You have heard of course that no two snowflakes are exactly alike. Of the billions and billions that have fallen to earth, no snowflake has ever been exactly duplicated.
That seems pretty remarkable until you think about complexity.
A single snowflake is made of billions and billions of atoms. There’s some carbon, some water, some nitrogen and a few other elements in there as well. It’s pretty tough to get billions and billions of anything to line up in the exact same way twice. Mathematically, the universe hasn’t been around long enough for that to happen by sheer chance.
Amazing. Billions and billions of pieces make a snowflake a rather complex object.
But here is the interesting part. There are no two exact copies of anything. No two grains of sand are exactly alike. We know this from looking at them under the most powerful microscopes. No two coins are alike. No two blades of grass. No two of anything. (Note: When we get down to the atomic level, all like things are exactly the same. You can’t tell one proton from another. You can’t tell one water molecule from another (remember that when someone tries to sell you “memory” water!)
I find it fascinating that no two complex things are exactly alike even though the building blocks are exactly alike!
Let’s consider a very complex unit, the customer.
When you get to that level of complexity, certainly no two are exactly alike!
So why do we treat all customers with a “one size fits all” approach?
I have seen businesses lose millions of dollars because they refused to make an exception or to specialize in custom product. This is odd because most of the time, people are willing to pay more to get exactly what they want.
It may be difficult to be totally flexible at your business but you certainly should consider bending a little. There’s good money in it.
Chris Reich, TeachU.com
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