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The Necessity of Strangers: The Intriguing Truth About Insight, Innovation, and Success

by Alan S. Gregerman

A summary of the original text.

The Necessity of Strangers, summarized by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc., from The Necessity of Strangers: The Intriguing Truth About Insight, Innovation, and Success by Alan S. Gregerman. © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

In this summary...

· Learn why your success depends on engaging with strangers who are often very different than you, not on a network of close friends and contacts.

· Master each the five areas of business and life in which strangers are essential to greater success: innovation, people, collaboration, customers, and leadership.

· Understand how strangers can help you innovate in ways that matter, build remarkable teams and energize workplaces, and achieve genuine collaboration.

· Develop a more open mindset that can enable you to build stronger customer relationships, create better partnerships, and become a more effective leader.

· Unlock your real potential by gaining access to new ideas and perspectives through an approach that will help you explore the "Universe of Possibilities."

The Necessity of Strangers

Strangers rarely figure in people's thinking about business or personal success. And yet, strangers are the greatest competitive advantage in the battle to innovate, create, and deliver greater value, and make a powerful difference in whatever you choose to do.

Your ability to engage, learn from, and collaborate with strangers who are very different from you — in terms of what they know and how they approach the world — is the real key to creating the remarkable breakthroughs that you are capable of, growing the enterprises you were meant to grow, finding and delighting the new customers you were meant to serve, and making the most of your own life.

The exciting news is that you have the ability to unlock the real potential in strangers and the real potential in yourself, and all it will take is a sense of curiosity, a spirit of openness, and a willingness to connect.

It may seem counterintuitive that strangers are to be embraced rather than avoided, but they are a necessity — precisely because of their differences and what they know that we don't know; their ability to be honest with us about the things that really matter; and their capacity to challenge us to think very differently about ourselves, the problems we face, and the nature of what is possible.

You will never reach your full potential by simply hanging out with the people you know, or people who are a lot like you.

Not that friends, relatives, and colleagues aren't very important. Not that there is anything wrong with people who are a lot like you. They're just not enough. And in some ways, they aren't helpful at all.

Although friends are important, their value is somewhat misunderstood and too limiting in two vital respects.

· First, most of us just don't have enough friends, or a diverse enough set of them, to give us the breadth of insight and perspectives we need to continually stretch our thinking and grow.

· Second, the exact reasons why we count on friends are the same reasons that their input may not be ideal for our efforts to stretch and grow.

To put the first concern in perspective, according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the average person has about 150 friends. That's 150 people with whom you can have a meaningful relationship, which is based on some personal connection and a level of trust and commitment.

However, in a world that has over seven billion people, your 150 friends constitute an incredibly small percentage of the total population.

In other words, when challenged to solve a problem or create a new opportunity, if you have an average number of friends, you're not playing with a full deck. But let's add in more casual acquaintances — the rest of your Facebook friends and your LinkedIn contacts.

Even if your "new and improved" number is 500 or 1,000 friends, it pales in significance to seven billion people that you could know, learn from, and collaborate or innovate with. So relying on your circle of friends is quite limiting.

The second limitation of friends is that the people you know well are probably a lot like you. Most of them are likely to have a very similar educational background to yours, similar interests, similar views, and even a similar type of job.

So, in the most essential aspects of life, they are a lot more like you than different from you. And, most important, they are likely to think like you, which makes them less than perfect when it comes to questioning your thinking. In other words, they tend to agree with you even when they shouldn't — when you'd be better served by a divergent opinion.

In the world of business, conformity is even more pronounced. Companies typically hire people with similar backgrounds, personalities, and worldviews that will fit easily into the culture they've worked hard to build.

But business success requires companies to be different in ways that really matter to customers, colleagues, and shareholders. The firms that don't change are severely penalized. And even businesses that create major breakthroughs must figure out what comes next more quickly.

This suggests that all organizations must continually do things in new ways just to keep up; that there is now a premium on continually being different in ways that are more valuable to customers; and that being different requires companies to welcome very different people, ideas, and points of view.

Today, it's not whom you know, but whom you could know that determines your success.

The exciting news is that you now have the ability to connect with literally anyone else on the planet, including people with very different backgrounds, sets of knowledge, and perspectives on how to get important things done. It is a prospect that wasn't nearly as easy even 10 years ago.

But now, you can imagine what you would like to know and find the people who know it. That is a great equalizer, because in today's world of networks and potential connections, the companies and individuals that make openness part of their DNA have a better chance to win.

