Be Different or be dead

October 27, 2014

Why busy-ness is used by people as a bloody excuse

Source: Unsplash

Why is busy-ness used by people as a bloody excuse?

We finish our meal at a restaurant and would like our table cleared of the left-over rubbish and debris.

We wait and wait and wait.

Servers fly by, careful to avoid eye contact with us.

Their response when I finally asked for help: “I would have cleared your table earlier but I was too busy.”

This is a common problem. People today are ‘too busy’ to do the right thing; captivated in their moment rather than focussing on what is right

Too busy to keep a promise, meet that friend for lunch, take the extra time needed to care for a customer or to say thank you to someone who has done you a favour.

Too busy is the rationalization for avoiding what should be attended to.

It also serves the thrill some people get from ‘activity-mania’; they love to chase stuff. They aren’t focussed.

But it’s the easy way out.

Whenever you hear yourself thinking or talking too busy, STOP!

Be ruled by the right thing not busy-ness.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 10.27.14 at 04:30 am by Roy Osing
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October 13, 2014

Why benchmarking makes you a disgusting follower not a leader

Source: Unsplash

Why benchmarking makes you a disgusting follower not a leader.

Benchmarking is effective at keeping you in the boring herd. Here’s why…

Benchmarking is viewed as a necessary process for most organizations. There are benchmarking consultant experts and courses you can take to learn how to benchmark proficiently and gain the maximum benefit.

In my view, benchmarking is a simple concept as is its process:

▪️Identify the organization that excels in some aspect of your operations that you believe requires improvement — customer service, business planning, customer engagement, sales management, accounts receivable, advertising planning and so on;

▪️Map (understand deeply) their system or process to understand exactly how they perform the operation;

▪️Define the actions you must take to incorporate their operating system into your operation with the objective of replicating their level of efficiency.

Benchmarking might help you improve your operations efficiency but it won’t make you stand-out from your competition.

Benchmarking can be problematic on several levels:

Benchmarking is copying

It’s ‘sucking up’ to an organization or individual recognized (by someone presumed to be the thought leader) to be the best at performing a particular function and is therefore the organization you should aspire to be.

It doesn’t make you special. It may help you improve your position in the crowd of hungry competitors by being more efficient at something, but it won’t help you stand out from them by being more relevant or unique.

Copying is the enemy of being different. The maximum benefit you can achieve by copying is best in class levels of performance which may return better operating results than previously obtained but unless you vault beyond these levels true differentiation won’t happen.

Benchmarking keeps you in the herd

The herd is a place where organizations go to blend in with others; to conform with what others do and to lose the DNA attributes that make them special.

Even if you are the ‘best of breed’ you’re still in the herd. It’s just that you execute a process better than any other herd member; you’re still rubbing shoulders with your sameness brethren.

And because you’re tagged ‘the best’, you have no motivation to break away from the herd; you find consolation in it.

The world is becoming a home for best practice addicts and as a result it’s boring and benign.

Benchmarking robs you of your individuality

Benchmarking results in conformance; it sucks any unique thinking you may have out of your system and replaces it with the need to capitulate to the leader of the herd.

Rather than look for a unique solution to your problem, you look for another herd member that has put in the work to create a solution that works for them and you assume you can boilerplate it and it will work for you.

When you copy someone or something, you relegate — subordinate — yourself to them. You roll over, put your ‘paws in the air’ and subsume yourself to the leadership of someone else. Looking up when you’re lying on the ground isn’t a very liberating place to be.

Benchmarking won’t make you special and differentiate you from your competitors

It has no strategic value in moving the organization to a position in the marketplace that ONLY you occupy.

“What are our competitors doing?” is often asked when organizations are thinking about improving how they conduct business, and the benchmarking process ensues — adding zero space between them and their competitors.

And, of course, if you’re chasing another organization, you’re adding nothing to the kitbag of things that make you ‘special’ in the eyes of your customers and encouraging them to spread your word to others and attract new business.

If you copy someone, all you do is lower the bar.

Benchmarking is the enemy of innovation

If you’re a copycat, you’re not an innovator. Benchmarking does little or nothing to stimulate innovation and creativity which seem to be values organizations covet in today’s world of uncertainty and constant change.

