Why name my company The Crispian Advantage
Hi, Nick Anderson,
founder of The Crispian Advantage, here.
Someone asked me the other day,
“Why do you call your company The Crispian Advantage?”
I explained it and
he said “People need to know that!” So, here goes…
It’s based on a
painful personal experience and reveals some important lessons that I’ve learned
in 30 years of coaching sales effectiveness and organizational change.
On the personal
side, I love Shakespeare especially Henry V’s speech before the battle of
Agincourt. (October 25th, 1415 for those of you who like to know
such things.) Underlying a rousing speech, his strategy was to galvanize
his competitive advantage when facing a superior enemy.
Though English, Henry laid claim to lands in France and was there fighting to maintain them. His troops were outnumbered 3:1, some say 5:1, by an army of French Knights with heavy armor. Henry’s troops were largely English and Welsh Archers.
Their advantage lay
in that all archers were required by law to practice every Sunday in their
villages to the point where they could
fire 10 to 12 arrows a minute. What is even more remarkable/ is that each arrow
took a draw weight of 160 pounds!
Leading this beleaguered
army Henry’s speech was about finding strength and believing in yourself.That message
led me to recite the whole speech in my basement before giving the eulogy at my
wife’s funeral. The strength it gave me on that day stuck.
Fast forward 10 years
when I was establishing my own company and the speech came back to me:
Then he will strip his sleeve
and show his scars
And say “These wounds I had on Crispian’s Day”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot.
But he’ll remember, with advantages…
…We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
Faced with a dire
situation, Henry used the rain-soaked, boggy ground he was given to move his
archers to the narrowest point of the valley with dense forest on both sides.
This negated the French plan to outflank his position. He then provoked the
French Knights to charge over this boggy ground with their heavy horses and
armor. The confines of the valley and time spent in the “killing ground” was
the crux of his victory.
Over 30 years of
consulting, I have seen how this translates to business success and failure.
Many times, people use all their abilities to compete where their competition
is strongest, rather than exploit their strengths where the competition is
weakest.
The CrispianAdvantage is about helping clients see the field clearly both your competitors and yourself then to galvanize your “troops” with a clear,
compelling goal.
Our vision is to train and coach leaders to dig deep within and inspire
their teams. We help people and businesses make strategic and transformational
change to succeed in their chosen field.
To learn more about our Team of seasoned consultants and how we can help you develop
and deploy successful change:
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