Chapter 12: Creating and Sustaining Behavioral Differentiation
Written by admin on January 14, 2010 – 6:05 am -Overview
Will is the master of the world. Those who want something, those who know what they want, even those who want nothing, but want it badly, govern the world.
–Ferdinand Brunetière
Rhetoric is frequently an essential first step toward taking action. But just talking about what to do isn’t enough. Nor is planning for the future enough to produce the future. Something has to get done, and someone has to do it.
–Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, The Knowing-Doing Gap
One of the dangers of business books that discuss real companies is that the exemplary companies cited may later falter, which can appear to disprove the authors’ theses. As many pundits have pointed out, this occurred most famously following the 1984 publication of In Search of Excellence by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., when some of the excellent companies they wrote about later turned in less-than-excellent results. Another book, Lessons from the Top: The Search for America’s Best Business Leaders, published in 1999 by Thomas J. Neff and James M. Citrin, included a section on Ken Lay and Enron in which the authors praised how Lay “aggressively moved Enron into nonregulated businesses”.[1] We can imagine how the authors must have felt when Enron collapsed in 2001 because of its questionable moves into nonregulated businesses.
This book could suffer the same fate. One of our exemplars of BD is Ritz-Carlton. However, a story published on April 8, 2002, in the Wall Street Journal suggested that the Ritz-Carlton’s legendary service may be declining at some properties as the luxury hotel chain expands, perhaps too rapidly (although a first-person perspective by Paul Hemp in the June 2002 Harvard Business Review suggests otherwise). Even in the best of companies, service may sometimes fall below the exceptional standard the companies have set. No doubt there are customers who have had a bad experience with Southwest Airlines or were not well treated (at least in their view) by Men’s Wearhouse-two of our other exemplars of BD. But let’s be fair. It is impossible to satisfy everyone all the time, much less delight them all the time. Behavioral differentiation is not easy to establish in the first place, and it’s much more difficult to sustain. Why? Because, as the 1988 David Mamet film Things Change so humorously illustrated, things change.
As we write this book, Ritz-Carlton, Volvo, Men’s Wearhouse, Southwest Airlines, EMC, Harley Davidson, and the other companies we profiled do exemplify the concept of behavioral differentiation. However, in the future, under different business conditions, with different leaders, even these stalwarts of behavioral differentiation may become merely average. It is not easy to sustain BD. The tendency is to regress toward the middle of the behavioral spectrum because that’s where most people naturally behave. Companies are collections of individuals, each of whom will normally treat customers in ways that reflect his or her normal behavior. Some of those individuals will excel at customer handling because they are naturally inclined to treat people well, and some won’t. Consequently, sustaining BD throughout a large organization of people requires inspired leadership, a strong culture that reinforces differentiating behavior internally and externally, and processes that maintain and reward exceptional behavior. There must be an organizing principle at work in a company that motivates exceptional behavior toward customers and an infrastructure that normalizes those behaviors, and this is not easy to create, much less maintain over a long period under changing leadership. Yet Harley-Davidson has sustained its symbolic BD for nearly a century; Heidrick & Struggles has done it for half that. Southwest Airlines, Ritz-Carlton, and Men’s Wearhouse have sustained it since the 1970s. What do these companies teach us?
[1]Thomas J. Neff and James M. Citrin, Lessons from the Top: The Search for America’s Best Business Leaders (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1999), p. 217.
Taken From : Winning Behavior-What the Smartest, Most Successful Companies Do Differently
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