Business Tools Blog

According to dictionary.com, remarkable means “worthy of notice or attention. ”

Who doesn’t want to be remarkable?  Even if you don’t want notice or attention, you probably want to be worthy of it.

I just read Purple Cow (Transform your business into being remarkable) by Seth Godin.  On page 67 he writes that the opposite of remarkable is very good.

This was an epiphany for me and I think he’s right.  Click here for this post and other posts related to being remarkable.  Seth writes:

Ideas that are remarkable are much more likely to spread than ideas that aren’t. Yet so few people make remarkable stuff. Why? I think it’s because they think the opposite of remarkable is bad or mediocre or poorly done. Thus, if they make something very good, they confuse it with being virus-worthy. Yet this is not a discussion about quality at all.

If you travel on an airline and they do everything right, you don’t tell anyone. That’s what’s supposed to happen. What makes it remarkable is if it’s horrible beyond belief OR if the service is so unexpected (they were an hour early! they comped my ticket because I was cute! they served flaming crepes suzette in first class!) that you need to share it.

I started to think about Operation Science and all of the Management Theory that pushes companies to spend all of their effort to be very good.

I’ve worked for lots of companies that were very good … for example:

• We have 95% on time installs
• We have 4 hour MTTR (mean time to repair)

Unfortunately, doing everything right is what our customers expect … it never was remarkable enough to be “virus-worthy.”

I know we have remarkable things happen at Zayo.  Some of these stories even get shared with me.  For example, a customer was in a pinch.  Their network planners made a mistake and they needed to add a Gig-E of bandwidth in 48 hours to support a big rollout.    With heroic effort, John Wharton, one of our sales directors, field ops and the service delivery team worked together to deliver the Gig-E service from quote to test within their time frame.  The customer was ecstatic and that was a remarkable story.  Zayo did the unexpected in our industry.

At Zayo, we outsource our PR to an Advertising firm.  Our press releases follow the standard industry protocol.  Example: Zayo Bandwidth Selects Infinera for Northeastern Network.  Is that remarkable?  Will bloggers everywhere be spreading that story? Doubtful.

I wonder why companies follow the same old formula (safe boring press releases)?  Why aren’t we telling the remarkable stories?  As a customer, I would rather hear about John Wharton’s customer’s experience than Zayo’s vendor selection in the Northeastern Network.