Remember in the TV series Roots when Omoro, Kunta’s father, held his infant son,Kunta Kinte, up to starry sky and said, “Behold the only thing greater than yourself!”
I felt the article, Remapping your strategic mind-set by Pankaj Ghemawat was screaming that to egocentric senior executives about mental maps, and the executives’ view of the world. Mr Ghamawat wants executives to focus on a “rooted map to leaders enhance their intuition about the opportunities and threats inherent in our semi-globalized world.” Rooted maps, unlike conventional maps “depict the world from a specific perspective with a specific purpose in mind…They do so by adjusting the sizes and proportions of countries in relation to a specific home country… ”
This type of concept could be used by small business. Now, the obvious application is for a small business to draw a map according to countries it exports to. In other words, if their target is countries where English is commonly spoken, then they would “blow up” the size of those countries on the map.
However, a small business that does not export can use the same type of map. For example, in Southern California a business may want to see which districts are Spanish speaking and “blow” those districts up on a map. You should also color the districts by size and have a quantitative legend to add another dimension.
Small businesses have a tremendous ability to act like the big boys. As a CPA firm, we see both worlds at times. Try a map like this and see if it shows you something greater than what you have known.
How does your sales strategy match the map? How does your allocation of resources match the map?