Be Different or be dead

April 29, 2013

6 proven ways to do a better job of innovating

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6 proven ways to do a better job of innovating.

Innovate! is critical to the success of any organization, and these innovation strategies have been proven to work

But the process must be guided by a strategy to be different from the competition and provide people reasons why they should buy from them and no one else.

These 6 actions will help you do a better job of innovation.

▪️Establish a context for Innovate! — Idea generation and brainstorming is a waste unless it is guided by strategic direction. Use your strategic business plan as the frame to drive your Innovate! activity.

▪️Develop specific objectives with accountability and time-frames assigned. — Establish specific Innovate! objectives in your game plan to focus on the specific elements which require you to create a “new box”.

▪️Target your Innovate! objectives around your ONLY Statement — It should be your beacon to follow because it establishes your unique position in the market.
Many organizations follow best practices. This works if you want to improve delivery of your core service but it’s NOT OK if you want to stand-out from the competition.

Copying a best practice is a catch-up game at best; it’s not strategic.

Innovate! rule — Consider best practices to deliver flawless core service and your ONLY statement to leave the herd.

▪️Develop your Human Resources plan — to acquire and develop the Innovate! skills and competencies you need as defined by your game plan?

▪️Design reward and recognition programs — around your Innovate! objectives. If you don’t, you will do nothing but encourage the status quo.

▪️Leverage your customer learning capabilities — to drive the Innovate! process. Use both analysis and observation to know everything there is to know about WHO you have chosen to serve. Follow their lead.

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

• Posted 4.29.13 at 06:53 am by Roy Osing
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April 22, 2013

Amazing customer experiences can happen by doing these simple things

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How do you create a customer experience that blows a customer away and can’t be boxed?

Amazing customer experiences can happen by doing these simple things.

It can’t be time-bound. It can’t be created with an employee trying to get a customer on and off the phone in 20 seconds or less.

It can’t be engineered or architected. It can’t be manufactured from a blueprint. It doesn’t come from a can.

A magic moment is created when someone ‘puts in the time’ with another person, showing caring and thoughtful behavior.

It’s created through a process of listening, asking questions and responding with a serving attitude.

The spellbound customer experience cannot be managed with efficiency in mind.

This is how to create a customer experience with magic moments:

▪️Remove time restrictions on people who deal with customers. Let them take as much time as they need to serve them well and deliver the magic.

▪️Establish loyalty- building outcomes as the prime objective of any customer contact not how long it takes to unload a customer.

▪️Redefine how you use ‘work force management’ to manage your call center. These are useful tools to diagnose problems and issues but they shouldn’t be used to drive behavior of the call center rep.

▪️Hire employees with a proven track record of taking care of others. You can teach them your business but you can’t teach them to be customer experience moment magicians.

▪️Empower people to do the right thing for a customer, not enforce organizational rules and policies that do nothing but piss them off.

▪️Encourage the surprise element in your customer service strategy. What can be done to surprise a customer in a moment?

▪️Recognize and reward moment magicians. Make a big deal of treating them as heroes.

▪️Talk to customers. Mechanized touch points are limiting in their ability to create magic. They are designed to minimize engagement time and simply cannot replicate the experience humans can create for other humans.

The customer experience riddled with magic moments will propel your organization to the top because your customers will never leave you.

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

• Posted 4.22.13 at 06:29 am by Roy Osing
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April 1, 2013

Why the world needs ‘crazy ones’ to inspire and lead it

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Why the world needs ‘crazy ones’ to inspire and lead it.

I am sure that many of you have seen or heard this before, but it bears repeating. This was one of Apple’s very early ads. It personifies who Steve Jobs was and captures the “Think Different” culture he created.

This piece not only captures the persona of Jobs, it also paints a picture of what we might shoot for if we truly want to make a difference.

There was only ONE Steve Jobs, but maybe, just maybe we can try to emulate the character that separated him from everyone else.

And maybe, just maybe we can be tolerant with those we discover around us that look a bit like Steve. Cherish them. Nurture them. Make a pathway for them to succeed.

Check the video out and follow along…

“Here’s to The Crazy Ones
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things. They push the human race forward.
And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

WOW!

Thus manifesto should be a major element in how organizations recruit people in today’s world of uncertainty, unpredictability and chaos.

Are we actively looking for people with these attributes?

Are we trying to create a culture in our organization that fosters craziness? Or are we, by our very actions, forcing everyone into a pre-determined mold — a crowd of commonness and sameness?

I get that Steve Jobs was probably one of a kind, and we are unlikely to produce another one like him.

