Mike de Block

The crossroad

Every student that receives his bachelor or master degree faces the “hangover” of  college time, namely “the crossroad”, in which you have to choose what your next step would be.

exit 1: find a job       exit 2: go and explore the world       exit 3: start your own company

The exit I took a couple of weeks ago is irrelevant, since I decided to work according to the principle of Seth Godin; does your passion matches your job (exit). I mean that I am not taking an exit that is expected by my social environment in order to fit in. I am not taking a job for a job or starting a company for just having a company. I refuse to be a sheep and follow the herd, I want to life my life, my route, my passion.

Companies like Zappos could then be an interesting company to work for or start my own company immediatly and thus draw my own route. However, companies as Zappos from blocknotes 2 are unfortunately not in the majority in this world. While when I have my own company I still have to work with “sheeps” who work at my customers. Nevertheless, there is hope when you are an opportunity thinker from the “new world” and not a worker that accepts to be a faceless cog in a machinery of the “old world”. In the “new world” companies you are granted to draw your own route at your job as long as you create customer value. The only joy an employee from an “old world” company experiences is when he can put a tick at the box after his final task of the day is done. 

Oke, Mike nice story, but what is your point?

My point is that more and more “old world” companies are pretending to be aware of the reason why social media is so popular, but still ignore that they don’t reward their employees in being unique. For decades employees did standardised tasks without creating a lasting customer relation, since the employee would otherwise be hard to replace. In short, it would make the company dependent on their employees and therefore they decided to standardize all tasks. Think of a flight attendant standing at the exit and saying the standardized bye bye’s like a robot, while see could make an lasting customer relation. Flight attendants could make their own facebook page, where they could share their do and don’t for each destination and say to every passenger when leaving the plane “add us on facebook at www.facebook.com/****airflightattendents”. However, this behaviour is not perceived as normal and therefore not desirable in this standardised world.

Nevertheless there is hope, like the example of Hyatt Hotels that empowers their employees to draw their own route by being generous to their best customers. Employees can decide to offer free services in which they normally charge for (like messages). However, the employees decide which free service, since they know who are the best customers and what services they enjoy. Long term customer satisfaction is therefore prioritised over short term cash, since they know that this story is shared with others and for that reason become an unique characteristic of the Hyatt brand.

But again, it’s the need to be remarkable that is stimulating us in this new world, trendwatching.com named it already our statussphere. Every company/employee should just draw their own route to create value.  Jean-Baptiste Colbert did it already in the 1600’s and the French are still benefiting from the route he decided to take for his country. At that time the world was colonized by all superpowers except France, but in order to remain a superpower, France had to create a unique value-maker. France decided to embrace the handmade luxery industry, while the rest of the world embraced anonymous factories. In short, let other countries find the raw materials in every continent and the French would fashion, brand and sell it back to them as high priced goods (e.g. Louis Vuitton, Hermes). “Made in France” became a brand with lasting value. In short, just by daring to be different creates a brand that is cherished by your customers ( but that’s no rocket science).

To conclude, I, you, we,  the world is creating their own map in order to stand out in our statussphere via the social media platforms without the influence of “old world” companies . Former CEO of British ASDA Andy Bond named it “democratic consumerism”, which is the lack of consumer trust in large companies that causes this gap . According to his opinion the development of social media was the cause, but it was just the advancements we made as a human beings. Seth Godin summarised our need in chronical order: lift, hunt, grow, produce, sell, connect and currently create and invent. The real cause was the lack of remarkable people that worked for the “old world” companies who weren’t stimulated to put emotional labour into their job. The lack of value creators for a brands had caused this “democratic consumerism”, since unlike Hyatt almost all companies prefered to standardize the tasks for their employees and banish remarkable value creators. 

My passion equals being the sheep in front of the herd, but it could be that you have an other unique passion. However, my point is that you execute this passion in the new world and draw your own route like Jean-Baptiste Colbert did. In addition, you should also enlighten the “old world” employees/managers/entrepreneurs with the advantages of the near future that they had been ignoring for so long in order to create lasting value.

So ask yourselve, what’s yours passion and what can you add to this new world?