The ordinary won’t get you anywhere

remember the extremes, the exceptionally bad and the exceptionally excellent.
Do you remember the lukewarm cup of coffee you had last week Wednesday, the one served by the slightly dull waiter. No you do not.
But if I ask you to remember one experience where you had the perfect cup of caffeine served by a brilliant waiter you can probably imagine it.
Mine occurred in a little restaurant up in Nyanga where at the end of a taste filled meal as I pushed my chair back the waiter read my mind and offered me a cup of coffee — it was the perfect end to the perfect meal and has stuck in my mind.
Bland gets forgotten. Boring gets ignored.
Substandard gets avoided. Poor quality goods and service get shunted to the back of people’s conscious and filtered out of their lives.
The price of the substandard is heavy on your company.
Think of all the companies offering your type of goods, if you were to graph their service rating it would probably look like a bell curve.
On one end would be the really good, on the other the really bad that no one wants, and right bang in the middle is this huge clump of the average.
Offering substandard work lands you right bang in the rest of that pile of average.
In the middle of that crowd it is very difficult to stand out and be noticed. But be an outliner on the edge and people will notice, people will remember you.
Remarkable does not just happen. It takes effort and energy. Most people fail to create the remarkable because, well quite frankly, it is easier to settle for the lousy and the ordinary.
The shoe market was pretty full until Vibram created their “five-fingers” brand of shoes that fit your foot like a glove (Google them if you have never seen them before).
They could have stopped there with a nice gimmick that would have grabbed attention and sales.
Instead they invested in high quality material to make a shoe that would not wear out easily.
As other companies jumped on the gimmick bandwagon Vibram’s attitude to exceptional quality have kept them ahead of the curve.
Remarkable happens with intention. It takes intention to ask yourself “so we have this great idea, how can we make it even better”.
Every time you decide not to be remarkable then you are succumbing to the substandard.
I spent the last week exploring the Disney World theme parks in Florida. Disney’s creativity and attention to detail make them remarkable.
The concrete walkways in the Animal Kingdom have patterns set in them to mimic the leaves and debris you would find on a natural path.
Throughout the parks you find examples of where planning has gone beyond what many would settle for.
Ordinary would be to have a small waterfall filtering into a river, remarkable is to have that waterfall coming out of the mouth of a stone crocodile set in an aesthetically pleasing manner noticeable from a bridge. The park would function just fine without the crocodile, but then it would not be remarkable.
Someone thought of it and put it there. Creativity is not just having one idea. It is thinking of half a dozen possible ideas, filtering to leave the best ones and implementing them.
Too many people switch off after finding one solution that works. It may not be the best one so think of a couple more before finalising.
For all we know Disney may have considered a hippo, a water buffalo, an elephant and a giraffe for the waterfall before deciding on the crocodile.
Disney’s transportation system may not look remarkable, until you consider that they move over 75 000 guests through the park daily between resorts and zones, maintain a fleet of 350 buses, numerous barges and two monorails, and make sure that transport services a route every 20 minutes.
It is the co-ordination of making sure a guest never waits more than 20 minutes that is remarkable.
Perhaps our “kombi” drivers could take a page out of Disney’s book. Remarkable is not a one off experience, it is consistent effort tostay ahead of the rest of the pack. Aim for the zone on the bell curve that gets you noticed.