What We Can Learn From ‘The Office’
Say you’re a small, semi-obscure paper-supply firm, under siege from the big boys: Staples, Office Depot-ever-expanding behemoths with bargaining power you can’t match and Web-based customer interfaces you can’t beat.
Short of cashing out and going home, what do you do?
If you’re Dunder Mifflin, you take a deep breath, throw open your doors, and invite the cameras in. You identify your most floundering, dysfunctional branch and offer it up to NBC to use as the subject of a warts-and-all documentary series.
But will transparency rescue a moribund business? Turns out, it already has – across the pond, at least.
In 2001, a BBC film crew began following the worker bees of a midsize paper supplier based outside of London. When the documentary aired as a weekly series in the UK, the company’s paper sales skyrocketed.
In this new era of radical transparency, the way you sell paper is by showing the world that you’re not above getting reamed.
Photo by Image.com.
Mindful Entrepreneur on April 16th, 2007 11:54 am
Great post! Great show! Great example!
(need I say more…?)
-Jason
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