Outsmart!
Outsmart!: How to
Do What Your
Competitors Can’t
>> By Jim Champy
>> FT Press ©2008,
188 pages, $22.99
About the book>>
“Outsmart! How to Do
What Your Competitors Can’t” takes a look at
companies that have experienced super-high
growth for at least three years and identifies
the practical strategies that continue to work
for them.
The author>> Jim Champy has worked for
more than 30 years as a consultant and author.
His two best-sellers, “Reengineering the
Corporation” and “Reengineering Management,”
have helped earn him the reputation of being a
leading management and business thinker.
From an early business venture with his fellow
MIT friends to his current job as chairman of
consulting for Perot Systems, Champy has studied business extensively, lived it and is consistently eager to share the ideas he uncovers so
they can be put to good use.
Why you should read it>> Who would
not like to outsmart their competition? This
book looks at real business and identifies real
strategies that have worked, and are working,
for real companies. Champy pinpoints what
companies that outsmart competitors do. For
example, “Businesses that outsmart their competitors stay focused on what they do best,
while incumbent companies are often searching for new ideas and end up losing their
sense of purpose in the process.”
Why it’s different>> “Outsmart!” presents real examples, tells you what you should
learn from them and pushes you further by listing at the end of each chapter “Questions to
ask yourself,” which make you think about how
what you’ve learned can be applied to your
particular business.
Can’t miss>> “The Epilogue.” Champy
suggests some general lessons that smart
leaders in every line of business can apply, all
in a light 10 pages. It wraps up the book nicely
but also reiterates what leaders need to do.
To share or not to share>> This is an
interesting and valuable read. It is balanced
enough to keep your attention, and it’s easy to
trust and accept Jim Champy’s observations.
“Outsmart!” is definitely worth sharing with anyone
with an eye on his or her competition. The icing on
the cake is the examples themselves provide
good fodder for some smart conversation.
Capsule review and interview provided by
Jim Champy has spent a bit of time
thinking about successful businesses. For 30 years now,
Champy has been an author and consultant, taking peeks behind the curtain at every type of company. The
author of two previous best-sellers,
Champy’s new book, “Outsmart!,”
focuses on lessons learned from companies that have mastered high
growth. Smart Business got a few
thoughts from Champy about how
quickly a company can grow and why
a leader should tune out the competition in order to beat it.
You interviewed thousands of high-growth companies, what growth rate
should companies aspire to?
A small-to-medium company with a
great strategy and good execution skills
can double or even triple in size every two
to three years. That kind of growth would
be difficult, if not impossible, for a big
business because of scale. There’s no
denying that scale can be a real drag on
percentage growth, but sometimes, it
becomes an excuse for not growing.
That said, growth is about ambition.
Large corporations like Procter & Gamble
outgrow their rivals, and all companies —
both large and small — that outsmart
their competitors exude excitement and a
sense of purpose that feeds their appetite
for growth.
When a company is trying to achieve
high growth, should they pay more attention to the customer or the competitor?
I have been struck by just how attuned
to customer needs fast-growing businesses seem to be. Their new products and
services grow out of a continuing, almost
fanatical focus on solving a customer
problem. They are looking straight ahead
at the customer and do not allow themselves to be led astray by peripheral market noise.
Incumbents, on the other hand, often
become distracted in their search for
growth opportunities by what competitors
are doing. What they don’t understand is
that meaningful strategic differentiation depends not on competitors but on the
needs of a company’s customers.
How can managers deal with mistakes
and risk of failure when leading a fast-growing company?
Leaders of high-growth businesses might
be facing life-and-death situations every
day, but they don’t even think about it.
Their passion overrides their fear.
In every one of my interviews with the
executives featured in ‘Outsmart!,’ I asked
what mistakes they had made in growing
their companies. With rare exception, they
appeared flummoxed by the question or
said they had never focused on their mistakes. All told me that they were always
learning and saw mistakes as a natural
process in the development of their companies.
How important are shared values and a
strong corporate culture in high-growth
companies?
Shared values and beliefs drive and control behavior. Sometimes, these bedrock
values are made explicit; sometimes, they
are undeclared and simply appear in time
of need.
In incumbent businesses, especially big
ones, rules and controls often dominate.
The prevailing assumption is that, when
given the chance, people will do the
wrong thing — exactly the opposite view
of companies in ‘Outsmart!’
HOW TO REACH: Jim Champy, www.jimchampy.com
SPECIAL AUDIO CONFERENCE OFFER: Soundview Executive Book Summaries will host a 90-minute interactive audio conference
with Jim Champy as part of the Beyond the Books series at 1:00 p.m. (EDT) on Thursday, Nov. 20. To sign your company up for a live connection to this conference so your managers can hear Champy’s advice firsthand, call (800) 775-7654; mention Smart Business to earn a
special discount or go to www.sbnonline.com/champy
