Book Summary Preview : Change to Strange

The Big Idea
In today’s tough times, and in the face of ever fiercer competition from all sides, you need to create a competitive advantage and sustain it. To do so, you must create and deliver something that’s valuable, rare and hard to imitate – and a run-of-the-mill workforce can’t do that for you.

When it comes to winning customers and beating down competitors, the last thing you want to do is fit in. Your workforce needs to be strikingly different and obsessively focused on delivering your unique value proposition. Success will not come from being like your competition.

Ergo, you, your people and your organization need to be downright strange!

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Why You Need This Book
Change to Strange instructs readers everything they need to know to build a workforce both strange and extraordinary enough to execute the most powerful strategies. It teaches exactly how the workforce needs to be different to succeed.

The book tells readers how to create a Strange Workforce Value Chain; how to implement workforce systems that support unique goals; how to establish detailed metrics based on what makes you unique; and how to use those metrics to drive organizations to success.

Being Strange
Welcome to the concept of the strange workforce. A strange workforce is what makes customers notice your organization and want to go with you instead of with a competitor. The important thing is to build the workforce that creates something customers notice and makes them say, “I want that.”

People as competitive advantage
It’s easy for a workforce to give an organization a competitive advantage:

1. The workforce must obviously create something valuable to the marketplace – there must be customers who need what your workforce does or creates. However, using a workforce to create something valuable simply represents the basic stakes of being in business.

2. The workforce must create something rare and unique that sets your organization apart.  Some special product that gets customers coming back for more even though there might be so many competitors out there. Something that differentiates the organization and adds special value in the minds of consumers.

3. The unique valuable thing that is offered shouldn’t be easy for competitors to copy. Otherwise, the business won’t have a sustained competitive advantage at all. Something valuable, rare and hard to imitate must be offered – something that competitors can’t see or even understand.

In order to achieve your goals and be successful, there’s one more element: the workforce has to be obsessively preoccupied with success. Furthermore, what is obsessed on should be something other workforces do not obsess.

It’s important to realize that you have to go above and beyond to create a strange workforce. It’s delusional to expect your employees to be extraordinary and differentiate your organization if your employee systems are basically the same as those in other organizations. Your workforce systems have to get employees to obsess on the things that you want your company to be known for.

The Strange Workforce Value Chain Model
Here is the overall model you can use to link up with your organization’s strategy with your people and your people systems. It’s known as the Strange Workforce Value Chain.

The Chain aims to give you a simple framework to:

• Articulate your strategy in terms of your workforce, be very clear about how you expect to beat the competition and what you need from your people

• Measure your competitiveness concepts by strapping numbers onto your concepts of winning

• Test your theory about what best helps your workforce to win. Run statistics to examine the theory and see if it really works out in practice, and how well if so

The Model Proper
The Strange Workforce Value Chain model is composed of four distinct steps, as follows:

1. Organizational Outcomes – Begin with the end in mind because everything you do must be a means to that end. These outcomes would be the results of your strategy; they are the ends of your organizational processes.

Go out three years from now and imagine a perfect, ideal world where your workforce is strange and where you’re beating your competition into the ground. What would be the ultimate results if this paid off big? What would be the fruits of your labor over the last three years?

These are what you measure to know whether you are winning in the way you want to win.

To start developing these outcomes, preside over a day-long meeting with you top leaders. You’re going to convert your strategy into a series of three to four measures to demonstrate that your way of winning is paying off. You only want three or four so that you’ll be able to focus on a few things and do them right instead of going all over the place.

 

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