And that's where the real power of strangers can change the equation.

Aversion

In a world where it is estimated that knowledge is now doubling every 12 months, we should be more open to the ideas and insights of others.

And we should be keen to reinvent our definition of expertise to include greater openness to finding the right knowledge, no matter where it comes from. This leads us to a simple, yet difficult, formula for success:

1. Determine your objective and the compelling result you hope to achieve.

2. Develop an initial plan to achieve it.

3. Determine the knowledge required and the gaps in your understanding and abilities.

4. Find strangers with the knowledge to fill those gaps.

5. Invest the time to learn from them in order to fill your gaps.

6. Revise your plan based on your new learning.

7. Execute the plan with some flexibility, being open to making adjustments along the way.

This formula is simple because it is not very different from the process that most organizations try to follow in doing anything important. And it is difficult because we are challenged to be honest about our gaps and then equally challenged in our willingness to stretch our thinking about where we might turn for help.

We tend to turn to the usual suspects — friends, colleagues, and experts in our field or industry whose insights align with our thinking — and not to people from other places, disciplines, or walks of life, who we are sure could never understand the unique nature of our businesses.

Consider just one example that highlights the surprising cost of our aversion to the most common of strangers — those who pass by us every day.

In 2008, after investing more than $600 million, the U.S. Census Bureau decided to scrap its plan for equipping census takers with handheld computers. As a result, the 2010 census was conducted much like the first U.S. census back in 1790, when people went door to-door with pencil and paper, or quill and paper, asking questions of citizens and recording their answers by hand.

In an era in which innovations in information technology have revolutionized business and enabled greater efficiencies and cost savings, one is left to wonder why the Census Bureau dropped the ball. And given that this screw-up resulted in an additional $3 billion cost to the taxpayers, one is even more amazed to realize that it didn't need to happen.

This mistake could have been avoided had the powers-that-be been open to a world of strangers and powerful ideas. They should have never committed to creating a "custom" solution when their problem had already been solved. The answer was right under their noses: the UPS drivers who dropped off and picked up packages at their offices.

These drivers carry handheld computers to record and track their work — handheld computers that one can only assume contain every address in America. UPS's leaders might have been willing to share what they knew about handheld computers and collecting data at millions of addresses because it was probably in their interest to be kind to the federal government. But it never happened, simply because the decision makers were not willing to learn from strangers.

Mindset

You have a choice: You can approach any challenge or opportunity you face with a belief that you, and the people you know best, have the right knowledge and skills to address it.

Or you can believe that you don't have all the answers and there may be people you don't know who hold the secret to a better result.

This choice has powerful implications for your ability to connect with and learn from strangers. A useful framework is to think about the notions of "closed" and "open" mindsets. The core characteristics of each are summarized as follows:

· With a closed mindset, people believe that they know best and that there is a single best way to solve any challenge. They are also more likely to believe in the power of expertise in solving any problem: Find the right experts, and they are halfway there. And if a problem does require new thinking, assign the people they know best to brainstorm as the best way to come up with new ideas.

· With an open mindset, people believe that they don't know everything. They may begin with some initial ideas, based on their own expertise, but they quickly solicit the input of others, especially people who look at the world in very different ways. In doing this, they are able to come to a better approach, one that might be a fusion of several ideas.

Business success is all about seeing things in new ways and, as a result, creating new and more powerful solutions to the problems and opportunities you face. You are far more likely to create meaningful innovation when you combine what you know best with the ideas and expertise of others — especially if those ideas and expertise are very different from your own.

To change your mindset, you will need a simple set of behaviors that will help you cultivate a more open mindset.

For many of us, our work lives are characterized by the following behaviors:

· Focusing on getting our work done.

· Staying at our desks.

· Relying on our expertise and the things we already know.

· Collaborating and brainstorming with people who are a lot like us.

· Rarely looking beyond our walls for ideas and inspiration.

· Avoiding, at almost all costs, stepping out of our comfort zones.

· Avoiding people who are different from us.

These behaviors are not likely to enable us to create real breakthroughs, find the best people, build more meaningful collaboration, gain new customers, or become better leaders. They are the embodiment of a closed mindset.

Contrast these with the following set of behaviors — behaviors that we can and should be trying to incorporate in our everyday lives:

· Focusing on finding the real potential in our work.

