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I always avoid prophesying before hand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has taken place.

–Winston Churchill

Many businesses offer one-size fits all. Naturally, you can imagine that those who are very large and very small avoid those choices.

However, it’s not enough to just offer more choices . . . people must be able to see that these choices fit what they need. As a result, watch out what you say about the new choices. For instance “light” beer originally was described as a product that was good for women who didn’t drink beer because they didn’t want to gain weight. It didn’t sell. The same product when offered as “tastes great, less filling” to overweight men who loved beer sold like crazy.

Let’s look at how this applies to information-based offerings with an example drawn from my experiences. Peter Drucker told me that we could design better information offerings by working with and observing people who were applying our ideas from our two existing books than by writing new books. He also recommended that we focus our writing on shorter pieces.

Severely chastened, I began to embed more and more of the management processes from my first two books into our consulting assignments. I did, however, reserve some time during my vacation to write brief outlines of new management processes.

I put the information up on the internet with an unusual structure designed to make the materials easier to select from and to use. I offer this structure as a possible way for you to provide your information online:

Each subject opens with a brief summary to help you decide if the material is relevant to your needs. If you find that you are interested, you go to a prediagnostic page that tells you how to determine the potential of the subject to help you.

If that exercise is sufficiently positive, you go on to a set of instructions for employing the process that include an example and a description of likely benefits. After you apply those instructions, you can click through to the postdiagnostic page that tells you how to build on your first successes in applying the process.

For awhile I was tempted to crank out dozens of these processes. Then I realized that Peter would have advised me to get the processes I had into circulation before adding any more.

My tracking study of CEO best practices for Chief Executive Magazine provided me with an opportunity to write briefly about the two books and these processes. For example, one issue carried my thoughts on managing forces beyond the control of management.

What is the lesson for you?

Even my bite-sized pieces of information contained more than what most people wanted. Like the material world (being broken into molecules, atoms, and the components of atoms), offerings should be subdivided into finer bits (as I did with the management processes) that capture just the essence of what someone needs at that moment. In that way, the consumer of the information can customize it to just that person’s needs.