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What Are You The BEST At?
What are you the best at? Not just good or even great at, but the absolute best at. Be honest. No one else needs to know your answer - at least not yet. Have you pinned it down? Can you defend the answer, at least to yourself? It's not all that easy finding that one thing that sets us completely apart from the crowd. Few of us have the luxury of being a Bobby Fisher, Greg Louganis, or Hank Aaron. Defining ourselves with a label of "best at" is a title that seems to be reserved for a small sliver of humanity.
What if your ability to answer that simple question was to become the most important factor in achieving individual, organizational and even national success in the coming century? Hard to swallow, isn't it. This is not the sort of world most of us have grown up in. Yet this sort of unambiguous identity of excellence is exactly what already sets apart the leaders in every field, every industry. It is not a new phenomenon. Henry Ford understood it as well in 1906 as Steve Jobs does in 2006.
Organizations are increasingly tasked with a mandate to focus on what is core, and to shed the rest in order to truly differentiate themselves and the value they bring to the market. Yet, few organizations can truly claim a core competency that sets them apart. Most of us think of core competency as a product or a service, but such things are fleeting. Gillette's core competency is not Fusion, the Mach 3 or Venus, the Sensor or Sensor Excel, or even the Safety Blade. Pepsi's core competency is not caramel flavored soft drinks. Apple's core competency is not the iPod. The success of these companies shows up in standard indicators: market share, accelerating demand and profitability. But the foundation of their success - understanding and leveraging core competency - is far less visible. The best predictor of ongoing cycles of innovation is a clear focus on repeatable core competency. If that's a bit tough to swallow, consider that all of the companies just mentioned operate in what are essentially commodity markets where they repeatedly innovate the simplest products, which are often first invented elsewhere.
Core competency cuts much deeper and lasts much longer than any single product. A core competency is linked inextricably to an organization's, culture, leadership, and processes. A core competency is reflected in the business model of an organization and in the way it innovates this model.
The most admired companies are almost always those which repeatedly use their competency to reinvent themselves. GE, Toyota, Dell, FedEx, Sony, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, IBM have all gone through myriad changes and challenges yet somehow have remained true to their core competencies. Yet it can be amazingly difficult to articulate and nearly impossible to emulate a core competency.
That's why leadership has to make it a priority to focus on core competency and how it shapes the business model and the innovation of an organization.
This essential point is often lost in many discussions around the issue of core competency discussion. In my experience, understanding and articulating core competency is only possible with strong committed leadership that has been at the helm for a reasonable period of time. The liability in this is that the competency becomes synonymous with the leader - think of Jack Welch and GE. Once this is disrupted, an organization typically goes through a period of soul searching, which is accompanied by a bit of an identity crisis as far as core competency is concerned. One way to mitigate this is to provide for succession planning that acknowledges the importance of continuity for core competencies.
However, it is important to keep in mind that even core competencies need to be reevaluated if an organization begins to struggle with its market position. Look at IBM, HP and Apple, which all have gone through leadership changes that required re-evaluation of core competencies. In these cases, leadership's role was to re-establish the core competency of the organization and clearly articulate it. This is a tumultuous period for any organization and requires leadership that is committed to the long term and to a dedication to further developing the organizations core competency by focusing it away from distractions. Take IBM and Lou Gerstner, who took on one of the most visible examples ever of an organization struggling to find its core. Gerstner's famous quip, "the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision," seems to fly in the face of the need for core competency. But it speaks to what happens to an organization that becomes lost without one. IBM had become an incredibly distracted company. Gerstner has said that one of the best lesson to takeaway from the IBM turnaround was that the "Lack of focus is the most common cause of mediocrity."
Our own research at Delphi shows that those companies that are able to sustain growth and margin best are also the companies that focus on innovations around their business model and core competency. These innovations have a natural cascading effect, spilling over into product and service innovation.
Once an organization has answered the question, every employee and department can then ask, "How does what we do support and align with that core competency?" If it doesn't, look out. These are the jobs and people at risk as companies refocus themselves to streamline costs and innovate. If you're in IT and what you do does not align, your job will end up somewhere else, perhaps down the street or across the ocean. It's just a matter of time.
In a global economy where knowledge workers are being created in greater numbers offshore than on, and where knowledge work can flow to even the most remote corners of the world, we have little choice; we have to separate ourselves from the pack in a loud and clear voice.
So what are you best at? Think hard about it because it seems that your ability to succeed in every other way begins with your ability to answer that simple question.
Thomas M. Koulopoulos, an internationally recognized authority on the subject of knowledge management, is the author of four books, president and founder of The Delphi Group in Boston, professor of Knowledge Management at the Boston College Wallace E. Carroll Graduate School of Management, and one of the industry's most influential consultants. He may be contacted by e-mail at tk@delphigroup.com.
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