2 kinds of organizations

In Seth Godin’s book “The Big Moo,” he shares inspirational words from 33 of the world’s smartest business thinkers.As he suggests (and offers permission on his website), I’m sharing with you a chapter from the book. Check our library or call me to get a copy. I’m glad to pass one along to you.



TWO KINDS OF ORGANIZATIONS


Have you ever seen a recumbent bicycle? They look sort of like Easy Rider-style chopper motorcycles, but the seat is even more reclined and there’s no engine, except the driver.

It turns out that recumbent bikes are faster, more comfortable, and more fun to ride than the bikes we all grew up with.

Speed aside, for anyone with back trouble, neck trouble, or the need to make a spectacle of himself, a recumbent bicycle is a great choice. There are more than a dozen “major” manufacturers of the bikes, each producing a few hundred or a few thousand recumbents a year. In total, the industry accounts for less than 1 percent of all bikes sold.

Here’s the surprising problem: Recumbent bikes are taking off. At InterWest 2005, the giant bike show held every year in Las Vegas, all the major traditional-bike manufacturers were showing off bikes that are beginning to look more and more like recumbents.

They’re just responding to the changing market. Aging baby boomers don’t want a Lance Armstrong bike—instead, they want to be comfortable. So brands like Trek and Giant (which sell, in one day, as many bikes as most recumbent companies do in a year) are starting to push their designs in the recumbent direction.

So why is this a problem? Why isn’t this great news for the existing recumbent manufacturers? After all, they’re already good at building the bikes people want.

It’s a problem because the long-suffering existing manufacturers are delighted that the marketplace has finally seen the light.

“We were right!” they’re thinking, and they’re responding to the competitive pressure of traditional-bike manufacturers’ going after recumbents by making their recumbent bikes more like traditional ones. In essence, they’re emulating Trek while Trek is emulating them.

They’re going to get crushed.

There are two kinds of organizations. One kind likes to be on the cutting edge, to do what hasn’t been done before, to embrace the new. The other kind fears that, and holds back to allow someone else to go first.

The United Way is facing tough times because they’re afraid to change. The Saddleback Church in California is doing wonderfully (10,000 percent growth over the last few years) because they love to change.

The recumbent-bicycle companies aren’t organized to compete on price and distribution and consistency. They should let the Treks and the Giants of the world teach everyone what to buy, while they keep making the expensive, quirky stuff for the real aficionados.

As the market gets bigger, they’ll thrive. They’re good at staying on the edge, and they should stay there.

Companies that are good at being edgy will always find a way to thrive. The sure way to fail, it seems, is to attempt to compromise that affinity for edginess for the mass market. It’s harder than it looks.

But what if your organization embraces its stuckness? What’s it going to take for you to start changing? What do you do when the market is moving away from you, not toward you? It seems to me that if you wait too long, it’ll be too late to do much of anything at all. Instead, recognize that change is coming, that the reality you operate in is dying out, and start practicing how to do the next big thing.

Betting on change is always the safest bet available.

GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY: excerpt from The Big Moo, by Seth Godin

Shaun Considine rescued the greatest song in the history of rock and roll—from the trash.

In 1965, the VP of sales and marketing at Columbia Records took a look at Bob Dylan’s new song, “Like a Rolling Stone.” He didn’t listen to it—he just looked at it and decided it was way too long to be released as a single. It would never get radio airplay and wouldn’t sell, he said. Dylan refused to compromise the length. So, astonishingly, the master (one second short of six minutes in length) was thrown into the trash.

Shaun was working at Columbia at the time, as the coordinator of new releases. Shaun found the record — a studio-cut acetate — wrapped it up, took it home, and listened to it over the weekend.

As it happened, Shaun was part owner of a hot New York City club at the time, called Arthur, on East Fifty-fourth Street. This club was so hot that Dylan himself had been turned away (he showed up in “wine-stained, beer-splattered Army-Navy store couture”).

Shaun slipped his copy of the song to the DJ, and the place went nuts, including two influential people who happened to be in the audience—a DJ from WABC and a programmer from WMCA, two of the most important stations in New York.

The two radio guys rang up Columbia and demanded copies of the song. Columbia complied — they even shipped it in red plastic to flag it as a hot record. Despite the conservative fears of the marketing department, the record was a hit.

If it weren’t for Shaun, Rolling Stone magazine would never even have heard the song, and certainly wouldn’t have chosen it as the number-one rock-and-roll song of all time.

Maybe you don’t own a rock club. Maybe you don’t know Bob Dylan. But you’ve still got as much power as Shaun Considine.

What’s in the trash that needs to see the light of day, needs to be run by a customer, or tried out on a playground?

(Listen to the song “Like A Rolling Stone” in a whole new light…click here)