· Getting up and away from our desks to connect with colleagues in new ways.

· Acknowledging the limitations of our expertise and seeking to find new knowledge and approaches that will make us even more successful.

· Seeking out opportunities to collaborate and brainstorm with people who are very different from us.

· Consistently looking beyond our walls for ideas and inspiration.

· Looking for opportunities to stretch outside our comfort zones.

· Seeking to engage with strangers — especially if they are very different from us.

These behaviors are the embodiment of an open mindset and a guarantee that we will be more open to reaching our full potential.

Now let's see how to put an open mindset into practice. We'll explore the five areas of business and life in which strangers are essential to greater success:

1. Innovation

2. People

3. Collaboration

4. Customers

5. Leadership

Innovation

We all know that innovation is essential to the success of companies, organizations, and individuals. If they are to grow and prosper, enterprises of all types and sizes must continually deliver even greater value to the people and businesses they serve.

And yet, most people are stuck with a strange notion of how innovation happens. When you ask most companies how they innovate or come up with powerful new ideas, they quickly say that they spend a lot of time encouraging their sharpest minds to spend time brainstorming.

But this approach flies in the face of the entire history of innovation — a history built on the ability of people, working on their own and in groups, to get beyond the limits of their own expertise, experience, and insights and beyond what they know best; to seek inspiration by exploring the ideas and insights of others — around the corner and around the planet; and to connect with strangers toiling in similar fields but in different ways, and with strangers in different fields who know things they don't know, so they can combine this understanding with the things they know best.

Consider this fact: Ninety-nine percent of all new ideas are based on an idea or practice that someone or something else has already had.

Yet most of us, when challenged to think "outside the box" in order to solve a problem or create a new business opportunity, rack our brains to come up with our own original idea.

The good news is we can be more innovative. And strangers are the key to our success.

Even Apple, viewed by many as one of the most innovative companies in the world, owes much of its success to the ideas of strangers. Think about what makes the iPod, with its 70 percent market share, so successful.

· Apple didn't invent the concept of personalized music — that was Sony, in 1979, with the Walkman.

· Apple didn't invent the technology platform the iPod relies on — that was a German company named Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft, which developed the MP3 standard and received a patent for it in 1989. Ten years later, the first portable MP3 players hit the market, two years before the first iPod.

· Apple, with its iTunes store, didn't invent the notion of creating the greatest single source of content in the world; that was the Egyptians, who roughly 2,300 years ago built the great library of Alexandria, which contained more than 400,000 documents.

What Apple did was combine its own brilliance with these inputs from strangers, along with the skills of a number of equally clever outside partners, to create the most compelling offering and product ecosystem available.

Once we understand that strangers are a necessity in innovation, the very nature of how we attempt to come up with new ideas changes dramatically. Instead of locking ourselves in a room and racking our brains until we create entirely new possibilities, we unlock ourselves from our desks and the ways of thinking that limit our ability to create real breakthroughs.

We can then begin to imagine a world filled with people and places that might stir our creativity or hold the missing piece to the puzzle we are trying to solve. In other words, we challenge ourselves to figure out who the perfect strangers are — the folks who understand important things we don't, or the folks who have developed new business models that could be used to reinvent our world.

Sometimes the right strangers are colleagues working down the hall, or in another location of our own company or organization. They might be people we have passed by in the lunchroom, or seen at an all-hands meeting, but never found the time to connect with in order to learn more about who they are, what they do, what they know, and, most important, what they are passionate about. We have simply never imagined that they might help us to solve the challenges or opportunities we face.

Sometimes the right strangers are outside our enterprise but right under our noses, and we simply fail to notice them, like with the case of the Census Bureau and its quest to create a handheld device. If we are not open to finding the perfect strangers to support our objectives, we are missing the real nature of innovation.

But if we could unlock a lot more brainpower, we would have a significantly better chance of coming up with a real breakthrough.

The answer to tapping more brainpower lies in our willingness to cast a much wider net. This "wider net" might begin with the expertise of those around us — including our colleagues and the "usual suspects" of partners — but it also gives us the chance to look into other domains that have relevant insights to share.

This approach to casting a wider net is called the "Universe of Possibilities." It depicts, on a single page, a solar system, with your challenge or opportunity represented by the sun and circled by eight "domains" or planets, where you can seek to discover new possibilities.

