There’s a BIG difference between out of the box and outside of the box.
When I buy or get something new, I like it to work out of the box. You know what I mean. I want it to work for me with minimal to no additional effort other than opening the box it came in.
And that’s a good thing! It’s what most of our customers want from the products and services we offer.
However, our customers also want something else. In some ways, the service or product we provide needs to be outside of the box. That’s what differentiates us from others who provide a similar service or product.
So, I guess we could say that our services or products need to provide something that’s outside of the box, out of the box?!
But, there’s also another way these who phrase play together in business.
We, as business owners, have a multitude of demands upon us. The areas of our business that demand our time and attention feel never ending.
It’s important to decide which of these attention grabbing items need to be solved with out of the box solutions and which ones need an outside of the box solution.
For example, maybe your accounting needs are straightforward. If so, this is an area that can be addressed with an out of the box solution. Don’t reinvent the wheel on this one.
But another area may be creating either an obstacle in your business or perhaps even offering an opportunity in your business. That’s when you need to invite outside of the box thinking into the discussion.
A great example of outside of the box thinking comes from Amazon’s warehouse storage dilemma. Most people think of a warehouse as every product has a designated spot. If I need a widget, I can find it on aisle 5 , in Section A (out of the box). But that approach became a bottleneck for Amazon’s volume of product and they moved to a chaotic storage system (outside of the box):
Basically, Amazon stores new shipments of goods wherever an empty spot is on the shelf. There are no predetermined shelf locations. Mrs. Potato Head may sit right next to a book on Buddhism. Why? Because the book could squeeze in the gap. A computerized indexing system using barcodes records the location of every item as it’s placed on the shelf. Then when someone buys the product, the indexing system points to the product’s location so it can be retrieved. (Learn more here)
What are some things your company has decided should be an out of the box solution or an outside of the box solution?
