or Let’s Go Light Up The World?
By Brian H Meredith
From the NZBusiness Magazine"Marketing Maestro" Archive.
First published November 2010
If New Zealand business were ice cream it would be vanilla.
If it were coffee it would be a single shot latte.
If it were a car it would be a five year old Toyota Corolla (although not quite as reliable).
And if it were a colour it would be, well, almost colourless (is there a name for that colour?)
And is there anything wrong with vanilla, single shot lattes, 5 year old Toyota Corolla’s and an almost colourless unnamed colour?
No of course not. But they are boring. They are not breaking any new ground. They are not exciting. They are safe. And they sure as heck don’t stand out from the rest.
In short they (and New Zealand business as a whole) are middle of the road.
And is that a problem for our business sector? You bet.
Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company magazine and co-author of Mavericks at Work, writes in Harvard Business Review:
“I've said it before, and I'll say it again: It's not good enough to be "pretty good" at everything today. You have to be the most of something: the most elegant, the most colourful, the most responsive, the most focused. For decades, organizations and their leaders were comfortable with strategies and practices that kept them in the middle of the road — that's where the customers were, that's what felt safe and secure. In the new world of business, with so much change, so much pressure, so many new ways to do just about everything, the middle of the road has become the road to nowhere. As Jim Hightower, the colourful Texas populist, is fond of saying, "There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos." To which we might add companies and their leaders struggling to stand out from the crowd, even as they play by the same old rules in a crowded marketplace”.
So what are we doing in the middle of the road?
Undoubtedly there are many reasons for this and many more opinions and perspectives. Here are some of mine.
We lack leadership. We lack it in government, we lack it in business and we lack it in our psyche.
Bill Taylor again:
“The true mark of a leader is the willingness to stick with a bold course of action — an unconventional business strategy, a unique product-development roadmap, a controversial marketing campaign — even as the rest of the world wonders why you're not marching in step with the status quo. In other words, real leaders are happy to zig while others zag. They understand that in an era of hyper-competition and non-stop disruption, the only way to stand out from the crowd is to stand for something special”.
One of the consequences of this lack of leadership (or, perhaps, it is a cause rather than an effect?) is that we are risk averse. We commonly get locked into “Ready Aim Aim Aim Aim” mode and either fire too late or don’t fire at all.
We are still locked in to the “she’ll be right” mode. If we can cut any corner, shave any cost, cobble anything together, we will. The result is that, with some notable exceptions, both our manufacturing sector and our service sector sub-optimise their potential significantly with ordinary, often “me too”, offerings where price is the single differentiating factor.
This is sometimes compounded by the deep routed belief that “No 8 Fencing Wire” is an indicator of innovation and creativity. And sometimes it is. Mostly, however, it dovetails nicely with “She’ll be right” and ends up meaning cobbled together or botch job.
We are insecure. Step off the plane in Sydney and you immediately feel an energy, a buzz and a sense of “anything is possible”. Step off the plane in Auckland and you get a sense that it’s nearly time for bed after a long hard day of trying to maintain the status quo and not rock any boats.
Our country and our business sector needs to invest in understanding and developing the whole concept of leadership if we are to exploit the extraordinary strengths that we really do have. We are a young country, we are full of keen, talented, creative and energetic people (we just don’t really know what they look like or what to do with them right now). Technology means that our geographic isolation is no longer a barrier to business success. In fact, the reverse is the case.
But in order for this to happen we need to acknowledge and accept that economic success stems from many things but key amongst them are innovation, creativity, energy and flexibility. And for these things to flourish, we need to breed leaders who know what leadership really means.
I’ll let Bill Taylor have the final say:
“It's hard to overcome the pull of conventional wisdom — established ways of doing things, familiar ways to size up markets. That's why it's hard for leaders to do something genuinely new — to embrace one-of-a-kind ideas in a world filled with me-too thinking. But that's the job description for leadership today. After all, if you do things the way everyone else does things, why would you expect to do any better. How are you planning to zig while everyone else zags?”
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