Loved this on Twitter today from Outdoor_Girly:

Theory: successful people read best selling business books, wildly successful read random books (philosophy), normal people just don’t read

I was looking through our weekly bestsellers and found The Great Influenza: The Story of The Deadliest Pandemic in History by John Barry at #8. Given recent events, I was a little more than interested in what was happening with that title.

Meg tells me the order for that book was placed before H1N1 began making news, taking away all hope of some long winded essay about how hysteria is sweeping our nation and that books can provide wonderful context for current happenings.

Oh well.

Four Cornerstones of Distinction by Scott McKain

It all begins with a simple question:“How can our customers and prospects tell the difference between us and our competition?” Here’s what I find absolutely amazing — the most prevalent answer I hear from highly successful and sophisticated marketing leaders in a wide array of industries is: “I don’t know.”

Distinction is like a vaccine for your organization. If you don’t know what distinguishes you from your competitor — or, if the answer is “price” – then I believe that you are probably doomed, in the long run.

In one of my earlier books, I described the fortunate set of circumstances that enabled me to play the role of the villain in a highly-regarded German movie, “Stroszek” by the esteemed director, Werner Herzog. This marvelous event in my life later afforded me another unlikely opportunity — to become a film critic, with my commentaries syndicated across the U.S. and around the world.

Several years ago, I attended a reception in Hollywood, and had the occasion to meet the best in the business, Roger Ebert. To my delight and surprise, the famed critic remembered the terrific review he gave my solitary attempt at acting. Roger asked me to sit with him and his wife, and we began a warm and fascinating conversation.

Roger asked me, “Scott, how many movies are you normally seeing in any given week?” My answer was that the usual total was one – the film I would be reviewing for that week’s broadcast. He responded, “Many of the people in this profession are seeing one or two movies a day! The little off-beat, quirky, odd, foreign or independent film captures our attention because they are a bit different! When you are overwhelmed with such boring similarity, you begin to perceive that ‘different’ IS ‘better’!

The remarkable Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and critic taught me a great lesson I now call “The Ebert Effect”: When someone, from their perspective, is inundated with indistinguishable choices, they perceive a product, service, approach, or experience that possesses a specific point of differentiation to be superior.

Because this effect means that different is perceived to be better, we must realize that there are four steps — I call them the “Four Cornerstones of Distinction” — that create what every organization, and professional, needs in today’s volatile economy.

The first Cornerstone is Clarity. To grab attention and guarantee satisfaction, you have to be precise about who and what you are. You cannot differentiate what you cannot define.

The second Cornerstone is Creativity. Distinctive organizations find some unique twist, some original spin to put on the interaction that they have with customers.

The third of the Cornerstones is Communication. And, while we often hear about the importance of that topic, what our research clearly shows is that today’s customer wants to be engaged by a compelling narrative. Tell the story of your product, your company, and your service in a manner that involves customers and prospects.

The final Cornerstone is Customer-Experience Focus. This more than the old “focus on the customer” line we’ve heard for years. Today’s customer centers purchase decisions as much on feelings as facts and figures. In other words, how they feel about your marketing — and the experience and emotional connectivity they have with your organization and people — are the primary determinates of what they will buy and refer.

The easiest tactic for you is simply to continue what you are currently doing. Let me emphatically state my belief that this is also the most dangerous approach.

Because of the Three Destroyers of Differentiation discussed in the previous post, your job – organizationally and individually – is only going to continue to grow in difficulty. However, if you begin today to chart a fresh approach based upon the Four Cornerstones of Distinction, you can begin to enhance your organization — while you nurture and grow yourself.

Check out Collapse of Distinction: Stand Out and Move Up While Your Competition Fails by Scott McKain (Thomas Nelson, March 2009)

The Three Destroyers of Differentiation by Scott McKain

There was a time not too long ago when Chevy owners felt superior to those poor souls driving a Ford — and vice versa. A person gained identification through the goods that they purchased, the stores where they shopped, the institutions where they invested — no matter the level of price or sophistication of the product.

