Becoming a Category of One: How Extraordinary Companies Transcend Commodity and Defy Comparison - By Joe Calloway
Date read: 2016-01-26How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
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How to get into your own category, ahead of your competitors, and better satisfy your customers. Great book to help a company come up with a clear and compelling mission and vision statement and to better understand why you are in this business to begin with.
Contents:
My Notes
Most extraordinary companies make a clearly defined decision to go.
Great companies become even greater when a crisis forces the decision to go.
A crisis can be the time you actually accelerate your business plan and make a decisive move.
Action without the foundation of a shared belief usually lacks the power to sustain itself for the amount of time necessary to accomplish something significant.
Some of the things that got you to 1,000 may not be the same things that get you to the next level.
Sometimes taking the time to sit quietly, listen, think, and then discuss will result in much more powerful decisions than the same amount of time spent cheerleading. The quiet gathering is often where the most radical decision making takes place.
Creating process change will initially mean throwing old things out more than putting new things in place. You have to clear out the space for new ideas to move in.
Instead of success being based on always making the right decision or prediction, success is based on being able to move quickly from one decision to the next. Even if you're right, you are still going to have to move on in a very short period of time.
It's the essence of leadership to constantly remind everybody of the story that drives you to do what you do.
Repetition is the mother of a strong corporate culture.
When you transcend policy, you begin to transcend commodity.
Great leaders are one-trick ponies. When it comes down to what really counts, they don't have a lot of changing ideas. They stick with what's important and they talk about it over and over and over.
The value of a person with the ability to perform well under pressure cannot be over-estimated in a world where constant pressure is the norm.
People can be the great differentiator that enables you to transcend commodity and defy comparison.
Every Category of One company that I've ever worked with has created clarity around the "why" of their business, not just the "what."
Culture is what you do when the boss is out of town.
If you have strong feelings about your company, your people, your customers, and your work, then use strong language (for your mission statement).
Hire for attitude - train for skills. You can't teach people to be passionate, creative, and innovative about the work they do and serving the customer.
Employer branding is as important as being branded with customers. They both want to know who you are. If you don't know, how in the world are they supposed to know?
Your brand is owned by your customers and anyone else who has an impression of your company.
Nothing is more important than your brand, because it's what defines you in the marketplace.
Marketing, advertising, or public relations departments' job is to tell the story of the brand. It's the job of everyone else in the company to create the brand with the quality of how they do their work every day.
Your brand should be a simple understanding of who you are, what you promise the marketplace, and your ability and willingness to keep that promise. The simpler the brand statement, the better.
When the customer's perception of the brand is in synch with your intention for the brand you've got brand strength.
The lesson for individuals and companies is to discover your uniqueness, exploit it as best you can in the service of your clients and customers and then become so damn good that no one can compete with you based on your excellence.
Don't make assumptions about what will work tomorrow based on what worked yesterday, especially in the area of processes, procedures, strategies, and operations.
Mediocre companies are the ones that always rally around the flag of "but that's just not done in this business." It's just not done until a competitor does it and you end up wondering where all your customers went.
If you do good work because it's in the company manual, it's a policy. If you do good work because you don't know any other way to do it, it's your identity.
Change today is constant, sudden, and significant.
There's a point of diminishing returns that is reached very quickly today with almost anything that works. Don't think: "It worked. Do it again." Think: "It worked. Now what will work next?"
You have to introduce the next thing while what you are doing is at its peak of popularity, so that you continually replace what is declining with what is ascending.
Do you send your customers flowers? Do you call them to see if they're doing okay?
My approach is to build on principles - they never change. A principle is true across time, culture, and context. What changes is how the principle is applied.
What wins customers' loyalty and helps a company become a Category of One is that they have learned to simply pay attention to their customers.
Anything that another company does for your customer can have a strong influence on how she rates your brand (even outside of your industry).
The three rules that Category of One companies all follow are:
The discipline I follow in gaining competitive advantage knowledge is ongoing awareness knowledge about the marketplace in general. The secret weapon is the company web site in the section with "News and Press Releases."
Mike isn't focused on what he wants to sell. Mike is focused on whom he is selling to. And that gets him closer to me. The knowledge comes first, the closeness comes next.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): understand the customer, know him, and get close to him.
Knowing your customer in a truly meaningful way means knowing who they are today, not a year, a month, or even a week ago.
An emotional connection is created when you demonstrate an interest in her as a person and not just as a customer. It's created when you see an opportunity to help a customer solve a problem or create an opportunity in an unexpected way.
You don't decide if you've exceeded the customer's expectations. The customer does.
Category of One companies don't ask "Who is our customer?" They ask, "Who do we want our customers to be?"
Go beyond price, product, and service to create a separate category in the minds of customers.
If somebody out there provides the level of service I want, then I want my provider of everything else to give me that same level of service. Never mind that they are in completely different businesses. It doesn't matter. Today's customer doesn't care.
You can't make your customer guess or have to work to figure out what your difference is. One of the most valuable exercises you can do for your business is to have everyone answer the question, "Why choose us?"
The new reality is that it's not about quality anymore. Quality has graduated from its past status as a competitive factor. It's an expected factor.
Companies that do what they do extremely well every time, with every customer, are exceptionally rare. If you can get to that level of consistency, chances are very good that you will find yourself in a Category of One.
Just do your job! Then you can impress me with the really cool gestures and above-and-beyond feats of service.
Sometimes people step over dollars to pick up nickels.
Powerful tiebreakers almost always come down to this: consistent execution.
Companies that do business with other companies find that there are 3 key differentiators: