Be Different or be dead

June 27, 2022

Why Nasr is absolutely amazing at creating experiences for people that last forever

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Why Nasr is absolutely amazing at creating experiences for people that last forever.

Petra, Jordan.

Nasr, our tour guide, who took us through breathtaking Petra had it right. And it was so natural for him to say it. And to do it.

He was able to turn a tour of Petra, one of the 7 Wonders of the World (given the honor in 2007) into an experience my wife and I will never forget.
And one that we will likely talk about for many years to come.

His concluding comments to us came from his heart: “My job as a guide is to create memories”.

Like Baboo in Mumbai, he went on to ask: “Please tell your friends about my country”.

And that’s what I’m doing.

Can you imaging if every one of your frontline customer contact employees saw their job to create a memory for every customer they ‘touched’?

The truth of the matter is that people will soon forget the price they paid for your product or service but they will NEVER forget the experience they received when they bought it.

Do you think it would lift your business to new levels? Do you think it would deepen customer loyalty to you?

In Nasr’s case, he personally understood that unless he was successful creating memories, people wouldn’t visit his country.

And he desperately wanted people to see the country he loves so much (it was refreshing to hear him speak of Jordan in emotional loving terms).

The problem is that employees in our businesses don’t have the same compelling driver or sense of urgency to create memories for customers.
They don’t understand its critical strategic importance to organizational success and survival

And it’s not their fault.

It’s a failure of leadership.

You get what you ask for. You get what you pay for.

Ask for memories to be created by your people. Make it a critical element of their role and compensation plan.

Hire people who innately know how to do it, because not everyone can. And don’t rely on training to teach people to do it. Memory creators are born with the gift.

We need a Nasr to lead our organizations out of the common, boring, invisible, unremarkable, unimaginative, stale herd.

We need many of them.

PS. If you have a chance to visit Jordan, do it. It’s safe and full of charming people.

There Nasr, it worked. I told your story.

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

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 6.27.22 at 06:09 am by Roy Osing
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June 20, 2022

Why being an outside-of-the-box thinker really isn’t good enough

Why being an outside-of-the-box thinker really isn’t good enough.

Let me start by saying that I would take an out-of-the-box thinker over someone who ‘colours inside the lines’ any day.

But unfortunately, if the only thing that happens out-of-the-box is thinking, it amounts to mental gratification only.

Let’s face it, the mind is only one ingredient to achieving greatness.

You need it to imagine doing extraordinary things but imagination on its own doesn’t go very far.

How many amazing ideas are left dying on the vine because they remained as ideas with no implementation?

That’s the startup reality and the challenge of making any new idea successful.

The death rate of new businesses and new ideas is painfully high because bright, imaginative individuals can’t turn their ‘brave new idea’ into a ‘crude deed’ that people are willing to pay money for.
They may be incredible at off-wall-thinking but can’t monetize what’s in their head.

What we need are ‘out-of-the-box DOERS’ who are capable of taking a ‘just about right’ idea and turning it into mind blowing success.

I’d put my money on someone who has a slightly flawed idea with an amazing ability to execute their ‘imperfect notion’ pristinely.

Here are some outside-the-box doer tips for you that I learned over my career as an executive leader with an operations bent.

#1. Have a plan the is ‘built to execute’; a plan to do!

The doers ethic is to have a plan that can be effectively executed, and this is where my Strategic Game Plan—SGP—comes in. The SGP is a simple and audacious way to simply and quickly create a strategy for your organization in literally 48 hours and begin executing in the 49th hour.

The SGP is created by answering 3 questions:
HOW BIG do you want to be — 24 month revenue growth goal?
WHO do you want to serve — Customer groups to target?
HOW will you COMPETE and win — The ONLY Statement: “by being the ONLY ones who…”

Check out the above referenced links to learn more about SGP.

#2. ’Cleanse-the-inside’ of the organization

You can’t DO anything if the inside of the organization is clogged up with stuff preventing people from executing your plan, so try these tactics to make things run smoother:

▪️Eliminate the Dumb Rules, policies and processes that don’t make any sense to customers and do nothing but create painful experiences for them. If people aren’t willing to engage with you and your inside reality, your imagined future evades reality.

▪️Cut the CRAP or grunge that makes it extremely difficult for people to do their jobs and deliver expected results. This is the bureaucratic bullsh*t that slows things down while some power pusher gets their ego assuaged.
How do you identify CRAP? Just ask the people doing the job and they’ll tell you in no uncertain terms what’s preventing them from doing their job.

