The positioning field guide

A position you can defend in a room

Eight exercises that take you from a vague ambition to a position you can defend in a room. Fill it in by hand. It takes a focused afternoon and it settles arguments you would otherwise have with yourself every week for a year.

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The share test, which you can start using today

Three of the exercises ask you to write down things that may be sensitive: client work, real numbers, failures with other people in them. This is the system that lets you publish real proof without burning a confidence or a contract. It is useful on its own, so here it is in full.

Green

You would say it on a podcast tomorrow with the name attached. Publish as it is, and stop deliberating about it.

Yellow

Publishable with work. Swap the company name for a type and size, the exact figure for a range, the date for a quarter. Most genuinely useful material lives here.

Red

Reveals a confidential number or a client's identity, or could harm someone if it spread. Keep it private, permanently, and replace it with a story you would tell the world.

The rule that matters most

Anonymize by removing detail, never by inventing it. A mid-sized manufacturer in the Midwest is safer than the client’s name and lands just as hard. Roughly a third is safer than 34 percent and nobody notices the difference. Last quarter is safer than March and reads better anyway. The moment you invent a detail to protect a real one, you have written fiction with your name on it, and that is a considerably worse problem than the one you were solving.

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Three things to agree with first

We would rather you decided against this here than abandon it at exercise five. The commitment is real, and stating it plainly is more useful to you than a bigger download number is to us.

The honest prerequisites

Read all three. Check the ones that are true. Nothing is validated and nobody is checking. This is a decision you are making with yourself, which is the same thing the workbook asks for on every page.

I have about four hours and I am willing to spend themNot in one sitting necessarily, but this quarter rather than eventually. Half a workbook produces nothing at all.I want to work my position out rather than be handed oneThe workbook only asks questions. A position you did not arrive at collapses the first time a competent person challenges it, and one of them will.I will answer honestly where the honest answer is unflatteringParticularly exercise four, which asks what you would come to resent, and exercise two, which asks what went wrong. Flattering answers produce a workbook that reads well and does nothing.

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Eight exercises that take you from a vague ambition to a position you can defend in a room. Fill it in by hand in a focused afternoon.

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A position you can defend in a room

The share test, which you can start using today

Three things to agree with first

Where should we send it?

Finishing the workbook is the easy half