Outliers
Ask me what makes our company great, and I’ll tell you its the people who work there. Our current team of All Star Rock Stars is constantly striving to build a better company for our valued customers every day. Be it back in the die cutting department, paper making, printing, accounting, assembly, shipping, customer service, sales, or the art department, we all are working hard to make Bloomin’ the best it can be. It’s the people that work there that make it so fun and exciting to come to work everyday. It is inspiring to see the diverse backgrounds and intersts that make up our complex, yet ever so simple company fabric.
I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell books. Having read the Tipping point and Blink, I was excited to find his latest release “Outliers” traveling back from one of my recent promotional products trade shows. He delivers many insightful accounts, including one of the Chinese rice farmers of the 15th century. He describes their work as particularly meaningful and entrepreneurial. “They weren’t just planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall, they autonomously ran their own small businesses - renting the best land they could find, juggling the family workforce, hedging uncertainty with hearty seed selection, building and maintaining sophisticated irrigation systems, and coordinating the complicated process of harvesting the first crop while simultaneously preparing the next”. Sounds a lot like the challenges and rewards we face at Bloomin!
In Outliers, Gladwell talks about how today’s very best hockey and soccer players are people who are not only talented and work hard but they also benefit from weird and peculiar ways in which their world is organized. I am certain the Outlier phenomenon occurs within many of our own key people, and has been instrumental in our ability to pen our own “Story of Success”. A good read, as are all of his books.
Don Martin