Here's how it works. For each important challenge or opportunity, look at it from the following perspectives:

1. What's our best thinking to date? Consider not just your immediate team or business unit, but the wealth of knowledge that resides all across your organization.

2. What's the best thinking in our industry? The wisdom of your leading competitors and partners might give you a better starting point for innovating and understanding what is possible within a world that you are still quite familiar with.

3. What's the best thinking in other industries? The key here is to figure out who is brilliant and innovative at something that could change your world, whether it be customer service, new product development, or anything else that could be part of your equation for being remarkable.

4. What's the best thinking from popular culture? What do performers know about captivating an audience? What do teenagers know about getting the most value out of technology?

5. What's the best thinking in other cultures? The best insight may come from other cultures where they have different ways of looking at the world. Ever stop to think about what micro lenders in South Asia might know about sparking innovation? Or what sumo wrestlers in Japan might know about competition?

6. What's the best insight from nature? Nature abounds with best practices, from the burrs that inspired Velcro, to hummingbirds that inspired helicopters, to natural networks that have widespread implications for how you can connect with customers.

7. What's the best insight from science? The discoveries and thought processes behind the latest Nobel Prize winners in scientific fields could offer you a new perspective on your world and the challenges you face.

8. What are the best possibilities from science fiction? Science fiction is all about innovation, and it frees you to invent a much more remarkable world when it comes to the products, services, solutions, and experience you offer.

These perspectives are all fertile ground for stretching your thinking about how to be more valuable and more remarkable. And they are all based on the ability to get comfortable with the notion that the path to innovation and success has a lot to do with strangers.

People

We all know that having the right people is vital to the success of organizations. Enterprises must continually attract, retain, and motivate employees and leaders at all levels with the skills to create and deliver winning products, services, solutions, and customer experiences.

But today, more than ever before, we desperately need to hire people with open mindsets and a keen gift for making the right things happen. Business success is all about finding, developing, and engaging people who:

· Make us far better than we already are.

· Ask tough questions and commit to finding and acting on the best answers.

· Bring us new ideas and fresh perspectives.

· Don't always agree with us.

· Believe we can always be better at the things that matter.

· Are passionate about delivering the most compelling value to the customers we serve.

· Can discover important new business opportunities that will help us to grow.

Granted, this isn't a typical job description, but you really can't afford to hire "typical" people. You already have enough people who don't make waves, and think and act just like you. You need folks who are different.

This doesn't necessarily mean "diversity" in a narrow sense of the word, based on gender or skin color. Most of the "diverse" people companies end up hiring act just like the "not diverse" people they already have.

What you should be searching for are people who are very different — in what they've studied and the way they've been trained, the experiences and accomplishments they've had, and the way they look at the world and your business.

You should have people who can't stop asking interesting questions, people who won't take "no" or "yes" for an answer, people trained as artists and people trained as engineers, left-brain and right-brain thinkers, people with no formal training at all, and even people labeled as learning-challenged. You should have a good mix of introverts and extroverts.

You need truly diverse people so that they can figure out new and better ways to do the things that matter most.

The right new hires are filled with fresh ideas, energy, and a desire to make a real difference. But rather than viewing them this way, companies tend to think of them as people who have a limited amount of time to get with the program.

So HR people came up with the concept of employee "orientation" as the fastest way to get the new folks up to speed on what the organization believes in, why it's so great, what it does, and how things get done.

But what if your company is not better? In fact, what if you are great at some things and downright mediocre at others? Then wouldn't it make more sense to have new hires orient you? To have them give you guidance on better ways to get things done?

The right new employees are an amazing resource. They arrive filled with different ideas and fresh perspectives based on a new and different set of work and life experiences — ideas, perspectives, and experiences that might actually make your organization more efficient, effective, innovative, customer-focused, and successful, if you are willing to listen.

Given this, doesn't it make sense to find out just how your company looks through their eyes? If so, getting their ideas is a very easy thing to do. All they need is a clipboard, holding several sheets of paper with one line down the center to form two columns. At the top of those columns should be the words "BRILLIANT" and "CLUELESS."

Then simply ask them to wander around and talk with the strangers that they will be working with. This should include the people in their new department and also anyone in any other department that interests them, including the executive office, and the CEO.

You can send them off for the day, or a week, or two weeks, depending on the nature of their new role and the nature of your organization. They should attend meetings; hang out in the call center, the cafeteria, or any place people congregate; get demonstrations on how your stuff works; and connect with anyone in your organization.

