Jim Champy’s in an ebullient mood. The reason? His new book, ‘Outsmart!’, has reinvigorated his optimism about business. Made up almost entirely of case studies, it tracks the success strategies of a group of diverse and dynamic companies that all boast double or triple-digit growth rates over the past few years.
But they also had to have something special about them to make it into the book: “Many companies with high growth were just in the right place at the right time. Then there were those that stood out.”
What makes some companies stand out? I ask Champy in the first of a three-part interview starting below.
Why this book, now?
I didn’t want to write just another management book. There’s very little that is new in management to write.
I originally wrote ‘Reengineering the Corporation’ and I still believe in the need for companies fundamentally to change the way they operate. But in many ways re-engineering isn’t enough anymore. There are changes in the marketplace that require a new business model, something more complete.
You won’t find me using those terms — business model — in the book because I didn’t want to use jargon.
But it’s about what a company delivers to its customers and how it does it.
What inspired your choice of case studies?
There are a lot of businesses that are just different to those of 10 years ago. I wanted to look at how these were operating.
I was taken both by the nature of the initial idea for the business — new and fresh to me — and then how they implemented it.
What do they have in common?
I wasn’t looking for commonalities or a new business theory. I was looking for richness, variety.
The universal rules of business are very basic, fundamental stuff.
But there were commonalities in the way these companies behaved, which I try to sum up in the last chapter.
Several of the case studies involve turnarounds. Is this a coincidence?
Often, an entrepreneur comes up with the bright idea, but won’t have operating skills.
Either that founder will hand over to someone else or the business is taken away from them — or they have to go through multiple attempts at starting up.
There was a persistence about the people running these businesses — they kept going until they got it right.
Where did the entrepreneurs get their ideas?
Sadly, there’s no universal rule about where to find good ideas. But many came from a need the founder had — they all had some ‘pain’ that they wanted to address.
Panos Panay was an agent trying to match performers with promoters when he came up with Sonicbids. Becky Minard’s sick horse spurred her to start SmartPak.
Did you have a favourite story from your research?
If there was, it would have to be Sonicbids. It’s run by a guy — Panos — who’s incredibly enthusiastic, who is serving 120,000 performers who would have no other way to market. He’s created this whole infrastructure to support the work of these people. It’s genius, really.
My hope is that he can turn it into a business of great scale and success by extending the services he provides to those 120,000 people.
It’ll be interesting to see if this company can maintain its traction and find ways to reach the scale it could grow to.
Next: Champy defends re-engineering.
Photograph by Randal F. Vanderveer