Now, however, over the past several years we have seen the homogenization of practically everything. The big store where I shop almost certainly appears and feels a lot like yours, no matter the logo on the door, no matter the community where it is located.

When customers perceive times are a bit tighter, they naturally want to spend their money where they sense they are receiving the highest degree of value. Certainly, they’ll become more price conscious than in better financial situations. However, if you differentiate your business and yourself, you will find that a downturn is tailor-made for grabbing market share from your competitors.

If you cannot find it within you to become emotional, committed, engaged, and…yes…FERVENT about differentiation, then you had better be prepared to take your place among that vast throng of the mediocre who are judged by their customers solely on the basis of price. It is the singularly worst place to be in all of business. If you aren’t willing to create distinction for yourself in your profession — and for your organization in the marketplace — then prepare to take your seat there in the back, with the substantial swarm of the similar, where tedium reigns supreme.

There is a trio of aspects — called in my book the Three Destroyers of Differentiation that created the “Collapse of Distinction.” Taken individually, each of these Destroyers creates a compelling challenge for you in the marketplace. When combined, they have a synergistic and destructive impact on your industry, your organization…and you!

The first Destroyer is: Copycat Competition. When my competitor creates a point of distinction, my natural inclination is to either:

a) Copy/imitate the improvement; or,

b) Attempt to incrementally improve upon their advancement

Notice the distinction problem with this paradigm: My efforts are based upon what my competitor is doing — NOT what my customers may truly desire! And, in most cases, both your advancements and mine have been evolutionary — NOT revolutionary. We have arrived at the point where most organizations focus more on the competition than their customers.

The second Destroyer is: New — and Better — Competition. If you are like most, your reaction to Destroyer Two — cultural, technological and societal change bringing new competitors to your doorstep — is to probably execute precisely the wrong strategy. You figure if most of your customers are going to McDonald’s, you try to “out-McDonald’s” them to restore your business. Unfortunately — and despite your best intentions — imitation gains you little traction in the marketplace.

The third Destroyer is: Familiarity Breeds Complacency. My Mom told me that, “Familiarity breeds contempt.” As much as I hate to dispute her advice, this isn’t true. When something, like a product or service is present so much that it becomes thoroughly familiar and is boundlessly available, we do not then begin to scorn it, hate it, or express disdain towards it. Instead, we begin to take it for granted. We become complacent and presume it will always be around.

What a combination! You may be:

1. Creating only incremental improvements, so there is nothing to distinguishes you from your competition
2. Encountering new competition that you didn’t even dream of a few years earlier — and they are tough, price-slashing competitors that can rapidly deliver either a similar (or even the very same) product or service to your customers
3. Taken for granted by the customers you have served for a period of time because they have been lulled into complacency through their total familiarity with your execution

The next segment will outline the Four Cornerstones of Distinction — and show you the process to create a compelling strategy to stand out and move up — while your competition fails!

Check out Collapse of Distinction: Stand Out and Move Up While Your Competition Fails by Scott McKain (Thomas Nelson, March 2009)

Michael Arrington’s Grok This: Forget The Business Books, Go Sci-Fi To Stoke Your Imagination post from two weeks ago garnered alot of attention. I just wanted share the additional recommendations from the genre that popped up in various places.

In the comment thread of Arrington’s post itself:

• Seth Wagoner recommends Charlie Stross and Ken MacLeod, pointing to Marc Andreessen’s post on top novelists from this decade.
• Ben says “I’d have to agree with everything on this list – although it’s a bit of a ‘beginners guide’ to sci-fi. Add in Peter F. Hamilton, the Cormac novels of Neal Asher etc. and you’re humming.”
• Tom recommends:
• Richard K. Morgan – Altered Carbon (all his stuff is great but AC is a good introduction)
• Neal Asher – The Skinner
• Alastair Reynolds – Revelation Space (Chasm city and the prefect are also awesome books)
• Charles Stross – Singularity Sky (Halting State is another stand out book)
• Mark suggests The Player of Games by Iain Banks
• And almost all the comments recommend the addition of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game.

