Book excerpt: 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 extraordinary enough to execute 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 toward 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 forward: make the Change to Strange. · Why “normal” workforces just won’t cut it anymore Everyone says their people make the difference. Most everyone’s wrong. · Create your strange workforce in four steps Imagine, pinpoint your gaps, prioritize, and act. · What your customers must notice for you to win Link your real performance drivers to specific workforce deliverables. · Rearchitect your workforce to break from the pack Organize to get strategic results from the right people. · Leverage the magic of measurement Implement metrics that work–and keep them working.