One of the phrases I hear repeated over and over until it becomes a meaningless buzz is, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I understand the sentiment that was behind this phrase when it was first uttered: it came from the telephone industry, and it was an admonition not to make things worse by fiddling with something that’s working well enough. But here’s the danger in accepting that statement at face value: Things often are broken, and we can’t see it. We’ve developed blind spots to them, and have accepted them as a good-enough status quo. And in today’s world, that doesn’t serve us.
This is as true for a sales organization as it is for a leadership team or a design group made up of engineers. It’s a matter of adaptation: failing to adapt to a rapidly changing environment can mean the difference between success and irrelevance (the only thing, by the way, that’s a worse end state than failure). Tom Peters captured the essence of this concern beautifully: “To meet the demands of the fast-changing competitive scene, we must simply learn to love change as much as we hated it in the past.”
Here’s the fundamental question: what’s at risk if your sales team doesn’t adapt to evolving technology and changing customer environments? The answer, quite simply, is—everything. Organizations must change and must provide an incentive to change to their employees AND their customers. Why? Because that incentive is the essence of leadership. Let me explain.
Today, we’re going through a period of wrenching and uncomfortable evolution in business. Just look at the number of industries — not companies, entire industries — that are being innovated out of existence. The online world is wreaking havoc on traditional storefronts. Uber is changing the domain of public transportation. AirBNB is changing how and where we stay when we travel. To many people’s way of thinking, companies like Skype have delivered a death knell to traditional telephone companies. Apple reinvented the music industry. Netflix changed how video entertainment is delivered and made blockbuster companies like—well, Blockbuster irrelevant. And Amazon? Well, starting at the supply chain, they redesigned everything.
The truth is that most people are in a competitive mindset rather than a collaborative one. It’s just part of today’s business culture. Yet, if we think hard about the most successful individuals and companies out there, we find that they owe their success to their willingness to collaborate to achieve and even exceed their goals. In effect, they’re willing to be transformed, willing to establish a new behavioral status quo based on the idea of giving up control to gain influence.
Let me give you an example of this. The last time I looked, there were 2.2 million apps in the Apple app store, 2.8 million in Google’s Android store. But out of those two-million-plus apps, Apple only created a handful of them—iTunes, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and Garage Band. The rest were created by third-party developers. Clearly, it isn’t hurting Apple.
What this demonstrates is that today, it is far more important in a market to have influence than it is to have control. Apple willingly and deliberately gave up control of the applications market so that they could gain influence over the platform market. Android did the same thing. By giving up control, by forging strong but loose relationships with a collection of other players, of collaborators, they gained enormous influence.
So why don’t we collaborate more? Well, because in our hypercompetitive business culture, we’re taught that winning implies that the other party must lose. ‘Second place is the first loser’ is a common theme here. But think about that for a moment. No one on this planet is great at everything. Sure, we all like to think we are, but we’re not. But Albert Einstein got it; he once said, ‘Nobody is as smart as everybody.’ The collective skill, knowledge, intelligence and capability of a group of people will always outperform an individual, as long as all players operate under a model of mutual trust, cooperation, and shared knowledge.
This is how transformation—organizational change for the better—happens. By forging skill, knowledge and trust-based relationships with other capable people, by taking advantage of the collective wisdom of the group, by allowing ideas to expand, then viewpoints expand as well, and so do goals. Modest ideas become big, audacious, entirely reachable goals.
Think about it this way. Many people believe that Amazon is killing the traditional, brick-and-mortar retail industry. Really? Nordstrom’s is doing just fine, thank you very much. And why? Because they understand that it isn’t Amazon’s Internet presence that is so damaging; it’s the fact that Amazon, like Nordstrom’s, understands the power of good customer experience. And what about Airbnb, killing hotels? Really? I don’t think so; the Ritz-Carlton is thriving, as is the Four Seasons. Why? Customer experience. And what about those people who run around telling the world that Apple destroyed the music industry? Nope—they did that to themselves by forcing customers to buy an entire album, when all they wanted was one song. They put more focus on control than influence. Then along came Apple, and they flipped the equation—influence, not control. They didn’t kill the music industry; they saved it.
Technology isn’t the threat: failing to be customer-centric is. And that, you can take to the bank.
This story originally appeared on the GreatAmerica office equipment blog.
