Nine steps to boosting your business.

If, to borrow the tired business buzz phrase, you’re thinking outside the box, then you’re doing it wrong. So says Mr Matt Watkinson, award-winning author of The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences; you should be using his grid instead.

In his new book, The Grid: The Decision-Making Tool For Every Business (Including Yours), Mr Watkinson argues that most of us – from employees up to business owners – have become so embroiled in our own finicky areas of expertise that we fail to grasp the wider impact that the decisions we make can have. For example, by cutting costs in the production of an item to increase profits you might actually be making a less desirable product that you can’t sell. The problem is when you’re looking at a linear company from ground level, you won’t see much beyond the next room; Mr Watkinson suggests you need to take a “space-station view” instead, to see it as a whole.

But how do you – and we hate to break it to you, but essentially a cog – best get your head around the complexities of the machine that is the modern company? This is where Mr Watkinson’s grid comes in. By breaking down the workings of a business to nine components in what looks like a noughts-and-crosses board – wants and needs, revenues, customer base, rivalry, bargaining power, imitability, offerings, costs and adaptability – he believes you have a basic checklist for making any decision, and a means of taking a more holistic approach to the corporate world.

To better understand this bigger picture, here we delve into three of the boxes on Mr Watkinson’s grid.

Don’t compete

The traditional view of competition is one you’ve probably picked up from the school playing field. But aiming to be the best can actually prove counterproductive: get stuck in a game of one-upmanship with a rival and you could end up cutting the retail price until you can no longer afford to make your product or adding fancy new features that actually turn a customer off. Worse, if everyone works as efficiently as possible within the framework of the rules, you can end up with a market saturated with companies all offering exactly the same product. Mr Watkinson instead thinks it’s better to change the rules themselves by introducing something that nobody else can offer; “if we view the business world less as a competitive sport and more as an ecosystem”, he says, we can harness Darwinian principles to allow rival companies to coexist, and in fact work more efficiently.

Avoid rapid growth

In this age when a startup can, in just a few years, amass a value to rival the GDP of a small country, there is the temptation to opt for a revenue model that guarantees rapid growth. But not all companies are set up to go down this route, and in some cases, you can do better by avoiding it entirely.

Mr Watkinson notes that in the 1980s and 1990s, “many fashion brands saw licensing as a win-win. By licensing their brands to foreign operators, they could expand quickly without having to build distribution and local knowledge.” The downside: the brand has little control over how it is marketed globally. He gives the example of Burberry. Prior to the arrival of CEO Ms Angela Ahrendts in 2006 and her “brand tsar” (and later CEO himself) Mr Christopher Bailey, Burberry had gone into partnership with 23 international licensees making “everything from kilts to dog leashes”. Meanwhile, you could pick up the brand’s iconic trench coat for a vast array of differing prices in different markets. Under Ms Ahrendts, Burberry bought back the licenses and refocused on its core range. “In the six years that followed, Burberry’s annual sales and share price more than doubled.”

Channel your inner surfer

It sounds unlikely, but Mr Watkinson picks up on a number of parallels between running a business and surfing. And while we don’t suggest donning a wetsuit for your next board meeting – it’s not that kind of board, after all – he has got a point. Surfing, like business, takes a lot of perseverance to master, can be exhausting if you’re paddling against the tide, but most importantly requires constant vigilance and awareness of what is going on around you. “Watch a line-up of surfers and you’ll notice everyone is staring out to sea,” he says. “Nobody wants to get caught off guard by a big set coming in.” Timing therefore is essential. Where Mr Watkinson proposes surfers and company executives differ is that surfers are actively out there searching for the next big set of waves, and will go to great lengths – Fiji, or getting in the water at 5.00am, as he puts it – to find them. Perhaps your company should follow this lead: “every business rides a wave that will eventually dissipate, and relies on continued waves of change for growth in the future.” So if your industry is hit by a wave, make sure you catch it.

The Grid: The Decision-Making Tool For Every Business (Including Yours) (Penguin) by Mr Matt Watkinson is out in paperback on 19 April