I just finished reading a provacative article written by Steve Denning titled What Killed Michael Porter's Monitor Group? The One Force That Really Matters. It is a long piece but definitely worth reading for anybody interested in business or strategy. 

The basic premise of the article is that Porter's Five Forces Model for strategy is wrong. The model has been taught in every business school and has been accepted globally as gospel by most people so it is a pretty ballsy thing to come out and say that the legendary business guru is wrong and there is a better way to think about strategy. 

Having read the article and spent some serious time thinking about it, I think Steve Denning might be right. My current experience at Weebly convinces me that he is on to something.

Denning basically says of Porter's model:

He argues that radical innovation focused on delivering more and more value to the customer is what sustainable companies have done to stay ahead and to deliver above average profits over the longer term. 

Having been at Weebly full time since June and having watched the founders build the company over the years, I believe Weebly is a real life example of a company that lives and breathes this approach every day. It absolutely works and I am a definitely a convert to this way of thinking about business strategy.

At Weebly, we don't worry about the bottom line. We worry about our customers and the bottom line will take care of itself. We want to deliver steadily more value to customers. That's the beauty of the strategy. It is simple to understand, it doesn't take months of data analytics to pick a direction and there is no need expensive strategy consultants. All it takes  just a clear view of who drives our strategy and our business success... our customers.

For example, whenever we talk about building new features, we always come back to how it helps customers. When we build a feature, it is never finished until our customers try it and tell us they love it. We never say "now we need to build feature X because competitor Y has it". When we decide to send an email to our customers (which we rarely do since they don't often add value) we always make sure that the email is going to have a net benefit to the user and their Weebly experience. When we work with partners, we take the same approach. When we partner with other companies we do it is because we believe we can help them add value to their users or they add a lot of value to our customers. 

This all sounds really simple. I am sure every company says that their customers are the most important thing and every feature or product line they introduce is meant to make lives easier. Trust me, it isn't easy. It is surprisingly easy to believe that everything is going to improve a customers life and when you can send a single email that drives a lot of new revenue it is even easier to "just send it" and fall into the getting revenue today trap. All these things send signals to customers and they all matter, every single one of them. Being able to say "no" matters and it is the things that you don't do that often make the difference when you think about strategy like this. That's probably the biggest lesson I have learned in my time at Weebly.

I am definitely a convert and I have Dave, Dan and Chris (Weebly founders) to thank for it. This isn't how I used to think about strategy at all and am really enjoying being part of a company that thinks this way. It is making me a better executive for sure. There is an amazing amount of clarity to be had when you take this approach. When making money isn't the immediate goal and the customer truly comes first, you can really focus on the things that matter. It isn't easy by any means and takes a lot of hard work but the benefits are worth it. 

There are a couple of books I  recently read that I wanted to share with everybody. While I read both of these book back in February while on vacation, the lessons have stuck with me since then and I have seen a marked improvement in my own life. Once you read them, you will never look at yourself, your organization, or your world quite the same way.

POWER OF HABITS
This book by Charles Duhigg focuses on how to recognize and change the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives. Every single one of us has a bad habit we want to get rid of (nail biting, binge eating, procrastinating) or new habits we wish could stick to (going to the gym, being more productive). Well, this is the book that helps you understand why habits exist and how they can be changed. I have read several "habit" books before and where this one stands out is in the scientific approach taken to the subject. The research and examples are just more rigorous than any other book I have read on the subject. 

Some examples shared by Duhigg include. 

• A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.
  
• Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern—and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.
  

What I found after reading it though was that taking that first step was actually quite hard. There intention is there and the data was compelling, so why couldn't I just do what the book said and get going. Well, it turns out this little thing called willpower was standing in the way. 

WILLPOWER
Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney write a book on understanding the secrets of self-control and then how to master it. The premise of the book is that willpower actually operates like a muscle: it can be strengthened with practice and fatigued by overuse. Willpower is fueled by glucose, and it can be bolstered simply by replenishing the brain's store of fuel. That's why eating and sleeping- and especially failing to do either of those-have such dramatic effects on self-control (and why dieters have such a hard time resisting temptation). You learn not only how to build willpower but also how to conserve it for crucial moments by setting the right goals and using the best new techniques for monitoring your progress. 

This is where both books read together can supercharge results. While we would all love to create healthy new habits or get rid of bad ones, often what stands in the way of that first step is the willpower to do something about it. Once you understand willpower and power of habits together, it is life changing.