· Each time they learn something or see people doing something that they think is totally brilliant, they will write that down in the BRILLIANT column.

· Each time they learn something or see people doing something that they think is nuts, they will write that down in the CLUELESS column.

Then, when their "orientation" is done, they'll meet with the leadership team and share their ideas — good and bad.

In addition to helping you out, this approach sends a powerful signal to all new employees that their ideas really matter right from the start. It shows that you believe they have a lot to contribute to your enterprise and that this is a place where they can make a real difference.

Just as you need to rethink the way you welcome new hires, you also need to think in new ways about all of your employees and team members. Reinventing employee orientation sets a tone for involvement, but it is only the starting point in capturing their hearts and skills.

Challenge all your employees to become both the "visionary leader" and the "entrepreneur" of their job. Give them responsibility, right from the start, for envisioning the greatest possible value that they can have in supporting your success as an organization.

Of course, you have to do a few things to set the stage for their success, but they are things you should be doing anyway:

· First, paint a clear and compelling picture of the organization's vision or purpose; its strategy to achieve it; and the things that really matter. This provides the essential context for bringing out the best in everyone.

· Second, make sure that every employee can find his or her place in this picture, and that all employees can see the value of their role in enabling the company to achieve greater success.

· Third, let them know that you believe in them and their ability to do remarkable things.

· Fourth, challenge them to reimagine their role and how it might be filled to create greater value for the internal or external customers they serve. This means understanding the real needs of customers and colleagues in new ways.

· Fifth, help them to develop a clear plan to guide the changes they believe the organization should make — a plan that identifies the resources, support, learning, and collaboration that will be required and the likely return on the company's investment.

· Finally, give them the tools to succeed and the encouragement and incentives to work through any challenges along the way.

Collaboration

We all know that collaboration is important to the success of companies because it enables us to bring more knowledge, ideas, and perspectives to the problems and opportunities we face. And we all seem to understand the simple notion that we are much better and much smarter collectively than we could ever be flying solo.

As a result, most businesses have made collaboration a top priority by stressing its value, implementing systems and tools that are designed to support greater teamwork and knowledge sharing, and launching a wide range of initiatives intended to get people to work across organizational boundaries.

However, most efforts to encourage collaboration fail to realize their real potential because they don't consider how to connect and engage with strangers: people we either don't know at all, don't know particularly well, or view as just too weird to collaborate with.

In the previous section, we talked about connecting with people as soon as they arrive, and that's a vital starting point for building a commitment to working together. But what about all the folks who are already here and could be powerful collaborators if we made such a collaboration a more compelling part of their lives?

If we learn and appreciate what they know, especially the differences that we deem "weird," we might be able to tie that to a shared sense of purpose and change the equation.

This leads us to a few simple guidelines that should be fundamental to the culture of your organization. By following these guidelines, you can make your organization a greater engine for collaborating.

· First, before you can begin to collaborate with the colleagues and strangers you work with in any meaningful way, you must commit to getting to know them better. You must seek to establish a basis for working together that is made up, in part, of the work that must be done, but you also need to find common ground with them as humans. You'll need an easy and comfortable way to make this happen.

· Second, you must spend more time learning and exploring the world around you.

· Third, you need to have a shared and compelling purpose for collaborating that motivates people to work together in order to make a powerful difference in something that matters.

· Fourth, you must believe that working together enables everyone to provide much greater value in achieving your shared purpose.

This begs the question: Have you ever taken the time to really get to know the people you work with?

This doesn't mean just your closest friends at the office, the other people who work in your department, or the people across the hall or in the next set of cubicles, but all of the other people in all of the other departments who may seem to exist simply to make your life miserable. Or the ones who are simply names and titles posted on doors. If you did try to get to know them, you might find that you actually like them and have something in common with them.

But how can you create a "culture of conversation" in which people are asked to commit to discovering the humanity, genius, and possibilities in their co-workers? The trick is to do this two people at a time, by making a human connection through a simple exercise called "The Power of 10 Things."

To use this exercise yourself, pair off with someone you don't know very well or don't know at all. Then have a five-minute conversation in which you can talk about anything you like, except work. You can talk about your hobbies and interests, your family, where you grew up, where you went to school, what you eat for breakfast, the books you like to read, or literally anything else except work.

During the five minutes, you have to come up with a list of at least 10 things the two of you have in common. These are 10 things about you that are shared by another person from your company or organization whom you hardly know.

