According to Daniel M. Cable, what characterizes successful companies these days is "a strikingly different, obsessively focused" workforce, one that -- compared to competitors' workforces -- is "downright strange." Cable, a management professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, makes his case in a new book titled, Change to Strange: Create a Great Organization by Building a Strange Workforce (Wharton School Publishing). To get the best results, Cable says, companies have to build a workforce "that is extraordinary in a way that customers care about." Below, Knowledge@Wharton excerpts a section of the book.
Chapter 4: Performance Drivers: What Must Customers Notice About Us So That We Win?
Performance Drivers are what cause your Organizational Outcomes to move; they specify what customers need to notice and think about your organization in order to make them choose you over your competition. In this chapter, I argue that you should literally build your organization around measuring and gaming your Performance Drivers, which results in a strange workforce. Developing, measuring, and enacting your Performance Drivers will not be easy (fortunately!), but it will give you incredible insight into what your organization is creating and not creating in order to differentiate you, attract customers, and win. It will bring discipline to the words and ideas that are your strategy, and you will be able to track and manage the extent to which your strategy is being enacted. You know you want this; the only question is how hard are you willing to work to get it?
Games People Play
As the Dean of a business school, you decide that the best reflection of winning is BusinessWeek's rankings. These are prominent reputation scores created by a third party that directly pits business schools against each other every two years. Essentially all MBA applicants know about the BusinessWeek rankings, and the smartest MBA applicants with highest motivation try to go to the best-ranked schools.
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