Features
- Cover Type: Hard Cover with 224 pages
- Published by: Wharton School Publishing
- Edition: 1st Edition May 6, 2007
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0131572229
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0131572225
-
Book Dimensions:
9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
- Weighs: 1.2 pounds
Back Cover Copy
“It’s not just a war for talent out there, it’s a war for the right talent. Cable sheds light on how managers can identify and attract the right people to turn strategy into reality.”
—Susan Ashford, Associate Dean for Leadership Programming and the Executive MBA Program, University of Michigan
“Change to Strange takes the mystery out of the gap between strategy and strategy execution. Daniel underscores that success is dependent on the quality of your workforce, specific targets, and disciplined measurement. The book provides a useful process and a set of questions that your leadership team requirements to address to create a great organization that stands above competitors.”
—Stan Kelly, Senior Vice President, Wachovia Corporation
“In an era of over-emphasis on best practices and benchmarking, it is so refreshing to see a blueprint for how an organization can invest in its people to truly drive competitive advantage and create uncommon value for its customers and owners. Daniel Cable’s insightful, practical, and rigorous ‘strange workforce value chain’ will help your organization build a workforce with distinctive and compelling capabilities that better serve your customers and beat the competition.”
—Christian M. Ellis, Senior Vice President, Sibson Consulting, A Division of Segal
“Change to Strange helps you ask the right questions about what will differentiate you in the marketplace and the strange (distinctive, extraordinary) steps you must take to make it happen. Be strange; get Change to Strange and have fun cooking up the special sauce your customers will love and your competition will find tough to imitate.”
—Ben Schneider, Senior Research Fellow, VALTERA; Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland; and author of Winning the Service Game.
“Cable’s model is highly thought-provoking. The book is full of great ideas for standing out from the competition and getting your workforce fully engaged!”
—Sara Rynes, Editor, Academy of Management Journal; Murray Professor of Management, University of Iowa
“What a great read! I found plenty of great ideas and examples in this book that I can use at VIF, and now my executive team is reading it.”
—David B. Young, Chief Executive Officer, Visiting International Faculty Program
“Change to Strangea fascinating and thought-provoking approach to extracting value from your human value chain. A must read for leaders engaged in reinvigorating enterprises in highly competitive markets.”
—Sean Crane, Senior Vice President of Operations, The Fresh Market
“You can’t be great if you just do what everybody else does. Dan Cable sheds light on how companies can get extraordinary business results by creating a workforce that consistently ‘wow’ their customers.”
—Sven-Åke Damgaard, Vice President Human Resources,
Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications
“At SAS we have our own definition of ‘strange,’ and it has yielded more than three decades of continual growth. What’s your definition? Use Cable’s book to figure it out. Then be prepared to be extraordinary!”
—Jeff Chambers, Vice President Human Resources, SAS
“One word about this book: Terrific. It’s time for companies to stop saying people are their competitive advantage when they don’t know what it means. Cable’s book is essential reading if you want to do more than hope that your people are your competitive advantage.”
—Michael Sayeau, Former Executive Vice President, Nabisco
“If you want your organization to attain and sustain a competitive advantage, Change to Strange is a must read. This is the book to help you develop a winning workforce that will impress your customers and overwhelm your competitors.”
—Vice Admiral Gerald Hoewing, Retired Chief of Naval Personnel, U.S. Navy
“Dan Cable hits the nail on the head with regard to several critical issues facing today’s business leaders. Change to Strange will help you select the right things to measure, which will determine the culture and ultimate success of your organization.”
—Jim Parker, Former CEO of Southwest Airlines
"Change to Strange is an imperative for those companies that want to grow and create lasting value in their industries. Companies that have the guts to embrace a Strange workforce are the companies that will have the power to lead and generate sustainable differentiation and innovation in their businesses."
--Tim Kelly, President/Consumer Division, Sprint Nextel
To achieve sustained competitive advantage, you must create and deliver something that’s valuable, rare, and hard to imitate—and you can’t do that with a run-of-the-mill workforce. Your workforce requirements to be strikingly different, obsessively focused on delivering on your unique value proposition. Compared with everyone else’s workforce, your people need to be downright strange!