This exercise is easy to do. In fact, each of us could be paired with any other person in the world and we would, within just a few minutes, find at least 10 things we have in common.

Ten things that would begin to build a bond. Ten reasons why we should be more inclined to collaborate with them than not. Ten things that would make almost all of our stereotypes about them and the role they play drift away. Ten things that could spark new ideas and perspectives, based on our shared interests outside of work, that could be brought to bear in our work lives and efforts to make our companies more remarkable.

Once you've done the exercise with one colleague, you could do it with another, and another, until you become part of creating a culture of conversation that is a far more powerful driver of collaboration than anything else that you or your company could do. Collaboration takes place face-to-face between humans who are open to connecting and sharing the things they know.

And then, once some of the barriers have been reduced, you continue these conversations, to include the world of work, what other people do, the things they know best, the things they would like to know more about, the things that concern them most, and the way they look at problems and opportunities.

Most organizations, and even most individuals, rarely come close to reaching their full potential because they don't take collaboration seriously, or they don't understand how to collaborate with the strangers down the hallway or around the world.

"The Power of 10 Things" is a positive way to demonstrate the value of connecting with others, and it's an awesome starting point for connecting with strangers inside and outside of our organizations.

Customers

We all know that customers are essential to the success of any business. Without them, we don't have a reason to exist. In order to grow and prosper, we need to continually deliver greater value to our existing customers and find new sets of customers around the corner and across the globe.

We all talk about the importance of being customer-centric, but what we really mean is being stranger centric. Our real task is to figure out how to create and deliver the right offerings and experiences when we might never really know the specific individuals or businesses that will buy our products, services, and solutions.

Increasingly, as more business is done over the Internet, we know very little about our customers as individuals. And that suggests the need to take a fresh look at how to connect with strangers in more meaningful ways.

This changing reality requires us to rethink the way we understand and empower strangers. Amazon, Staples, and eBay are three companies that dominate their markets in large part because they systematically study the interests and buying patterns of the strangers they do business with and continually provide suggestions and offers for products that anticipate their needs. Each of these companies is particularly skillful at collecting and mining data as a tool in driving greater value for their customers.

Remember that a growing number of customers do actually seek to remain strangers as they search for the easiest buying experience and the lowest possible price. They'd like to get more value out of the things they buy, but on their own terms — unless we can figure out a more powerful way to engage them.

That's where companies like REI, Apple, and Whole Foods Market seem to have cracked the code: by building strong bonds with strangers based on a commitment to making them smarter and more able to reach their full potential.

REI is a leading provider of outdoor recreational gear. REI sells a wide range of products for climbing, hiking, backpacking, camping, bicycling, skiing, snowshoeing, and paddling. Central to this mission is the company's history of hiring people who are informed and enthusiastic representatives for the power of outdoor sports.

The company also provides a wide range of clinics, classes, and excursions, for people at all different levels, all designed to foster greater ability and engagement. Plus, REI regularly asks customers to report on experiences with new products so the company can be smarter in making recommendations.

So making customers and strangers more comfortable and more capable is still a brilliant formula. In fact, no matter what business you are in, it is increasingly important to make your expertise more accessible. This is an interesting departure from an older business model, in which companies used their knowledge to make customers more dependent as a way to keep their business.

It's a model that continues today in many disciplines — in particular, professional services, in which people are hired because they are leading experts in their field and possess more specialized knowledge than their customers or clients can ever hope to attain.

This gap is their assumed competitive advantage, and businesses like law firms, accounting firms, engineering firms, and IT firms, as well as plumbers, electricians, and physicians, come to mind.

For some customers this is a winning formula. "Just get it done and send me a bill." But even that is changing.

Clearly, a high level of expertise is important in many fields. After all, why would customers hire you if they could do their own legal work or architectural design, build their own ERP system, or treat their own illness?

But increasingly, customers want to have a better understanding of the work that businesses and professionals do, if for no other reason than to gain greater value from the products, services, and solutions they buy.

For example, new iPhone owners can take classes at an Apple store, where the employees are delighted to increase customers' knowledge and ability. Apple's approach is tied to the understanding that more informed customers are more loyal, and more likely to spend more money.

In fact, Apple's greatest advantage has been its capacity to empower users to accomplish more in their mobile and digital lives — not only through classes, but through the knowledge delivered by its employees, the Genius Bar, other forms of technical support, and the wealth of content and possibilities available through the iTunes store.

