Tight Rugby Shirts

Great to see you again.

And since the Six Nations, excuse me the RBS Six Nations in association with The Taxpayer, is still occupying my attention, I thought that I would take a risk and stay with the rugby theme this week. If you are English, or even Scottish, you can look away now though I am going to break the habits of a lifetime and desist going for the cheap and obvious gag..

Instead I want to talk about tight rugby shirts and their importance to my and your business and our marketing programmes. As always bear with me. All will become very clear. It is all do with critical non-essentials.

In 2003 England won the Rugby World Cup. I think you may have read or heard about it. It is sometimes mentioned. Anyway they did this because of critical non-essentials. They recognised that on technical skills alone there were four or five teams capable of winning, and I don’t think Scotland was one of them. The team that would win would be the one that identified those little edges, the critical non-essentials that would make the fine difference between defeat and victory. One of these was the introduction of tight rugby shirts, and England were at that time one of the first teams to put squeeze their bodies into these corset like structures, making it more difficult for opponents to grab hold of the jersey and pull the player down. They would also run off the pitch at half time to demonstrate they still had energy in the tank and thereby get the psychological edge over their opponents.

Now you will be grateful to know that I am not advocating that we turn up to work in tight fit clothing. The sight of me wearing a tight fighting shirt is not a pretty sight. Instead I am suggesting that we look to find those critical non-essentials in our business to gain little edges over our competitors. All our businesses are trying to compete in a society where there is a surplus of people exactly like us, sitting in offices like ours, coming up with similar ideas and deals like us. The businesses which will succeed will be those which can identify enough of those little edges to make a difference and get real stand out in the eyes of their customers and potential customers. We all have to be different to get noticed.

It might be what we do as much as how we do it. The way we answer the phone. The way we write our letters. The typefaces we use. Or the willingness of our people to go the extra mile for our customers. It could be anything and everything we do but the business that wins will be just like the England rugby team of 6 years ago, the one that finds enough of these critical non-essentials to make it sound, appear and look different or better from the competition.

In past week I came across a contract cleaning company. Now I thought that contract cleaning companies were all pretty similar and that the only thing that mattered was the quality of cleaning. Well the owner of this company may well have been in the England rugby world cup winning squad as he obviously realised that there was a surplus of contract cleaning companies all capable of cleaning offices to the same standard. And so he came up with his own critical non-essential. Every night his cleaners left a chocolate on every desk in the office. His business was known as the ‘chocolate company’ and when the contract came up for renewal he was told that there would be a staff walk out if the contract was not renewed. Another successful critical non-essential.

So start now and try to identify the tight rugby shirts in your business, the critical non-essentials that will give your business stand out and the edge, the differences that will make you succeed.

Now is it me?

Many businesses these days seem to have adopted a dress down policy, sometimes for only one day. But is it only me that thinks that dress down policies lead to dress down attitudes, loose thinking and a decline in professional standards? I know for a fact that in some areas of Royal Bank of Scotland they allow dress downs on a Friday. And it is surely no coincidence that it was on a Friday that they bought ABN Amro, the Dutch bank, that was the source of their and Fred the Shred’s fall from the grace. So let that be a warning to us all. Dress down codes lead to sloppy thinking and a decline in business performance and the shredding of managerial reputations. QED.

Do you have any other examples where dress down codes have seriously impacted on business performance?

Have great week.

Sit felix. Et sit fortunatus.