PASADENA, Calif. — In today's highly competitive market, successful organizations develop a value system first, then invent strategies to help them deliver upon those values.
This was the message of WesCorp's Future Forum speaker Bill Taylor, founding editor of Fast Company magazine and co-author of the book Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win.
How are you rethinking your business? What do you see that the competition doesn't see? Oftentimes, companies are afflicted with strategic tunnel vision, and miss out on opportunities because they're chasing what everyone else is doing. What you need to do is find new ways to interact with customers that their competition doesn't see," Taylor said.
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The author used Cherry Hill, N.J.-based Commerce Bancorp as an example. As financial institutions continue to discourage brick and mortar transactions in an effort to cut costs, Commerce Bank has instead chosen to place value on the retail delivery experience.
Commerce branches are open seven days a week, are staffed by extroverted, even silly, employees, and feature colorful coin counting machines that have attracted customers in droves.
Taylor said Commerce's unorthodox strategy has resulted in an average 48,000 monthly visitors per branch, which is twice the foot traffic of an average McDonald's restaurant. And, Commerce has attracted $10 billion in deposits away from competitors in New York, considered to be the most cutthroat banking market in the country.
"If you went out of business tomorrow, would anybody really miss you? Only if you were offering a product or service that's so special, if the customer lost you it would be like losing a friend," he said.
An organization's value system should be so strong it will refuse to introduce products or services that don't support it, even at the expense of profit.
"I call it the spandex rule of strategies. Just because you can wear spandex, doesn't mean you should, and just because a company can get into a business, doesn't mean they should," he said.
Taylor said the best rate or most profitable account doesn't mean automatic success.
"If you look around in this competitive market, there is no shortage of good deals, but there is a shortage of companies that customers feel take care of them," he said.
He also cautioned against traditional corporate hierarchies in which executives come up with ideas and make decisions, and employees implement them.
"As leaders, you need to stop thinking of yourselves as problem solvers. You should be solution finders instead. Assume that whatever problem you have, somebody already has the solution, and it will probably come from most unlikely place. Sometimes great solutions hiding in plain sight, but leaders can't see them because they're blinded by their own expertise," he said.
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