It's not just REI and Apple that understand the value of making strangers or customers smarter. If you shop at Whole Foods Market, you might marvel at this company's ability to charge a premium for groceries.

Whole Foods' success is tied to getting customers to buy into a powerful ethos that connects the food they buy to their overall health and well-being — and the company's commitment to a community of local, national, and international suppliers that are following more humane and sustainable practices.

And Whole Foods reinforces this connection by providing a high level of knowledge through evening and weekend classes, new product demonstrations and tastings, printed materials, and what employees share in their regular interactions with customers.

These are powerful formulas based on connecting with strangers in deeper ways to make them smarter and more successful.

But there's more to the necessity of strangers as customers. Strangers are also the fastest-growing source of insight and support in our business and personal lives.

Think about the last time you took a trip that required any planning. No matter where you went, you likely did some homework that relied on the input and insight of total strangers on a site like TripAdvisor. Increasingly, we count on people we've never met to tell us where to stay, what to do, the best places to eat and drink, and what remarkable things should not be missed.

This is part of a powerful trend toward "crowdsourcing," which is putting strangers at the center of business. Strangers now have more power than ever before to influence both our buying decisions and the success of our organizations.

We buy cars based on the reviews of both experts and everyday strangers. We decide which classes to take at many colleges and universities based on professor evaluations completed by other students. We decide which movies to go to based on reviews aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes that allow us to compare the opinions of expert strangers with those of regular people strangers. We are, it turns out, increasingly indebted to strangers for their advice.

There's another, equally exciting side to the aggregating of strangers — as investors in ventures, creative projects, and social initiatives. A growing number of entrepreneurs, artists, and social activists are inviting strangers to provide the start-up or seed capital needed to launch their efforts through new Web-based platforms such as Indiegogo and Kickstarter.

Each of these sites provides a mechanism for connecting opportunities to a growing audience of strangers who are interested in supporting start-ups, innovative ideas, or causes they believe are important.

Kickstarter has proven to be a powerful force in nurturing new ideas. Its biggest single campaign to date raised more than $10.5 million to launch the Pebble E-Paper Watch — a watch that can display messages from a smartphone.

Think of crowdsourcing as providing a vital initial set of customers and supporters for our creative ideas, which might never have made it into the marketplace if not for our ability to connect with a world of like-minded strangers. Although our friends are important, we just don't have enough of them. And for most of us, the friends that we do have aren't rich enough to carry the day. But a world filled with interested and engaged strangers, crowdfunding dramatically changes the equation and makes many more new ideas and projects possible.

You depend on strangers in more ways than you realize. Increasingly, they are becoming your core customers, your most trusted advisors, and the inspiration for the new products, services, and experiences you rely on. They are also becoming a powerful group of investors in making your most promising ideas a reality.

Leadership

We all know that leadership is crucial to business success and that the best leaders help us to build organizations and cultures that nurture innovation, unlock the brilliance in employees at all levels, foster collaboration, and encourage new connections with customers.

But the leader's role needs to change in a world filled with strangers and hidden possibilities. With that in mind, here are six "new" rules for leaders.

These new rules build on our earlier discussion of mindsets and the notion that openness is the real key to greater business and organizational success — openness to our own potential, where new ideas actually come from, the value of people we don't know, and the power of connecting in new and more deliberate ways.

The essential roles for leaders in a world filled with strangers and possibilities are as follows:

1. Leaders challenge us to ask the right questions.

2. Leaders can help us to see that we can always be better at the things that really matter.

3. Leaders capture our imaginations and inspire us to be remarkable.

4. Leaders empower us to discover and combine our greatest abilities.

5. Leaders encourage us to cast a wider net and to embrace the necessity of connecting with strangers and new ideas.

6. Leaders build cultures of conversation, engagement, and possibilities.

Leaders provide the context for helping all of us to step out of our comfort zones and see that we can always do better, and that we have the shared ability to do something remarkable if we are open to putting our hearts, minds, and resources together.

This assumes that your company has a compelling purpose; that is, that your business exists to enable your customers to be more successful in some meaningful way.

If this is not the case, then your starting point should be becoming clearer about a purpose that makes a compelling difference for those you serve.

You can do this by asking two essential questions:

1. Why do we exist as an organization?

2. If we didn't exist tomorrow, would it matter?

None of us can afford to be complacent in a world filled with smart customers, great competitors, powerful purposes, and a host of new and creative business models and offerings. Employees, customers, and potential collaborators all have choices, and we want to be the best choice in meeting their objectives.