Eliminate CRAP = EXECUTE BETTER

#3. Assign a Strategy Hawk

Doers need someone—the Strategy Hawk—to drive the execution process, someone whose entire existence in the organization depends on how well the SGP is implemented in terms of meeting the objectives of the plan within the expected timeframes.

The Hawk must be a leader who is well respected by the employee group, is tenacious and who has a high tolerance for ‘pain’ (changing the course of any organization is difficult; it requires someone who has the energy and perseverance to push through all internal roadblocks and resistance).

#4. Focus on the frontline

The employees on ‘the bottom’ of the organization need to receive priority attention from everyone who has their fingerprints on the SGP.

If the frontline doesn’t perform well, the SGP doesn’t get executed. Period.

Focussing on the frontline requires actions like:
— leaders holding Bear Pit Sessions with frontliners to determine what help they need to execute better.
— leaders reorienting their calendars to spend more time ‘serving around’ in the workplace.
— recognizing and rewarding frontliners for behaviours that lead to superlative execution.
— changing the internal communications emphasis on such things as technology and products and services to add the frontline component and why they are so critical to the organization.

#5. Clarify everyone’s role in executing the strategy

This is where most organizations fail.

Leaders don’t spend the time translating the SGP into what it means specifically to every function (and every individual) in the organization. What each person has to give up and what new actions, activities and behaviours they need to take on.

If employees don’t have a direct line of sight to the SGP, they decide on their own what actions are needed to implement it, which results in internal dysfunction (as everyone takes a different approach to executing the Plan) and results fall short of Plan execution.

Leaders must take on the role of SGP translation to ensure the right actions are taken in harmony by everyone in the organization to ensure flawless Plan execution.

Takeaway

Out-of-the-box Doers are the most valuable assets of any organization.

Out-of-the-box thinking will get you only so far; without morphing intellectual intent into action, thoughts have little value.

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

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 6.20.22 at 04:20 am by Roy Osing
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June 13, 2022

Why aspirations should never be used to define your competitive advantage

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Why aspirations should never be used to define your competitive advantage.

BE DiFFERENT or be dead has one simple message: if you’re not different in a way your customers CARE about, you’re dead (or soon will be).
You will neither be relevant nor special compared to your competitors and therefore your target customers will have no reason to buy from you… and they won’t… and your business will ‘die’.

It’s just a matter of time.

It’s interesting to me that despite the intensity of competition and the power of consumers these days, organizations have progressed very little in terms of being able to define what makes them unique—their competitive advantage.

CLAPTRAP dominates

Businesses continue to use CLAPTRAP works like ‘better’, ‘best’, ‘number 1’, ‘premium’, ‘great tasting’, ‘most’ and ‘leader’ in trying to define what makes them different from their competitors, but they offer no real clarity or value to a person wanting to select a supplier.

Here’s a couple of examples:

▪️”(Coffee retailer) offers the best coffee and espresso drinks for consumers who want premium ingredients and perfection every time.”
▪️“We work hard every day to make (credit card supplier) the world’s most respected service brand.”

ASPIRATIONS contaminate

As well, they constantly defer to using ASPIRATIONS to ineffectively try to carve out and communicate their unmatchable traits.

And so, we are exposed to declarations like:

▪️“We’re in business to save our home planet.”
▪️“To inspire humanity - both in the air and on the ground.”
▪️“To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”
▪️“To build the web’s most convenient, secure, cost-effective payment solution.”

These are intent-based statements; they don’t depict who you are at this moment.

I don’t care what you INTEND to do. Tell me how you’re different from all the other members in the herd.

These aspiration-based statements may work with employees to give them a sense of purpose in terms of the values the organization intends to live by, but they are utterly useless ‘on the outside’ speaking to potential customers and trying to convince them how you are different from your competition and hence why you are the logical supplier of choice.

How does “We’re in business to save our home planet.” help a mother searching for the right bedroom furniture for her newborn child choose the company making this statement?

Even if sustainability is something the mother believes in, I suspect there are other more relevant and compelling requirements to consider in making her purchase decision.

‘Saving the planet’ may be a nice (undefinable) vision—wish—to aspire to, but it really doesn’t define who you are in the competitive landscape (I suspect there are many organizations out there that all believe that saving the planet is something they believe in as well).

An effective (and honest) competitive advantage claim needs to address the customer group you’ve chosen to serve and it needs to respond to what they CARE ABOUT in a compelling manner. And, of course, it needs to be measurable (and ideas on how you would measure ‘save the planet’?

