Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Seizing the opportunities of tomorrow calls for leadership. To lead is to look beyond prevailing products, current services, today's competitors, and existing markets.

Market leadership is driven by:

• Pinpointing performance gaps with current customers and partners.
• Pinpointing performance gaps by benchmarking across your entire market(s) and against your key competitors.
• Searching for latent or unmet needs and exploring new markets, products, or services.

Knowing your customer is a key part of innovation. If you don't truly understand their products, marketplace and issues, how will you ever develop outstanding products to meet their needs? Ways to get in touch include:

• Spending time on the order entry desk.
• Going out on service/sales calls.
• Attending their trade shows.
• Calling your own order desk.
• Inviting customers to celebrate your successes.

Spending hours and/or days on strategic plans, in the artificial world of budgets, plans, strategies, and concepts does little to improve market leadership and can consume hours of precious time. Effective planning is a critical success factor focused on improvement and action planning.

...next chapter summary