About two weeks ago in Charleston, SC, in spin class where I sounded like I was getting a hair transplant, I enjoyed being at once together with my friends in the class and yet competing with them. When they peddled harder and stood up, I wanted to also. Our competing didn't mean that there was one winner and everyone else lost. It wasn’t a zero-sum game. In that spin class, we all won. After that class, we all felt great. Competition is an efficient way to get the most out of ourselves and an organization.
Scott Galloway, a business author that passionately follows my writings (ok, ok, it's actually the opposite), last week extolled the importance of competition in his weekly newsletter, No Mercy No Malice. Citing Nikola Tesla facing off against Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs battling Bill Gates, he said that competition is often healthy and helps produce more benefits at a faster rate.
We agree. Here at Bridge, we occasionally review competitors’ offerings, and this helps us improve our software. We straddle a few different sectors, and in each of them, there are giants with which we’re pointing our slingshots and sharpening our spears. Registry services are our largest revenue generator, and for this, we compete with Shopify (and its apps) and MyRegistry. For general public orders, we’re competing against other e-commerce platforms, including Shopify, BigCommerce, and Big Cartel. We also compete against wholesale platforms like Faire, Juniper, and MarketTime.
In addition, we're helping our stores compete. Our 980 indie stores compete against Amazon, Zola, Target, and even brands’ websites. We have to likewise keep an eye on these players.
What inspiration can Bridge draw from Tesla, Jobs, and that spin class? Can we use competition between retailers to help them perform better? For example, via a Peloton-like leader board, John, who owns the store Shulan’s in Ohio, could try to add more products than Laura, who owns the Ivy House in Texas. If we motivate them via competition to add more products than they would have otherwise, they both win.
Similarly, we could ask: "How can we use competition within Bridge to make ourselves better?" How would this work? Would our programmers compete against our customer service coaches? They don’t do easily comparable projects. But, there is a way for us to still compete. We can: compete with ourselves. To this end, I asked the Bridge team to set three goals for themselves this quarter and share them with me. The true judges are themselves. I'm only the record keeper.
The goals should be a bit outside of their comfort zones. Pretend you're Edison and want to beat Tesla (or vice versa). I will likewise share my goals with the team.
We are doing this because our team members can impress themselves and feel great about what they accomplish via this. This competition will make each of us, and Bridge, better.
To help the team make their goals, I reminded them that, in most goals, one needs to take action Z to do a number of X in Y time. Consider pushups: a goal may be to do 40 (number) pushups (action) in 2 minutes (time).
Therefore, many goals have these elements:
A time frame. This is the time (e.g. date) by which you’ll do it. (In this case, it will be June 30th.)
An action or actions you will take to do it.
A number. This number may relate to the action.
This is: TAN (time - number - action).
We’ll also be doing goals for the third and fourth quarters.
Trivia: In BE 2.0 (page 287), Jim Collins advises team members to set quarterly goals. I thought this strategy dovetailed nicely with Scott’s praise of competition.