Be Different or be dead

March 23, 2020

4 hazardous problems leaders should know about digital speeches

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4 hazardous problems leaders should know about digital speeches.

We live in digital space; we use digital technology in our personal life to practically do everything from telling time, listening to our favourite music and keeping a personal journal to controlling our home security through devices such as video cameras and motion sensors.

In business, digital technology is the heart of products and services, internal control processes and customer contact systems.

Digital pervades literally everything we do, but I believe the most profound impact it has had is on the way we communicate with one another.

Analog technology defined the boundaries and limitations on how the communications function was performed; digital technology completely rewrote the book and it has a profound effect on leadership and the way leaders talk to their tribe.

There are definite advantages to a leader communicating digitally. It’s a quick way to get a message out to the intended audience. It’s a voice conference call (in the old world) on steroids. And it’s an effective way to reach a large audience; the broadcast capabilities of digital allow the leader to communicate to virtually their entire organization if required.

Speed and coverage; significant benefits over the ways we used to communicate using analog technology.

But what about the challenges digital technology creates for today’s leader?

These are important shortfalls of digital communications leaders should consider.

#1. You become an avatar to your audience

Exclusive use of digital renders the leader in absentia with an avatar for their face. Employees receive emails, social media commentary and maybe even have an opportunity to participate in a ZOOM meeting, but they don’t have enough face time with the leader to decipher who they are and what makes them tick — interests, biases and philosophy.

An avatar is inanimate; a digital expression of who you are. It’s not real and that’s the problem. Organizations need real leaders with feelings, emotion and passion that can be communicated to employees to instil vision and gather support.

#2. You think your communications is effective (but it’s not)

Speed and coverage dominates the criteria for determining whether or not a communications channel is doing its job. The problem is speed and coverage are an insufficient criteria to determine effectiveness.
The real questions are:
— “Did people understand my message?”
— “Were they convinced?”
— “Are they prepared to go where I believe we should go?”

If the answer to these questions after a digital speech is “no” then the communications failed and the leader did as well.

Digital may have succeeded in getting the message out to everyone but if people didn’t understand it, were not convinced to change their views by it, were ok to not be able to ask a question of it, then it failed.

#3. You avoid the opportunity to be inclusive

A HUGE part of communications is the engagement process not just the content. Sending out a digital message doesn’t engage everyone; it informs them but doesn’t include them in the process which can only be done by tailoring the message and making it compelling and relevant to the various demographics in the audience.

A one-dimension email message will not satisfy everyone who has a stake in it and who look at the issues differently given their different backgrounds.
Being inclusive in business is to engage with people, listen to them and engage in healthy debate to decide on an outcome; old school analog has its advantages.

#4. You’re in the cloud

You have a virtual presence; your physical form is absent much of the time. Let’s face it, you can communicate digitally without ever having to leave your office or your home (or your bed) — in fact your “home” is the cloud.

Leaders must have a presence in the workplace, face-to-face with people if they are to be effective and digital, unfortunately, has redefined “get out of your office” to get off of your cloud as the imperative for leaders to leave their cave.

The one thing old school technology did was, because of its limitations, force leaders to talk to people as there was no other choice. The telephone and in-the-flesh meetings had to be used; and they were effective.

Great leaders spend time eye-to-eye with employees in their organization. It’s the only way they can get a complete picture of people and how they really feel about where the leader wants to go. And it’s the only forum where meaningful dialogue (complete with body language) can occur with the leader getting honest unfiltered feedback.

At the end of the day, the challenge for leaders is to balance the use of both analogue and digital tools to communicate with people in their organization; I suggest you consider more opportunities to ”do analog” and change the mix to include a more direct engagement approach.

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

• Posted 3.23.20 at 07:55 am by Roy Osing
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March 9, 2020

4 great ways to be different and easily beat your ruthless competitors

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4 great ways to be different and easily beat your ruthless competitors.

If you’re looking to be unmatched in the marketplace, follow these simple proven tactics…

1. Be relevant and unique — in the business plan for your organization.

Dumb your strategic game plan down and answer the three fundamental questions to capture the essence of what you have to do to WIN. Create your ONLY statement around requirements that both matter to your target customers and which you and only you provide.

And, focus on execution recognizing that a plan that can’t be implemented is worthless.

2. Be holistic in your approach to customer opportunities — to create value in your marketing function.

Provide value-based packages for your chosen customer groups based on a customer learning competency your organization adopts.

Look at the total customer in terms of their broad attributes and requirements and not a thin slice of their product needs. Discover the secrets of your customers and use them as the driver of your marketing strategy.

3. Be dazzling — in how you serve your customers.

Treat creating memorable customer experiences as a critical priority. Vary how you treat your customers to enhance their loyalty.

