One of my favorite stories is from the departed Robert Updegrafft, who is perhaps America’s original business coach (before business coaches were even “a thing”). He wrote a short, but amazing book called:
Obvious Adams
You can learn a lot about creativity, marketing, advertising, branding, collaboration, and the power of simplification by studying this man’s work.
Example?
He talked about a hat company that owned two stores in the same town. They did a lot of advertising for both but one got almost all the foot traffic while the other struggled mightily. Adams was sent to investigate and discovered the very simple and obvious reason the one store struggled. Something so obvious all his peers completely missed it.
He stood across the street and watched the pedestrian traffic patterns.
What did people’s eyes fixate on as they passed the struggling hat shop location? Not the store front window because it was too narrow and easily overlooked. He even walked past it four times before finding it.
Adams convinced the client to end the lease and relocate store #2 to a more visible location where it then thrived.
So much wisdom in simple but powerful solutions.
Speaking of simplicity:
Everything I do revolves around the concept.
I don’t do complicated because it doesn’t work nearly as well as simple.
This goes for coaching, marketing, speaking, writing, selling, and everything else.
Including, business strategy.
Which, incidentally, is what my newest book is about. I’ve published my own version of Obvious Adams. This version includes a foreword and afterword from ‘your’s bruly’ about why simplification is so important and how you can recognize and implement the obvious to get a better result and gain a significant competitive advantage over your competition.
More info here:
https://coachbru.com/product/obvious-adams/