#371  from Innovative Leader Volume 7, Number 11          November, 1998

Can’t Play the Management Game Anymore?  Just Change the Rules!
by Jeffrey Tobe, CSP

Mr. Tobe is the Primary Colorer at Coloring Outside the Lines (Monroeville, Pa., 1-800-875-7106; www.jefftobe.com) and conducts creativity workshops and keynote speeches.  He is co-author of The Sales Coach…Selling Tips From the Pros (Imago Press, Pittsburgh, 1996) and The Communication Coach…Business Communication Tips From the Pros (Coloring Outside the Lines, Monroeville, PA, 1998).

Recently, I sat down to play a Chutes-and-Ladders-type game with my seven-year-old daughter.  It was a lot of fun to see her little mind at work, but she had one annoying peculiarity: she was continually bending the rules, reshaping roles, changing the boundaries, reversing strategies.  Everything I took for granted, she challenged.  Cheating?  I don't think so. 

When we decide that we’re in competition with the way things have always been done, we implicitly agree to play the game the way it has always been played, to abide by the formal and informal rules and roles, as well as the unspoken rituals.  Although competing can be fun and exciting, it’s not very creative and definitely limits the imagination.  It is because of this experience that I have concluded that competition encourages conformity.

Kids are always changing the rules and the way the game is played.  Research shows that kids spend more time creating and re-creating a game than actually playing it.  So, why not ignore the competition and start to re-create the way the management “game" is played?

Don’t Compete

When you try to keep up with, or do better than, everyone professing to be in your business, you are just agreeing to play by the old rules--to stay in the lines!  Innovation simply means to change the way we do things.  I believe that there’s no such thing as a new idea, only new ways of presenting old ones.  This hits at the very core of our manager persona.  Once you make the decision not “to look in your rear view mirror," but to “look through your windshield to see what’s coming down the road ahead of you,” you can find solace in the fact that you don't have to "re-invent the wheel" to be successful.  Approach your new challenges with the mindset that you are simply going to find new ways to present what you already have.  Maybe that means altering your management style, or simply changing the way you look at your challenges.

When you begin to accept competition as a head-to-head battle, then there are no winners, and you tend to lose any advantage you ever had in your marketplace.  Look what’s happened with airline frequent-flier programs.  What was once a unique, innovative idea now has been copied so many times that no airline has the advantage in this arena. As a matter of fact, I would guess that many airline executives rue the day that the concept of frequent flier bonuses was ever developed. 

It would be naive and foolish of me to tell you to ignore programs and administrative techniques that have worked in the past.  I realize that anything you can do nowadays, to beat your competition to the punch, can give you some small advantage in the marketplace.  Though you will gain some small, often one-time "one ups" on your competitors  by facing them head-on, competing will never present the breakthroughs that you’re going to need to really move ahead of the pack, nor the staying power you need to survive in any profession.  You need to out-think the competition not beat them.

Thanks For the Ad

A great example is a pizza delivery business in a small Iowa community.  Of all the independents in town, they had always been one of the best known even with only very little marketing or advertising effort.  Then, without warning, a national pizza delivery company moved into town opening various locations and using a full page ad in the yellow pages.  This ad over-shadowed the other pizza delivery ads.  Within months, the national chain took over a major portion of the community’s pizza business.  Rather than sit and stew over the business that was lost, the small business owner out-thought his competition.  He launched his own advertising campaign using billboards and direct mail, challenging consumers to “tear out the national chain’s yellow page advertisement and bring it into our shop for a free pizza.”

If you spend your time considering the way things have always been done in your organization, you’re not prioritizing your energies.  Start asking yourself, "How can I present my firm’s, or my management, ‘experience’ differently than it has been presented to our market in the past?”

By changing the rules to the game, you get outside of your comfort zone and begin looking at this volatile marketplace from a whole new perspective.  We’re no longer going to feel comfortable and we can either accept the challenge or get left behind.  Wayne Gretzky, one of the greatest hockey players, was asked by a reporter how it was that he always managed to be where the puck is.  With much thought, Gretzky replied, "I'm not always where the puck is.  I am always where the puck is going to be!"  Are you where your profession is, or are you where the profession is going to be?

Helen Keller once said, "The most pathetic person in world is someone who has sight but has no vision." Rather than looking at the past that was or the present that is, why not start to create what isn’t? 
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