Adopt the elements of a dazzling service experience plan:
▪️hire human being lovers
▪️empower frontliners to say yes
▪️kill dumb rules that make no sense to your customers
▪️ recover from your service blunders —  fix the problem and do the unexpected by leveraging the customer secrets you have discovered.

4. Be intimate — in your sales strategy building strong relationships with your customers.

Avoid product flogging that does nothing to generate loyalty and makes you the same as everyone else. Strong deep relationships encourage your customers to buy stuff over the long term; product flogging is short term thinking at best.

There you have it, the essential elements of establishing a winning strategy and healthy culture in your organization.

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

• Posted 3.9.20 at 07:46 am by Roy Osing
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February 24, 2020

6 simple ways ‘CRAP’ can be cut from your organization

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6 simple ways ‘CRAP’ can be cut from your organization.

The world is a noisy and cluttered place to live; so many choices and so many people exercising them.

Resources available are scarce and limited but demand continues to grow.

How can organizations — and governments for that matter — achieve their growth objectives with limits on the available time and money necessary to achieve them? And in some cases, not just holding the line on resources but reducing their availability?

Obviously productivity gains will offset the need to add some resources.
If the organization can realize a 10% increase in productivity, and growth requires a 5% increase in operations expenses, growth goals can be more than achieved assuming the targeted productivity savings are realized and are allocated to growth projects — spending productivity gains elsewhere is a waste and results in added costs being necessary.

But there are limits on how much should be mined out of expenses from productivity to fund growth.

Doing things more efficiently has its limits and it’s trade offs

Changing operational processes to drive cost out can impact customer service.
Costs of a re-engineered process might decrease but customers could be dissatisfied with the resulting way they have to engage with the organization — it’s less customer friendly.

And they express their dissatisfaction by buying less or by moving to another supplier.

Outsourcing call centers to remote regions of the world, for example, may reduce costs but could also reduce customer loyalty due to the new experience that customers have to endure.

And of course when productivity benefits are calculated, the opportunity costs associated with impaired service and lost revenue are rarely part of the analysis.

In my experience, the bigger play is not to focus on how to do things right — seek more efficiency — but rather to do the right things — be more effective.

Effectiveness is achieved when the right set of new programs is selected and is flawlessly executed to achieve the long term strategic intent of the organization.

Effectiveness is not just deciding on the new things you need to do

A huge part of effectiveness is not what additional to take on, but what you decide to give up — the current activities in motion you decide to stop.

It’s forced obsolescence — productivity applied on a macro scale (large projects or blocks of activity) as opposed to eliminating smaller pieces of the operations (a call center or product fulfillment process).

Forced obsolescence — cut the CRAP — is consciously eliminating yesterday’s relevance for tomorrow’s necessity.

Examples of forced obsolescence initiatives could include marketing programs established in the past to enhance a product line that are no longer in the crosshairs of the strategy. Or a planned HR system built to support acquiring skills and competencies that are no longer considered essential.

This is my step-by-step process to force obsolescence out.

1. Assign a senior champion

Appoint a respected and trusted senior person with a high tolerance for ‘pain’ and whose compensation is based on how much savings is actually realized by the cut the crap activity.

Avoid the mistake that most organizations make by assigning a mid level manager to the task. This communicates that forcing obsolescence out isn’t really all that important and like many other corporate programs, “it too shall pass”.

2. Take inventory

Inventory all current initiatives in the organization. It’s important that the list be complete in order to capture all of the activity consuming resources. I suggest that you set an annual expense threshold — say, $100K — and identify only activity that exceeds this amount.

The point is to isolate activity that consumes a material amount of resources and a threshold criteria is a meaningful way of doing it.

>3. Create a ‘keep’ list

Create a list of those initiatives that should remain because they all directly support the organization’s strategy.
Make keep list short, as there is a tendency to try and justify everything that is currently going on as vital to the future of the company.

This, of course, is hogwash and is merely an attempt for people to protect their position in the organization. If you end up with 100 major initiatives on the list, walk away. You are wasting your time.

4. Create a ‘cut’ list

Create a list of yesterday’s work that is no longer needed because it is not relevant to the strategy the organization has chosen.
Make the cut list long; make it tough to keep doing activities of yesterday.

As a guideline, you should have at least 3 cut activities for every keep activity; on a threshold of $100K that means you are cutting $300K in expenses for every $100K you keep — a 3:1 payback; not a bad place to start.

5. Finalize keep and cut lists

With both lists in hand, the senior leader must present and get input on both lists throughout the organization to get as much buy-in as possible.

Forced obsolescence will never get 100% support so don’t bother fretting over it. This is a challenging step as no one wants to give up what they’re doing. They have too much emotional equity in what they’re busy with.

So debate and listen then make the call on what needs to stay and what needs to go.

6. Prepare the CRAP execution plan

Develop a 6 month action plan to execute the cut list initiatives. Include firming up the annual savings and the organizational units that will realize them.

