Have you ever wondered how a major difference is made through minor actions, words or gestures? If you haven't, well, someone else has. Enter the Little BIG Things, the newest book by Tom Peters. As a concept, the book originated with the Success Tips that ran on Tom Peters blog from late 2004 through mid-2009. However, as Tom worked on the book it became much more, and now its resemblance to the Success Tips is mainly that it is a collection of ideas: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence (which is the subtitle of the book).The ideas are bundled into sections consisting of a handful of related actions that you might implement in your day-to-day business routine. Here is one personal experience from Peters that illustrates the little BIG thing. In his own words he describes his favorite stop-by café. Tom writes: “With choices aplenty, I am nonetheless firm in my habit of stopping at the Wagon Wheel Country Drive-in. It's, in fact, a smallish coffee shop–diner. The food includes the fresh muffins that are about a foot away as you enter (typically at dawn's early light, in my case). But make no mistake, my custom is well and truly earned, three or four times a month by . . .the restroom! It's clean-to-sparkling. (Come to think of it, despite the invariably crowded shop, I have never seen even the tiniest scrap of paper on the bathroom floor.) Fresh flowers are the norm. And best of all, there is a great multigenerational collection of family pictures that cover all the walls; rushed though I typically am, I invariably spend an extra minute examining one or another, smiling at a group photo from a local company dinner, or some such, circa 1930 I'd guess. To me, a clean and attractive and even imaginative loo is the best”. “We care” sign in a retail shop or professional office — and (Attention! Attention! ) it goes double when it comes to employee restrooms! So . . . Step #1: Mind the restrooms! Not a “Trivia l Pursuit”. Today, the recession's tentacles continue to cling. If possible, an abiding obsession with “the basics” beat “brilliance” more handily than ever, and I can't think of a better place to start than in the loo! I suggest that you devote most of your “morning meeting” or “weekly phone call” to the “little” things — from clean restrooms to deliveries made or missed to thank-you calls to a customer for her business after an order ships to flowers acknowledging “lower-level” staff excellence. Keep on each other! And be very, very liberal with the public sweets for those who go an extra millimetre to do a “trivial” job especially well. Fix your voice message now! “If you claim to be different from your competition, a GREAT place to start is your recorded message.” — Jeffrey Gitomer, The Little Red Book of Selling What other little things might you do today to make a big difference in your business? Action item: At every weekly team meeting, have each and every honored invitee (that is, employee upon whom Excellence wholly depends) bring in and present “a little thing” that could become a Big Thing. • Select at least one. • Implement. • Now.* (*This item is very, very short — and I hope very, very sweet. And I know very, very doable. Hence zero excuses for not putting it into effect. Now.) 3. Flower Power! (1) Put flowers all over the place (!) in the office — especially in winter. (2) Let it be known that the “flower budget” is unlimited. (3) In the next 24 hours, send flowers to four people who have supported you inside or outside your organisation— including, and this is mandatory, at least one person in another function.* *I am simply, unabashedly insane about enhancing cross-functional communication, arguably business's issue #1! This obsession with “little things” may have increased after several recent publications. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his partner Amos Tversky observed dramatic human overreaction to some tiny thing—and underreaction to some big thing. Their central idea just enumerated: “Little” things can make enormous — staggering — BIG differences in situations of the utmost importance; situations that can, in health care, for example, save thousands and thousands of lives. Consider this tiny sampling of examples: • Stanford University works to increase significantly the number of multidisciplinary research grants that it receives. That's the basis for solving the world's most important problems, the president contends. In fact, he calls it nothing less than the key player of that Great University's future. • People whose offices are more than 100 feet apart might as well be 100 miles apart, in terms of frequency of direct communication. • Wal-Mart increases shopping cart size — and sales of big items go up 50 percent! • Use a round table instead of a square table — and the percentage of people contributing to a conversation leaps up! • If the serving plate is more than 6.5 feet from the dining room table, the number of “seconds” goes down 63 per cent, compared with leaving the serving plates on the table. • Want to make a program “strategic”? Put it at the top of every agenda. Make asking about “it” your first question in every conversation. Put the person in charge in an office next to the Big Boss. Etc. (Talk about powerful messages!) • Frito-Lay adds new bag sizes, suffers no cannibalization of current offerings, and ends up creating totally new (and enormous) markets—racking up, eventually, billions in revenues. • Get rid of wastebaskets under desks—recycling leaps up. • Simply put hand-sanitizer dispensers all over a dorm, with no signs asking students to use them—and the number of sick days and missed classes per student falls 20 %. (source: University of Colorado/Boulder.) • Let patients see greenery through their windows—and their average post-op stay duration drops 20 percent. Final words: Those examples are merely indicative of the sorts of things that one can concentrate on. The toughest part of this message is that to do much with the idea you need an “attitude.” An attitude that this sort of thing can work, and a willingness to screw around until you get “it” more or less “right”—and then keep fine-tuning, eternally. Kaizen it!
