Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win?

THREE

Exploit Anomalies

Sometimes a growth opportunity lies hidden in something—such as an idiosyncratic customer preference or a seemingly aberrant employee behavior—that, at first glance, seems to have no relevance to strategy, the business, or growth. Hardball players know that such anomalies can contain the seeds of a new business idea, and they look for ways to exploit them.

An anomaly is an irregularity, a departure from the norm. A good example of a business anomaly is the one identified by a guy named Joe Girard. According to the Guinness World Records, Girard is the world’s greatest automobile salesman, as measured by volume. Harry Beckwith calls him “the Michelangelo and Tiger Woods of sales.”¹ In Girard’s book How to $ell Anything ...