Mavericks at Work by William C.Taylor & Polly LaBarre

You have to pick this book only after reading 'Blue Ocean Strategy', because only then would you know what strategy really means to a corporation, what it means to the customer and finally to YOU as an employee, who is proud to be associated with the company. Every company has its own way to lure the customers and they do every possible thing to clinch the deal and get the bottom-line shining. Well, you would remember Kelloggs. It made waves when it hit the US market and for a while the company thought they could repeat the same success in India. But it was all together a different ball game with the Indian Consumers. They can buy 'anything', yes anything that's neatly packed in a Re 1 and Rs 2 sachet. :) Kelloggs could not understand this fact. They priced their breakfast cereal pack @ Rs 100 per pack which hardly got sold. As every other company, they imitated the strategy and pulled the priced to Rs 10 per pack of breakfast. Well did it work? May be it did increase the sales and booked the profit but turnaround? Not sure. It never really picked up! So what went wrong? Strategy was good, so did the marketing and other operational processes. It is this gap which you will really understand after reading the 'Mavericks'. It's truly truly magnificent.

It's a story of those very few companies who never ever compete with giants yet create a MARK in the minds of the customers. It's a story of those crazy guys who advocated what they told to the people. They gave customers a sense of pride and a sense of belonging to the company because they did what we call 'Advocacy of Strategy'. Put it simply, you mean what you said when you laid out the vision for Customer...yes you read it right....Mavericks lay“vision for the Customer” and NOT for the company. This makes customers special and they will never leave you, even if it means a higher Cost. So a company can never ever compete on Cost & Price. What they can really compete is on the 'Value'.

Personally I have few favorites in the book. One amongst them is Arkadi Kuhlmann, who's innovation through agitation gave a new dimension on how people see the banking system in US, when giants like Goldman Sachs , Citi Group were harping on loans, derivatives, stock markets to enhance the profit for their organization. This man was advocating his customers to just save. His bank ING Direct never encouraged it's customers to go for the loans but gave lot of stress on Piggy Banking! He even fired customers who don't pay by the Bank rules. It's simply because they don't fit the model what Kuhlmann and his team has advocated. There were many more incidents which is explained and worth your reading.

My other favorite in the book - “It's not TV, it's HBO” - redefined how TV is veiwed in US. Albrecht, the executve of HBO says, “TV is a finite Idea...It's not TV is an infinite idea".

Remember Netscape? It was bought out for 10$ billion by AOL. For a company with a 5 year history it was an amazing price to pay! And then Netscape got a deep cut from Microsoft. Why and what went wrong? Competition killed them and instead of building something great for the customers, they woke up every day thinking how to beat Microsoft in the market. The rest became history for Andreessen and his team. They lost focus from the customer and this incident was wonderfully explained. I sat back and started thinking "Competition is irrelevant in the eyes of the customer".

There are many more stories to get motivated and get charged. Reading this book is worth your time.