The Necessity
of Strangers: The Intriguing Truth About Insight, Innovation, and Success
by Alan S. Gregerman
A
summary of the original text.
The Necessity of Strangers, summarized by arrangement with
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., from The Necessity of Strangers: The
Intriguing Truth About Insight, Innovation, and Success by Alan S.
Gregerman. © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
In this summary...
· Learn why your success depends on engaging with
strangers who are often very different than you, not on a network of close
friends and contacts.
· Master each the five areas of business and life in which
strangers are essential to greater success: innovation, people,
collaboration, customers, and leadership.
· Understand how strangers can help you innovate in ways that
matter, build remarkable teams and energize workplaces, and achieve genuine
collaboration.
· Develop a more open mindset that can enable you to build
stronger customer relationships, create better partnerships, and become a more
effective leader.
· Unlock your real potential by gaining access to new
ideas and perspectives through an approach that will help you explore the
"Universe of Possibilities."
The Necessity of Strangers
Strangers rarely figure in
people's thinking about business or personal success. And yet, strangers
are the greatest competitive advantage in the battle to innovate, create, and
deliver greater value, and make a powerful difference in whatever you choose to
do.
Your ability to engage, learn
from, and collaborate with strangers who are very different from you — in terms
of what they know and how they approach the world — is the real key to creating
the remarkable breakthroughs that you are capable of, growing the enterprises
you were meant to grow, finding and delighting the new customers you were meant
to serve, and making the most of your own life.
The exciting news is that you
have the ability to unlock the real potential in strangers and the real
potential in yourself, and all it will take is a sense of curiosity, a spirit
of openness, and a willingness to connect.
It may seem counterintuitive
that strangers are to be embraced rather than avoided, but they are a necessity
— precisely because of their differences and what they know that we don't know;
their ability to be honest with us about the things that really matter; and
their capacity to challenge us to think very differently about ourselves, the
problems we face, and the nature of what is possible.
You will never reach your full
potential by simply hanging out with the people you know, or people who are a
lot like you.
Not that friends, relatives,
and colleagues aren't very important. Not that there is anything wrong with
people who are a lot like you. They're just not enough. And in some
ways, they aren't helpful at all.
Although friends are important,
their value is somewhat misunderstood and too limiting in two vital
respects.
·
First,
most of us just don't have enough friends, or a diverse enough set of them, to
give us the breadth of insight and perspectives we need to continually stretch
our thinking and grow.
·
Second,
the exact reasons why we count on friends are the same reasons that their input
may not be ideal for our efforts to stretch and grow.
To put the first concern in
perspective, according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the average person has
about 150 friends. That's 150 people with whom you can have a meaningful
relationship, which is based on some personal connection and a level of trust
and commitment.
However, in a world that has
over seven billion people, your 150 friends constitute an incredibly small
percentage of the total population.
In other words, when challenged
to solve a problem or create a new opportunity, if you have an average number
of friends, you're not playing with a full deck. But let's add in more
casual acquaintances — the rest of your Facebook friends and your LinkedIn
contacts.
Even if your "new and
improved" number is 500 or 1,000 friends, it pales in significance to
seven billion people that you could know, learn from, and collaborate or
innovate with. So relying on your circle of friends is quite
limiting.
The second limitation of friends
is that the people you know well are probably a lot like you. Most of
them are likely to have a very similar educational background to yours, similar
interests, similar views, and even a similar type of job.
So, in the most essential
aspects of life, they are a lot more like you than different from you.
And, most important, they are likely to think like you, which makes them less
than perfect when it comes to questioning your thinking. In other words,
they tend to agree with you even when they shouldn't — when you'd be better
served by a divergent opinion.
In the world of business,
conformity is even more pronounced. Companies typically hire people with
similar backgrounds, personalities, and worldviews that will fit easily into
the culture they've worked hard to build.
But business success requires
companies to be different in ways that really matter to customers, colleagues,
and shareholders. The firms that don't change are severely
penalized. And even businesses that create major breakthroughs must
figure out what comes next more quickly.
This suggests that all
organizations must continually do things in new ways just to keep up; that
there is now a premium on continually being different in ways that are more
valuable to customers; and that being different requires companies to welcome
very different people, ideas, and points of view.
Today, it's not whom you know,
but whom you could know that determines your success.
The exciting news is that you
now have the ability to connect with literally anyone else on the planet,
including people with very different backgrounds, sets of knowledge, and
perspectives on how to get important things done. It is a prospect that
wasn't nearly as easy even 10 years ago.
But now, you can imagine what
you would like to know and find the people who know it. That is a great
equalizer, because in today's world of networks and potential connections, the
companies and individuals that make openness part of their DNA have a better
chance to win.
