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Daniel M. Cable. Change to Strange: Create a Great Organization by Building a Strange Workforce. Philadelphia: Wharton School Publishing, 2007, 224 pages, $25.99 hardcover.
Reviewed by Benjamin Schneider, Senior Research Fellow, VALTERA, and Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, La Jolla, CA.
"Your organization is not going to be great unless your customers reliably notice something out of the ordinary about your products and services. And customers are not going to detect much extraordinary about your products and services if your workforce is essentially the same as your competitors" (p. 173).
There are three key words in this quotation from Cable's concluding chapter: "customers," "workforce," and "competitors." There is one key phrase in the quotation: "out of the ordinary." "Out of the ordinary" is another term for "strange" as in the title Change to Strange.
This brief book is chock full of really excellent insights into what makes for competitiveness in a capitalist business world where customers determine survival-and how the workforce that serves them and/or produces the products and services they purchase is critical to that outcome. At one level the book has a straightforward and simple message: Do better than your competitors and you will succeed. But what is different about the book is that Cable identifies the many ways in which an organization can become strange-become extraordinary and thus competitive-in the eyes of customers.
The book is also very straightforward in another way: it is in the workforce stupid. Hire better people, give them high expectations, train them well, lead them intelligently, and you will succeed. But what is different about the book is that Cable tells you what kind of people to hire, what kind of expectations to give...