“In an age of skills shortages, guerrilla tactics become particularly relevant.”
You may have noticed the rise of a new euphemism: guerrilla tactics. Suddenly, there is guerrilla marketing, guerrilla consulting, guerrilla innovation, guerrilla recruiting, guerrilla news and even guerrilla parenting! The common denominator in all of these is aggression! Act aggressively, or be swallowed up by the competition.
It’s kill or be killed, soldier.
“Of course, none of this is relevant to us”, I hear you say, “we work in IT”. Ah, well, that’s just the sort of attitude that’s going to get you into trouble. This is an all-in, worldwide, rumblein-the-jungle. Yes, maybe you skirted the quality assurance ’80s (snickering in the corner when the quality assurance manager declared that the next system would be 100 percent error free). Perhaps you stood by the mainframes when everyone else was declaring them dead. Maybe you’ve even avoided getting tangled up in the always-on, ubiquitous, mobile generation. But believe me no one avoids conscription into the guerrilla era.
The basic tenets of guerrilla-ism are as follows:
• Be aggressive
• Focus on quality, not quantity
• Target opportunities with laser precision
• Life is 24x7. So is your job
• All’s fair in love and war.
And this is war. The global competitive landscape isn’t getting any easier to negotiate and the rise of guerrilla-ism means that activities designed to harass and undermine the competition (the “enemy” in guerrilla talk) are now a legitimate part of the competitive arsenal.
In fact, in an age of skills shortages, guerrilla tactics become particularly relevant. Guerrilla recruitment, for instance, can mean stealing from competitors to get those high-performers. Not just so that you can have the best talent but, more importantly, so that you can deprive the enemy of those skills. You know who your competitors are (you do, don’t you), but do you know what skills they desperately need to get their next initiative off the ground? Do you know who has those skills, and do you know how to keep them away from the enemy? Either you attack the enemies’ factories (IT development capabilities) now, before their new weapons have been developed, or you deal with a fully developed offensive on your market position in the future.
Okay, so you’ve saved your company from attack by your competitors, but what about your customers? They’ve turned into guerrillas too! They don’t trust consultants or salespeople, they know more about your product than you do, they know that they can buy it cheaper from your enemy over the Internet and they have no brand loyalty. So how do you sell to guerrillas?
First, you make sure you put your customers second (your staff are harder to replace) and then you sack 20 percent of them (they’re sucking your company dry). Then become guerrilla marketers. Remember, you can’t con a guerrilla customer. The only thing you can do to gain trust is to bring them into your confidence and tell them the truth. Guerrillas see the world as it really is. If your product or service doesn’t stand up to the light of day, the best marketing in the world won’t save you.
A friend recently told me about his new CIO, whom he described as “altruistic”. I looked around to see him shaking his head before he added: “I don’t think he’s going to last long.” Today, business is war, and guerrillas need thick skin (and some body armour wouldn’t hurt). As I like to remind my poker buddies: “If you look around the table and you can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you!” How’s the table looking?
Gerald Khoury consults, lectures and writes in IT strategy and planning.
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