And that's where the real power
of strangers can change the equation.
Aversion
In a world where it is
estimated that knowledge is now doubling every 12 months, we should be more
open to the ideas and insights of others.
And we should be keen to
reinvent our definition of expertise to include greater openness to finding the
right knowledge, no matter where it comes from. This leads us to a simple, yet
difficult, formula for success:
1.
Determine
your objective and the compelling result you hope to achieve.
2.
Develop
an initial plan to achieve it.
3.
Determine
the knowledge required and the gaps in your understanding and abilities.
4.
Find
strangers with the knowledge to fill those gaps.
5.
Invest
the time to learn from them in order to fill your gaps.
6.
Revise
your plan based on your new learning.
7.
Execute
the plan with some flexibility, being open to making adjustments along the way.
This formula is simple because
it is not very different from the process that most organizations try to follow
in doing anything important. And it is difficult because we are
challenged to be honest about our gaps and then equally challenged in our
willingness to stretch our thinking about where we might turn for help.
We tend to turn to the usual
suspects — friends, colleagues, and experts in our field or industry whose
insights align with our thinking — and not to people from other places,
disciplines, or walks of life, who we are sure could never understand the
unique nature of our businesses.
Consider just one example that
highlights the surprising cost of our aversion to the most common of strangers
— those who pass by us every day.
In 2008, after investing more
than $600 million, the U.S. Census Bureau decided to scrap its plan for
equipping census takers with handheld computers. As a result, the 2010
census was conducted much like the first U.S. census back in 1790, when people
went door to-door with pencil and paper, or quill and paper, asking questions
of citizens and recording their answers by hand.
In an era in which innovations
in information technology have revolutionized business and enabled greater
efficiencies and cost savings, one is left to wonder why the Census Bureau
dropped the ball. And given that this screw-up resulted in an additional $3
billion cost to the taxpayers, one is even more amazed to realize that it
didn't need to happen.
This mistake could have been
avoided had the powers-that-be been open to a world of strangers and powerful
ideas. They should have never committed to creating a "custom"
solution when their problem had already been solved. The answer was right
under their noses: the UPS drivers who dropped off and picked up packages
at their offices.
These drivers carry handheld
computers to record and track their work — handheld computers that one can only
assume contain every address in America. UPS's leaders might have been
willing to share what they knew about handheld computers and collecting data at
millions of addresses because it was probably in their interest to be kind to
the federal government. But it never happened, simply because the
decision makers were not willing to learn from strangers.
Mindset
You have a choice: You
can approach any challenge or opportunity you face with a belief that you, and
the people you know best, have the right knowledge and skills to address it.
Or you can believe that you
don't have all the answers and there may be people you don't know who hold the
secret to a better result.
This choice has powerful
implications for your ability to connect with and learn from strangers. A
useful framework is to think about the notions of "closed" and
"open" mindsets. The core characteristics of each are
summarized as follows:
·
With a
closed mindset, people believe that they know best and that there is a single
best way to solve any challenge. They are also more likely to believe in
the power of expertise in solving any problem: Find the right experts,
and they are halfway there. And if a problem does require new thinking,
assign the people they know best to brainstorm as the best way to come up with
new ideas.
·
With an
open mindset, people believe that they don't know everything. They may
begin with some initial ideas, based on their own expertise, but they quickly
solicit the input of others, especially people who look at the world in very
different ways. In doing this, they are able to come to a better
approach, one that might be a fusion of several ideas.
Business success is all about
seeing things in new ways and, as a result, creating new and more powerful
solutions to the problems and opportunities you face. You are far more
likely to create meaningful innovation when you combine what you know best with
the ideas and expertise of others — especially if those ideas and expertise are
very different from your own.
To change your mindset, you
will need a simple set of behaviors that will help you cultivate a more open
mindset.
For many of us, our work lives
are characterized by the following behaviors:
·
Focusing
on getting our work done.
·
Staying
at our desks.
·
Relying
on our expertise and the things we already know.
·
Collaborating
and brainstorming with people who are a lot like us.
·
Rarely
looking beyond our walls for ideas and inspiration.
·
Avoiding,
at almost all costs, stepping out of our comfort zones.
·
Avoiding
people who are different from us.
These behaviors are not likely
to enable us to create real breakthroughs, find the best people, build more
meaningful collaboration, gain new customers, or become better leaders.
They are the embodiment of a closed mindset.
Contrast these with the
following set of behaviors — behaviors that we can and should be trying to
incorporate in our everyday lives:
·
Focusing
on finding the real potential in our work.
·
Getting
up and away from our desks to connect with colleagues in new ways.
