The Chief No Officer

Ambitious managers and entrepreneurs have a fatal flaw.

They want to do too many things.

They take on new projects, pursue new joint ventures and partnerships, want to hire more people, want to add new products, introduce new processes, expand into new markets and more! While this is great, it can also reduce your venture's source of being truly different.
Each new move you make can either deepen your differentiation or make you look like other companies in your space. But on the other hand, if you shut yourself off from all new initiatives, you also shut yourself off from emerging opportunities.

So what's the solution?
Actually it has two parts:
Part 1 - Do whatever it takes to have new ideas and opportunities bubble up in your company. Encourage people to think outside the box and come up with new variations of your core product or services. Encourage them to find new markets. Encourage them to innovate like Edison. But let most of the innovation be on paper as thought experiments.

Part 2 - Have a "Chief No Officer" (CNO) whose job is to keep the company focused on the straight and narrow statement that sticks to the positioning originally decided upon. The CNO should ideally be saying no to 99 of the 100 ideas that come to his attention. The 1% of initiatives that he says yes to, should deepen differentiation or speed up growth without diluting the company's positioning statement. And you should put most of your money behind these one or two initiatives.

If new opportunities in adjacent markets or with new positioning statements come up, the n they can be pursued under a separate new brand name.

So who should be the CNO?

Ideally it should be a person who is not involved in the day-to-day affairs of the company. It could be an advisor, board director or consultant. If the CNO is somebody who is involved in the day-to-day affairs, he or she will tend to bring emotion and ego into the decision making.

The worst mistake is to add so many things to a brand that it becomes obfuscated.