On our own post, Seth Godin commented that “[E]very employee I’ve hired in the last ten years has been required to read Snow Crash [by Neal Stephenson].” He also highly recommends Cory Doctorow. In his latest book Tribes, he starts the acknowledgements with one to Doctorow and his book Eastern Standard Tribe.

Finally, Michael Fitzgerald at BNET writes:

[H]ere are three science fiction authors he should have on there and doesn’t: John Brunner (“Squares of the City” is the one I’ve read, though “Shockwave Rider” is probably more relevant), Vernor Vinge (“Rainbows End” is his most recent, and I posted on its vision for the Future of Business, but “True Names” would matter more to high-tech entrepreneurs), and William Gibson (“Neuromancer,” natch…).

Anyone else want to chime in?

Unsticking an Idea

by Chip Heath & Dan Heath,
Authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Since Made to Stick came out, many anxious people have asked us, “How do I unstick a sticky idea?” They want to unstick a rumor about their company or a false perception of a particular product. They want to unstick whispered mistruths about political candidates. Once, we were even asked, “How would you unstick Paris Hilton?”

Our answer on that last one was a bit slow in coming. We finally admitted, “You can’t.” There’s no Goo Gone for ideas. Sticky ideas stick. There are millions of people who’ve come to follow, willingly or unwillingly, the antics of a party-girl heiress. There’s no magic sticky incantation that will make us divert our attention to alternative energy, or some other worthy topic. Our best advice, on the Paris Hilton matter, was: Just wait it out. As we age, the memories will fade, and perhaps those neurons will die off entirely. (With any luck, they’ll go before the “dress ourselves” neurons.)

But the question — How do I unstick an idea? — nagged at us. So we dug into the relevant academic research. It was a long and frustrating search, because there’s not much research tackling this topic. But we did find one promising lead that was about sixty-five years old.

During World War II, social scientists had a keen patriotic interest in rumor control. About two-thirds of the rumors during were “wedge-drivers,” accusations that provoked anger at various social groups (blacks, Jews, the Brits). These rumors were false and socially destructive, so the government wanted to fight back aggressively. One tactic that seemed to work against wedge-drivers was to redirect the anger and make people mad at the rumormongers. For instance, the rumor-control people would put up posters of Nazi spies spreading rumors to gullible dupes. This primed listeners to react angrily when someone spread a rumor: You’re undermining the American war effort by spreading Nazi untruths!

At first, this work in wartime propaganda seemed pretty removed from the concerns of our readers, who want their ideas to stick in business or in school. But then it dawned on us: Trying to unstick an idea is a bad strategy. The World War II rumor-control people weren’t trying to unstick an idea. They were shifting the turf and propagating a different, competing idea. Instead of arguing that the rumors themselves were baseless, they argued: The Nazis are trying to trick you. Are you going to fall for that?

This suggests that we shouldn’t try to unstick ideas. We should fight sticky with stickier, meet Scotch tape with duct tape.

For decades, McDonald’s fought rumors that it used earthworms as filler in its burgers. At first, the company tried to unstick the idea. In 1978, McDonald’s officials had denounced the rumors as “completely unfounded and unsubstantiated.” (Quotes taken from Newsweek via Snopes.com, the mecca of urban-legend debunking.) Guess which idea was stickier: “earthworms in your meat patties” or “unfounded and unsubstantiated”?

By 1992, Ray Kroc, McDonald’s most famous CEO, had come up with a better approach. He said, “We couldn’t afford to grind worms into meat. Hamburger costs a dollar and a half a pound, and night crawlers cost six dollars!” That’s nice; Kroc is fighting sticky with sticky. Notice the elements of credibility (dollars per pound) and unexpectedness (We can’t afford to serve you earthworms). He might even have gone a step further and made a joke about it: “If someone ever tries to sell you a WormBurger, you should worry about them secretly filling it with beef.”