·
Acknowledging
the limitations of our expertise and seeking to find new knowledge and
approaches that will make us even more successful.
·
Seeking
out opportunities to collaborate and brainstorm with people who are very
different from us.
·
Consistently
looking beyond our walls for ideas and inspiration.
·
Looking
for opportunities to stretch outside our comfort zones.
·
Seeking
to engage with strangers — especially if they are very different from us.
These behaviors are the
embodiment of an open mindset and a guarantee that we will be more open to
reaching our full potential.
Now let's see how to put an
open mindset into practice. We'll explore the five areas of business and
life in which strangers are essential to greater success:
1.
Innovation
2.
People
3.
Collaboration
4.
Customers
5.
Leadership
Innovation
We all know that innovation is
essential to the success of companies, organizations, and individuals. If
they are to grow and prosper, enterprises of all types and sizes must
continually deliver even greater value to the people and businesses they serve.
And yet, most people are stuck
with a strange notion of how innovation happens. When you ask most
companies how they innovate or come up with powerful new ideas, they quickly
say that they spend a lot of time encouraging their sharpest minds to spend time
brainstorming.
But this approach flies in the
face of the entire history of innovation — a history built on the ability of
people, working on their own and in groups, to get beyond the limits of their
own expertise, experience, and insights and beyond what they know best; to seek
inspiration by exploring the ideas and insights of others — around the corner
and around the planet; and to connect with strangers toiling in similar fields
but in different ways, and with strangers in different fields who know things
they don't know, so they can combine this understanding with the things they
know best.
Consider this fact:
Ninety-nine percent of all new ideas are based on an idea or practice that
someone or something else has already had.
Yet most of us, when challenged
to think "outside the box" in order to solve a problem or create a
new business opportunity, rack our brains to come up with our own original
idea.
The good news is we can be more
innovative. And strangers are the key to our success.
Even Apple, viewed by many as
one of the most innovative companies in the world, owes much of its success to
the ideas of strangers. Think about what makes the iPod, with its 70
percent market share, so successful.
·
Apple
didn't invent the concept of personalized music — that was Sony, in 1979, with
the Walkman.
·
Apple
didn't invent the technology platform the iPod relies on — that was a German
company named Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft, which developed the MP3 standard and
received a patent for it in 1989. Ten years later, the first portable MP3
players hit the market, two years before the first iPod.
·
Apple,
with its iTunes store, didn't invent the notion of creating the greatest single
source of content in the world; that was the Egyptians, who roughly 2,300 years
ago built the great library of Alexandria, which contained more than 400,000
documents.
What Apple did was combine its
own brilliance with these inputs from strangers, along with the skills of a
number of equally clever outside partners, to create the most compelling
offering and product ecosystem available.
Once we understand that
strangers are a necessity in innovation, the very nature of how we attempt to
come up with new ideas changes dramatically. Instead of locking ourselves
in a room and racking our brains until we create entirely new possibilities, we
unlock ourselves from our desks and the ways of thinking that limit our ability
to create real breakthroughs.
We can then begin to imagine a
world filled with people and places that might stir our creativity or hold the
missing piece to the puzzle we are trying to solve. In other words, we
challenge ourselves to figure out who the perfect strangers are — the folks who
understand important things we don't, or the folks who have developed new
business models that could be used to reinvent our world.
Sometimes the right strangers
are colleagues working down the hall, or in another location of our own company
or organization. They might be people we have passed by in the lunchroom,
or seen at an all-hands meeting, but never found the time to connect with in
order to learn more about who they are, what they do, what they know, and, most
important, what they are passionate about. We have simply never imagined
that they might help us to solve the challenges or opportunities we face.
Sometimes the right strangers
are outside our enterprise but right under our noses, and we simply fail to
notice them, like with the case of the Census Bureau and its quest to create a
handheld device. If we are not open to finding the perfect strangers to
support our objectives, we are missing the real nature of innovation.
But if we could unlock a lot
more brainpower, we would have a significantly better chance of coming up with
a real breakthrough.
The answer to tapping more
brainpower lies in our willingness to cast a much wider net. This
"wider net" might begin with the expertise of those around us —
including our colleagues and the "usual suspects" of partners — but
it also gives us the chance to look into other domains that have relevant
insights to share.
This approach to casting a
wider net is called the "Universe of Possibilities." It
depicts, on a single page, a solar system, with your challenge or opportunity
represented by the sun and circled by eight "domains" or planets, where
you can seek to discover new possibilities.
Here's how it works. For
each important challenge or opportunity, look at it from the following
perspectives:
1.
What's
our best thinking to date? Consider not just your immediate team or
business unit, but the wealth of knowledge that resides all across your
organization.
