Roy's Blog: Customer Service
January 12, 2005
BUSINESS. SCHOOL’S. OUT.
🚀 Audacious Move of the Week
BUSINESS. SCHOOL’S. OUT.
Business schools and traditional business textbooks teach students the accepted rules of business.
But if you want to succeed in today’s brutally competitive marketplace, BE DiFFERENT or be dead teaches something far more important: how to win when following those rules makes you look and act like everyone else.
Put down the conventional business textbook; pick up one written from the battlefield.
I have a problem with the way we educate people for business.
We teach them what is already known.
Established models.
Accepted methods.
Proven formulas.
Case studies describing what somebody else did in circumstances that no longer exist.
Then we graduate students into a world that is changing by the hour and expect them to figure it out.
We’re preparing them to explain business rather than WIN at it.
That’s why I believe BE DiFFERENT or be dead should be the business textbook students actually follow if they want to succeed.
That’s a big claim.
I can back it up.
🎓 Business School Teaches What Already Happened
My textbook wasn’t born in a classroom.
It was born while I was helping build a startup into a business generating more than $1 BILLION in annual sales.
There was no professor standing beside me.
No answer at the back of the book.
No tidy case study telling me what happened next.
We made decisions with incomplete information.
We screwed things up.
We tried things respectable business thinking might have considered ridiculous.
And we discovered something business education has fundamentally backwards:
Knowing what has worked is not the same as knowing what to do.
That gap is enormous.
📚 Real Business Doesn’t Come In Chapters
Traditional textbooks necessarily organize business into neat subjects.
Strategy over here.
Marketing over there.
Customer service somewhere else.
Leadership gets its own chapter.
Sales gets another.
Real business doesn’t arrive like that.
It arrives Tuesday morning at 9:17 disguised as a pissed-off customer, a competitor cutting your price, an employee doing something stupid, a technology shift nobody anticipated or a plan that suddenly isn’t working.
There is no Chapter 7 telling you what to do next.
You have to move.
That’s what BE DiFFERENT or be dead teaches.
Not how to admire someone else’s success.
How to create your own.
Not how to apply a fashionable formula.
How to think when the formula breaks.
Not how to become “best in class”.
How to make the class irrelevant.
Not how to reduce uncertainty until everyone feels comfortable.
How to make a call when certainty is impossible.
And certainly not how to copy the organizations business schools have decided are worthy of case studies.
Copying yesterday’s winner is a lousy way to become tomorrow’s one.
👊 The Market Doesn’t Give You An Exam
Business schools aren’t useless.
They can give students valuable knowledge.
But knowledge isn’t the finish line.
The test comes when the market punches your beautiful plan in the mouth.
What do you do then?
That’s where my textbook begins.
It contains the Audacious Moves we actually made.
Some worked spectacularly.
Some needed fixing.
Some violated conventional wisdom.
But they were forged in the only laboratory I ultimately trust: the marketplace.
That’s the fundamental difference between BE DiFFERENT or be dead and the traditional business textbook.
One teaches you about business.
Mine teaches you how to survive and win in it.
🚨 Learn The Rules. Then Stop Thinking Like Everyone Else.
So if you’re studying business, study the conventional textbooks.
Learn the language.
Understand the principles.
Know what everyone else is being taught.
Then open BE DiFFERENT or be dead and learn something considerably more dangerous:
how NOT to think like everyone else.
Because your future won’t be determined by how well you can recite what business already knows.
It will be determined by what you do when what business already knows isn’t good enough.
That’s the textbook I wish I’d had when I started.
So I wrote it.
🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?
🎙️ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION™ for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business.
✍🏻 Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.
Extraordinary businesses aren’t built by ordinary decisions.
They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.
Now go make yours.
Cheers,
Roy
- Posted 1.12.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
- Permalink
January 3, 2005
INCHES. DELIVER. BILLIONS.
🚀 Audacious Move™ of the Week
INCHES. DELIVER. BILLIONS.
Extraordinary business growth isn’t always the result of one breakthrough strategy or spectacular decision.
In most cases, it’s the cumulative impact of hundreds of unconventional moves that make a business different and more relevant to its customers.
Stop searching for the ONE BIG IDEA that will transform your business. Start making moves that advance your business, even if it’s only a nano-inch at a time.
🔥 The BILLION Wasn’t One Big Idea.
We took a startup to over $1 BILLION in annual sales.
That’s a pretty big number.
