So that's one kind of core competency. But there's another view of the idea that many of these companies share. Their fundamental expertise may be not just the skills themselves but the ability to learn and keep on learning new skills. It's the learning that enables them to hang on to markets as those markets shift beneath their feet.
Learning, of course, is a squishy concept in a business environment, and fashionable terms like the learning organization conjure up visions of company executives attending seminars at ivy-bedecked campuses and studying the latest management buzzwords. For the Inner City 100, learning is a grittier and more tangible process. Step one: say yes to those customers you have identified as important to your business. Step two: take on jobs that stretch your company's capabilities. PlastiComm, for instance, recently completed a major five-year project that entails building so-called racking systems for a big telecommunications manufacturer, configuring the systems, prewiring and testing them, and installing them throughout the company's network. The scale of the job and PlastiComm's central role in it dwarf anything the company has done in the past.
SWEET LIFE: "It makes sense for this company to put a significant chunk of its resources into something that's good for the world, because we are building a reputation in the world, and our customers appreciate that."
--Trish Karter, CEO of Dancing Deer Baking Co.,
referring to a company mandate to help
organizations aiding the homeless
#15, 2002 Inner City 100
Step three: invest in figuring out how to do something. "We spend a tremendous amount of time and floor space doing R&D projects for telecommunications companies," says PlastiComm's Montoya. "We'll build and rebuild and reconfigure and reconfigure systems at our own expense." The hope is that company personnel will come up with a workable new methodology or product and that they alone will then have the knowledge necessary to put it into production.
Interactive Ink, the Ohio Web-consulting-and-other-stuff company, is a case study in the importance of learning, maybe because its owners got an early and brutal lesson in the importance of developing new skills. The business started with a contract from Panasonic Interactive Media to develop CD-ROMs for children. It was sailing along merrily -- "something like 95% of our revenues were coming from Panasonic," remembers CEO Tom Rausch -- when Panasonic suddenly announced it was quitting the business. Ouch. Rausch scrambled to develop and market a Web-database product for the real estate market. Since then it's been one damn new skill after another. While converting a big lighting manufacturer's catalog to CD-ROM and Web format, Rausch proposed adding Amazon.com-like affiliate-marketing functionality, which would provide the manufacturer's mostly mom-and-pop dealers with instant E-commerce capabilities. ("Suddenly, we had to become experts in Internet marketing," says Rausch.) Asked by another client to develop an intranet, Rausch realized that the client hadn't begun to think through the strategic ramifications of the project. ("Now we had to become experts in business planning," Rausch says.)
Benchmark
Percentage of IC 100
CEOs who are immigrants |
11% | |
Spend enough time learning, of course, and your company is likely to wind up a long way from where it started. It will be deep into new markets. It will be armed with new skills. Many of this year's Inner City 100 companies have followed that approach. When you're checking out the rankings to see the businesses these companies are apparently in, remember that it's often impossible to capture the sheer diversity of what they do in one line on a chart.
For Interactive Ink, that approach to business is standard operating procedure, and CEO Rausch has turned it into something like a mantra. Companies that are married to a technology or product, he says, look inward. Companies that are focused on customers look outward and therefore change all the time. Rausch's words to live by effectively define the whole modus operandi for the learners and adapters that make up so much of the Inner City 100 list:
"If you're married to the customer-need side," he says, "you say, 'I don't care what technology I have to learn or adapt to. I'm just going to go where my customer is going to go.' "
John Case is a contributor to Inc.
Inc staff Kate O'Sullivan, Tahl Raz, Thea Singer, Anne Stuart, and Ilan Mochari also contributed to the reporting of this year's Inner City 100 package.
The Inner City 100
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