Are you normal?

In their book, Funky Business, Swedish business professors Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale offer the following observations and simple advice:

The “surplus society” has a surplus of similar companies, employing similar people, with similar educational backgrounds, coming up with similar ideas, producing similar things, with similar prices and similar quality.

To succeed we must stop being so damn normal.

In a winner-takes-all world, normal = nothing.

So the question is… how normal are you?

Are you clinging like crazy to the mistaken belief that you have to look like your competitors… act like them and generally align with them as much as possible.

If so… don’t.

It’s not worth it.