Outthinkers #42—Verne Harnish: Proven Insights into Mastering Strategy
Verne Harnish is founder of the world-renowned Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), with over 16,000 members worldwide, and chaired for fifteen years EO’s premiere CEO program held at MIT, a program in which he still teaches today.
Founder and CEO of Scaling Up, a global executive education and coaching company with over 200 partners on six continents, Verne has spent the past four decades helping companies scale up.
He’s the author of the bestseller Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, authored The Greatest Business Decisions of All Times for which Jim Collins wrote the foreword; and wrote Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0) which has been translated into 22 languages and has won eight major international book awards including the prestigious International Book Award for Best General Business book. His latest book, Scaling Up Compensation, rocketed to the #1 HR book on Amazon.
Verne also chairs the annual ScaleUp Summits and serves on several boards including vice chair of The Riordan Clinic; co-founder and chair of Geoversity; and board member of the social venture Million Dollar Women, and is a private investor in many scaleups.
In this podcast, he shares:
- Several practical proven tips for designing your growth strategy
- How strategy has evolved over the last few decades and
- How to identify the right customer niche for you
- The key lesson for keeping competitors at bay
- Why you shouldn’t be designing strategy at the office, and where you should do it instead
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"We have the framework: right people doing the right things right. So, it’s figuring out the right things for people to do, and that those right things are different than what everyone else in your industry is doing. That is the essence of strategy: doing it different. "
-Verne Harnish
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Episode Timeline:
00:00—Introducing Verne + The topic of today’s episode
2:23—What is your definition of strategy?
4:02—What do you say to CEOs about going after a big market share vs. a niche market?
5:23—How can a company figure out what their niche is?
7:23—Examples of companies that have dominated their niche
8:22—How to "blackmail" a market
11:00—How have you seen the field of strategy evolve in the last few decades?
12:03—The importance of organizing a council
13:48—Why all great thinkers have a physical space for creative thinking
15:55—What is an important framework you'd highly recommend?
19:04—How can people connect with you?
16:55—How can people connect with you?
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Additional Resources:
Company Page: https://scalingup.com/verne-harnish/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/agilescaleup
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/verneh
Thank you to our guest, our executive producer Zach Ness, our editor James Pearce, and the Outthinker team. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, download, and subscribe. I’m your host, Kaihan Krippendorff—thank you for listening.
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