But what if leaders could, by inspiring craziness in our people, be lucky enough to stumble on 10 of them?

Would that make a difference? I’m thinking it would.

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

• Posted 4.1.13 at 09:57 am by Roy Osing
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March 18, 2013

Why a successful business plan depends on avoiding ‘yummy’

Why a successful business plan depends on avoiding ‘yummy’.

If you chase yummy incoming activities, your business plan is toast.

So, here you are. You have completed your business plan and now you must determine the tactics you need to see your brave idea turn into reality.
You start with a clean sheet of paper and decide to brainstorm on all the things you need to do to implement your new plan.

Good idea? Well, it can be, or it can create a lot of activity but little movement forward.

It’s ok to create a list of possible actions that you feel should be taken, but then you must purge the list down to the critical few actions to focus on that you believe have an 80 percent chance of achieving the results you want.
You simply don’t have enough resources and bandwidth to do an effective job on 25 things you have on your brainstorming list.

Multitasking is deadly when you are trying to implement the game plan of your ‘new baby’.

If you can’t define the critical few actions necessary to achieve progress towards your business plan goals, it indicates that you really don’t understand your strategy and the specific execution levers are necessary to get you going.

Spend time debating this issue because if you merely throw possibilities at the wall and then try to implement every one of them, your energies will be spread too thin and you will be unable to move forward.

Determine 3 things (or maybe 4 or 5, but not a dozen) that will produce 80% of your business plan results and get on with them — Roy’s Rule of 3

Spend time on Roy’s Rule; it will pay off handsomely for you.

Beware of yummy

Once you’ve defined the few critical things that you believe will get your startup off the ground, be prepared for distractions that will pull you away from your game plan. This always happens as you learn more about what your strategy means, and when others find out what you’re up to and present you with added opportunities.

If you have more than three priorities then you don’t have any — Jim Collins, Author

For example, you’ve decided on the customer group you want to target and out-of-the-blue comes someone who is not a target customer reaching out to you to ask for your attention.

They want to explore adopting your product solution and of course they have questions that they need answers to which will take time and effort on your part to accommodate — they will drain your scarce resources.

This happens all the time. A client of mine decided to focus on the Vancouver market where access was easy and market growth was attractive. Then they received a call from an organization in South America who found out about their innovative solution and wanted to explore partnership opportunities with them. Clearly not on strategy. But oh so tempting to chase!

‘Yummy incoming’  is the over-the-transom stuff that comes up that we are tempted to chase.

Another client developed an innovative wireless technology for a particular application in the security market segment. When other companies learned of their plans, they reached out and presented them with other potential applications for their technology.

The CEO was delighted with the additional interest and decided to evaluate these new opportunities but in doing so diffused the efforts of his team and reduced the focus on building the security solution. The end result after about a year of toiling over at least a half dozen applications was nothing advanced. The security opportunity faltered and investors pulled their funding. yummy was the instrument of their demise.

What do you do when yummy appears and has the potential of pushing your business plan off the rail?

How to beat yummy

Here’s how to keep yummy from diluting the effectiveness of your business plan:an action plan to consider.

▪️ Give yourself one day — no more — to do a quick and dirty evaluation on whether or not yummy has any potential. It’s important that you maintain the discipline to not burn endless resource cycles on the possibility that there could be a significant opportunity vis-a-vis your current focus but you have to make the call fast so the impact on your current momentum is minimized.

▪️ If you decide to chase yummy , go back and review your business plan. If Yummy looks like it has potential, change the focus of your business plan.

If you decide to try and have it both ways — trying to stay on your original path and also chase yummy — you won’t succeed in execution your business plan and you probably won’t do a decent job chasing yummy . 

You can’t have more than a handful of number one priorities. Multitasking is bad news for most organizations but it’s deadly for startups. And don’t for even a moment think you have the luxury of taking on additional resources to implement yummy . You don’t.

▪️ Explore whether or not the organization representing yummy is prepared to contribute resources to evaluate the potential of their idea and to help implement it if it turns out if it offers as much value as your current strategy. They may be willing to partner with you in the development of their idea and in the go-to-market action plan in return for a piece of the action.

Remember, every minute yummy consumes your time is a minute less you have to spend on the focus you’ve decided on to execute your overall strategy so resist the temptation to deviate from it without compelling evidence that you will be better off doing so.

Chasing stuff is not healthy. Busyness may be comfort food, but remember that you created a game plan to avoid eating it.

Successful businesses focus on their business plan and don’t chase things that are interesting and cool but are clearly off strategy.

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

• Posted 3.18.13 at 09:57 am by Roy Osing
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