And people naturally assume we must have done something spectacular to make it happen.
A revolutionary product.
A breakthrough strategy.
Some HUGE decision that changed everything.
Nope.
The BILLION wasn’t the result of ONE spectacular move.
It was the cumulative impact of hundreds of moves that challenged conventional thinking.
Different ways of serving customers.
Different ways of leading people.
Different ways of getting things done.
Individually, many didn’t look like much, in fact they looked kind of “crazy”.
But collectively, they created something extraordinary.
You don’t need to make a BILLION-DOLLAR MOVE to build a BILLION-DOLLAR BUSINESS.
💥 What Did Our MOVES Look Like?
We didn’t just TALK about being different.
We actually DID things differently.
For example we:
* Killed Dumb Rules™ that dissatisfied customers.
* Hired for Goosebumps™ to get “Human Being Lovers”.
* Cut The CRAP™ to eliminate barriers to strategy execution.
* Lived Leadership by Serving Around™ asking “How can I help?”.
* Created Line of Sight™ to define strategy execution roles for everyone.
* Strategically Micromanaged™ the things essential to the execution of our strategy.
* Called the Audible™ when things went haywire.
* Got our strategy Just About Right™ and didn’t chase perfection.
These weren’t all massive strategic breakthroughs.
They were unconventional approaches to everyday business challenges.
Some were simple.
Some were uncomfortable.
All challenged accepted ways of doing things.
Together, they helped transform the way our organization operated.
The SIZE of the move isn’t what matters. The DIFFERENCE it creates does.
🎯 The Secret Is in the ACCUMULATION.
I’ve always believed in making a nano-inch of progress.
Not every move has to be spectacular.
Not every decision has to produce a massive breakthrough.
Sometimes all you get is a nano-inch.
GOOD.
One move eliminates a customer frustration.
Another simplifies a cumbersome process.
Another removes a barrier preventing an employee from doing their job.
Another makes you just a little MORE relevant to the customers you serve.
A nano-inch here. A nano-inch there.
Keep making those moves.
Every day.
Throughout the organization.
And those nano-inches ACCUMULATE.
Being different becomes the way your organization BEHAVES.
Not a marketing claim.
Not a clever slogan.
People instinctively look for different ways to solve customer problems rather than defend organizational policies.
The BILLION wasn’t created by one giant leap. It was built by relentlessly accumulating nano-inches of progress.
And that’s how you march toward becoming The ONLY One™ who does what you do.
⚡ The BEAUTY Is That EVERYONE Can Do It.
Here’s what I love most about this lesson.
You don’t need a billion-dollar business to use it.
You could run a small restaurant.
A retail shop.
A professional services firm.
A startup with five employees.
It doesn’t matter.
You can make a move tomorrow.
Kill ONE dumb rule.
Remove ONE frustrating customer touch point.
Find ONE way to surprise a customer.
Discover ONE customer craving nobody else is satisfying.
The moves don’t have to be expensive.
They don’t have to be complicated.
They just have to make a meaningful DIFFERENCE to someone who CARES.
And here’s the leadership challenge.
Don’t make these moves the exclusive responsibility of executives.
Build an organization FULL of people who challenge convention.
Give them the freedom to act.
Encourage them to Be Imperfect FAST™.
Then make another move.
The real power isn’t one audacious leader. It’s an organization full of people who dare to do things differently.
🚀 What’s Your Next Audacious Move™?
Stop waiting for the BIG ONE.
The next breakthrough idea.
The next strategic planning session.
The next technological revolution.
The opportunities to conduct business differently are already around you.
A stupid internal policy.
A frustrated customer.
An unnecessary process.
An employee with a crazy idea.
Your challenge?
Ask your team:
“What’s ONE MOVE we can make TODAY that will move us a nano-inch closer to becoming The ONLY One™?”
Then DO IT.
Learn.
Adjust.
And do it again.
Because our BILLION wasn’t built by one magical idea.
It was built by making being different a HABIT.
INCHES. DELIVER. BILLIONS.
You may never want to build a billion-dollar business.
That’s fine.
But you CAN build an extraordinary one.
ONE MOVE. ONE NANO-INCH. ONE DAY AT A TIME.
🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?
🎙️ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION™ for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business.
✍🏻 Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.
Extraordinary businesses aren’t built by ordinary decisions.
They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.
Now go make yours.
Cheers,
Roy
- Posted 1.3.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
- Permalink
