You know how they say “don’t talk about yourself, talk about your customer”?
Yeah well just for today I’m going to ignore that, and talk about me me me – what I’m trying to do here, my vision for Basic Arts, and OK perhaps a little bit about what that might mean for you.
Why am I doing this?
I don’t know really. Mainly to just organise my thoughts. Partly to put this stuff out there so I’m held to account. And maybe also because I think some of you will have an interesting POV on the matter – so if you do, please hit reply and let me know.
Right, so what’s this about?
Well, for a while now I’ve been thinking about something I call “The Starbucks Strategy”, which basically boils down to this:
- Don’t raise the ceiling, raise the floor
I call it “Starbucks” because that’s exactly what they did. They didn’t produce the best coffee. Instead they massively raised the standards of bad coffee – turning the 3/10 norm into a 6/10. This is very different from what most brands try to do. Most brands want to raise the ceiling. They want to turn a 9/10 to a 10/10, and think that’s the way to create the biggest impact. Because hey, the best must be the most impactful right?
Wrong.
The impact of turning the 3/10s into 6/10s is far far more meaningful (and lucrative) than creating the best of something. Starbucks have contributed infinitely more positively to global coffee culture than your favourite artisanal roaster, and that’s just a fact. (Even if that roaster considers them a blight on the coffee landscape).
So what’s the relevance of this?
Well, that’s what I want to do with strategy. I want to create “The Starbucks of Strategy”. I want to create a business that turns all the 3/10 strategies out there (or let’s be real, they’re generally more like 0/10 cos they’re not happening at all), into 6/10 ones.
I am probably not the best strategist. I am definitely not the most experienced, or knowledgable. I have not advised the boards of Shell, or Meta, or Lockheed Martin. And I probably never will.
But I am willing to venture that I might be one of the best at “dumbing down and sexing up” strategy concepts. Making them quick, accessible, and fun. And that’s just what Starbucks did with real Italian coffee – introducing a “close enough” version of it to the world, and massively raising the average standards of coffee worldwide.
Just imagine for a second how impactful this might be at scale.
Strategic businesses create value. New value. Unstrategic businesses don’t. They either do something worthless, or they do something that’s been done many many many times before. What this means is that the amount of genuine value being produced by the vast mass of companies out there is a fraction of what it should be based on their intelligence and efforts.
If however we were to make those masses strategic – not necessarily “Southwest Airlines strategic”, just reasonably strategic – then there would be an explosion of new value, growth, and richness created for the precise same amount of effort and capital outlay. (Or arguably even a little bit less).
This is the potential power of successful implementing “the Starbucks of Strategy”.
Now of course this probably sounds a bit grandiose. And who the hell am I anyway, I’ve got a few thousand followers but it’s not like I’m Tony Robbins or something.
But I do have a few ideas.
And regardless of the scale they achieve, it’s something to shoot for anyway. It’s something to be getting on with. So I’ll give it a crack. And at the very least hopefully produce a lot more value for you – my core crew – in the process.
