Review of Change to Strange: Create a Great Organization by Building a Strange Workforce (Hardcover)

How many times have you heard a CEO count his or her work force as a "competitive advantage?"Yet a trip to that CEO's store or office reveals nothing special.

Daniel M. Cable argues an organization needs to do something special to create something special.You cannot be great if your organization does what everyone else does.You have to be unique.You have to be out of the ordinary.If you want to stand above your competitors, you cannot be normal.To deliver a unique experience to your customers, your workforce must be unusual or striking. This out-of-the-ordinary experience, Cable defines as strange.

Even though too man organizations claim their workforces as a competitive advantage, most do not differ from their competitors.They treat their workforce the same way their competitors do.They compare their people practices to industry averages.As a result, nothing the organization produces is particularly noteworthy from a customer's point of view.

Cable, a management professor at the University of North Carolina, argues that if your organization hopes to achieve extraordinary results, your work force cannot be normal.The author offers four undeniable observations:

1.A great organization develops a sustained competitive advantage.
2.They get it by creating and delivering something to the market that is valuable, rare and hard to imitate.
3.Creating and delivering this value demands the disciplined obsession of a strange workforce.
4.A strange workforce is built by using unique metrics and strange workforce architecture.

Make sure you do not quit reading before the last chapter on measurement.The book's processes rely heavily on measurement and metrics.Creating a strange workforce, the author states, relies on a process for measuring fuzzy concepts.In the last chapter, he provides it.

The challenge leaders face is not developing a strategy, but translating it into reality through their workforces.Cable, whose consulting and teaching focus on bringing human systems in line with company strategy, weaves a healthy dose of practicality with inspiration to help them build a strange workforce.





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