UNCOMMON TAKEAWAYS

• It's not enough to design your service model right. Uncommon service is achieved when great organizational design meets a culture of service excellence. A basic way to think about it is this: service excellence is a product of design and culture.

• The right culture is not a universal concept. Your right culture is a distinct asset that must be consistent with your organization's service model.

• One way to understand culture is to break it down into its relevant components. We like Edgar Schein's culture framework, which loosely divides a culture into artifacts, behaviors, and shared basic assumptions. As Schein argues, to change behavior (a company's typical goal), you have to change the way people think. To change the way people think, start with the underlying assumptions that drive that thinking.

• Great service organizations tend to do three things well in their relationship with culture. They have deep clarity about the organizational culture they must cultivate in order to compete and win. They are effective in signaling the norms and values that embody that culture. And they work hard to ensure cultural consistency, alignment between the desired culture and organizational strategy, structure, and operations.

His hard-bitten air was a grotesque parody, making everyone laugh, for he was shrunken and unwell, dressed in rags, and was often beaten in the streets by other boys. No one knew where he slept for he had no home. Kahlil called him kifa urongo too. ‘Another one. The original,’ he said.

Every morning, the old gardener Hamdani came to attend to the secret trees and bushes, and clean the pool and water channels. He never spoke to anyone and went unsmiling about his work, humming verses and qasidas.

Could” led to more innovative solutions because it encouraged divergent thinking. Thinking outside the box and without boundaries. Considering multiple approaches, encouraging new connections, and reducing the likelihood of settling for obvious answers. Rather than just seeing things for how they are, thinking in terms of “could” encourages us to see them for how they could be. To overlook the obvious and explore different ways of doing things.

Here’s how each essentially functions:

• The emotion default: we tend to respond to feelings rather than reasons and fact.

• The ego default: we tend to react to anything that threatens our sense of self-worth or our position in a group hierarchy.

• The social default: we tend to conform to the norms of our larger social group.

• The inertia default: we’re habit forming and comfort seeking. We tend to resist change, and prefer ideas, processes, and environments that are familiar.

There are no hard edges between defaults; they often bleed into one another. Each on their own is enough to cause unforced errors, but when they act together things quickly go from bad to worse.

SUB-CAPABILITY NO.2: CUMULATIVE EXPERIENCE

The people in our study simply got better at doing what they were encoded for, layering experience upon experience over a long period of time. They learned how to recognize patterns, they learned from mistakes, they honed existing skills and added new skills.

Help people feel successful. Just four words. But so important. Note that this maxim doesn’t say, “Help people be successful.” It’s about feeling successful instead.

Every product or service that is growing and thriving today does this well. They help us feel successful. Look at the products and services you love—from shopping online to the clothing you wear to the apps you use every day for driving, communicating, or playing games. You’ll see that you’re getting a feeling of success from them.