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[(Change to Strange: Create a Great Organization by Building a Strange Workforce )] [Author: Daniel M. Cable] [Jun-2010]
To achieve sustained competitive advantage, you must create and deliver something that's valuable, rare, and hard to imitate -- and you can't do that with a run-of-the-mill workforce. Your workforce needs to be strikingly different, obsessively focused on delivering on your unique value proposition. Compared with everyone else's workforce, your people need to be downright strange. This book is about everything it takes to build a workforce that's strange and wonderful enough to execute on your most powerful strategies and your unique value proposition. It's about understanding exactly how your workforce needs to be different; creating an end-to-end Strange Workforce Value Chain; implementing workforce systems that support your unique goals; establishing detailed metrics based on what makes you unique; using those metrics to drive clarity throughout your entire organization; and steer it towards success. If you're tasked with executing strategy through people, and balanced scorecards and strategy maps just haven't been enough, take your next and greatest leap make The Change to Strange.
Unknown Binding
First published April 26, 2007
21 people are currently reading
335 people want to read
About the author
Daniel M. Cable
8 books28 followersDan Cable is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School.
His research and teaching focus on employee engagement, change, organizational culture, leadership mindset and the linkage between brands and employee behaviors. Dan was selected for the 2018 Thinkers50 Radar List, the Academy of Management has twice honored him with Best Article awards and Academy of Management Perspectives ranked Dan in the Top 25 Most Influential Management Scholars.
Dan is also a founding partner at Essentic, an organization dedicated to helping people discover their potential and enabling organisations to offer truly personalised fulfilment in the workplace. Essentic assessments offer individuals evidence of their distinctive strengths and the moments when they have the greatest impact on people close to them – colleagues, family and friends.
Dan’s newest book, Alive at Work, will appear in March 2018 through Harvard Business School Press. Dan’s first book was Change to Strange and he has also published two edited books and more than 50 articles in top scientific journals. His most recent research was published in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Academy of Management Journal and Administrative Science Quarterly. This research has been featured in The Economist, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, The New York Times and Business Week.
Dan has worked with a broad range of organizations – from high-tech startups to the World Economic Forum. His recent clients include Carlsberg, Coca Cola, Estée Lauder, EY, HSBC, IKEA, McDonalds, MS Amlin, Prudential, PwC, Rabobank, Roche, Sanofi, Siemens and Twitter.
His research and teaching focus on employee engagement, change, organizational culture, leadership mindset and the linkage between brands and employee behaviors. Dan was selected for the 2018 Thinkers50 Radar List, the Academy of Management has twice honored him with Best Article awards and Academy of Management Perspectives ranked Dan in the Top 25 Most Influential Management Scholars.
Dan is also a founding partner at Essentic, an organization dedicated to helping people discover their potential and enabling organisations to offer truly personalised fulfilment in the workplace. Essentic assessments offer individuals evidence of their distinctive strengths and the moments when they have the greatest impact on people close to them – colleagues, family and friends.
Dan’s newest book, Alive at Work, will appear in March 2018 through Harvard Business School Press. Dan’s first book was Change to Strange and he has also published two edited books and more than 50 articles in top scientific journals. His most recent research was published in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Academy of Management Journal and Administrative Science Quarterly. This research has been featured in The Economist, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, The New York Times and Business Week.
Dan has worked with a broad range of organizations – from high-tech startups to the World Economic Forum. His recent clients include Carlsberg, Coca Cola, Estée Lauder, EY, HSBC, IKEA, McDonalds, MS Amlin, Prudential, PwC, Rabobank, Roche, Sanofi, Siemens and Twitter.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
November 18, 2018
Brilliant! This book has such a great premise about how to create a unique company. I appreciate that he explained how to develop processes to track the areas that differentiate our brand and use the data to promote action and accountability. Honestly, this is strangely one of the best business books I've read this year. I liked it so much that I bought and read his newest book, Alive at Work.
July 31, 2023
This was a book that came up a lot in Scaling Up and Scaling Up compensation and I thought just thinking about having a unique workforce would be enough. I'm glad that I made the time to actually read this title as Daniel Cable is very thorough in explaining just how strange you need to be and what. This boils down to that Good to Great concept about needing to do something different versus your competitors. Change to Strange fully commits to this and tries to hammer the point home that you need to do something different.
