"CIN" Your Way to Competitive Advantage

By Todd Youngblood

Every day, one or more of your competitors adds a new feature, function or service that erodes your competitive advantage. They are relentless. As a result - and simultaneously - you and the members of your team feel ever-intensifying pressure to get more and more accomplished every business day. No function or department in any company is immune - ever. Your obvious and appropriate reaction is to wring every possible ounce of productivity from the resources at your disposal. With regard to your staff, this translates to superior time management on the part of everyone. Problem is, ever since the Internet forced business to clock everything in dog years, that's not enough... not nearly enough.

What you really need are more CINers. And not just natural-born CINers. To do it right, you need to implement a formal "CIN Process", a process whose hallmark is the continuous addition of new Critical tasks. More work? More hard work? Quite, simply, yes, and...

There is more to CIN than identifying, adopting and reaping the benefits of creative new competitive advantage enhancing activities. It also entails analyzing your current state of CIN, that is, your "Hierarchy of Tasks"; identifying the Critical, the Important, the Necessary, and migrating current tasks down and out. 

Your Hierarchy of Tasks consists of every activity currently performed, sorted according to its direct contribution to competitive advantage. The perspective can and should be personal, i.e. the tasks that you perform, as well as departmental, functional and enterprise-wide. The real challenge is in getting comfortable with the fact that only 10% of your identified tasks can be considered Critical. The next 30% can be called Important. Everything else, a full 60% of what's done by you, your department and your firm, is merely Necessary.

Necessary tasks are those performed by every business. This ubiquity is the source of their defining characteristic. A necessary task, while essential, can never create or enhance competitive advantage. Poor execution will hurt you, but there is no up side. Security, Food Service, Accounts Payable, Payroll, Software Maintenance and Expense Management are examples of Necessary items. (There is an important footnote here. If you are in the Payroll Processing business, then payroll immediately jumps to the Critical category. Most providers of outsourcing services, be it Payroll, Information Technology or whatever got into business by becoming superb at what is a Necessary task for most companies.  Important tasks are those performed by everyone in a given industry. Their sum total makes up the defining characteristics of that industry. All insurance firms do underwriting, all distribution firms do inventory management, and all publishing firms develop relationships with authors. As is the case with Necessary tasks, Important ones are not a source of competitive advantage. Poor performance, however, implies a considerably greater downside risk. (Again an important note. An insurance company could make a conscious decision to be the world's greatest underwriter. In this case, underwriting gets promoted to Critical. Without this overt decision, however, it remains part of the middle 30%.)

What makes a company successful is world-class execution of the Critical tasks. These top 10% are the differentiators. These are the activities that distinguish one manufacturing firm or one legal firm from all the others. 

Before you conclude that the analysis phase of the CIN Process, laying out your Hierarchy of Tasks, is easy, try it. If you are the VP of X, you will probably conclude that X is Critical. The CEO and the VPs of A, B and C might not agree. If your CIN Analysis is not controversial, even painful for some, you are not seriously analyzing your Hierarchy of Tasks.

Next comes the migration phase of CIN. As noted above, the active acquisition of new critical tasks is the essential hallmark of the CIN Process. Whenever a new critical task is adopted it is also essential to demote an existing Critical to Important, an existing Important to Necessary and an existing Necessary to "we don't do that anymore". Talk about easier said than done! 

Push the tasks down, pull the people up. As a manager you must motivate everyone in your organization to move their own set of responsibilities down the Hierarchy of Tasks and to take on new ones that are higher up. Everyone must commoditize what they currently do so that it can safely be delegated or outsourced to a less expensive resource. Everyone must also be impatient to take on tougher, more demanding responsibilities. Going back to the insurance example... What if you got so good at underwriting and claims processing that you could demote them to Important? That would free up your best and brightest to develop and implement your idea to revolutionize the industry. Think that might keep a few competitors awake at night?

Sounds exciting to me. Scary, but exciting. Time to get out there and do some CINing.