Stick To Your Knitting But Make Sure You Have Enough Wool

How does that play into Leadership and Business?

Well, great businesses today focus on being great at something that no one else can do.  

They are either the most creative at Innovation (Apple), clear winners in Excellence (Toyota), fanatical about efficiency (Wal-Mart) or obsessed around Customer Intimacy (Four Seasons Hotels).  They have a single minded focus on being better at their area of market advantage than anyone else.  They DO NOT try to be all things to all people.

Businesses that attempt to be innovators, efficiency experts and deliver a great customer service experience all at the same time, ultimately fail or languish in the sea of mediocrity.

Second.  When you decide what your business is going to be better than anyone else, make sure you have replicable processes and thorough training in place to ensure you can deliver your greatness time in and time out and… in multiple locations.

Customers will take your greatness virally social to tell the world about you if you WOW them!  They will crucify you if you fail to deliver the experience they have talked about to others.  Case in point, a good friend of mine was telling me about a time that he went to Starbucks and they were out of coffee.  What’s worse than a coffee shop being out of coffee is that they did not offer any kind of recovery strategy to entice my friend to come back when they did have coffee.

Finally, being great is actually relatively easy because there is not a lot of competition.  All it takes is figuring out what your greatness is, and paying attention to every single little detail in the delivery of that greatness so that it is flawless every single time!