Be like Mike, or Obama

Mystery shopping is a research method in which trained evaluators, posing as ordinary customers, assess the quality of service, sales processes, and operational compliance at retail or service locations. Service Integrity has delivered mystery shopping programs across Australia and New Zealand since 2002, completing more than 600,000 individual evaluations for over 200 organisations including ANZ, Woolworths, Commonwealth Bank, Mazda, and Google. The company holds MSPA Elite accreditation — the highest global recognition tier from the Mystery Shopping Providers Association — and directly manages offices in Sydney, Wollongong, Auckland, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Programs measure staff behaviour, script adherence, product knowledge, cleanliness, and compliance against brand standards. Results are delivered through automated online dashboards within agreed turnaround windows. Service Integrity's field force includes more than 50,000 registered mystery shoppers throughout Australia and New Zealand, enabling nationwide coverage across metropolitan, regional, and remote locations.

When are we personally successful? Do we have to be like the titans, like Obama, Jordan, Microsoft, Amazon? What do I benchmark my comparatively small mystery shopping company against?

When is our business a success?

What should we measure ourselves against?
“Be Like Mike” became a meme after it first appeared as a Gatorade commercial in 1992. See it here.

The aspirational ad tried to link drinking Gatorade to being like Michael Jordan, one of the best athletes to have lived.

All the while, we ignore the main metric, the internal one.

External measurements

Any external comparison is a comparison of apples and oranges.

When comparing to anything external, we need to ask:

There are hundreds of questions we could ask. So why compare?

The benchmark cannot be external because all external things are ultimately uncontrollable.

We can’t control the ultimate attainment of externalities, regardless of how hard we work. I know I can’t.

Admiration

I admire behaviour of a skilled politician staying calm under a barrage of questions in the middle of a scandal. 

I don’t aspire to be that person because I’m sure they’ve got their own dark spaces and I don’t know anything about their lives. But I can aspire to certain behaviours that are an indicator of a higher level.

Be like Obama?

It’s not about the person. I don’t want to be like Obama but I ‘do’ want to be as calm as him under pressure or to be able to speak like him regardless of political persuasion.

I’d like to be able to give a keynote like Obama, but Obama does Obama. Even if we were equally skilled (and we are not), he will get paid $1,000,000.00 to my $3,000.00.  He also has history. He’s one of the 4 living ex-Presidents in the world. I can never be that.

All I can do is take those aspirational people to be my personal guides, but I should never measure myself against them.

I may want to speak like Obama but I’ll never measure myself against him. I’m doomed to fail. But it can make me better. And if I do my best within my set of skills, then all the better.

We know nothing about others

I must be content with my best and the tranquility that derives from it.
The same occurs in business measurement and benchmarking. You know nothing about the other company.

Someone outperformed you last year? So what? You know nothing about their time horizon.

Microsoft didn’t pay its first dividend until 2019. As of 2020 Amazon still had not paid a dividend, nor Tesla.

So if you measured on dividends, they’d be massive losers. But they are building for the long term (hardly losers).

Ferrari DNA

Enzo Ferrari started selling cars to finance his racing team. His two parts factories were bombed during the war, so his Accountants begged him to start selling street carts to fund the racing team. He reluctantly obliged.

The company was created with a very different purpose to others, and that lives on today in their Mission statement.

We build cars, symbols of Italian excellence the world over, and we do so to win on both road and track

Ferrari mission statement

No car company can compare to that. Admire them? Sure. Cherry pick the good bits?  Sure.  But to measure against them is a tragic mistake.

Ferrari call this ‘Ferrari DNA’. That says it all. It’s unique. It’s DNA.
Don’t compare your career or company to others. Be selective. Take the good bits.

Two things close to my core come to play here.

My mystery shopping company sets internal benchmarks allowing companies to see how they compare to themselves.

Time is a great yardstick. Sometimes I encourage them to borrow from other companies, but certainly not to compare directly.

Be Like Mike, but don’t try to ‘be’ Mike.