2.
What's
the best thinking in our industry? The wisdom of your leading competitors
and partners might give you a better starting point for innovating and
understanding what is possible within a world that you are still quite familiar
with.
3.
What's
the best thinking in other industries? The key here is to figure out who
is brilliant and innovative at something that could change your world, whether
it be customer service, new product development, or anything else that could be
part of your equation for being remarkable.
4.
What's
the best thinking from popular culture? What do performers know about
captivating an audience? What do teenagers know about getting the most
value out of technology?
5.
What's
the best thinking in other cultures? The best insight may come from other
cultures where they have different ways of looking at the world. Ever
stop to think about what micro lenders in South Asia might know about sparking
innovation? Or what sumo wrestlers in Japan might know about
competition?
6.
What's
the best insight from nature? Nature abounds with best practices, from
the burrs that inspired Velcro, to hummingbirds that inspired helicopters, to
natural networks that have widespread implications for how you can connect with
customers.
7.
What's
the best insight from science? The discoveries and thought processes
behind the latest Nobel Prize winners in scientific fields could offer you a
new perspective on your world and the challenges you face.
8.
What
are the best possibilities from science fiction? Science fiction is all
about innovation, and it frees you to invent a much more remarkable world when
it comes to the products, services, solutions, and experience you offer.
These perspectives are all
fertile ground for stretching your thinking about how to be more valuable and
more remarkable. And they are all based on the ability to get comfortable
with the notion that the path to innovation and success has a lot to do with
strangers.
People
We all know that having the
right people is vital to the success of organizations. Enterprises must
continually attract, retain, and motivate employees and leaders at all levels
with the skills to create and deliver winning products, services, solutions,
and customer experiences.
But today, more than ever
before, we desperately need to hire people with open mindsets and a keen gift
for making the right things happen. Business success is all about finding,
developing, and engaging people who:
·
Make us
far better than we already are.
·
Ask
tough questions and commit to finding and acting on the best answers.
·
Bring
us new ideas and fresh perspectives.
·
Don't
always agree with us.
·
Believe
we can always be better at the things that matter.
·
Are
passionate about delivering the most compelling value to the customers we
serve.
·
Can
discover important new business opportunities that will help us to grow.
Granted, this isn't a typical
job description, but you really can't afford to hire "typical"
people. You already have enough people who don't make waves, and think
and act just like you. You need folks who are different.
This doesn't necessarily mean
"diversity" in a narrow sense of the word, based on gender or skin
color. Most of the "diverse" people companies end up hiring act
just like the "not diverse" people they already have.
What you should be searching
for are people who are very different — in what they've studied and the way
they've been trained, the experiences and accomplishments they've had, and the
way they look at the world and your business.
You should have people who
can't stop asking interesting questions, people who won't take "no"
or "yes" for an answer, people trained as artists and people trained
as engineers, left-brain and right-brain thinkers, people with no formal
training at all, and even people labeled as learning-challenged. You
should have a good mix of introverts and extroverts.
You need truly diverse people
so that they can figure out new and better ways to do the things that matter
most.
The right new hires are filled
with fresh ideas, energy, and a desire to make a real difference. But
rather than viewing them this way, companies tend to think of them as people
who have a limited amount of time to get with the program.
So HR people came up with the
concept of employee "orientation" as the fastest way to get the new
folks up to speed on what the organization believes in, why it's so great, what
it does, and how things get done.
But what if your company is not
better? In fact, what if you are great at some things and downright
mediocre at others? Then wouldn't it make more sense to have new hires
orient you? To have them give you guidance on better ways to get things
done?
The right new employees are an
amazing resource. They arrive filled with different ideas and fresh
perspectives based on a new and different set of work and life experiences —
ideas, perspectives, and experiences that might actually make your organization
more efficient, effective, innovative, customer-focused, and successful, if you
are willing to listen.
Given this, doesn't it make
sense to find out just how your company looks through their eyes? If so,
getting their ideas is a very easy thing to do. All they need is a
clipboard, holding several sheets of paper with one line down the center to
form two columns. At the top of those columns should be the words
"BRILLIANT" and "CLUELESS."
Then simply ask them to wander
around and talk with the strangers that they will be working with. This
should include the people in their new department and also anyone in any other
department that interests them, including the executive office, and the CEO.
You can send them off for the
day, or a week, or two weeks, depending on the nature of their new role and the
nature of your organization. They should attend meetings; hang out in the
call center, the cafeteria, or any place people congregate; get demonstrations
on how your stuff works; and connect with anyone in your organization.
·
Each
time they learn something or see people doing something that they think is
totally brilliant, they will write that down in the BRILLIANT column.
