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Rethinking Business As Usual
Two new books reveal how being strange reinvents some businesses — and how being complacent sinks others.
Make the ‘Change to Strange’
Change to Strange: Create a Great Organization by Building a Strange Workforce
By Daniel M. Cable
 Many organizations claim that their
people are their competitive advantage.
And yet most organizations build work-forces that really are not very different
from their competitors. In fact, companies
deliberately benchmark their
people practices to the industry average.
Not surprisingly, there is nothing particularly
distinctive about most organizations’
workforces, nothing particularly
noteworthy from a customer standpoint.
Nothing very strange.
If your competitive advantage
depends on your people being able
to create something valuable and distinctive,
then your workforce can’t be
normal. To get extraordinary results,
you have to build a workforce that is extraordinary
in a way that customers care
about. To build a great organization, you
need to build a strange workforce.
Success will not come from being
like your competition. You need your
organization to be out of the ordinary,
unusual, and striking.
With an end-to-end framework
for architecting people and business
systems that help you break from the
pack, Change to Strange: Create a Great
Organization by Building a Strange
Workforce by Daniel M. Cable will
teach you how to measure and manage
the extent to which your workforce
is helping you make an extraordinary
success story come true.
The author, Daniel M. Cable, is
Sarah Graham Kenan Distinguished
Scholar and Professor of Management
at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business
School. His consulting and teaching
focus on aligning a wide spectrum of
human systems with company strategy.
Cable cites the Home Depot as an
example of an early adopter of a strange
workforce only to turn normal and lose
its competitive advantage.
When Strange Turns Normal
Excerpt from Change to Strange: Create a Great Organization by Building a Strange Workforce, "Chapter 1: Be Strange. Be Very Strange."
Home Depot established a competitive
advantage by creating a strange workforce.
How was the workforce strange?
Home Depot hired building contractors
and put them in the aisles to help customers
with home improvement problems.
For example, Home Depot associates
might show customers the right kind of
wire needed to run a three-way circuit so
that they can walk in one door, turn on
the light, then use another switch to turn
out the light at another door. They might
even sketch the customer a diagram of
how the wiring should be run (a PhD
does not help me understand this, but i
still have the hand-drawn diagram from
the Home Depot associate to this day).
Or a Home Depot associate might show
you which diamond blade works best
on a grinder to cut stone (the expensive
thin ones are worth it) and talk to you
about how to use the grinder (score the
stone with the grain about 1/4” and then
smack it with a hammer and cold chisel).
And they might even suggest which thick
gloves you should wear.
Helping customers buy the right products
and teaching them how to use
the products is valuable to consumers
because it saves them time (like trips
back to the store), prevents costly and
dangerous errors, and creates a sense of
familiarity and trust with the store. These
“contractor grade” associates gave Home
Depot a competitive advantage, meaning
that people like me would drive a little
farther and give this store money because
we experienced something different about
the store and liked it.
This was a winning practice until Home
Depot tried growing at the pace of a new
store every week in the midst of a large
house-building boom. it became difficult
to find enough contractor-grade tradespeople
to put in the aisles. As a consequence,
today it is hard for customers to
find associates in Home Depot stores who
actually have worked in the trades and
can solve building problems.
Shine a Light on the Dark Places in
Your Business
The Self Destructive Habits of Good
Companies... And How to Break Them
By Jagdish N. Sheth
 GM. Ford. AT&T. Sears. Firestone.
Krispy Kreme. Digital. Kodak. Once,
they were riding high, the exemplars
of business excellence. Then, disaster.
Is your company headed for the same
fate? How do you know? How do you
change course? The Self Destructive
Habits of Good Companies?... And How
to Break Them by Jagdish N. Sheth has
some insights.
Shine a light on the dark places in
your business and uncover your self-destructive
habits: blinders, culture conflicts,
and corporate denial; competitive
myopia; focus on volume, not profits.
Root them out. Then, instill the good
habits your business needs: the habits
of sustainable profitability and market
leadership. This book shows you how in
detail, from start to finish.
Why do so many good companies
engage in self-destructive behavior?
Sheth identifies seven dangerous
habits even well-run companies fall
victim to and helps you diagnose and
break these habits before they destroy
you. Through case studies from some
of yesterday’s most widely praised corporate
icons, you’ll learn how companies
slip into “addiction” and slide off
the rails, why some never turn around,
and how others achieve powerful turnarounds,
moving on to unprecedented
levels of success.
Jagdish N. Sheth is a world-recognized
authority on global competition,
strategic thinking, and
customer relationship management.
Sheth is Charles H. Kellstadt Chair
of Marketing Strategy in the Goizueta
Business School at Emory University.
He has served as a distinguished
faculty member at the University of
Southern California, the University
of Illinois, Columbia University,
and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Sheth has published
more than two dozen books and hundreds
of research papers in different
areas of marketing and business
strategy; many are considered classics
in their fields. His previous book, Firms of Endearment: How World-Class
Companies Profit from Passion and
Purpose (Wharton School Publishing),
was co-authored with Rajendra
Sisodia and David Wolfe.
The Warning Signs
of Arrogance
Excerpt from The Self
Destructive Habits of Good
Companies, “Chapter 3.
Arrogance: Pride Before the Fall”
As with the personal habits that insidiously
settle upon us, sometimes we’re the last
to see—or admit to—the behaviors that
can prove our undoing. To learn whether
your organization might be suffering from
arrogance, look for the following signs.
You Stop Listening
...to customers, employees, investors,
consumer advocates, the government.
You stop listening to the outside world.
You ignore or laugh at others. You believe
you’ve seen it all before.
You Flaunt It
...in travel, office space, perks, retreats.
You like to show off your corporate
jets and art collections. Or, like Dennis
Kozlowski of Tyco, you throw your wife a
$2 million birthday party — complete with
scantily clad models in roman togas — on
the Italian island of Sardinia.
You Browbeat others
You encourage and even offer incentives
to your managers to browbeat employees,
customers, and investors. When analysts
give your company unfavorable reports,
you think you can go to their bosses and
have them rebuked or reprimanded. Your
company acts like a bully.
You’re High-Handed
You abuse governance rules and procedures
in the belief that they don’t pertain
to you, that no one can regulate or even
question your business. Or, like GM, you
abuse or lobby against government regulation
because “what’s good for you is
good for the nation.”
You Curry Approval
You bring in consultants and advisors to
validate the status quo and inflate your
ego. At the same time, you fire those who
become critical, including suppliers, customers,
and even employees. When ad agencies
or research groups suggest strategies you
don’t like, you hire somebody else.
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