Workplace Calisthenics: Being normal can be the kiss of death for business

Are you and your organization "normal"? Good luck.

Are you getting nervous about 2001? Have you been testing your deodorant's advertising claims lately? Had any weird dreams lately about showing up at your bank naked? Are your hands shaking? Can you remember the date or the name of our president?

The DOW and the NASDAQ have been in a free fall most of the year.

The unemployment numbers are inching up. Orders for durable goods and/or services are reaching a plateau.

The tech sector has been torched.

And, to add insult to injury, the only growth industry in this country is the legal "expert" (a job you know you could have aced if MSNBC had only called).

It appears the economic parade has ground to an inauspicious halt.

I am suggesting that in the eerie backwash of the boomtown gone bust, there probably is some reality testing you and your organization need to conduct.

First let's all admit it this is still the best of times. Look at the three streams of prosperity gushing into this economy.

The baby boomers have yet to exhaust their buying power. With almost 70 million of us out here with homes paid for and retirement fully funded, there are still a lot of checks to be written for cruises, motor coaches and cashmere.

Now, look at your Sunday newspaper advertisement inserts. The cost of technology continues to tumble.

Even without Internet access rebates, the modern home can have a chicken in every pot, a car in all three garages and a computer in every room.

Logging on has never been easier or cheaper.

The third stream of cash is our penchant for obsolescence. Think about it: most of our products and services are designed and built to fail. A new computer is obsolete in just 47 days.

The "life" of a dishwasher is about seven years. It is hard to find a car or truck that has more than a two-year or 24,000 mile warranty. Men's ties are the right color and width for about five years before they slip out of fashion.

Put all of this together and it is easy to see that the fat lady has yet to sing.

Well, the second reality check should probably kick in at this point.

Much of our recent economic euphoria was built on perception.

With P/E ratios at more than 300, why are we "tsking" (tsk-tsk-tsk) our way into 2001? What do we think will happen when we are gobbling up securities, faster than potato chips at a Fourth of July picnic, which were selling at 300 to 400 times the book value?

The bad news is we will never learn our lesson because the whiff of wealth will always jerk us around.

Whether it is the Yukon or Yahoo!, grabbing the brass ring and heading to some secluded beach for many moons of Mai Tais is what, we reason, life is all about.

This hallucinatory state brings me to the final reality stop: only organizations intent on dominating their markets will survive.

I'm not ranting about using rancor as the rule for remarkable returns. I am suggesting that doing business, without mediocrity, is the ultimate secret of success in a nanosecond economy.

Being normal is the kiss of death.

Here is the punch line. If you, or I, sit around either whining about how sick the economy is or screaming how unethical our competitors may be, we better have our organizations measured for the right size coffin.

The historic companies have become history.

Encyclopedia Britannica, Woolworth's, Kaypro and Commodore are memories, not marketers today.

The slap-me-in-the-face reality is seven out of 10 companies under performed the stock market in 1999, when many of us did not need Regis to become a millionaire.

There is a mass of companies in this economy, which are mired in mediocrity, barely breathing, and no one has the guts to pull the plug.

So, 2001 can be your best year if you and your colleagues just decide not to be normal.

(Dr. Cal LeMon solves organizational problems with customized training and consulting. His company, The Executive Edge, can be contacted via the Business Journal at sbj@sbj.net.)