·
Each
time they learn something or see people doing something that they think is
nuts, they will write that down in the CLUELESS column.
Then, when their
"orientation" is done, they'll meet with the leadership team and
share their ideas — good and bad.
In addition to helping you out,
this approach sends a powerful signal to all new employees that their ideas
really matter right from the start. It shows that you believe they have a
lot to contribute to your enterprise and that this is a place where they can
make a real difference.
Just as you need to rethink the
way you welcome new hires, you also need to think in new ways about all of your
employees and team members. Reinventing employee orientation sets a tone
for involvement, but it is only the starting point in capturing their hearts
and skills.
Challenge all your employees to
become both the "visionary leader" and the "entrepreneur"
of their job. Give them responsibility, right from the start, for
envisioning the greatest possible value that they can have in supporting your
success as an organization.
Of course, you have to do a few
things to set the stage for their success, but they are things you should be
doing anyway:
·
First,
paint a clear and compelling picture of the organization's vision or purpose;
its strategy to achieve it; and the things that really matter. This
provides the essential context for bringing out the best in everyone.
·
Second,
make sure that every employee can find his or her place in this picture, and
that all employees can see the value of their role in enabling the company to
achieve greater success.
·
Third,
let them know that you believe in them and their ability to do remarkable
things.
·
Fourth,
challenge them to reimagine their role and how it might be filled to create
greater value for the internal or external customers they serve. This
means understanding the real needs of customers and colleagues in new ways.
·
Fifth,
help them to develop a clear plan to guide the changes they believe the
organization should make — a plan that identifies the resources, support,
learning, and collaboration that will be required and the likely return on the
company's investment.
·
Finally,
give them the tools to succeed and the encouragement and incentives to work
through any challenges along the way.
Collaboration
We all know that collaboration
is important to the success of companies because it enables us to bring more
knowledge, ideas, and perspectives to the problems and opportunities we
face. And we all seem to understand the simple notion that we are much
better and much smarter collectively than we could ever be flying solo.
As a result, most businesses
have made collaboration a top priority by stressing its value, implementing
systems and tools that are designed to support greater teamwork and knowledge
sharing, and launching a wide range of initiatives intended to get people to
work across organizational boundaries.
However, most efforts to
encourage collaboration fail to realize their real potential because they don't
consider how to connect and engage with strangers: people we either don't
know at all, don't know particularly well, or view as just too weird to
collaborate with.
In the previous section, we
talked about connecting with people as soon as they arrive, and that's a vital
starting point for building a commitment to working together. But what
about all the folks who are already here and could be powerful collaborators if
we made such a collaboration a more compelling part of their lives?
If we learn and appreciate what
they know, especially the differences that we deem "weird," we might
be able to tie that to a shared sense of purpose and change the equation.
This leads us to a few simple
guidelines that should be fundamental to the culture of your
organization. By following these guidelines, you can make your
organization a greater engine for collaborating.
·
First,
before you can begin to collaborate with the colleagues and strangers you work
with in any meaningful way, you must commit to getting to know them
better. You must seek to establish a basis for working together that is
made up, in part, of the work that must be done, but you also need to find
common ground with them as humans. You'll need an easy and comfortable
way to make this happen.
·
Second,
you must spend more time learning and exploring the world around you.
·
Third,
you need to have a shared and compelling purpose for collaborating that
motivates people to work together in order to make a powerful difference in
something that matters.
·
Fourth,
you must believe that working together enables everyone to provide much greater
value in achieving your shared purpose.
This begs the question:
Have you ever taken the time to really get to know the people you work with?
This doesn't mean just your
closest friends at the office, the other people who work in your department, or
the people across the hall or in the next set of cubicles, but all of the other
people in all of the other departments who may seem to exist simply to make
your life miserable. Or the ones who are simply names and titles posted
on doors. If you did try to get to know them, you might find that you
actually like them and have something in common with them.
But how can you create a
"culture of conversation" in which people are asked to commit to
discovering the humanity, genius, and possibilities in their co-workers?
The trick is to do this two people at a time, by making a human connection
through a simple exercise called "The Power of 10 Things."
To use this exercise yourself,
pair off with someone you don't know very well or don't know at all. Then
have a five-minute conversation in which you can talk about anything you like,
except work. You can talk about your hobbies and interests, your family,
where you grew up, where you went to school, what you eat for breakfast, the
books you like to read, or literally anything else except work.
During the five minutes, you
have to come up with a list of at least 10 things the two of you have in
common. These are 10 things about you that are shared by another person
from your company or organization whom you hardly know.
