Be Different or be dead

June 29, 2013

Why don’t organizations recruit and honour ‘weird’ people?

Source: Unsplash

Why don’t organizations recruit and honour ‘weird’ people?

✔️ You’re unreasonable;
✔️ You’re not normal;
✔️ You’re weird;
✔️ You’re crazy;
✔️ You’re off the wall:
✔️ You’re ridiculous;
✔️ You’re unpredictable.

These are common accusations made when someone doesn’t conform to someone else’s expectations:

— When someone stands-out from the commonplace crowd and is noticed;

— When someone makes another person feel uncomfortable;

— When a person casts ‘normal’ aside to be who they are, not what others expect them to be.

Innovation and creativity comes from weirdness. It doesn’t come from being like everyone else

Strong leadership comes from crazy notions of what people value and are prepared to pay for. It does not come from fitting-in and doing what everyone else does.

Great companies have a ‘ridiculous’ DNA structure, always searching for products and services that excite people’s emotions and make them happy.

They aren’t made great by following best of breed.

Traditional HR practices sorely lack the ability to attract weirdness because they don’t look for it.

Look for it.

Declare that it is a strategic imperative for you.

Include it in your statement of values.

“We treasure weirdness and ridiculousness”.

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

• Posted 6.29.13 at 08:44 am by Roy Osing
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June 15, 2013

Why copying others is lazy and wrong and you should be fired

Why copying others is lazy and wrong and you should be fired.

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 6.15.13 at 06:53 am by Roy Osing
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April 29, 2013

6 proven ways to do a better job of innovating

Source: Unsplash

6 proven ways to do a better job of innovating.

Innovate! is critical to the success of any organization, and these innovation strategies have been proven to work

But the process must be guided by a strategy to be different from the competition and provide people reasons why they should buy from them and no one else.

These 6 actions will help you do a better job of innovation.

▪️Establish a context for Innovate! — Idea generation and brainstorming is a waste unless it is guided by strategic direction. Use your strategic business plan as the frame to drive your Innovate! activity.

▪️Develop specific objectives with accountability and time-frames assigned. — Establish specific Innovate! objectives in your game plan to focus on the specific elements which require you to create a “new box”.

▪️Target your Innovate! objectives around your ONLY Statement — It should be your beacon to follow because it establishes your unique position in the market.
Many organizations follow best practices. This works if you want to improve delivery of your core service but it’s NOT OK if you want to stand-out from the competition.

Copying a best practice is a catch-up game at best; it’s not strategic.

Innovate! rule — Consider best practices to deliver flawless core service and your ONLY statement to leave the herd.

▪️Develop your Human Resources plan — to acquire and develop the Innovate! skills and competencies you need as defined by your game plan?

▪️Design reward and recognition programs — around your Innovate! objectives. If you don’t, you will do nothing but encourage the status quo.

▪️Leverage your customer learning capabilities — to drive the Innovate! process. Use both analysis and observation to know everything there is to know about WHO you have chosen to serve. Follow their lead.

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

• Posted 4.29.13 at 06:53 am by Roy Osing
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April 22, 2013

Amazing customer experiences can happen by doing these simple things

Source: Unsplash

How do you create a customer experience that blows a customer away and can’t be boxed?

Amazing customer experiences can happen by doing these simple things.

It can’t be time-bound. It can’t be created with an employee trying to get a customer on and off the phone in 20 seconds or less.

It can’t be engineered or architected. It can’t be manufactured from a blueprint. It doesn’t come from a can.

A magic moment is created when someone ‘puts in the time’ with another person, showing caring and thoughtful behavior.

It’s created through a process of listening, asking questions and responding with a serving attitude.

The spellbound customer experience cannot be managed with efficiency in mind.

This is how to create a customer experience with magic moments:

▪️Remove time restrictions on people who deal with customers. Let them take as much time as they need to serve them well and deliver the magic.

▪️Establish loyalty- building outcomes as the prime objective of any customer contact not how long it takes to unload a customer.

▪️Redefine how you use ‘work force management’ to manage your call center. These are useful tools to diagnose problems and issues but they shouldn’t be used to drive behavior of the call center rep.

▪️Hire employees with a proven track record of taking care of others. You can teach them your business but you can’t teach them to be customer experience moment magicians.

▪️Empower people to do the right thing for a customer, not enforce organizational rules and policies that do nothing but piss them off.

▪️Encourage the surprise element in your customer service strategy. What can be done to surprise a customer in a moment?

▪️Recognize and reward moment magicians. Make a big deal of treating them as heroes.

▪️Talk to customers. Mechanized touch points are limiting in their ability to create magic. They are designed to minimize engagement time and simply cannot replicate the experience humans can create for other humans.

The customer experience riddled with magic moments will propel your organization to the top because your customers will never leave you.

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

• Posted 4.22.13 at 06:29 am by Roy Osing
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