Kill to Save! — Management Strategy
An effective way to survive the wrath of a Competitive Environment
A controversial yet essential technique to stabilize and strengthen our company, career, and even our relationship. This technique has been ripped off from the pages of the US Military Handbook! and I tweaked it a bit here and there, to better fit our practical needs.
Escaping the Myopic bubble:
Kill to Save? It might sound like an oxymoron, but it’s one of the powerful management strategies. In things that are really close to us, in this case, our career, school, or relationship - we only see what we want to see, and not the actual truth. We are often myopic, especially to the ones we are closely associated with. We don’t know our flaws and mistakes are, until or otherwise, others explicitly state them to us. Even when others point them out, we often retort to defensive mode. Not acknowledging these flaws at times could even result in dire consequences.
This is where “Kill to Save Strategy” can be effective, it stretches us out of our defensive mode and look at the bare naked truth.
Here is the ‘Kill to Save strategy' broken down into simple steps that we can readily use and test in our lives.
Kill to Save Strategy:
Step 1: Select your Roles!
This is a role-playing act, and the first step is selecting your role. But there is a catch here… You should take up the role of your competitor or authority or an enemy. Here are a few examples:
- You own a company — XYZ. So the role you gonna select is your competitor.
- You are a job seeker, then your role is a recruiter.
- You are an employee, so your role is your manager or CEO.
- You are in a relationship, your role is ‘a secret admirer' of your partner who is jealous of your relationship.
Step 2: Plan to Kill
After assuming the roles, the next step is to come up with ideas and detailed plans that could ‘DESTROY YOU’. Yes, you need to come up with all possible ways to destroy your career or relationship, or business.
- How do I make the company XYZ lose all its market? How can I poach its highly skilled employees?
- What reasons can I come up with, to reject this candidate? What are the flaws in this candidate that I could highlight?
- How do I deny this employee his/her promotion? What reasons can I provide to reduce the hike? what are the flaws in his performance scores?
- (As a jealous friend) How do I break this couple apart? What differences or conflicts they have which I could capitalize on?
Come up with all possible ways, however crazy it may be. You need to be ruthless, even more than your competitor. Come up with all these plans only as of the role you picked.
Step 3: Seal the holes, save the boat!
Now that we have all possible reasons for someone to sabotage our goals, the next step is to work tirelessly to fix all these negatives.
The company survives even from fierce competition, you land your dream job, you will have a strong and lasting relationship, and the authorities cant deny the hike/promotion that you deserve.
This is an interesting and efficient strategy, that could help us evaluate ourselves from a different person's perspective and detect & fix flaws even before anyone else notices them.
Further reading: Google ‘Red Teaming’, ‘Kill the Company’.
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