This exercise is easy to
do. In fact, each of us could be paired with any other person in the
world and we would, within just a few minutes, find at least 10 things we have
in common.
Ten things that would begin to
build a bond. Ten reasons why we should be more inclined to collaborate with
them than not. Ten things that would make almost all of our stereotypes
about them and the role they play drift away. Ten things that could spark
new ideas and perspectives, based on our shared interests outside of work, that
could be brought to bear in our work lives and efforts to make our companies
more remarkable.
Once you've done the exercise
with one colleague, you could do it with another, and another, until you become
part of creating a culture of conversation that is a far more powerful driver
of collaboration than anything else that you or your company could do.
Collaboration takes place face-to-face between humans who are open to
connecting and sharing the things they know.
And then, once some of the
barriers have been reduced, you continue these conversations, to include the
world of work, what other people do, the things they know best, the things they
would like to know more about, the things that concern them most, and the way
they look at problems and opportunities.
Most organizations, and even
most individuals, rarely come close to reaching their full potential because
they don't take collaboration seriously, or they don't understand how to
collaborate with the strangers down the hallway or around the world.
"The Power of 10
Things" is a positive way to demonstrate the value of connecting with
others, and it's an awesome starting point for connecting with strangers inside
and outside of our organizations.
Customers
We all know that customers are
essential to the success of any business. Without them, we don't have a
reason to exist. In order to grow and prosper, we need to continually
deliver greater value to our existing customers and find new sets of customers
around the corner and across the globe.
We all talk about the
importance of being customer-centric, but what we really mean is being stranger
centric. Our real task is to figure out how to create and deliver the
right offerings and experiences when we might never really know the specific
individuals or businesses that will buy our products, services, and solutions.
Increasingly, as more business
is done over the Internet, we know very little about our customers as
individuals. And that suggests the need to take a fresh look at how to
connect with strangers in more meaningful ways.
This changing reality requires
us to rethink the way we understand and empower strangers. Amazon,
Staples, and eBay are three companies that dominate their markets in large part
because they systematically study the interests and buying patterns of the
strangers they do business with and continually provide suggestions and offers
for products that anticipate their needs. Each of these companies is
particularly skillful at collecting and mining data as a tool in driving
greater value for their customers.
Remember that a growing number
of customers do actually seek to remain strangers as they search for the
easiest buying experience and the lowest possible price. They'd like to
get more value out of the things they buy, but on their own terms — unless we
can figure out a more powerful way to engage them.
That's where companies like
REI, Apple, and Whole Foods Market seem to have cracked the code: by
building strong bonds with strangers based on a commitment to making them
smarter and more able to reach their full potential.
REI is a leading provider of
outdoor recreational gear. REI sells a wide range of products for
climbing, hiking, backpacking, camping, bicycling, skiing, snowshoeing, and
paddling. Central to this mission is the company's history of hiring
people who are informed and enthusiastic representatives for the power of
outdoor sports.
The company also provides a
wide range of clinics, classes, and excursions, for people at all different
levels, all designed to foster greater ability and engagement. Plus, REI
regularly asks customers to report on experiences with new products so the
company can be smarter in making recommendations.
So making customers and
strangers more comfortable and more capable is still a brilliant formula.
In fact, no matter what business you are in, it is increasingly important to
make your expertise more accessible. This is an interesting departure
from an older business model, in which companies used their knowledge to make
customers more dependent as a way to keep their business.
It's a model that continues
today in many disciplines — in particular, professional services, in which
people are hired because they are leading experts in their field and possess
more specialized knowledge than their customers or clients can ever hope to
attain.
This gap is their assumed
competitive advantage, and businesses like law firms, accounting firms,
engineering firms, and IT firms, as well as plumbers, electricians, and
physicians, come to mind.
For some customers this is a
winning formula. "Just get it done and send me a bill."
But even that is changing.
Clearly, a high level of
expertise is important in many fields. After all, why would customers
hire you if they could do their own legal work or architectural design, build
their own ERP system, or treat their own illness?
But increasingly, customers
want to have a better understanding of the work that businesses and
professionals do, if for no other reason than to gain greater value from the
products, services, and solutions they buy.
For example, new iPhone owners
can take classes at an Apple store, where the employees are delighted to
increase customers' knowledge and ability. Apple's approach is tied to
the understanding that more informed customers are more loyal, and more likely
to spend more money.
In fact, Apple's greatest
advantage has been its capacity to empower users to accomplish more in their
mobile and digital lives — not only through classes, but through the knowledge
delivered by its employees, the Genius Bar, other forms of technical support,
and the wealth of content and possibilities available through the iTunes store.