THE key step — close the loop by reducing their operating expense budgets and place savings in a special account that can be used to fund new initiatives.

This fund should be available to anyone responsible for introducing a new strategic program that is a priority.

And beware of those who possess the CRAP.

These ‘custodians of the past’ are people who are comfortable handling past activities; they enjoy them and they don’t want to change.

They are managers of irrelevance and are critical to the CRAP elimination process. If they are permitted to continue to do their thing they will infect others in your organization and prevent them from taking on the new direction.

Identify these folks and manage them: either reassign them or, if they are unwilling to move to the future, exit them with dignity from your organization.

Cut the CRAP will save the world. If we don’t expunge today’s unproductive and wasteful activity, we won’t have the resources to take on the new initiatives necessary to advance organizations and societies.

Taken to its ultimate conclusion, the obsolete will rob the world of growth and limit our possibilities.

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

• Posted 2.24.20 at 06:33 am by Roy Osing
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February 10, 2020

3 proven ways to make an easy and affordable business plan

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3 proven ways to make an easy and affordable business plan.

If you can answer 3 questions, your business plan will beat all others.

Unfortunately, many organizations don’t develop a strategy to guide them into an unpredictable future; they rationalize the current planning process to be too complicated, time consuming and expensive.

And they’re right.

Numerous people gather in a room for a strategic planning session. Subject matter experts descend of the group and try to impress everyone with their detailed knowledge of the many governing factors that need consideration in the strategy building process, and many days are consumed — in my experience wasted — to get the strategy perfect.

Normally the services of a third party firm are used to both facilitate the session and provide expert content to the plan direction and efficacy. This is a clever way of avoiding having the people responsible for the strategy’s success taking ownership of the direction taken by applying their own opinions and good judgement.

The planning team is presented with material, they ask questions about various aspects of it and in the end most of the time they agree with the results of the analysis and direction proposed.

But at the end of the day, the traditional planning process takes so much time and energy, there is insufficient time left to develop how the plan will be executed in the trenches by real people. And the planning team is left with a strategy that may make sense on paper, but can’t be executed effectively because there was insufficient time devoted to implementation.

Get insanely focused on execution

Given that eventually any strategy or plan must result in action, the best planning process is predicated on the premise: keep it simple, get to the gut issues quickly and ACT.

Minimize the strategy direction setting time; maximize the implementation action planning time.

Loosen up on strategy development; tighten up on execution.

The strategy-building process I developed was necessary because although the field of experts who could help me develop a theoretically pristine direction was wide and deep, the number who actually could help in plan execution was close to zero.

The process I developed was simple, fast and time efficient. And unlike its brethren, it used the knowledge and experience of the planning team members rather than going with a third party planning expert — added benefit was the team building that went on during the process.

My process — the strategic game plan — was based on discovering the answers to 3 questions; the answers defined the strategy.

Growth — HOW BIG do you want to be?

Most planning processes end with financial results. They calculate the growth results of executing the strategic direction chosen.
My process starts with your growth intentions, and builds the strategy from HOW BIG you want to be. The reason is simple: more aggressive growth goals require a more aggressive — and risky — strategy, and more moderate growth goals need a more incremental — and less risky — strategy.

The traditional planning approach forgets that there is an extremely tight relationship between revenue growth and strategic intent; my strategic game plan doesn’t and that’s what makes my approach DiFFERENT than others.

Customers — WHO do you want to SERVE?

You have a goal to grow revenue 25% annually over the next 36 months. The next question is where are you going to get it? Where are you going to invest your scarce resources of time and money.

It boils down to selecting a group of customers who collectively have the potential to generate the revenue you have decided to go after.
To get the right answer to this question requires an intimate understanding of the various customers you serve.

You can’t choose the customer group to generate the revenue you covet if you don’t understand the propensity of your various customer segments to buy from you — discover their secrets and success will follow.

Competitors — HOW will you compete and WIN?

It would be nice if you were the only provider of products and services to the customer group you’ve chosen, but that’s not likely to be the case. There is likely to be healthy aggressive competitors targeting the same customers you want to target, so the challenge you face is to determine how you will differentiate your organization from all others you will be competing with.

Why should people choose your organization when they have other choices available?

What makes your team special in view of the alternatives available?
HOW will you compete is intended to explore the competencies of your organization that you can exploit to gain competitive advantage, with emphasis on how you can be positioned in the customer group you’ve chosen as the ONLY one that does what you do.

By answering these 3 questions using the expertise of those in the room you will have your business plan quickly (less than 3 days) and inexpensively (a personalized experience for your team). And it will be owned by every person who has contributed to it which means execution will follow.

if you want your business plan to be easy and affordable, this is the way to do it.

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

• Posted 2.10.20 at 02:06 am by Roy Osing
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