Goals of This Book
Many leaders have stories about differentiating and winning, but nobody is really listening to them. There is no discipline to enforce it and make it real. The challenge many leaders face is not developing a strategy, but getting it translated into reality through their workforce. Only through a workforce—a group of employees who behave in a strange way that customers appreciate—can a strategy succeed. By translating a strategy into a measurable set of Workforce Deliverables and people management systems, leaders can clarify the thinking of employees and achieve results that customers notice. To this end, the recipe for this book is one part inspiration and two parts practical application.
The goals of this book are
- To inspire you to build a strange workforce. Reliably beating the competition into the ground means your workforce has to be strikingly different than your competition. What is your organization's special sauce, and is your workforce strange enough to create it?
- To introduce the Strange Workforce Value Chain. This is how to get your story straight about your workforce and why customers notice unique value. It is critical for you to have it clear in your head so that you can make it clear in employees' heads.
- To help you turn your Strange Workforce Value Chain into a system of metrics. This lets you steer your organization toward winning and demonstrate you are leveraging your workforce to win in the unique way that you want to win. This brings discipline to fuzzy concepts that are the basis of your competitive advantage.
- To help you make choices about your workforce systems. Your workforce systems form an architecture that needs to be as strange as the workforce you want to create. We will work on making system choices that culminate in a strange workforce that provides differentiated behaviors.