It's not just REI and Apple
that understand the value of making strangers or customers smarter. If
you shop at Whole Foods Market, you might marvel at this company's ability to
charge a premium for groceries.
Whole Foods' success is tied to
getting customers to buy into a powerful ethos that connects the food they buy
to their overall health and well-being — and the company's commitment to a
community of local, national, and international suppliers that are following
more humane and sustainable practices.
And Whole Foods reinforces this
connection by providing a high level of knowledge through evening and weekend
classes, new product demonstrations and tastings, printed materials, and what
employees share in their regular interactions with customers.
These are powerful formulas
based on connecting with strangers in deeper ways to make them smarter and more
successful.
But there's more to the
necessity of strangers as customers. Strangers are also the
fastest-growing source of insight and support in our business and personal
lives.
Think about the last time you
took a trip that required any planning. No matter where you went, you
likely did some homework that relied on the input and insight of total
strangers on a site like TripAdvisor. Increasingly, we count on people
we've never met to tell us where to stay, what to do, the best places to eat
and drink, and what remarkable things should not be missed.
This is part of a powerful
trend toward "crowdsourcing," which is putting strangers at the
center of business. Strangers now have more power than ever before to
influence both our buying decisions and the success of our organizations.
We buy cars based on the
reviews of both experts and everyday strangers. We decide which classes
to take at many colleges and universities based on professor evaluations
completed by other students. We decide which movies to go to based on
reviews aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes that allow us to compare the opinions of
expert strangers with those of regular people strangers. We are, it turns
out, increasingly indebted to strangers for their advice.
There's another, equally exciting
side to the aggregating of strangers — as investors in ventures, creative
projects, and social initiatives. A growing number of entrepreneurs,
artists, and social activists are inviting strangers to provide the start-up or
seed capital needed to launch their efforts through new Web-based platforms
such as Indiegogo and Kickstarter.
Each of these sites provides a
mechanism for connecting opportunities to a growing audience of strangers who
are interested in supporting start-ups, innovative ideas, or causes they
believe are important.
Kickstarter has proven to be a
powerful force in nurturing new ideas. Its biggest single campaign to
date raised more than $10.5 million to launch the Pebble E-Paper Watch — a
watch that can display messages from a smartphone.
Think of crowdsourcing as
providing a vital initial set of customers and supporters for our creative
ideas, which might never have made it into the marketplace if not for our
ability to connect with a world of like-minded strangers. Although our friends
are important, we just don't have enough of them. And for most of us, the
friends that we do have aren't rich enough to carry the day. But a world
filled with interested and engaged strangers, crowdfunding dramatically changes
the equation and makes many more new ideas and projects possible.
You depend on strangers in more
ways than you realize. Increasingly, they are becoming your core
customers, your most trusted advisors, and the inspiration for the new
products, services, and experiences you rely on. They are also becoming a
powerful group of investors in making your most promising ideas a reality.
Leadership
We all know that leadership is
crucial to business success and that the best leaders help us to build organizations
and cultures that nurture innovation, unlock the brilliance in employees at all
levels, foster collaboration, and encourage new connections with
customers.
But the leader's role needs to
change in a world filled with strangers and hidden possibilities. With
that in mind, here are six "new" rules for leaders.
These new rules build on our
earlier discussion of mindsets and the notion that openness is the real key to
greater business and organizational success — openness to our own potential,
where new ideas actually come from, the value of people we don't know, and the
power of connecting in new and more deliberate ways.
The essential roles for leaders
in a world filled with strangers and possibilities are as follows:
1.
Leaders
challenge us to ask the right questions.
2.
Leaders
can help us to see that we can always be better at the things that really
matter.
3.
Leaders
capture our imaginations and inspire us to be remarkable.
4.
Leaders
empower us to discover and combine our greatest abilities.
5.
Leaders
encourage us to cast a wider net and to embrace the necessity of connecting
with strangers and new ideas.
6.
Leaders
build cultures of conversation, engagement, and possibilities.
Leaders provide the context for
helping all of us to step out of our comfort zones and see that we can always
do better, and that we have the shared ability to do something remarkable if we
are open to putting our hearts, minds, and resources together.
This assumes that your company
has a compelling purpose; that is, that your business exists to enable your
customers to be more successful in some meaningful way.
If this is not the case, then
your starting point should be becoming clearer about a purpose that makes a
compelling difference for those you serve.
You can do this by asking two
essential questions:
1.
Why do
we exist as an organization?
2.
If we
didn't exist tomorrow, would it matter?
None of us can afford to be
complacent in a world filled with smart customers, great competitors, powerful
purposes, and a host of new and creative business models and offerings.
Employees, customers, and potential collaborators all have choices, and we want
to be the best choice in meeting their objectives.
