Most companies bore the pants off everyone:  employees, customers, management, the public.  Everyone but the board room and C-suite.

Why is this?

What makes most companies insufferable bores?   The petty rules and conditions they build to protect some people from the ideas of others.  In other words, senior managers.

Here’s an example:  Most companies use some internally hosted and managed email system like Microsoft Exchange.  Around Exchange, they build a little empire of a VP, technicians, a data center manager, and policy czars.  Even for large companies that benefit from economies of scale, the average cost per user for Exchange is around $1,000 a year. That includes the storage and networking of user documents created with Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.    It includes all of the PDF files people save and share.  For a company of 2,000 employees, that’s $2 million a year.

Smart companies, on the other hand, use Zoho or Gmail.  Here, for about $50 per user per year, they get email, messaging, 25 GB of file storage, and someone else has the headaches of keeping it running. They get word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations that are just as feature-rich as Microsoft’s products.  Plus, sharing is inherently easier and users are less likely to email copies of a document.  That means less wasted disk space and fewer version problems.

Propose the idea of switching from Exchange, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to Zoho, though.  Boring companies with fiefdoms will toss you out the door faster than you turn on your Out of Office auto-responder.  Boring companines think its worth $2 million a year to avoid figuring out what to do with the 20 people who used to manage the email and document systems.

Boring Companies are in Trouble

If you look at the Wall Street Journal, you’ll see daily news about boring companies:  Citigroup, GM, Chrysler, Bank of America, Lehman Brothers, etc.   All were icons of the boring company model.  All are gone or going or should have left already.

Look at the companies that thrive:  Google, Amazon, IDEO.  These are exciting companies that people pay attention to.   They’re not boring–not for a  minute.  They do what makes sense instead of what protect the golden VP.

If you want to thrive in any economy, don’t bore everyone.  Let go of the things you’ve always done.  Find out what someone else does better than you, and let them do it for you.

*UPDATE*  Seth Godin’s noticed the same thing.  So has Copyblogger.