November 2006
Email: gcohen@co2partners.com
Dear Readers,
Are you a Lion hunting food for survival or the gazelle racing ahead of the pack? Have you ever stopped to think that someone out there is trying to survive and your failure works to their benefit and success. Learn more about how to navigate the jungle in If I were the competition, what would I do to put us out of business?
Also, drop us a line. We would love to hear from you. Your suggestions and comments are always sincerely appreciated.
Best Regards,
Gary Cohen
|
![]() |
<<<<<>>>>>
Every day in Africa a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion
or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows that it must outrun the slowest gazelle
or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better be running.”
-Abe Gubegna, Ethiopia, circa 1974
<<<<<>>>>>
|
|
| |
![]() |
| |
If I were the competition, what would I do to put us out of business? |
![]() |
Successful corporations reinvent themselves every year. Take Sony, which produces a zillion new products per day, or 3M, which races itself in the invention process. Leaders of these corporations ask themselves, “If I were the competition, what would I do to put us out of business?” They pride themselves on finding the answers and acting on them before the competition does.
My business partner, Rick Diamond, CEO of ACI, has a saying over his desk that he got from Ted Deikel, former CEO and Chairman of Fingerhut Corporation. It is shown above.
Rick and I had no prior experience in the call-center industry, so when we woke up in the morning, we knew we had to do at least one thing better than our competition. Otherwise, our company would starve. We asked ourselves, “How can we catch the competition? How can we improve upon what they do?”
We first narrowed our focus. How could we make our call-center operators more productive? How could we reduce the amount of dead time they spent on the phone? And how could we create a more seamless transition between calls? These questions prompted us to seek the technology called predictive dialing, which was being used in the collections industry. Predictive dialing eventually became the call-center industry standard, but not before little ACI grew from two employees to 2,200. This technology predicted when operators were going to complete a call and transferred another call to them the moment they hung up. If call center operators normally spent twenty-two minutes an hour talking to customers on the phone, now they would spend forty-five. Because payroll was our largest cost, we were able to both out-produce and undercut the competition. As lions new to the territory, lion cubs really, we caught our first gazelle.
If you’re chasing the competition, be a lion. Ask yourself, “How can we catch the competition? How can we improve upon what they do?” If you’re trying to stay ahead of the competition, run like a gazelle. Ask yourself, “How can we avoid being caught? What will allow us to increase the distance between us and the competition?”
I want to receive Leadership Thoughts
Please remove my name
|
