Change to Strange: Create a Great Organization by Building a Strange Workforce

Product Author Bios

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.

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 needs 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 needs to be different...creating an end-to-end Strange Workforce Value Chain...implementing workforce systems that support your unique goals...establishing detailed metrics based on what makes you unique...using 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.

Table of Contents

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 Workforce Deliverables: What the Workforce Does to Make Customers Notice and Love Us 71

Chapter 6: Job-Specific Strangeness: Different Deliverables from Different Jobs 89

Chapter 7: Strange Workforce Architecture: What Systems Will Produce the Deliverables I Need From My Workforce? 107

Chapter 8: Strange Workforce Architecture: Breaking Out From the Pack 125

Chapter 9: Strange Workforce Architecture: Taking the Next Step 143

Chapter 10: The Magic of Metrics: Creating and Implementing Measurement Systems 155

Conclusion 173

Index 175