Flying in the Face of a Disturbing Trend: Gain Competitive Advantage by Doing More!

I’ve been thinking about how bad air travel has become, prompted by this recent story in USA TODAY (http://usat.ly/1tiHNgn) by Christopher Elliot. Poor customer service is a prevailing and longstanding complaint of many travelers. Yet air carriers not only seem tone deaf to those concerns; they are compounding things by trying to maximize revenue through charges for many services that previously were included in the price of a ticket.  If you’re managing a trade show or conference, the wariness about an unpleasant travel experience that attendees face in getting to your event is just another challenge.

But within every challenge is a new opportunity if you approach things the right way. Rather than lower standards to the current norm, why not raise them? And thereby make any event really worth the effort to attend. What would happen if I confounded the current trend – and perhaps the expectations of prospective attendees – and made a concerted effort to go the proverbial “above and beyond”?

My inspiration for this approach is a list of suggestions that hangs by the computer in my office and reflects the thinking of noted business author and speaker, Tom Peters. He created his list of ideas as a set of business strategies that would help deal with the recession of 2007. They might not be profound, but they capture the kinds of practical, executable behaviors that can be a foundation for success. Here are some examples:

  • You come to work earlier
  • You leave work later
  • You work harder
  • You volunteer to do more
  • You sweat the details like never before

Do they sound trite or perhaps clichéd? But in terms of day-to-day operation of a business, I find them to be the kind of actionable recommendations that can be done effectively. And, if done effectively, they can deliver the kind of experience that distinguishes what I do for my business, and do it in ways that deliver real value to my clients. These attributes outline how I do my work. And that how differentiates my business.

The full list can be found at http://tompeters.com/docs/TLBTSynopsis_07_Recession46.pdf and they are worth your consideration. I see doing these things as the way to gain and sustain competitive advantage. They are my requirement of anyone that I hire for a project.

My question is do you see them similarly? If so, are you doing them? And if not, then I’d ask why not?

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