Be Different or be dead

November 24, 2011

Why chasing tactics can prevent progress to your business plan goals

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Why chasing tactics can prevent progress to your business plan goals.

Chasing stuff is fun. It’s non-threatening. It provides here-and-now gratification. It’s organizational comfort food

Go fish. Pick a card. Follow the instructions. Where does it lead? Who knows until you pick another card.

Many organizations function like this. Tactics rule. Immediate opportunities dominate how time is consumed.

Performance is often measured by how many things a person has on the go; the length of their to-do list.

Tactical driven activity, unfortunately, sometimes produces little value because it is often not consistent with the business plan of the organization

And activity with little or no connection to its strategic intent consumes copious amounts of time and energy.

You never know how much progress you’re making.

Get your strategic thinking straight before you give chase to action.

Be sure you are focusing on what is absolutely necessary to do in order to deliver your strategy.

If you can’t define precisely how your actions contribute to the strategy STOP!

Pick a card that puts you on the right path and follow it.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 11.24.11 at 10:28 am by Roy Osing
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November 21, 2011

Why career success can’t be achieved by doing one thing

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Why career success can’t be achieved by doing one thing.

Everyone is looking for the one thing that will vault them, or their business, to success and riches.

What is the one thing that, if you knock myself out on, will propel you to success?

Is their one single thing you can do to have an amazing career plan?

The harsh reality is that you can’t count on one thing to succeed either personally or in business.

Success is a journey.

— Made of single wins;
— Incremental gains;
— Nano-inches of progress;
— Passion;
— Tenacity;
— And pain, a high threshold for it.

The intellectual master plan rarely produces a star.

Want to win? Set your sights on what you want to be. Get going. Learn from your actions. Keep going.

Success comes from doing lots of stuff not pontificating on theoretical possibilities

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 11.21.11 at 10:19 am by Roy Osing
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November 10, 2011

Why giving thoughtful gifts to your customers will make you rich

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Why giving thoughtful gifts to your customers will make you rich.

Give stuff away and get rich. Think it can be done?

You’ve heard of the lost leader product which is often sold at below cost to get the buyer’s attention and to convince them to buy another offering. A cut priced pair of shoes just might entice her to pay full pop for a matching purse.

The other approach used is bait and switch: lure someone in by a tempting offer on one product bit then get them to buy another priced more expensively.

FREE in the sense of business building refers to neither of the above marketing strategies; it refers to gift giving. giving something of value unconditionally, expecting nothing in return.

The shameless act, as Seth Godin says, of passing your art to someone else, hoping you make a difference in their life.

Effective gift giving is all about intent. If your intent is to fool the receiver into believing you are earnest when you’re not, you will be discovered for your dishonesty and lose business

You will be found out and punished for your lack of integrity.

Pure gift giving has an amazing upside. First of all, the recipient is surprised with your unselfish act.

They will most assuredly accept your gift with thanks and will spread the word of your gift giving to their friends and colleagues.

And, when faced with the opportunity to do so, will go out of their way to help you in any way they can. They will also continue to reward your selfishness with repeat buying; in fact they will feel obligated to do so.

So, give a gift. Give it unconditionally. Unselfishly. Openly. With no ulterior motive to sell something. With no eye on a commercial transaction.

When you do, watch the magic.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 11.10.11 at 09:35 am by Roy Osing
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November 3, 2011

Why being efficient by reducing cost results in worse service

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Why being efficient by reducing cost results in worse service.

Efficiency is the enemy of humanity

I can hear the efficiency experts and technology pundits screaming. The process re-engineering guru’s laughing at my outrageous declaration.

But here’s the thing. Any person charged with employing a new way of conducting business — a process, procedure or system — always looks for the cost savings involved.
Streamlining is measured by how much we reduce operating expenses; how the customer experience will be enhanced is never the starting point of a redesign project.

Technology adoption is rarely measured by how much it enhances the customer experience notwithstanding the application of AI in the customer engagement environment.

It is the norm that when we seek to apply new methods of doing business we extract a nano-gram of humanity from our organizations.

We reduce our ability to dazzle a customer to save a dollar in operating expenses by substituting humans with technology.

If you migrate a person-function to a machine, you reduce humanity in your organization. If you rush a person-function to make the process ‘more productive’ (save expenses), chances are that you are reducing the value of the customer engagement.

It’s virtually impossible in my view to mechanize a customer contact function and preserve the warmth of the human experience. The delight of a customer reaction to a caring act by an employee.

Some advocates say AI technology can replicate an amazing human- based experience, but I have yet to see it. Yes, Chatbot technology, for example, are improving because the controlling algorithms are getting more exhaustive and they are now able to deal with the most rudimentary and predictable customer transactions. But they quickly run into trouble when customer behaviour doesn’t fit the predictive algorithm.

And I also think in general that technology acceptance is governed by the fact that people are now resigned to receiving the lower grade of service they provide.

If you are doing something for the sake of efficiency and cost reduction, be honest enough to declare it.

Then tell everyone how your actions will preserve the humanity in your business — good luck with that.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 11.3.11 at 09:50 am by Roy Osing
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