But we can do this only if we
ask the right questions and, in answering them, commit to being more valuable
through a unique combination of what we offer and the experience that surrounds
it. And the real litmus test is whether the world would be greatly diminished
if we decided to close our doors tomorrow.
That's why people at places
like REI, Apple, and Whole Foods sleep well at night. They know that
their offerings make a compelling difference — and that they are providing
their customers with greater knowledge, capability, possibilities, and
results.
So although your most loyal
customers might be sad if you suddenly folded your tent, would they quickly
find some other organization to fill the void? If so, you haven't been
valuable enough, and you've still got some important work to do.
And that's where leaders matter
most.
To succeed today, organizations
must "go big or go home." They must make the choice to be
remarkable as the only way to play the game. It's not enough to have a
compelling sense of purpose; we also need to achieve it in a way that changes
the game. So the best leaders need to challenge us to create new business
models that push beyond the bounds of what we already know.
Michael Lewis's book Moneyball and
the subsequent movie tell the true story of the Oakland Athletics and their
general manager, Billy Beane, who were forced to compete with limited resources
in the very expensive world of major league baseball. In this
world, teams with deep pockets had a distinct advantage in their ability to pay
big dollars for the very "best" players.
But the A's didn't have a lot
of money, so they had to create a different model for achieving success.
Instead, they adopted the insight of a total stranger who was addicted to data,
crunching numbers, and baseball statistics. His idea was to use analytics
to create a roster made up of undervalued players who could be combined at an
affordable price to build a winning team. These were players who may have
excelled at only one or two things, but whose unique abilities would, based on
statistical analysis, create powerful synergies with each other.
It would take a rare leader to
be open to an approach this different — one that flew in the face of
conventional baseball wisdom, which had always relied on the ability of
baseball experts to discern talent. To make a long story short, this new
model proved to be a brilliant formula that continues to drive the success of
the low-budget Athletics and has changed the way that many other teams compete.
If you're not the big dog in
your industry, this story will give you cause for optimism in a world that's
changing quickly. And if you are the big dog in your industry, it should
challenge you to rethink the way you do business.
You can win by buying the best
and most talented team members, or you can win by being scrappy and taking
informed chances. And often that means placing bets on the insight of
someone from outside with a very different view of your world — someone who can
help you to reinvent the game you play, in an effort to be more successful.
To go big, you will need all
the energy, openness, and brainpower you can muster, and a strong belief that
success belongs to those who are willing and able to consistently reinvent
their businesses by looking beyond their walls for broader perspectives and
deeper insight.
Taking the First Step
Each day, we all pass by
hundreds of people, places, and things that could change our lives, but we
never take the time to notice them. In our rush to get from Point A to
Point B, we walk past strangers who know things we've yet to discover. We
walk past stores, offices, galleries, libraries, and even billboards with
powerful insights to share.
We stroll through new or
familiar places, failing to look below the surface to figure out what makes
them remarkable. We watch movies, listen to the radio, read a newspaper
or a blog, or search the Web without seeing the real brilliance in an idea that
could matter to our life, the lives of others, or the success of our
workplace.
All because we have forgotten
how to be curious and open and are unable to believe that important ideas
abound, and that we can be more remarkable. But it doesn't have to be this
way.
As humans, we have the amazing
ability to be open and to dream, imagine, explore, learn, connect, share,
collaborate, innovate, and grow, and to go big instead of going home.
So get out there and find the
strangers that could change your life and make your organization more
successful. Their "strange" ideas will set you free to discover
new and better ways of doing the things that matter most.
About the Author
Alan Gregerman is an award-winning
author, business advisor, teacher, and volunteer. His writing and
consulting work focuses on helping companies and organizations create winning
strategies and more remarkable products, services, and customer experiences by
unlocking the genius in all of their people. He also gives speeches and
seminars, and leads "Team Learning Adventures" for corporations,
associations, government agencies, colleges, and universities around the world.
Alan is the author of two
previous books, Surrounded by Geniuses and Lessons
from the Sandbox, and his work and ideas have been featured on NPR,
CNN, ABC News, and FOX News, as well as Businessweek, the Washington
Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and more than 250
other publications.
He is founder and president of
Passion for Learning, Inc., where he is involved in efforts to build innovative
partnerships between the business community and low-income schools to close the
achievement gap for at-risk children.
To learn more and connect with Alan,
please visit his blog at www.alangregerman.com.
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75th Street, Willowbrook, Illinois 60527
1-800-776-1910 • 1-630-734-0600 (fax) • www.audiotech.com
1-800-776-1910 • 1-630-734-0600 (fax) • www.audiotech.com
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