Ok, so your business is no longer the industry leader. You’ve lost your market dominance. You’ve lost the support of your core audience and supporters. Your sales have plummeted beyond even the worst predictions. Your product has become a laughing stock.

What do you do? Well, I can tell you what you don’t do. You DON’T Wake Up Bold!

Research In Motion (RIM) recently staged a mock protest outside of an Apple Store in Sydney, Australia with the chant: Walk Up Bold!

In this series, I’ve been challenging business leaders to compete by changing the rules of the game instead of trying to be the best player at the game. Doing so requires breaking free of industry best practices and radically rethinking your business. In this post, I’m asking you to answer how standard customer service measurements enable those game changing strategies?

To change the rules of the game, your business must stand for a great idea, not just a great product. Anyone can sell a great product but it requires truly empowered and insightful employees to convey a great idea.

Winning requires the ability (and courage) to change the rules of the game completely. Innovation must be so radical that the competition is left scratching their heads.  

This is the first in a new series of posts that will set forth challenges for businesses looking to change the rules of the game in their industries. However, before any discussion of tactical changes in business functions can be had, we must look at changing an underlying business philosophy; one so critical to the process that if you cannot muster the courage to change it, you might as well forget the rest. 

Since 1776, when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, economists have been espousing the competitive advantages of “scale”, referencing to the almost guaranteed generation of revenue that enterprises enjoy when their sheer size provides a figurative barrier to a competitor’s innovation and price competitiveness.

Will “scale” remain a continuing business advantage where the barrier of entry is blocked by big business’ established and costly IT infrastructure and market reach? Where your competitors need huge cash reserves and many years to reverse engineer your success?

Or do you believe the social era’s new dynamics of fast, fluid and flexible will offset the prowess of scale?

Social business requires employees and managers to enter the matrix. The corporate matrix is both a culture and technology that encourages and even rewards open sharing of ideas, experiences, project statuses and, dare I say, opinions from every employee and across every silo regardless of hierarchy.

I responded to the recent news of the resignation of RIM’s Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis with mixed emotions. As a Blackberry user and fan, it signals a possible change in direction to what I saw as an arrogant disregard for my patronage and loyalty.