Episode Details

When Jim Collins wrote "Good To Great", he did talk a fair bit about the Hedgehog Principle. But what he stresses more on, is quite another concept called "Preserving the Core and Stimulating Progress". Why does this concept matter so much? And how do you combine the Hedgehog Principle with this concept? And where does the big, hairy, audacious goal fit in with everything? This episode shows you how to tie all the elements together in a neat little bundle.

Time to escalate that route to greatness, don't you think?

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Part 1: Preserving the Core + Stimulating Progress Part 2: The BHAG Part 3: Your Action Plan To Greatness Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer.

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Recently a client called Rosa wrote to us with a request.

"I would have preferred to read the series on Dartboard Pricing in ePub," she said. She made it clear it was a request, not a demand. Which brings up a whole new set of problems for us at Psychotactics. Most business books are designed with text in mind and may contain a few graphics. Our books aren't designed that way at all. They have dozens of cartoons and under every cartoon is a caption. In The Brain Audit alone there are almost 100 cartoons and corresponding captions. In a PDF, this layout is easy-peasy. Create the book in InDesign and export it as a PDF and it maintains its design integrity. Try to do the same thing for an ePub and it's like stepping in poo.

It's a tedious, frustrating process to get all the graphics to align the way they should The easier way is to just make a quick excuse, apologies and move on. After all, it isn't like 90% of our audience is asking for an ePub. It's just a stray request, isn't it? It's simple to ignore the request and get on with the important task of doing whatever it is we do. But that's where the problem lies, doesn't it? We've ignored the concept of progress. Almost all of us today read on a tablet or our phones. I know I do, my wife does, even my mother in law who ranted and raved about computers—she now loves her iPad. And PDFs work on tablet devices and phones, but they're super clunky.

Sadly that's not the only problem Jim Collins talks about two elements: preserving the core and stimulating progress. And he goes to great lengths to stress the AND in between both of them. So all of us have to stand back and ask ourselves: What's our core? The core of Psychotactics has been the factor of "consumption". Any one can create attraction and conversion. It's super-hard to get clients to consume what they've bought from you. Books, courses, workshops—we spend hours, days and weeks trying to figure out how to achieve a skill.

The cartoons, the captions in the book—they're not just a design concept. They're placed there as memory hooks; as a method of summary. They need to be exactly where they are in the books and courses. We could remove them and easily create an ePub like most ePubs, but that would fit in with our core. Collins says it has to be an AND. We have to preserve the core AND stimulate p