Imagine you can pass the challenge of growing your business to your most ardent customers. What would that look like in reality?

Entering an adjacent market is more than a simple transfer of competencies. The sooner you accept this, the faster you find the right adjacent market that values what you offer.

There are always lingering structural and business inefficiencies in any market. Look out for them since they can open a whole new world of opportunities for your business and offer the next step-change in growth.

Companies sometimes risk over-optimizing their operations around a single metric hoping to drive growth. Invariably, they create a situation where they reward behavior and outcomes that go against the best interests and long-term strategy of the company.

Discover a cross-functional growth exercise to supercharge your business even in gloomy times. The insights from this exercise can make your organization much more resourceful and nimbler to take control of the eventual good times.

One of the best ways to grow your customer base is to engage in a process of customer selection before crafting your customer growth or acquisition strategy. This simple step can focus your growth strategies overnight to generate better, predictable results.

Avoiding risk shouldn't be the default mode of a company. Trying to understand risk would be a better default. Don't let risk strangle your evolution. Better yet, make risk work for you!

What would you do to capitalize on a sudden boom in business? Do you have measures in place to turn that sudden boom into sustainable growth for the long term?

Netflix fights for a share of your viewing habits. Spotify is in the chase for a share of your listening habits. This ‘share philosophy’ offers a roadmap on how each company plans to carve the future to fit its worldview.

Get creative with injecting the scarcity factor into some element of your business model. You just might uncover a whole new way of dominating your market or competitive arena.

“Every person, organization, and even society reaches a point at which they owe it to themselves to hit refresh – to reenergize, renew, reframe, and rethink their purpose.” – Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft

Assuming you're in tune with what your customer values; what initiatives and investments do you have in place to keep winning customers, increase their spend each time, and eliminate hurdles in their buying experience? Being customer-centric doesn’t mean anything if your initiatives and investments don’t always seek to establish it as a reality for your company every single day.

Cross-pollinate your strategy influences. Keep an eye on what’s happening in other industries and innovative companies beyond your familiar set. There’s a bias for executives to look inward within their own company, maybe even study the past, or look at their peer companies to craft strategy. Sometimes the smartest strategy might be to borrow effective strategies from other industries and make it your own. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel always!

Why stop empathy mapping at the user or customer level? Why not extend it to every stakeholder in your company’s ecosystem? Let’s not use empathy mapping strictly for user experience design alone. Let’s think about empathy mapping as a collaborative tool for value creation for every stakeholder.

Articulate your value in a unique manner for every customer or customer group that you come across. Link it to specific impacts on their business. Develop case studies to show how you can deliver on those business impacts.

You can’t always expect to copy your competitor’s moves and hope to outsmart them every single time. A significant proclivity to offbeat thinking pays off in the long term.