Business is a tough gig. Fine margins separate the winners and losers.
In two broadly equally-matched companies, success is often the result of something small which gives one party a slight “edge” at first. This compounds over time until one business is top of industry awards lists and the other so far behind, it’ll never catch up.
Here’s three quick examples. Then we’ll get to the 50 million records…
Facebook is currently one of the world’s most valuable companies. But when they started out a dozen years or so ago, was their service vastly better than MySpace, social media’s early market leader?
It was not. Yet today, Facebook is everywhere (perhaps in too many places, if you value your data privacy) while MySpace languishes in some almost-forgotten corner of the internet.
At first, the difference was tiny…and the smart money would have been on MySpace to win. You can read more about it here… Why Facebook beat MySpace.
Then we’ve got General Motors. In the early years of their century-long tussle with Ford over who could claim bragging rights as the US’s biggest-selling automaker, their tiny difference was to offer easy credit terms to people wanting to buy cars, which Ford was reluctant to do. That tiny change to make it easier for people to buy a GM car boosted sales volumes without GM having to solve a single extra engineering problem or make their cars any better.
And VHS beat Betamax, even though Betamax was generally agreed to have been technically better. The tiny difference was that VHS worked out how to put more recording time on a single tape, until movie studios could fit a whole movie on a single VHS tape. By the time Betamax got round to copying this feature, pretty much everyone who was going to buy a video recorder had already bought a VHS-format one and it was “game over” for Betamax.
Tiny differences are talked about more often in the business world nowadays, in no small part due to Dave Brailsford’s approach to leveraging 1% improvements for the British Cycling Team. With his strategies, a team of also-ran’s become world-beaters in pretty short order.
If you’ve made it this far, you might be wondering what all this has to do with selling 50 million records…
Well, those 50 million records (and counting…) were sold by Aussie rockers, AC/DC…
The one tiny thing AC/DC do differently from their industry which has given them a 40-year career at the very top of the music business. AC/DC’s 1980 “Back In Black” album remains one of the best selling albums of all time, outselling arguably more famous collections like Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours”, The Beatles “Sgt Pepper” and Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side Of The Moon”.
While you might feel that examples from social media companies, the car industry, video-tape recorders and competitive cycling don’t have much relevance for your business, anyone can adapt AC/DC’s “secret technique” to make their business more successful.
And here it is…
When AC/DC make a record, they record it “live” with everyone in the same room at the same time. Many bands record their individual parts separately…sometimes on entirely different continents, not even in the same studio.
You can make perfectly acceptable music by recording each musician individually and stitching the results together in the studio. Most music you hear on the radio today has been recorded exactly that way.
But AC/DC, whose energy-filled live performances made their reputation long before they sold millions of records, recognised the energy they generated when they played off one another in the recording studio, just like they did when they were on a concert stage, gave their music an energy and an immediacy most other acts lacked.
This tiny difference in how AC/DC worked together in the recording studio resulted in “Back In Black” selling somewhere north of 50 million copies, more than just about any other record in history (Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and The Eagles “Greatest Hits” are about the only albums most published rankings put ahead of “Back In Black”.)
So what’s the business application for all this?
The term “teamwork” is over-used, and often wrongly used, in the business world today.
I’ve only rarely felt part of a team during my working life. “Team” has just become an easier way to refer to a particular group of people – the Sales Team, the Production Team, the Senior Executive Team, and so on.
But in practice, there’s very little true teamwork going on. Most businesses run in a succession of silos with senior executives coming together for monthly meetings where they argue about whose fault it was when things go against them, and scrap for a share of the credit when things are going well, whether or not they had anything to do with making it happen.
Between meetings, however, those senior executives and their respective teams spend very little time with one another.
Some would say it’s more efficient that way. Tasks have been assigned and allocated. KPIs have been set. Bonuses have been tied to meeting objectives. People are often just expected to put their blinkers on and hurtle as quickly as possible towards hitting the criteria that triggers their bonus.
Which, in my view, leaves a major opportunity untapped.
You can’t truly operate as a team with people you never see and only deal with via reports and emails, with only the occasional formal meeting adding a touch of theatre to inter-departmental rivalries.
You get an energy from being together, and feeding off one another that the members of AC/DC, and their ace production team, understood.
When teams get out of their silos, my experience is that not only do you tend to get better solutions, you also find them a lot faster than wading through three or four formal monthly meeting cycles in order to get one department’s pet solution signed off.
And in the Darwinian world of business, as MySpace, Ford and Sony, the inventors of Betamax, discovered, it’s often the fastest to a solution, not necessarily the biggest or the strongest, that wins the battle.
So if you want to get to a solution faster, follow the example set by those best-selling Aussie rockers…make sure everyone is in the same room at the same time. Nobody leaves until you’ve made something you’re proud of.
That’s teamwork.
(Photo by ActionVance on Unsplash )