Leadership
Innovative thinking is a highly valued capability today. By working specific mental exercises as a deliberate part of your day, you can increase your ability to integrate left brain (creative) and right brain (logical) thinking patterns into a mix that generates more productive innovative thinking.
Any edge to think and act with more agility, innovation and creativity is highly valuable. An article on the LIVESTRONG blog recently shared some practical exercises you can use to build your abilities to integrate right and left brain thinking. This enables you to be a source of innovative ideas that can be implemented in practical ways or to generate creative sparks at the right time while implementing structured processes. (more…)
You’ve just been handed the baton for improving customer experience at your company…now what?
The role of Chief Customer Officer (CCO), Chief Customer Experience Officer and other executive titles that revolve around strategic focus on the customer are some of the fastest growing titles in corporations today. But beyond assigning a top executive into the role of watching over customer experience, what should the capabilities of the CCO organization be and what should be their accountability? The leading customer organizations are taking on corporate challenges that require strong capabilities in strategy, marketing, creative and organizational transformation. Why are they building these diverse teams? What is the business value? And more importantly, how can you build a highly effective customer organization in your company? (more…)
The field of Customer Experience Management is driving a new wave of innovation through businesses. Innovation is often about fusing different disciplines together to generate new ways of thinking and ways of solving problems creatively. A major innovation trend today is the mixing of business strategy and design to form new ways of thinking to create compelling and valuable customer experiences. In the past, designers and business leaders would go to different schools, work at different professional services firms, work in different parts of an organization and belong to different professional associations. They were completely separate sub-cultures of the business world. Today, leaders are mixing those two worlds and the result is greater innovation, better customer experiences … resulting in greater business success. Venture capital funds, top business schools, leading customer experience executives and innovative service firms are all moving to harness this fusion. (more…)
One of the best metrics for monitoring your customer experience value is to measure customer satisfaction. Most companies do that. Most managers also look at the combined top two scores on a five point scale that includes “very satisfied” and “satisfied” and as long as those two categories are at a high percentage of answers, things are viewed as successful. After viewing Apple’s performance in mobile devices in terms of very satisfied customers and market share growth, maybe we should move to a two point scale that only includes Very Satisfied and “Also Ran” as the only two choices. That seems to be all that matters.
72% Very Satisfied Customers
Being satisfied with customers who say they are just “satisfied” is not the way to achieve market leadership. With competitive intensity so high in today’s markets, the only relevant measure is to drive up business performance is to focus on creating “very satisfied” customers as a majority. The bell shaped curve is after all average, or otherwise a commodity. A recent report published by CNET (and conducted by ChangeWave) on customer satisfaction with the iPhone 4 experience shows that Apple has achieved a 72% very satisfied rating. That is a rare accomplishment and demonstrates Apple’s commitment to customer experience excellence. Not just mere average “satisfaction.”
115% Growth in Market Share
The result of having such high “very satisfied” ratings is that Apple’s market share of mobile devices grew by 115% in the first quarter of 2011 according to a new study from IDC Research. That is growing from a single digit market share base, but the company above Apple’s share fell by almost 10% in the same quarter.
When setting success metrics, the benchmarks you set should not be done in a way to make you and your employees feel good and satisfied that, “at least people don’t dislike us.” Set the bar high, customer experience is an area of the business that can’t merely satisfy, it needs to wow, surprise, and delight customers every day and at every interaction. The result will be very satisfied customers and market leading growth.
In almost every recent transformation I’ve been involved in, we’ve been discussing the same things. How can we get more done, faster? And there is often a caveat…that we won’t be able to increase spending.Sound familiar? I spend lots of time thinking about how to frame up the situation about focus, selecting a small number of high-impact initiatives, and doubling-down resources on those initiatives. And with so many teams, it seems that a fundamental principle that is undermining high-impact execution is the seemingly logical concept of doing “more with less.” I try to explain the flaw in this thinking, and then Scott Adams, through Dilbert, just nails it! At least in terms of taking a jab at the flawed logic and way that it is received by employees. Here are some practical steps executing a better alternative, doing “More ON Less.” (more…)
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What’s get measured gets done. That statement can be true, but how many of us see countless reports coming out monthly, weekly or even daily, that take hours to produce, and nobody even looks at them? Metrics can be one of the most powerful tools for generating tight focus on execution if used correctly. Or, metrics can be a complete waste of time and distraction to the real running the business and delivering value to customers. What seem like slight differences make the difference in driving high-impact and valuable work.
One challenge that seems to have come up repeatedly in our work through the second half of 2010 was the issue of setting success metrics. So, it is probably worth sharing one key insight here that can help to focus and improve the use of metrics in driving success. (more…)
As we enter the normal stategic and business planning season it is clear that things are different this cycle. We are all being forced to ask tough questions about how we’ll invest, carefully, for 2010. I’ve been in several strategic planning sessions with both clients and in our own company where a single question is disturbing the status quo. The question boils down to asking, “is our current business model and approach over-engineered and over-built…and if so, how do we get it right for the coming years?” There is a fantastic Wired Magazine article you can use to spark the right conversation within your team that will help you target investments in the right areas.
Someday, the picture on the right of a typical cubicle farm will look just as obsolete as the rows of desks with the boss watching from behind on the left. For some workers, someday is today. And the good news is that the solutions for today are actually less expensive, more flexible, better for effective work, sustainable and to most employees…really cool. It is rare to find this type of business solution.
This week we had an opportunity to meet an amazing group of people at Sun Microsystems. They have developed what is by far the best, most cost effective, most efficient, and cool workplaces that I’ve seen in years. In my work, I have the opportunity to see a lot of different work environments and use a lot of different collaboration platforms…some of which I’ve written about on the blog. However, this one was different…. (more…)
A recent article in BNET was somewhat scolding executives for needing to go to ‘Strategic Planning 101′ in response to a Dartmouth Professor’s claim that newspaper publishers are just sitting around and whining, while their businesses go in the tank.
A clip from the article shows a somewhat insulting list of what Strategic Planning 101 is all about. Usually I just ignore this type of advice, but in this case it was so far off the mark, I had to comment.
______________________ARTICLE CLIP___________________
Strategic Planning 101
- Get a bunch of smart people in a room together … without cell phones and Blackberrys
- Have somebody present a completely honest analysis of the competitive situation
- Throw out all the sacred cows and preconceived notions
- Brainstorm new ideas until you can’t stand to look at each other anymore
- Vote on them, take the top ten, assign each to an executive to develop a business plan
- Meet back, present the plans, debate, decide on one or two to implement, and execute
At least you’d think that’s what they’re doing, right? All those high-paid executives with fiduciary responsibility can’t just be sitting around complaining and waiting to die. Or can they? What do you think? Do Syd and I expect too much from officers and directors that shareholders depend upon to make their investment worthwhile?
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This misguided view of what strategic planning has two major gaps that are the undoing of most efforts to set and execute strategy. (more…)
There is a natural reaction when a major disruption in business occurs to go into survival mode. That means tunnel and short-term vision as well as tactical and reactionary measures. That can be a necessity for survival. However, a recent poll of the Strategic Planning Community (SPC), a business social network of strategic planners hosted by the Association of Strategic Planning (ASP), shows that for the most part, the knee-jerk reactions to the downturn have passed and most companies are moving towards more strategic moves. (more…)
ABOUT
Michael Kanazawa shares recent insights and tips about the no-nonsense, results-driven approach to driving business breakthroughs found in his new book Big Ideas to Big Results.