The ONLY Statement

The competitive advantage tool I created as president of an early stage internet organization that we took to A BILLION IN SALES, was The ONLY Statement: “We are the ONLY ones that…” is ONLY’s form.

Here’s a good example:
“We are the ONLY team that provides integrated safety solutions that go beyond the needs of our customers ANYTIME, ANYWHERE. We are committed to growing our customer’s business. We ONLY serve safety.”

Where are aspirations useful?

If you’re wanting to be inspirational, the place for aspirations is ‘on the inside’ of the organization where you can use these ‘helium-filled’ statements as tools to explain the broader values—vision and mission—the organization has (very often the views of the executive and owners).

I look at these types of statements as feel-good ‘sensitivity triggers’; the issues of the day that the organization leans towards. And there is no shortage of challenges for organizations to identify with, ranging from the environment to inclusion and rights and freedoms.

These are internal perspectives, however, that address the question “What narrative-of-the-day do we want to be identified with?”, and not “How do we intend to compete and win” in the market?

Altruism has no place in declaring your competitive advantage.

Aspirations are useful guides in making certain types of decisions like:

▪️Organizations to target annual ongoing donations to.
▪️Events to sponsor.
▪️Communities to offer your employees for volunteer services.

But keep them away from your pitch to people about why they should choose YOU over the 10 other companies competing in the same space with you.

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

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 6.13.22 at 03:53 am by Roy Osing
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June 6, 2022

What really is a servant leader and how to be a different one

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What really is servant leadership and how to be a different one.

Servant Leadership is a topic that has attracted much attention over the past several years, and seems to be ‘the new black’ in the leadership narrative.

I’m concerned, however, that the notion is being pushed as another ‘flavour of the month’ promulgated by self-prescribed academic leadership experts with little or no demonstrated leadership experience in delivering superlative results.

From Google:
“Servant leadership is a leadership style and philosophy whereby an individual interacts with others—either in a management or fellow employee capacity—to achieve authority rather than power.”

As a leader, the end game of serving is NOT about achieving authority; the reason you decide to serve rather than command others or exert your hierarchical power in the organization is NOT because it’s a more effective way to achieve authority over others.

There have been other versions of leadership offered in the past that offered an alternative to command-and-control leadership.

Tom Peters talked about ‘Management by Wandering Around’—MBWA—as a way to get leaders closer to employees doing the work, with the objective of getting leaders out of their offices and making them more aware of the issues going on in the workplace.

I’ve always held the view that, even though it was a significant improvement over the traditional approach to leadership, MBWA simply didn’t go far enough. It was a good tactic to get leaders out in the workplace and exposed to the everyday realities employees faced, but it lacked clarity of purpose and focus to make it an effective instrument to enhance company performance.

I took it further by breaking away from the common notion of MBWA and creating a completely new—and audacious—leadership approach which I dubbed Leadership by SERVING Around—LBSA.

The purpose of LBSA is to increase the effectiveness of executing the Strategic Game Plan of the organization.

My purpose in practicing LBSA is very clear: it’s to improve the EXECUTION of the organization’s Strategic Game Plan.

LBSA is NOT a leadership ‘style’ designed for the leader to gain more authority; it’s a means to enable employees to perform their functions more effectively and, in so doing, take EXECUTION to a higher level.

”How can I help?” defines LBSA.

The fundamental ingredient in LBSA is the question “How can I help?”.

LBSA is not, as espoused by the ‘wandering around’ method, to observe what’s going on in the workplace and to spot dysfunction which requires intervention and eventual remediation.

LBSA is a PERSONAL ACT, not an organizational one; the leader is asking how they can PERSONALLY help the individual they are engaging with at the moment.

It’s a STRATEGIC MOVE targeted at determining what’s preventing people from executing the business plan of the organization.

LBSA is a ’CLEANSE-THE-INSIDE’ tactic to eliminate the internal barriers—rules, policies, procedures—that get in the way of employees doing their jobs effectively in executing the business plan of the organization and in delivering amazing service experiences to customers.

I ask “What’s preventing you from ‘saying Yes’ to our customers?” and “What’s preventing you from doing your job more easily and effectively?”

And, it’s an opportunity to practice FINGERPRINT LEADERSHIP Coaching allowing the leader to personally coach employees in the appropriate behaviour to pristine execution of the business plan.

Serving leaders don’t serve because they want an easier way to assume authority and they don’t serve because it’s being promoted by the so-called leadership experts as a new style.

They serve because it drives EXECUTION and lifts the performance of the organization.

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

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 6.6.22 at 05:42 am by Roy Osing
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