Peter Drucker is quoted as saying: The customer never buys what you think you sell. I’ve been with the same hardware store for more than ten years. Their work effectiveness is solid. They are friendly, personal, and make the time to provide good answers to my questions and provide sound advice. I have considerable confidence in their advice, especially the ‘old standby’s’ from whom I seek out for the tough questions. For that reason, I have never thought about business change or finding a new brand in the hardware business.
Then one day my wife and I started spending our winters in Florida. And now the option of finding a new hardware store brand became a necessity, as my old brand was not within my local area.
The new brand changed my entire perspective on the service expectations that I had developed over the past ten years. Why may you be wondering?
The new brand staff was younger and surely “less experienced.” But it didn’t seem this way. They were much more personal, asked important questions, spent more time with me, and did a more thorough job in getting solutions to my problems from home and yard maintenance. While I have not yet engaged with the entire service staff for sure, the ones I have dealt with were all of the equal knowledge.
This experience opened my eyes to the quality differences with my current brand service staff in my home in the north.
I had come to expect quality and service that was very good. But the new brand and their staff provided something even better.
Now every time I am in need of standard home maintenance action, I deal with my expert service staff from my new brand, even if it is by telephone. When I have some new equipment purchases, I hold off until I can give my new brand in Florida the opportunity. The new brand in Florida has won my standard business.
Business change examples
Here is another example. On December 9th, 1968, a research project funded by the US Department of Defense launched a revolution. The focus was not a Cold War adversary or even a resource rich banana republic, but rather to “augment human intellect” and the man driving it was not a general, but a mild-mannered engineer named Douglas Engelbart.
His presentation that day would be so consequential that it is now called The Mother of All Demos. Two of those in attendance, Bob Taylor and Alan Kay would go on to develop Engelbart’s ideas into the Alto, the first truly personal computer. Later, Steve Jobs would take many elements of the Alto to create the Macintosh.
So who deserves credit? Engelbart for coming up with the idea? Taylor and Kay for engineering solutions around it? Jobs for creating a marketable product that made an impact on the world? Strong arguments can be made for each, as well as for many others not mentioned here. The truth is that there are many paths to business change.
Here is a final example of business change. In her bestselling book Mindset, psychologist Carol Dweck argues that people who see their skills as a fixed set of strengths and weaknesses tend not to achieve much. On the flip side, those that see their skills as dynamic and changeable can continually grow their abilities and soar to great heights.
And surprisingly enough, businesses behave in the same way. Most see their business models as a permanent facet of their DNA, so when their environment changes, they fail to adapt.
And that my friends is why 87% of the companies on Fortune’s original list of 500 top firms are no longer there. You heard me right … 87%. Over time, most companies get better and better at things that people want less and less. Quite a paradox, isn’t it?
Of course, that’s not always true. Firms like Procter & Gamble, General Electric, and IBM still thrive after a century or more. The reason they endure is that they don’t see their business as fixed, but have continually reinvented themselves and are vastly different enterprises than when they started. In an age of change and disruption, the only viable strategy is to adapt. Even the best of the best, like these guys, teeter on the edge of disaster occasionally.
Business change … it doesn’t have to be that way. It has been said:
“If you don’t go, where you don’t go; you won’t know, what you don’t know.”
In other words, look for business change in the places you never look.
The more I have repeated that bit of insight, the more profound it has become. We are all creatures of habit. So are larger organizations. Doing things the way we’ve always done them is comfortable, familiar, and easy. It’s human nature to choose these “easy ways.”
Do you drive to work the same way every day? Probably! Do you read the same publications—or the same type of publications? Sure! How about TV and the Internet? Watching the same group of shows or using the same set of websites is also a common habit. When you do this, what do you get? You get a lot of familiar and comfortable feelings.
But true business change often doesn’t make us comfortable. It makes us uncomfortable. And yet, it is in that discomfort that the new ways, the new ideas, and the new feelings come to light. When you drive to work via a different route, you see different places and sights. If you go to the newsstand and peruse the magazines that you never otherwise look at, you will see things you simply would never think about otherwise
The bottom line
My business lesson from these examples?
If you are any service and product provider, never become complacent. Don’t provide a standard, average, or just good enough service. Always look for ways to improve your service and do things better to improve your work effectiveness.
Find staff that is the most caring and keep themselves well trained on the products you sell.
Because the day someone provides better results, service, or qualities than you do … is the day your customer’s loyalty will dry up. Left unchanged and not corrected so too may your business.
Remember, don’t strive to make your presence noticed, make your absence felt. Brands are verbs … what they do matters more than what they say.
Do you have an experience with the business change that you can share with this community?