What is most notable, and perhaps special, about Cable's take on this is how he recognizes that how your organization decides to be strange/different may not necessarily mean you'll be successful all the time. Thus he couples all this need to design unique ways of doing business with a need to have robust measures for success and investing in the time and resources needed to accurately (as much as reasonably possible) measure your performance drivers and not just settle for whichever KPIs or data points are already being measured today.
The whole book gives you a LOT to think about and I'm sure that I'm going to be re-reading many different parts fo this book as I try to implement the methodology somehow.
What is most notable, and perhaps special, about Cable's take on this is how he recognizes that how your organization decides to be strange/different may not necessarily mean you'll be successful all the time. Thus he couples all this need to design unique ways of doing business with a need to have robust measures for success and investing in the time and resources needed to accurately (as much as reasonably possible) measure your performance drivers and not just settle for whichever KPIs or data points are already being measured today.
The whole book gives you a LOT to think about and I'm sure that I'm going to be re-reading many different parts fo this book as I try to implement the methodology somehow.
September 8, 2025
Lots of useful methodologies. The book really is about that idea of not just being different for the sake of it, but embracing a certain kind of strategic “strangeness” to stand out in a meaningful way. One of the things Cable suggests is that companies should look at their culture and find something unique they can double down on—something that might seem a little unconventional but actually makes them memorable. So it’s all about embracing that kind of standout trait as a strength.
May 30, 2017
This book can be heavy but invaluable - I merged concepts from this book with Vern Harnish's scale up to facilitate our entire strategic process and have used it to craft much clearer brand values and job descriptions
August 30, 2017
a classic. read it 3 times.
October 2, 2017
It was a little challenging at times to stay interested, I think more stories would help in some of the drier reading areas.
Otherwise it was very informative and I enjoyed the bulk of it myself.
Otherwise it was very informative and I enjoyed the bulk of it myself.
February 11, 2018
Interesting concepts so worth the read. The tone sometimes irritated me, however was curious enough to keep on reading.
July 18, 2018
One of the most thoughtful book for understanding why you must be different if you want to achieve greatness. Its application can varied in many aspects, not just in business.
May 21, 2013
I met Professor Dan Cable at Essentials of Leadership program by London Business School. His teaching style is exceptionally descriptive, clear and spiced with great sense of humor.
Core idea of this book is importance of workforce which will be able to compete successfully with your rivals. And your workforce must be not "normal" (because "normal" workforce already works for your competitors), it must be strange. Strange in exact way which will help your enterprise to win strategically in your own chosen style. In the book you can find useful framework how to define unique features of your enterprise, set systems of workforce selection and training, measure people and enterprise performance.
An idea about utility of being "strange, very strange" become very exciting when scaled from enterprise to certain person.
Very recommended!
Core idea of this book is importance of workforce which will be able to compete successfully with your rivals. And your workforce must be not "normal" (because "normal" workforce already works for your competitors), it must be strange. Strange in exact way which will help your enterprise to win strategically in your own chosen style. In the book you can find useful framework how to define unique features of your enterprise, set systems of workforce selection and training, measure people and enterprise performance.
An idea about utility of being "strange, very strange" become very exciting when scaled from enterprise to certain person.
Very recommended!
October 4, 2009
I love books that change the way I think about work, or improve my ability to be effective at work. This is not one of those books. It took forever to slog through this, and at the end I feel like it tried way too hard to present a mundane idea as revolutionary. In the end, I didn't learn anything I didn't either already know, or found wouldn't help me in my day-to-day work.
June 6, 2016
Do you like to do things in an unusual way? Do you like when your team is winning? Do you frequently feel like a stranger? If you answered yes to these 3 questions, this book is for you! Through this book, you are going learn how to build a very different workforce that will win for a long time and that competitors won't be able to imitate!
January 20, 2017
Typical business book that has some great nuggets and pearls, but is about 100 pages too long. I enjoyed the overall concept and look forward to revisiting takeaways in the coming months. Glad it was a quick read!
May 14, 2016
Good Book
Good concepts on how to differentiate your company from the competition. The book is easy to read but need to expand in several of the ideas presented.
Good concepts on how to differentiate your company from the competition. The book is easy to read but need to expand in several of the ideas presented.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews