Better is Not Different. Only Different is Different.

"'Good job,'" says the hard-charging jazz teacher in the Oscar-winning movie Whiplash, “are the two most harmful words in the English language.” The point of the movie, and of countless books about success, is that good is never good enough; the people and companies that will be remembered are those that achieved greatness by being truly excellent. 

Yet there are plenty of excellent artists, scientists, and businesses who come and go through the decades, perhaps great at what they do but never achieving the acclaim some think they deserve. That’s because being good at what you do isn’t all that’s required to achieve real greatness; you must devote just as much effort to being different.

Many architectural professionals believe there were a lot more talented architects than Frank Lloyd Wright, yet who stands out in the minds of most people as the greatest American architect? Wright was certainly competent at his craft, but more importantly, he dared to be different. Over the years he developed an exceptionally distinctive style, one that either attracted or repelled potential clients. 

In the first half of the 20th century, there were painters with better technical skills than Salvador Dali. But Dali stands out because of his individuality, not his proficiency. 

Competence is not enough

Chances are, the criteria you use when naming great artists, great scientists, and great businesses have much more to do with distinctiveness than competence.

Sony has technical capabilities that rival those of Apple, but which is the more famous (and more profitable) company? The company that embraces “Think Different” is, as of this writing, the most valuable company in the world. 

Most businesses understand the need to continually improve their knowledge and abilities, and the best businesses invest in training programs and perpetual education for their people. For some companies, this can amount to a sizeable investment of time and money. The problem is that these organizations assume that business success comes mostly from excellence rather than difference. 

Being competent at your job, or in your industry, only brings you to parity with other competent people or companies. And the goal of most companies isn’t equivalence, but rather preeminence.

A plan is not a strategy

The great majority of “strategic plans” are mostly lists of tactics for how companies are going to improve their products, upgrade their service, and achieve KPIs having to do with both quality and efficiency. It’s true that great companies know how to execute, and that operational effectiveness is essential to protecting your reputation and keeping your customers. But flawless execution is seldom the reason customers would be attracted to you in the first place. In the 21st century, most customers expect high levels of product quality and service, making it harder and harder to rely on either of these factors to differentiate your offering in the marketplace. 

The reason most internal planning documents don’t qualify as a strategy is because they are mostly an exercise in articulating everything the company should be doing rather than making decisions about what the company should not be doing. As Michael Porter says, “Strategy is choosing what not to do.” When’s the last time you saw a strategic plan whose main focus was on subtracting from – rather than adding to – the companies list of products, competencies, and services?

Common sense is not a strategy

As business planners, we routinely make the mistake of believing that the path to growth and profitability is through diversification. The internal reasoning goes something like this: 

"Last year we offered 15 core services; this year let’s increase it to 20. That way, we’ll offer more variety to our current customers, plus we’ll attract new customers by offering new services. Besides, our competitors are adding these services and we can’t afford to fall behind. Plus, our customers have additional needs that we could probably fulfill. If we keep expanding, maybe we’ll have a chance at being their one-stop-shop. They won’t have a reason to go anywhere else."

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Isn’t diversification what companies do in order to grow? The problem is that business strategy is not common sense. In fact, effective strategy-making means going against many of the aspects of our human nature.

For starters, our human sensibilities would suggest that if a particular approach appears to work for someone else, it would make sense to copy it. Anthropologists tell us that the tendency to copy actually runs deep in our DNA, since copying the successful behaviors of other ancient humans was a useful survival mechanism. 

But effectual business strategies are those that actively avoid copying the products, services, and approaches of competitors. To replicate your competitors’ business models isn’t strategy, it’s karaoke. This means we must go against our natural and deep-rooted instinct to copy. It’s this dynamic that makes most organizations so strategically weak; they cannot or will not overcome this fundamental part of their human nature. 

Next, logic would suggest if we want to sell more, we should offer more. A store with 1,000 or 10,000 items will earn more revenue than a store selling just 100 items, right? While this seems a sensible assumption, an increase in the number of products rarely if ever produces a corresponding increase in revenue. 

And when it comes to profit, diversification is actually negatively correlated. Wall Street analysts actually attach a “diversification discount” to companies with broad product lines, discounting the stock by as much as 12%, because they know that generally the more diversified the company, the less profitable it is. 

What about expanding the organization’s offerings in an attempt to fulfill all major customer needs in the category – a single-source solution? Isn’t that a reasonable expectation? Perhaps in simpler times, when there were fewer providers and access to goods and services was limited. But in today’s world of the long tail, buyers can pick and choose from best-in-class solutions to their problems without having to settle for an “enterprise” solution that attempts to be good at everything and ends up being average in everything.

"Excellence" is not a strategy

Every decision we make about our business either contributes to or detracts from our desired brand; very few are neutral. Business decisions can’t be made in a vacuum or based on some vague notion of “excellence.”

Unless we know what our firm stands for, how can we possibly make effective decisions about how to run our business? Consider how a clearly defined business strategy can lead us to good answers to critical questions like:

• What services and capabilities should we develop and sustain?
• What should we be doing more of? Less of?
• Who are our best prospective clients?
• How should our firm be structured?
• What kind of business partnerships do we need?
• What kind of knowledge and expertise do we need to cultivate?
• What type of people do we need to hire?
• While kind of training and professional development should we provide?
• What should our website say?

The enterprises that make the best decisions are the ones with the clearest view of who they are and what makes them distinctive and remarkable. In other words, they’re the companies that understand it’s not enough to be as good as possible; we must also be as different as possible.