Creating a strategy
When Grosse was a kid, he liked to play Risk. “I thought that was the neatest game,” Grosse says. “It was about strategy. It was about matching wits with other people. As a boy, there was something exciting and sort of militaristic and Napoleonic about it all.
“It very much leant to a vivid imagination, which I had as a kid. Even though it was just a stupid map with a bunch of plastic pieces on it, it was somehow more than that.”
Risk rewards players who are opportunistic and execute a carefully laid out strategy. Maximize your forces where the opponent is weak, and you’ll win the game.
After Sept. 11, the map Grosse was looking at was suddenly real. The pieces in the game now weren’t plastic, they were people, with lives of their own and families. Every decision he made could lead to victory — or to ruin.
Like the generals of old, he called together his most trusted advisers to formulate a plan to get Hotwire through the crisis.
“I know very few people that can take the mountaintop approach to strategy where they go off by themselves and sit on a stoop next to some llama in Asia and come back and say, ‘Here’s how I’m going to reinvent the world,’” Grosse says.
“Strategy is based on having real insight into your market. The only way you get real insight into your market is to just be an outstanding listener.”
By listening to the people around him, his suppliers and his customers, Grosse determined that to get to Point B, Hotwire was going to have to diversify its offerings. It could not rely on hitching its cart to the now faltering airline industry. Instead, it was going to have to get into booking hotel rooms and car rentals to offset the airline losses.
Effective listening — the kind that can provide insight into getting out of a major jam — means giving the other person your undivided attention.
“It’s really that ability that makes people talk more,” Grosse says. “Ultimately, listening is not just listening and getting information, but it’s also the ability to get information out of people that they wouldn’t necessarily have given or won’t give to other people. People respond naturally to people that really care about them and people that really give them undivided attention.
“Listening is an active skill, whereas, oftentimes, it’s perceived as something that is passive, where you’re just sitting back and listening to someone droning on and on. Listening, when it’s done really well, is not a sit-back-in-your-chair kind of act. It’s a lean forward and put your elbows on the table and really hear what the person has to say.”
Next you have to take the information you hear and interpret it by relating it to your situation to choose the best routes to pursue.
“Typically, people fall off the rails in one of two ways,” he says. “One is they actually were good at it, but they’re just not anymore and don’t know it yet. That gets back to really listening and understanding that business isn’t static — it’s dynamic and there’s always new entrants and new ways of doing things, and you may be the king of the hill today or you may have been king of the hill five years ago, but you’re not today, and you have to wake up and smell the coffee.
“The second one is, I think people tend to focus on the obvious things of what makes people successful in a particular industry, even if that’s not necessarily who they are. I think a business has to be true to itself and leaders have to be true to themselves about what makes them really different.”
