Let me share several remarkable lessons and examples of business change and work effectiveness.
Here is the first one.
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 stand-by’s’ from whom I seek out for the tough questions. For that reason, I have never thought about 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 the 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.
Did you know that Galileo once said that
“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, one of the first things he did was develop a marketing campaign to rebrand the ailing enterprise. Leveraging IBM’s long-running “Think” campaign, Apple urged its customers to “Think Different.” The TV spots began, “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes…”
Yet Jobs’s actual product strategy did exactly the opposite. While other technology companies jammed as many features into their products as they could to impress the techies and the digerati, Jobs focused on making his products so ridiculously easy to use that they were accessible to everyone. Apple became the brand people would buy for their mothers.
The truth is that while people like the idea of being different, real change is always built on common ground. Differentiation builds devotion among adherents, but to bring new people in, you need to make an idea accessible and that means focusing on values that you share with outsiders, rather than those that stir the passions of insiders. That’s how you win.
Great marketers uncover those obvious, but unexpected truths to win consumers’ hearts and sell products.
Examples of business change … 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.
Examples of business change … here is a final example
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.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. It has been said:
“If you don’t go, where you don’t go; you don’t know, what you don’t know.”
In other words, look for a business change in the places you never look at.
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.”
