One of the best ways to set your business apart is by looking after the small details well.
Most organisations don’t.
They think details are unimportant when set against a sea of grand strategy, so they leave it to whoever is looking after things today to make their own decisions as they go along.
Or some clown questions whether the details “add value”.
Done well, details always add value. Although I’d also concede that “focusing on the details” and “doing the details well” are worlds apart as concepts.
When I worked with large public service organisations, there were armies of people focused on the details.
Most of those details were irrelevant. Some were actually harmful to the stated mission of the organisation. But the detail monsters ran with it, and managed those details more tightly than most people hold a 2-year-old’s hand when navigating a busy high street.
So a focus on the details, for the sake of the details, is usually counterproductive, and detracts from your bottom line rather than adding to it.
But a focus on the right details…for the right reasons…can transform an otherwise me-too experience into something exceptional.
Christina Aguilera
My favourite example of this is late-90s singing sensation Christina Aguilera.
In the late 1990s I watched a lot of MTV (back in the days when they actually showed music videos, rather than the terrible reality shows they show today) and Christine Aguilera’s video for “Genie in a Bottle” played several times a day.
As it should have done. After all, “Genie in a Bottle” topped the US singles charts for five weeks and was the second best-selling single of 1999. (Regular viewers of late-90s MTV won’t be surprised to learn that “…Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears was the best-selling US single of 1999.)
However my favourite example of managing details well isn’t from late-90s Christina Aguilera. Rather, it’s from her mid-2000s reincarnation as an old-time soul singer, with heavy influences from people like Eartha Kitt and Etta James.
In that phase of her career, Christina Aguilera recorded my favourite song of hers, “Ain’t No Other Man” (her slightly earlier cover of “Lady Marmalade” with Lil’ Kim, Mya, and Pink is a very close second, though).
Why is “Ain’t No Other Man” my favourite Christina Aguilera song?
Details, my dear Watson. Details.
Scratching an itch
Christina Aguilera’s vocal performance on “Ain’t No Other Man” is amazing. She really lets rip, and there’s a power in her voice that wasn’t there for “Genie in a Bottle” a few years earlier.
But that’s not the best bit of that song for me – impressive though her vocals are. Christina Aguilera won the Best Female Pop Vocal Performance Award at the Grammys for it, so you know her vocal performance is about as good as it gets.
The attention to detail on “Ain’t No Other Man” is exceptional though.
On the video (linked below) Christina Aguilera plays a Golden Age of Hollywood screen siren character. And in a really nice bit of detail, the video is shot in black-and-white, not in colour, to give it a Golden Age of Hollywood vibe.
The clothes she’s wearing seem like the sort of clothes a screen goddess from the 1940s might well wear. More nice detail.
I don’t have the technical recording studio language to tell you what’s happening in technical terms, but her vocal doesn’t sound “clean and crisp”, which is the style in a 21st century recording. The vocal sounds like it was recorded back in the 40s or 50s on an old-fashioned microphone.
That piece of sonic detail enhances the original vocal performance and helps tell the story of the song. The interesting thing about this creative choice is that, by some standards, this makes the vocal “worse” by today’s standards (ie less crisp and clear). Yet making the vocal “worse”, it actually makes the vocal better, and more in keeping with the character Christina Aguilera plays in the video.
We also have an old-style horn section on the song, again sounding like it was recorded through old-style microphones. (And a great horn section it is too!)
All of that is fabulous attention to detail, but we haven’t even got to my favourite bit yet.
What’s absolutely glorious about this song is that, in the background, they put in scratches like the ones you’d hear if you played a vinyl 78 on an old gramophone.
The net effect is that “Ain’t No Other Man” really does sound like a recording from 50 years ago – it’s an amazing level of attention to detail considering that by the mid-2000s recording technology had advanced so much all of this might be considered unnecessary, or at least old-fashioned.
Depending on how good your hearing is, you can just about make it out on a car stereo. But put some decent headphones on, and all of those wonderful scratches – which again, by some standards, make the record objectively “worse” but, in reality, make it 1000 times better – are really easy to pick out.
But that’s not all
What makes “Ain’t No Other Man” extra-glorious is that it isn’t just a pastiche of an old track from the 1950s.
All of that wonderful, old-time-sounding detail is there. Yet there are also beats and samples in there too, bringing an old-style song right up to date.
It would have been easy to stop at just providing a decent representation of an old-style song. And if the writers, artist, and producers had stopped there, it would still have been a pretty good record.
However, attention to detail came to the fore again when the creative team involved asked themselves how they could create a homage to old-style Hollywood and, at the same time, produce a contemporary piece of work that would stand up to comparison with everything else on the charts in the mid-2000s.
They had to balance the creation of something so unusual that it would stand in a category all if its own, without turning it into something your grandma might listen to.
From the very first note, listeners had to know exactly what song it was. The writers, artist, and producers made sure there wasn’t the slightest chance of their song being mistaken for anything else on the radio.
So, against a base of a 1950s Golden Age of Hollywood-themed sound, the producer (DJ Premier) brought the track right up to date with some of the latest musical styles.
And guess what? That required attention to detail.
Too much of an early 2000s influence and it would make a mockery of the original 1950s-themed concept. Not enough, and “Ain’t No Other Man” turns into a record your grandma would listen to.
That took some real judgement and creative skills to pull off.
However, it was worth the effort.
“Ain’t No Other Man” won a Grammy and sold over 2 million copies, so the writers, artist, and producers did something right.
Attention to detail
The main thing they did right was attention to detail.
However, they didn’t obsess over trivialities – which is what many detail-focused people tend to do.
Every single little detail made the song more true to its mission, even though it took more effort than just pumping out something generic and hoping that Christina Aguilera’s star power would turn it into a hit.
Ironically, some of the details arguably made the finished product better by making it worse.
Like adding scratches which weren’t there. And making the record sound like it had been recorded on out-of-date microphones when modern recording technology could capture cleaner, clearer vocals.
And, although I don’t imagine it cost a huge amount, it is clearly more expensive to add old 78-style scratches into a three-minute pop song than not to bother. But they did it anyway, and made the finished product better in the process.
All of this is, of course, a metaphor – unless, by some miracle this ends up on Christina Aguilera’s desk, in which case I hope she sees it as a heartfelt tribute to one of my favourite songs.
If you want your business to be a great success, that’s a bit like a recording artist winning a Grammy.
It’s not easy to do. You often have to think counter-intuitively, and not be afraid to go against what everyone else is doing.
As a wise old boss of mine used to say, “you don’t stand out from the crowd by being the same as everyone else”.
Sometimes organisations think that means you have to invent whole new product lines, at huge expense, with major capital investment consequences.
More often, in my experience, you can stand out from the crowd just by learning how to pay attention to detail.
Not detail for the sake of it, like some box-ticking bureaucrat. That’s not going to help you achieve anything.
But attention to detail where it enhances the product or service you provide, and gives you a way to set your business apart from every other business in your sector.
Almost always, that requires no new products, no £multi-million capital investment programme, no need to bet the company on your idea working in the markets you serve.
All it takes is the right sort of attention to detail. Including introducing those details which some might consider makes your product worse, by some objective or popular standard, while actually being the nugget that sets you apart from your competition.
Which, after all, is what every business should be trying to do.