On Rediscovering Words....

Every once in a while I rediscover the meaning of a word.

Thanks to Seth Godin, I rediscovered the word "remarkable". He uses it within a marketing context - creating a positive customer impression, sufficient enough to get your customers evangelizing you or your product. To be praiseworthy.

If you think about it, too many companies are UNremarkable. They do what they do - in uninspiring, unremarkable ways. They don't leave you with sufficiently positive impression, that you want to tell your friends or relatives about them. So you don't.

Every customer you serve is your chance to be remarkable, and yet millions of times every day, businesses across the country forfeit that opportunity.

Seth makes the case for "remarkable" far better than I do, so I strongly recommend reading any of his books. Start with Unleashing the Ideavirus.


Another word I've recently rediscovered is "catalyst".

Dictionary.com defines a catalyst as:

1. something that causes activity between two or more persons or forces without itself being affected.
2. a person or thing that precipitates an event or change: His imprisonment by the government served as the catalyst that helped transform social unrest into revolution.
3. a person whose talk, enthusiasm, or energy causes others to be more friendly, enthusiastic, or energetic.

If you think about it, in a business sense, a catalyst is (in old parlance) "a mover and a shaker" - someone who gets things done. I wonder why we don't talk about catalysts more? Shouldn't we be celebrating those people in our organizations who are catalysts?

The word rarely (if ever) appears in a Performance Review. We don't talk about catalysts around the water cooler. I can imagine that in some places a catalyst is seen as a bad thing - a troublemaker, perhaps even, a contrarian.

Your mission: Go find a catalyst at your company and thank him or her. Better yet. Try to emulate them.