Another case of fighting sticky with sticky came during the late 1990s, when e-mailed rumors about nasty computer viruses circulated constantly. According to these rumors, if you clicked the wrong link, or opened the wrong e-mail, you’d destroy your computer. One day, a young systems operator, fed up with the dozens of bogus warnings he received every day, wrote a parody of the rumors:

Warning: if you receive an e-mail with “Goodtimes” in the subject line, DO NOT OPEN IT!!!!! Goodtimes will rewrite your hard drive. It will also scramble any disks that are even close to your computer. It will recalibrate your refrigerator’s coolness setting so all your ice cream goes melty. It will demagnetize the strips on your credit cards and use subspace field harmonics to scratch your CDs. It will give your ex your new phone number. It will mix Kool-Aid into your fish tank. It moves your car randomly around parking lots so you can’t find it.

The parody became a viral hit, as popular as the rumors it mocked. Bill Ellis, a folklorist at Penn State Hazleton, has documented that, as this parody spread, the apocalyptic virus warnings faded away. The parody cleverly provided people with a schema of an overhyped warning. Afterward, if you received more e-mails that fit the schema — full of overheated language and dire warnings — you knew to laugh rather than get worried. The young systems operator fought a sticky idea with a stickier idea.

But sometimes the best way to fight a sticky idea is not with a message at all, even a stickier one. Sometimes what you need is a sticky action. Consider the dawn of the automobile era. As described in Hayagreeva Rao’s book Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations, the gasoline-powered car was greeted, at first, with skepticism and outright fear. People called it a “devilish contraption.” It spawned rabid opposition. The Farmer’s Anti-Automobile Society of Pennsylvania, for example, demanded that cars traveling at night on country roads “must send up a rocket every mile, then wait ten minutes for the road to clear. If a driver sees a team of horses, he is to pull to one side of the road and cover his machine with a blanket or dust cover that has been painted to blend into the scenery.” One technologist of the time scoffed at the idea that gasoline engines would ever be widely adopted: “You can’t get people to sit on an explosion.”

That’s a sticky idea: simple, concrete, emotional. If you were an entrepreneurial automaker, how would you combat it? Well, the dumb thing to do would be to try to “unstick it” with a message: Go ahead, try telling potential customers, “Don’t worry, you’re actually sitting on a contained explosion.” Oh, and all the top automotive authorities say your fears are “unfounded and unsubstantiated.”

Auto enthusiasts chose to act. They created a series of “reliability races” in which automobile inventors would bring their autos together and have them compete on endurance, fuel economy, and hill-climbing ability. Reliability contests were one part product testing and one part festival. The first contest took place in 1895, and by 1912 they had been discontinued, because cars were an accepted social reality. What happened in between was that the automakers gave thousands of people the chance to see firsthand the promise of automobiles — to see that there was nothing to fear. (In fact, the acclaim Henry Ford received from his performance in the reliability contests enabled him to launch the Ford Motor Company in 1903.)

Note that the auto enthusiasts didn’t try to argue their way out of the fears; they acted their way out. They chose a demonstration that was Unexpected (Until today I thought cars were dangerous and unreliable); Concrete (Did you see it take that hill?); Emotional (I can see myself becoming one of those liberated drivers); and Credible (I saw it all with my own eyes!).

So how do you unstick an idea? First of all, be realistic. It took seventeen years for reliability races to establish public trust in the automobile. The rumor about earthworms in McDonald’s hamburgers still circulates in some places, despite Ray Kroc’s brilliant response. Sticky ideas endure, and, as we’ve seen in the book, that can be a great thing. It can also be a real nuisance if you’re working against a sticky idea that’s false.

Our advice is simple: Fight sticky ideas with stickier ideas. We hope we’ve given you some useful tools for making your ideas sticky. And if you want to unstick Paris Hilton, maybe you should be looking for another fame-hungry heiress to take her place? (We’re not sure heiress races will do the trick.)

