A sarcastic guide to avoiding strategy: be reactive, spam Twitter with personal stuff, ignore new ideas, try to be everything to everyone, and do everything yourself. The speaker uses absurd examples to show how anti-strategic behavior kills thought leadership.
Let's face it, when you're a thought leader, strategy is overrated. This isn't chess. This is barely checkers. You don't really need a strategy. You know where you're going, sort of, and you know how you'll get there, kind of. And after all, you're really busy, and busy's good, right? So, since we all hate strategy, here's 5 easy ways to avoid being strategic. Be reactive. Zig when everyone else zags. Proactivity is so 2007. Just instinctively react to every inquiry that you get, to everyone from India or Poland that emails you and wants to be your partner, to every event like the Left-Handed Plumbers Association of Kentucky's annual gala that asks you to speak, to everyone's cousin's brother-in-law that sat next to a guy on a plane that knows a guy who works at or maybe it was near Google, that's how you'll achieve your objectives. Planning is boring, and being focused and on target takes all of the excitement out of being successful. Tweet a lot. Spend all of your time on Twitter. These days, Twitter is where decision makers go to find top quality thinkers. Tweet about everything you can think of: your content, your dog, your food, your kid. You're definitely the only person that's had a less than pleasant experience on American Airlines or has a unique opinion about Miami's 97-degree weather. Avoid being insightful and don't even attempt to be interesting. Just keep tweeting. Resilience and flexibility are for gymnasts. You're not Mary Lou Retton. It's okay to be stubborn. You are the expert after all. Ignore new thinking. Don't integrate any relevant business or social trends into your work. Your ideas are flawless, timeless. Never adjust or modify them. Stick to direct mail and telemarketing, because if it worked back in the day, then by God, it will work now. Be everything to everyone. Being strategic preaches focus and precision. Every man, woman, and child on the planet can so obviously benefit from your brilliance. Who cares if they can afford it or how they prefer their content? Your stuff is so life-altering that they'll all figure out how to pay for it and how to master it. Target marketing is ridiculously limiting. Do it all by yourself. Clearly, you have all of the skills that it takes to leverage your content. You know exactly how to create it, how to get it published, how to develop it into every possible modality. Don't forget that you're an awesome market researcher, a business developer, a a social media expert, a magician, a contract negotiator, a logistics ace, a 4-star general, a blogger, a videographer, a publicist, an exterminator, an instructional designer, a web developer, a graphic designer, a geologist, and a zoologist. Keep all of your juicy profits by excluding other experts or those simpletons that spend all of their time just doing one thing. You are a jack of all trades, and it's It's better to know a little bit about everything than it is to pour your heart and soul into what you do best. Thank you.
