The Road To Extraordinary

Recently I had an opportunity to speak with a senior executive from a company that quite frankly has done a very credible job in their market segment. Conservative style, disciplined approach and......wait for it.....steadily improving performance year after year.....if companies were cars this one would classify as a mid-sized sedan...big and safe with virtually no chance of ever being edgy, innovative or fast. His greatest worry was that technology was going to turn his company into a dinosaur in the next five years...My suspicion is that he was spot on!!!

I had always wondered what held this company back from reaching their potential....certainly they were good at what they do...just never great...They held all the resources needed to be great....I wondered what was stopping them.....I wondered until I had that opportunity to sit down with someone who's purpose was to speak with me about ways that could help them break into new technology and reach into a market share of places they were well behind the curve on.

It went really well....we talked for nearly an hour about the goals of the business unit, the gaps that existed, and the incredible opportunity that lay before them to move into a technology they had never dreamed would be a requirement for their continued success. And then it happened....we talked about budget....not the budget for projects or capital equipment....we talked about their budget for the most valuable resource any company moving into technology can invest in.....PEOPLE....the men and women who will put their heart and soul into transforming their business and changing their outcome.

His comment literally blew me away when he said "when it comes to our people we tend to be pretty frugal, we don't believe in paying for top talent, we would rather take young engineers and develop them that way we can keep downward pressure on those salaries." I respected his candor, but wondered how his company could have any expectation of greatness when their formula limited them to only middle of the road players, and if by chance they did the impossible and succeeded in developing the next wave of incredible players, their long-term strategy would result in those folks leaving for higher paying jobs elsewhere. Their basic strategy would relegate them to becoming kind of a "minor league farm team" for their competition. 

Great teams recruit and develop great people, great franchises find a way to retain them once that happens. But where does the chemistry of extraordinary come from? In my opinion having worked for some pretty amazing teams, it has to come from the very top of a company. It has to be a conscious decision to push outside of what is safe and comfortable. I'll say it again for clarity....incredible advancement doesn't come by accident....it is built through innovative strategy and commitment to push beyond what is comfortable. Dream teams are the result of hard work, camaraderie and a lot of really hard work, but they require support from senior leadership, they seldom occur simply by chance. Very few companies possess the ability to keep them together once they are happen. So the few that do put up numbers that the rest of the corporate world only dreams of. These franchise companies recognize that the single most important asset on their balance sheet is their people and they find a way to retain the very best once they find them.

Our world is bursting with advance technologies few of us ever even imagined possible....the only question that remains is which companies will have the creative skills necessary to create organizations that can harness those technologies. The places that build the next group of amazing teams and learn to harness that potential while being flexible enough to keep those dream teams together will be the stuff of legend....legends like Apple...in that tiny garage....or Menlo Park.....at the very epicenter of the industrial revolution.....changing the direction of the world as they create technology and success by showing us all a better way to be extraordinary. PT