The above is an excerpt from the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath. The above excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.

Excerpted from Made to Stick by Chip Heath & Dan Heath Copyright © 2007 by Chip Heath & Dan Heath. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Green-to-Gold Plays
by Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston, authors of Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage
An Eco-Advantage Mindset, supported by the right tracking tools, a focus on redesign, and a culture of environmental stewardship, is the foundation for turning green to gold. But the real action lies in the strategies that create value, the Green-to-Gold Plays.
Like any other business strategy, our Green-to-Gold Plays aim to reduce the downsides a business faces (cost and risk) or increase the upsides (revenue and intangible value). Unlike many others, though, these plays don’t sacrifice responsibility in the pursuit of profit — or profit in the pursuit of responsibility. Our WaveRider companies offer proof every day that doing good and doing well can be symbiotic.
We’ve mapped the eight Green-to-Gold Plays drawn from our study of WaveRiders onto the two-by-two strategy framework we outlined earlier. Not surprisingly, most green business efforts to date have focused on the lower left box. Cost reduction is extremely low risk, easy to sell internally, and often pays back quickly. It can yield competitive advantage. But our research suggests that, by focusing solely on the cost side, many companies are missing chances to generate broader Eco-Advantage. Most companies have not yet executed all of the plays — they’re leaving money on the table.
1. Eco-Efficiency
Cutting pollution and waste makes good business sense. Even highly efficient companies have been shocked to discover savings they had previously overlooked. Over three decades, 3M continues to find new ways to pare costs through its 3P program, Pollution Prevention Pays. Many changes can be very simple. STMicroelectronics, for example, put in larger air-conditioner ducts, which allowed its air-circulating fan to run more slowly. The fan now uses 85 percent less energy. In just one year, with $40 million invested in changes like these, the company saved $173 million.
Sometimes the search for eco-efficiency can leapfrog past reduction to outright elimination of a process or resource. Rohner Textil once produced its dyed, woven fibers in the same manner as everyone else in the industry. To make the fibers strong enough to weave, it would coat the yarn with chemicals, which had to be washed off later, creating wastewater problems. While searching for a way to reduce chemical use, Rohner realized that humidity makes the fiber stronger. So the company now skips the chemical coating and simply doesn’t dry the yarn quite as much, leaving moisture in the fiber. Rohner cut out one step, shortened another, eliminated the chemicals, reduced energy use, and cut costs. A pretty good day at the eco-efficiency office.
Rohner’s efficiency improvements have driven per worker productivity up 300 percent over the past 20 years. During a vicious downturn in its industry, Rohner, unlike many other companies, remained profitable.
2. Eco-Expense Reduction
Efforts to lower direct environmental costs such as landfill fees or regulatory paperwork can also return big dividends. DuPont has saved billions on pollution control, and that’s only the measurable cost of waste. In one case, the company cut rejects from the Lycra production line from 25 percent of volume to less than 10 percent. That focus on reducing waste saved material, lowered landfill costs, and freed up $140 million in saleable product. It also meant the company could delay building another plant, saving many millions more in capital expense. The ripples from cutting waste and eco-expense can overflow and save money in many ways.
3. Value Chain Eco-Efficiency
Companies that look broadly for environmental gains and use tools like Life Cycle Assessment often find ways to reduce costs throughout their value chains. The play here is to try and capture that value, which can be a difficult task. In Chapter 4, we talked about one area in which companies are quite effective — distribution. IKEA and others stuff their trucks through smart package and product design, and save money.
4. Eco-Risk Control
With the rise of transparency, the risks to a business and its brand can come from anywhere. A substantial amount of goodwill is tied to corporate reputation. If a distant supplier dumps waste in a river or employs children, the major customer, with an international brand, may well be the one to pay the price.
