not necessarily the lightest, the smartest, or the strongest. The best jockey doesn’t win the race.
The jockey that wins the race is usually the one with the best horse. So pick yourself a horse to ride and then ride it for all it’s worth.
Back to Part I, Part II, Part III