In fact benchmarking kills real innovation because it has performance improvement using the standard of another as its end game as opposed to revolutionary changes that determine new strategic outcomes.

We need to get our thinking straight.

Few organizations today stand out, which is sad; few are deemed to be really special by their customers.
Being remarkable isn’t a strategy on the radar of most, or if it is, it’s an elusive goal because leaders allow people to use traditional tools — like benchmarking best of class — to do their jobs.

Uniqueness, remarkability and being special come from being different than your competitors, not copying what they and others do, even if they perform certain functions more efficiently than you do.

We need to change our ways and stick copying where it belongs.

Let’s:
— Start thinking about being different than best in class, not copying best of breed;
— Covet being ‘different than breed’, not best of breed;
— Think about doing what others are not doing, not looking to other’s successes;
— Go in the opposite direction that others are going, not following in their footsteps.
— Define best in class to be the highest bar to be different from, not emulate;
— Purge boilerplates from our toolbox and break new ground (and maybe be the author of a new boilerplate).

Copying is the enemy of being special and remarkable.

And as leaders, let’s change the conversation in our organizations; purging the notion of benchmarking and copying as ways of achieving strategic progress by asking these types of questions of our teams:

▪️”What can we do to be different from the crowd of competitors?”;
▪️“How does what you’re proposing make us stand out from the competition and be special to our customers?”.
▪️“What crazy ‘insane’ thing is a different business to ours doing and how can we use the basics of the idea to morph it into a special idea for us?”

Benchmarking is absolutely the wrong thing to do when the end game for most organizations seems to be uniqueness and remarkability, but there are ways to ‘bend the curve’ and go in the right direction.

Start the change now, though, because time is not your friend.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 10.13.14 at 05:41 am by Roy Osing
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October 5, 2014

28 reasons customers are sometimes enormous trouble

Source: Pexels

28 reasons customers are sometimes enormous trouble.

Customers are a pain; here are 28 reasons why customers are too bothersome to deal with.

1. They come late and expect us to stay open.
2. They come early and expect us to be opened.
3. They don’t appreciate some of our staff; they have unrealistic expectations.

4. They always change their mind.
5. They are too sensitive about getting their needs met.
6. They tell their friends how bad we are when we make a mistake or don’t meet their customer service expectations.

7. They feel entitled to get a deal; they never want to pay the regular price.
8. They are inflexible; they won’t accept a substitute when we don’t have exactly what they want.
9. They demand we check the back of the store if the item they are looking for isn’t on the shelf; this takes time.

10. They are quick to criticize but rarely praise us when we do a good job.
11. They complain about our prices being too high.
12. They hate standing in line or in a call center queue to pay for their merchandise.
13. They hate being told to go to another cash register when we take our break.

14. They expect us to be able to answer any question on any of our products; they don’t appreciate that it is impossible for us to know everything about each product we offer.
15. They don’t like our merchandise cluttering the aisles because of our limited space for inventory.
16. They expect to be served by friendly staff even if we are having a bad day.
17. They expect staff to be available to help them; they get very angry if they have to hunt for a store clerk.

18. They never seem to be satisfied; give them a little and they want more.
19. They ask for a manager if we can’t satisfy them.
20. They think they are the only ones we have to serve; they don’t care if we have other customers in the store.
21. They stress-out our staff by being so demanding.

22. They shop around for better deals; we can’t count on their loyalty.
23. They don’t understand our policies; they keep asking for things that our rules don’t permit.
24. They don’t get that if we break the rules and do something special for them, we would have to do the same for others.

25. If your delivery is late, they don’t understand that it was a problem with our courier service not with us.
26. They hate voice recording systems and would rather talk to a real person. They don’t understand we are trying to increase our productivity.
27. They are impatient and don’t like waiting 10 minutes on the phone for the next available representative.
28. They like to re-invent our menu. They always fight with us to add food items that they like.

Some days you think another line of work would be preferable.

The problem is you can’t avoid customers and their complications.

Gotta figure out how to live with these unpredictable and demanding folks since we can’t live without ‘em.

What’s your gotta live with ‘em strategy?

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 10.5.14 at 02:38 am by Roy Osing
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