WaveRiders identify potential risks and act on them as early as possible. When McDonald’s pushes back on its supply chain to lower antibiotic use in chickens, or asks for documentation that ensures that cattle do not have mad cow disease, it’s lowering the risk of contaminating its brand. Intel spends millions to ship its hazardous waste from some developing countries to the United States so it can be disposed of properly. Why? Intel doesn’t trust the waste-handling system in some countries where it operates. And company officials know they’ll be blamed if something goes wrong.
WaveRiders get ahead of regulations before they get tighter. BP began its Clean Cities program and sold cleaner-burning, lower-sulfur fuels in part to get out in front of more stringent air quality laws. “The driver was that sulfur regulations would come,” BP’s Chris Mottershead told us. “Rather than deliver on a regulated schedule, we decided to go early and try for a market benefit.”
Anticipating regulations can put a company in a position to meet requirements at a lower cost than its competitors. Some companies have even obtained a competitive edge by lobbying for tighter controls. Remember, it’s often the relative regulatory burden that matters.
5. Eco-Design
Redesigning processes and products to cut waste and pollution is a big part of Eco-Advantage. Keep in mind, too, that a great deal of potential gain might lie outside the factory gates or your own facilities’ doors. Helping customers reduce their environmental problems can strengthen customer loyalty and attract new sales. Reducing a product’s energy use or toxicity also can add to customer value. Like Johnson Controls, which sells entire energy management systems, companies that find ways to lower customer burden can profit.
6. Eco-Sales and Marketing
Marketing the green qualities of products can drive sales. When Wausau Paper launched a new brand extension of “away from home” products — paper towels, toilet paper, and the like — it first certified the product line with Green Seal, an NGO specializing in environmental product labels. The company then rebranded the product EcoSoft Green Seal, putting the certification right in the name. In an industry growing only 2 to 3 percent per year, Wausau’s sales in this market leapt 44 percent in the first two years.
In fact, Wausau took an unusual route by focusing its marketing pitch squarely on the environmental message. Products that scream “green” to the exclusion of other qualities often die on the shelves. As Shell learned with its Pura gasoline, a product often needs to stand on other attributes first before selling the environmental story. Green, we’ve found, is often best used as the “third button.”
7. Eco-Defined New Market Space
Environmental Vision can create new market space and value innovation. Toyota set out to redefine the twenty-first-century car and has come pretty close. Many customers now seek a hybrid, not a midsized car, and they’ll pay a substantial premium or wait months for a Prius in particular. For these consumers, there is no substitute.
Looking for environmentally defined market space can seem to lead companies far afield. Take John Deere’s recent foray into renewable energy. The tractor maker started up a business unit to help farmers harvest wind energy. Deere will offer financial backing and consulting. This may seem an odd fit, but we see it as an interesting play. A company known for providing farmers with the tools they need is offering to help them survive and find new revenue streams. That’s value innovation!
8. Intangible Value
Most companies are worth more than their hard assets, and in some cases much more. Brand value — or corporate reputation, more generally — can be worth many billions of dollars. Any threat to that value has to be taken seriously. From BP to GE to Wal-Mart, a growing number of companies have launched campaigns to build a green element into their brand.
Copyright (c) 2009 Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston
Author Bios
Daniel C. Esty, co-author of Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage, is the Hillhouse Professor at Yale University and Director of the Center for Business and the Environment at Yale (www.yale.edu/CBEY). Author and editor of nine books and dozens of articles, Dan is one of the world’s leading corporate environmental strategy experts with twenty years of experience working with companies of all sizes and across many industries worldwide. He served as senior official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1990s and is presently Chairman of Esty Environmental Partners (www.EstyEP.com).
Andrew S. Winston, co-author of Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage, advises some of the world’s leading companies on how to profit from environmental thinking. He is also a highly respected and dynamic speaker, exploring the business benefits of going green with audiences around the world. Andrew’s earlier career included corporate strategy at Boston Consulting Group and management positions in marketing and business development at Time Warner and MTV. See www.andrewwinston.com for more information.