This book is about everything it takes to build a workforce that’s strange and extraordinary enough to execute your most powerful strategies and your unique value proposition. It’s about understanding exactly how your workforce requirements to be differentcreating an end-to-end Strange Workforce Value Chainimplementing workforce systems that support your unique goalsestablishing detailed metrics based on what makes you uniqueusing those metrics to drive clarity throughout your entire organization, and steer it toward success.
If you’re tasked with executing strategy through people, and “balanced scorecards” and “strategy maps” just haven’t been enough, take your next and greatest leap forward: make the Change to Strange.
· Why “normal” workforces just won’t cut it anymore
Everyone says their people make the difference. Most everyone’s wrong.
· Create your strange workforce in four steps
Imagine, pinpoint your gaps, prioritize, and act.
· What your customers must notice for you to win
Link your real performance drivers to specific workforce deliverables.
· Rearchitect your workforce to break from the pack
Organize to get strategic results from the right people.
· Leverage the magic of measurement
Implement metrics that work—and keep them working.
Create a workforce that’s obsessed about delivering your company’s unique value proposition: one that’s so willing and able to execute, it’s downright strange!
Why you need a “strange” workforce, and how to build one: practical techniques and real-world case studies
An end-to-end framework for architecting people and business systems that help you break from the pack
Way beyond benchmarking: implementing workforce metrics that are unique to your company and strategies
Preface xix
Chapter 1: Be Strange. Be Very Strange. 1
Chapter 2: Shine a Flashlight into the Black Box That Exists Between Your Workforce and Beating Your Competition 17
Chapter 3: Organizational Outcomes: How Do I Know I Am Winning in the Way I Want to Win? 31
Chapter 4: Performance Drivers: What Must Customers Notice About Us So That We Win? 53
Chapter 5: Strange
About The Author
Dr. Daniel M. Cable is a Sarah Graham Kenan Distinguished Scholar and a Professor of Management at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Dr. Cable’s consulting and teaching focus on aligning a wide spectrum of human systems with company strategy; his consulting clients have ranged from Sony Ericsson to The Bureau of Naval Personnel. He has served on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, and other leading publications.
Dr. Cable was honored with the McCormick Award for Distinguished Early Career Contributions from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. He holds a Ph.D. from Cornell.
Reader Reviews
How many times have you heard a CEO count his or her work force as a "competitive advantage?" Yet a trip to that CEO's store or office reveals nothing special. Daniel M. Cable argues an organization needs to do something special to create something special. You cannot be great if your organization does what everyone else does. You have to be unique. You have to be out of the ordinary. If you want to stand above your competitors, you cannot be normal. To deliver a unique experience to your customers, your workforce must be unusual or striking. This out-of-the-ordinary experience, Cable defines as strange. Even though too man organizations claim their workforces as a competitive advantage, most do not differ from their competitors. They treat their workforce the same way their competitors do. They compare their people practices to industry averages. As a result, nothing the organization produces is particularly noteworthy from a customer's point of view. Cable, a management professor at the University of North Carolina, argues that if your organization hopes to achieve extraordinary results, your work force cannot be normal. The author offers four undeniable observations: 1. A great organization develops a sustained competitive advantage. 2. They get it by creating and delivering something to the market that is valuable, rare and hard to imitate. 3. Creating and delivering this value demands the disciplined obsession of a strange workforce. 4. A strange workforce is built by using unique metrics and strange workforce architecture. Make sure you do not quit reading before the last chapter on measurement. The book's processes rely heavily on measurement and metrics. Creating a strange workforce, the author states, relies on a process for measuring fuzzy concepts. In the last chapter, he provides it. The challenge leaders face is not developing a strategy, but translating it into reality through their workforces. Cable, whose consulting and teaching focus on bringing human systems in line with company strategy, weaves a healthy dose of practicality with inspiration to help them build a strange workforce.
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