Be Different or be dead

December 6, 2010

Every remarkable leader has these 16 simple strengths to use

Source: Unsplash

Every remarkable leader has these 16 fundamental strengths to use.

The most critical role the leader plays is to bring in the right “human essence” to their organization to ensure its success and survival in the long term.

These are the competencies remarkable leaders look for…

Lifelong learner — Look for evidence that prospects have been active learners. What areas are they interested in? Who have they learned from? How can their learnings be put to use in your organization?

Infection agent — the ability to “infect others” with the virus of your business plan is critical in terms of executing it. Some people have the interest, passion and tenacity to get others excited about advancing the cause.

Listener — you can’t discover customer secrets and create dazzling customer moments if you are not a 100% Listener.

Apologizer — a successful recovery act after you have screwed a customer around begins with “I’m sorry”. Make sure you covet people who do this naturally. Some can’t. Some don’t want to.

Human being lover — Dazzling customers is all about taking care of them and it can’t be done if your people would rather be doing something else other than dealing with humans.
Look for people with a born desire to serve. Memorable customer moments are possible only through employees that have the natural ability and desire to serve others.

High pain tolerator — greatness doesn’t come without disappointment and pain along the way. Resilience pays off.

Successful failure — Progress requires people trying stuff and failing along the way. That’s innovation. But failing is only useful and strategic if the learning from it advances the organization’s strategy. Failing begets learning.

Friend maker — deep customer relationships result in a revenue stream that goes on forever. Such connections depend on trust and friendship.

Storyteller — stories “breathe life” into a strategy. They paint pictures of what it looks like when a strategic game plan is being successfully executed in the field. You need people who can “light their eyes up” with a story about some aspect of your strategy. Talk the event.

Simple thinker — Execution is simplicity. Elegance that can’t be implemented is worthless. Think Simple. Find Simple. Dumb everything down.

Connector — think about this one from an internal perspective. Results (i.e. delivering what the customer wants) are produced through processes working across the organization and vertically.
This requires the ability to connect with others and build effective relationships with them. Service breakdowns often occur when a link in the teamwork chain breaks. Constant connections go a long way to avoiding such problems.

Reaction maniac — a huge aspect of surviving a customer screw-up is responding to what has occurred in the right (read as “Loyalty Building”) way. The truth is, a successful Recovery actually builds Customer Loyalty MORE than if the mistake never happened. Counter-intuitive I know, but true.

Service Recovery = FIX it + Do the UNEXPECTED.

Chillax-er — you really do need folks that react well under extreme pressure. STOP—PAUSE—THINK—RESPOND THOUGHTFULLY. This is tough to train people in (sometimes I think it is impossible).

Rememberer — a good memory will go a long way to dazzling a customer. It shows you paid attention the last time you connected with the person. It shows you care enough to remember.

Nano-inch seeker —  there’s no such thing as a silver bullet. Progress is made by having a distinguishing strategy and executing it flawlessly inch-by-inch-by-inch. Get an inch of progress FAST. Look for people who have demonstrated this capability.

Customer empathizer — can you look at yourself through the customer’s eyes? Objectively. Compassionately. ‘Solution-mindedly’. It’s not about your organization; it’s about the customer moment and you need practising empathizers if you want raving lunatic fans as customers (which we all do).

Competency coveting is the responsibility of senior leaders to ensure the right people with the right skills, experience, aptitude and attitude are in the right places to execute the strategy of the organization — delegation of this task is simply not an option.

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

• Posted 12.6.10 at 12:00 pm by Roy Osing
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November 26, 2010

Why amazing cultures are not created by one thing

Source: Unsplash

There is no silver bullet in changing the culture of an organization, just as there is no single brilliant idea that will guarantee the survival of an organization in today’s world.

No single solution or idea that will suddenly, overnight, protect it from demise.

Rather, cultural change is a game of inches, where the objective is to get as many people in the organization trying as many different approaches as possible, and achieving fast increments of progress along the way.

What happens is that the passionate actions of a few individuals begin to infect the masses; more and more change activity is created and a new momentum begins.

This sustainable new momentum, in turn, defines the new culture of the organization: a culture that embraces creativity and innovation, and a business that can look forward to a long and prosperous life.

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

• Posted 11.26.10 at 08:00 pm by Roy Osing
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November 25, 2010

Why your business plan should focus on 3 limited things

Source: Unsplash

Why your business plan should focus on 3 limited things.

If you try to boil the ocean you’ll lose; if your business plan focuses on 3 limited things, success awaits.

So, here you are. You have completed your business plan for your new business 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 a handful of number one priorities as a fledgling company. 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 limited priorities in 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 11.25.10 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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November 4, 2010

How my quiz can help leaders know if they are special

How my quiz can help leaders know if they are special

Source: Unsplash

One of the most critical roles of a leader is to create a business plan and strategy for their organization that enables it to standout from their competitors in markets of changing customer needs and intense competition.

How does a leader approach the challenge? How do they know if their business plan is on the right path to being different from the herd of competitors they face in the market?

It is often the simple tools that provide the greatest insight into such a question, and over my 40+ year leadership career I’ve developed specific practical and proven practices that work together to build an organization that is unmatched by others.

If you want to see how your organization rates on the BE DiFFERENT or be dead scale, check out my 25 question quiz .

Rate your leadership in each of the critical categories of strategy, marketing, customer service, serving customers and sales to see how effectively you are applying my practices to separate your organization from the competitive blur in the marketplace.

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

• Posted 11.4.10 at 12:00 pm by Roy Osing
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