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Mac Anderson on change

"Inch by inch, life's a cinch.  Yard by yard, life is hard."

I met Mac, the founder of Successories, a few years back while giving a speech on the nature of business success in today's chaotic world.  We quickly became friends and Mac asked me to condense my presentation into a Successories "Power of One" business handbook.  So I did. You can purchase it here. Or, over the next few months, you can come back to this page and read it online. I hope to post one chapter - or truth - a week (time permitting).  Enjoy.

A BRAND NEW WORLD - 10 Guiding Business Principles for Success in Chaotic Times

Why a brand new world? Because we’re living during a time of complexity and change driven by scores of emergent events, conditions and behaviors happening all at once. Can’t you feel it? Doesn’t the world seem a bit unpredictable and unstable? Well, it is! And in a chaotic environment, searching for connections and causal associations and developing a step-by-step recipe for success will never work.  Instead, you must develop a new way of thinking.

This new worldview is about the universal, rather than the particular. It’s about being human, as much as about being in business. It’s about tuning in to your audience’s new frequency. Turning on your inherent sense of empathy and passion. And ultimately, it’s about standing out in a marketplace that’s bursting at the seams with look-alike products, services and salespeople.

To make matters worse, war, terrorism, deadly infectious diseases and the recent rash of misdeeds by corporations have created an atmosphere of fear and distrust. People see the world as an extremely risky place, with selfishness and fakery at the core of human nature. Truth be told, the world - especially the world of business - has reached a state of crisis.

But, like the Chinese symbol for crisis, which is comprised of both the symbols for danger and opportunity, there is tremendous opportunity today. But only if you are willing to move out of your comfort zone and unlearn all of the old rules that continue to exert a tremendous pull on your strategic thinking. Otherwise, danger is imminent. And that danger is the very real possibility that you and your business or organization will become . . . irrelevant.

Truth One: From Real Goods to Feel Goods

You’re not in the real goods business any longer; you’re in the feel goods business.

The problem today, of course, is one of abundance: abundance of information, abundance of ideas, and abundance of technology. This wealth of opportunity has resulted in too many companies with too much stuff chasing too few people. This consequent shift in power to the people has serious hurt even the most “customer and employee-centric” organizations, as they struggle to understand the new value equation of these turbulent times. So, here it is - your first taste of unlearning (be prepared - it may make you squirm in your chair). You know those wonderful products and services that you work so diligently to create, improve, market and sell? They are not your value equation. That’s right. They are not your competitive advantage.

To understand why, you must tap into the fairly new realities of today’s economy. First, and foremost, people are completely overloaded with options and conflicting information regarding just about everything; from which products and services to purchase, to which school to attend or charity to support, to selecting a doctor or even a brand of pain medication. In addition, everything looks pretty much the same to them. Nothing truly stands out as the “best” choice in their minds. This new marketplace reality has made people confused, frustrated, tired, and more cynical and hard-nosed than ever before. And since they intuitively know that it is impossible to rationally cope with all of this choice in their lives, they have turned control over to their instincts. They choose with their guts.

Think about the last time you chose a computer, TV, insurance policy, mortgage, accounting service, restaurant, hotel, etc. Did you sit down and make a comprehensive list of the features and benefits? Did you make a purely rational choice based upon the price/benefit ratios of the plethora of competitive alternatives? Of course not. Who has the time? So what did you do? You created a mental short list based primarily on what you’ve heard or read. Then you did a little shopping and/or a little research to get a “feel” for your list of alternatives. Or perhaps a salesperson paid you a visit. Either way, in the end it was the “feel” that motivated your - by and large - subconscious decision. Because in an oversupplied economy, it’s feelings that drive purchase decisions, and as a result, profitability. Sure, knowledge may inform, but it's emotion that motivates.

At first, I found it hard to believe myself. I had been educated to focus on features and benefits and Unique Selling Propositions (USP’s). I left business school obsessed with the “4 P’s” of marketing and an assortment of theories like AIDA and SWOT analysis. I later realized that those concepts originated during the heydays of mass production and mass marketing, when price, image, and mega spending on advertising drove business growth. But those concepts simply don’t work any longer. How do you decide which camera to purchase when there are hundreds of models available? By choosing the cheapest? By comparing features and benefits?

The traditional view, which, by the way, they still teach in business school, concerns itself with a rational, analytical view of value. But in an oversupplied market with an incomprehensible amount of information (there are over 50 billion web pages on the Internet!), rational decision-making is a myth. Today we base our choices on what feels good to us. How will owning that product make me feel? What does my association with that organization or salesperson say about me? What image does choosing “whatever” project to others? Forget about Unique Selling Proposition and start thinking Unique Feelings Proposition.

Now, for this new way of thinking, feelings are not the same as emotions. Feelings refer to a very specific quality: pleasantness, unpleasantness, or neutrality in an experience and in a state of mind. Pleasant feelingsexcitement, fun, reward, increased self-esteem, etc. - habitually condition desire. Unpleasant feelings - pain, effort required, decreased self-esteem, etc. - condition aversion. And neutral feelings condition forgetfulness. Given this definition, your number one goal should be to increase people’s good feelings while minimizing their bad ones. This simple-sounding objective should be systematically applied to every interaction customers have with you, your product, your company, your communication, and your people. Do it well, and achieve the trust, admiration and liking of your audience. Do it poorly and . . . let’s just say that it definitely won’t be pleasant.

Posted June 5, 2006
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