Change To Strange by Daniel Cable
Book Summary Review
The full title is "Change To Strange: Create A Great Organization by Building A Strange Workforce" by Daniel M. Cable.
Who Is Daniel M. Cable
It wasn't a name that I was familiar with but Daniel Cable is a Townshend Distinguished Professor of Management at the University of North Carolina and he specialises in aligning human resource systems with business strategy.
I can be wary of books by academics but I understand that Daniel Cable also has consulting clients including Sony Ericsson.
The Big Idea of Change To Strange
To stand out from your competition, your workforce needs to be strikingly different and obsessed with delivering your unique customer value and benefits. In other words your employees need to be strange!
I like the idea.
While I seem to get into debates on who are the most important, your employees or your customers, I do agree that your employees have to appear to be different from your competition. In many markets, people find it very difficult to distinguish the basic product so your people and they way they connect with customers is the key differentiator.
Introducing the Strange Workforce Value Chain
Change To Strange explains how to implement workforce systems to create a strange workforce that delivers value to the customers.
There are four steps:
- Determine your desired organisational outcomes - I am very pleased to see that this starts with the customers and then looks at it through a competitor lens. Too many books I see on human resource issues ignore the customer and just assume that the company has the right to business.
- What drives performance towards the desired organisational outcomes - again, identifying, measuring and influencing performance drivers fits in with my own ideas for business development.
- Strange workforce deliverables - how can the performance drivers be improved by employees being strange and different.
- Strange workforce architecture - how can you design the people management systems to encourage the workforce to be strange, ranging from recruitment of the right type of people through to encouraging the wrong type to leave.
Each step in the book is backed up by a series of questions to help you implement your strange people strategy.
Conclusion on "Change To Strange"
Make your workforce strange may sound like a gimmick or perhaps you think that you already employ enough strange people but I like the concepts behind the Change To Strange book.
The key to success is differentiation. How your people look and act and what they say is a very effective way to make that differentiation visible to customers and tangible in the service that they receive.
My own one-to-one business coaching is offered on a "pay for performance" basis where my fees are linked to the extra profit that is generated. That strategy forces me to act differently from my competitors.
While my competitors sell coaching services and hours on the basis of probable benefits, I am looking to buy in to the company's vision and see whether there really is a profitable opportunity for the prospective client and me. It means that i have a very different conversation with prospective clients.
I like the concepts behind the Change To Strange and I rate this a four star business brief. I have read the BusinessSummaries report and I want to know more about the concepts in the book so I have added it to my "read at some stage" list.
My impression is that the book will suit larger companies better than small businesses although the concept about using your people to differentiate your business is equally valid.
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