"In the old days," Seth Godin writes, "showing up was 95 percent of success." And by old days he means just a few years ago — do you remember that simpler age?
If you offered a good product at a good price in a reliable way, you’d do fine. Being local was a good thing. Having a long track record helped. Decent quality and personal service mattered as well.
"No longer. Good enough isn’t good enough, because now everything is good enough. Our expectations of quality are unrealistic — and are being met every single day. We don’t just want to be satisfied, we want to be blown away.
With that, Mr. Godin launches a remarkable collection of short essays on being remarkable by 33 remarkable innovators. Some of the Group of 33 are mass market brands — Tom Peters, Malcolm Gladwell, Mark Cuban — others leverage their influence in less splashy arenas — Amit Gupta, Jacqueline Novogratz. In this book, none of that matters because the individual contributions are uncredited — a remarkable thing in its own right.
What does it take to be remarkable in the new world of work? A sampling from The Big Moo:
Remarkable is in the eye of the customer. If your customer decides something you do is worth remarking on, then, by definition, it’s remarkable.
Those who fit in now won’t stand out later. Those who follow the rules are never noticed — because the system has broken their spirit.
Organizations change when you give something a name. If it has a name, your peers can measure it. If it has a name, they can alter it. If it has a name, they can talk about it. And if it has a name, they can eliminate it.
Today, brands don’t have much of a choice. They can either stand for something something big and important to their consumers, or the can risk being categorized as trivial.
Is your flagship product going to be obsolete in five years? You betcha. That means the time to start panicking about replacement is right now, not in four years.
…in a world of disruptive innovation, where the premium in on continuous creativity, the enclaves of the corporate elite are more prisons than perks. They not only keep the rank and file (and all their ideas) out, they keep leaders in (and closed off from a universe of opportunities to learn and grow).
Everything is a beta release. Everything you ship is version .9, just waiting for one more upgrade before it’s right.
The next time you want to criticize yourself for being dull, stop. Criticize yourself (and your organization) for being scared instead.
The only reason the system exists is so that you can make the things you make, right? So if the system is demeaning your work, change the system.
The product is what the customer thinks it is, and what I think has little to do with that…a product isn’t for everyone, it’s for someone.
Fail fast and cheap. Fail often. Fail in a way that doesn’t kill you.
In a metric-minded organization, it’s very tempting to focus on things that are easy to measure instead of those things that are important to measure.
Access to assets is no longer the key to success. The will to implement is.
When you buy The Big Moo you’re buying the right to photocopy as many pages as you like, as many times as you wish. You can send your favorite essays to colleagues and customers until the cows come home or the toner runs out — whichever comes first.