But we can do this only if we ask the right questions and, in answering them, commit to being more valuable through a unique combination of what we offer and the experience that surrounds it. And the real litmus test is whether the world would be greatly diminished if we decided to close our doors tomorrow.

That's why people at places like REI, Apple, and Whole Foods sleep well at night. They know that their offerings make a compelling difference — and that they are providing their customers with greater knowledge, capability, possibilities, and results.

So although your most loyal customers might be sad if you suddenly folded your tent, would they quickly find some other organization to fill the void? If so, you haven't been valuable enough, and you've still got some important work to do.

And that's where leaders matter most.

To succeed today, organizations must "go big or go home." They must make the choice to be remarkable as the only way to play the game. It's not enough to have a compelling sense of purpose; we also need to achieve it in a way that changes the game. So the best leaders need to challenge us to create new business models that push beyond the bounds of what we already know.

Michael Lewis's book Moneyball and the subsequent movie tell the true story of the Oakland Athletics and their general manager, Billy Beane, who were forced to compete with limited resources in the very expensive world of major league baseball. In this world, teams with deep pockets had a distinct advantage in their ability to pay big dollars for the very "best" players.

But the A's didn't have a lot of money, so they had to create a different model for achieving success. Instead, they adopted the insight of a total stranger who was addicted to data, crunching numbers, and baseball statistics. His idea was to use analytics to create a roster made up of undervalued players who could be combined at an affordable price to build a winning team. These were players who may have excelled at only one or two things, but whose unique abilities would, based on statistical analysis, create powerful synergies with each other.

It would take a rare leader to be open to an approach this different — one that flew in the face of conventional baseball wisdom, which had always relied on the ability of baseball experts to discern talent. To make a long story short, this new model proved to be a brilliant formula that continues to drive the success of the low-budget Athletics and has changed the way that many other teams compete.

If you're not the big dog in your industry, this story will give you cause for optimism in a world that's changing quickly. And if you are the big dog in your industry, it should challenge you to rethink the way you do business.

You can win by buying the best and most talented team members, or you can win by being scrappy and taking informed chances. And often that means placing bets on the insight of someone from outside with a very different view of your world — someone who can help you to reinvent the game you play, in an effort to be more successful.

To go big, you will need all the energy, openness, and brainpower you can muster, and a strong belief that success belongs to those who are willing and able to consistently reinvent their businesses by looking beyond their walls for broader perspectives and deeper insight.

Taking the First Step

Each day, we all pass by hundreds of people, places, and things that could change our lives, but we never take the time to notice them. In our rush to get from Point A to Point B, we walk past strangers who know things we've yet to discover. We walk past stores, offices, galleries, libraries, and even billboards with powerful insights to share.

We stroll through new or familiar places, failing to look below the surface to figure out what makes them remarkable. We watch movies, listen to the radio, read a newspaper or a blog, or search the Web without seeing the real brilliance in an idea that could matter to our life, the lives of others, or the success of our workplace.

All because we have forgotten how to be curious and open and are unable to believe that important ideas abound, and that we can be more remarkable. But it doesn't have to be this way.

As humans, we have the amazing ability to be open and to dream, imagine, explore, learn, connect, share, collaborate, innovate, and grow, and to go big instead of going home.

So get out there and find the strangers that could change your life and make your organization more successful. Their "strange" ideas will set you free to discover new and better ways of doing the things that matter most.

About the Author

Alan Gregerman is an award-winning author, business advisor, teacher, and volunteer. His writing and consulting work focuses on helping companies and organizations create winning strategies and more remarkable products, services, and customer experiences by unlocking the genius in all of their people. He also gives speeches and seminars, and leads "Team Learning Adventures" for corporations, associations, government agencies, colleges, and universities around the world.

Alan is the author of two previous books, Surrounded by Geniuses and Lessons from the Sandbox, and his work and ideas have been featured on NPR, CNN, ABC News, and FOX News, as well as Businessweek, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and more than 250 other publications.

He is founder and president of Passion for Learning, Inc., where he is involved in efforts to build innovative partnerships between the business community and low-income schools to close the achievement gap for at-risk children.

To learn more and connect with Alan, please visit his blog at www.alangregerman.com.

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The Necessity of Strangers