Who are you not reaching today?

Here is a most relevant question.

Who are you not reaching today? The people and the number is huge relative to your potential business partners or customers. You know it is true. The times are changing. It is no time for business as usual.

Who will keep you in business tomorrow? Now think about it. Is it the people you are not reaching today?

Your passion for your mission and your customers can turn you into a hero

You have a passion for your mission. You want to do the right thing for your customers. You believe in a better customer experience. You are on a journey. This is a world that brings about radical change for your company. Your journey will require that you master “change management”. “Change management” is your primary role as a visionary who truly believes your company can end up in a better place with more reach for your mission and with an improved bottom line to fund it.

You are a champion of transformation and innovation in your company. You will face a lot of challenges. It will require hard work, perseverance and support from many. You will discover many allies and a few enemies.

Part of your work is about discovery. Much of it is about communication and formulation of strategy. A focus on going from strategy to a few actionable next steps is critical. This is definitely hard work. If you are up to it, which is precisely why it is interesting. Not everyone can lead the way.

All the hard work will lead to the reward. Unparalleled growth is the promise of an enriched customer experience. (Yes, there is data to support this.)

Too often, the customer’s experience of your brand is an afterthought. Your main focus is to become intentional about everything you can. To bring the issues front and center, you and others need to champion internal transformation. It doesn’t matter that you are unclear where to begin right now. Getting started will help you figure it out. You are going to need lots of helpers. And you probably need at least one mentor.

Acknowledging that the world is changing may be a wonderful place to start. We know consumer behavior is changing rapidly. It is impacting how customers view your company. Documenting how it is impacting your company is another key focus area. It is already impacting your bottom line.

Another focus of the journey may be to break a few deadly habits. We all have habits. One company habit is seeing customers from the view of a single transaction. This is called direct response. This habit can cause you to miss the customer (they are a millionaire) who has recently made a series of small transactions. What experience did they just have with you? As a result that experience, are they on a journey with you to engagement with your mission? Moving from a transaction mindset to a relational and engagement mindset can remarkably impact the experience the customer has. This has huge rippling effects into loyalty and total sales.

And so … it is a journey. Customer behavior is changing and changing fast. As a hero leading the journey internally, it is your role to help leaders see the impact to your bottom line and help everyone keep up.

"Some bosses say 'but I’m not paid to be a shrink'; There’s a great pair of words to describe such bosses: Ignorant. Ineffective" ~Tom Peters

"Some bosses say 'but I’m not paid to be a shrink'; There’s a great pair of words to describe such bosses: Ignorant. Ineffective" ~Tom Peters

" It's easier to focus on one number than it is to focus on a life." ~Seth Godin

Here is the context.

Measuring without measuring

 

As an organization grows and industrializes, it's tempting to simplify things for the troops. Find a goal, make it a number and measure it until it gets better. In most organizations, the thing you measure is the thing that will improve.

Colleges decided that the SAT were a useful shortcut, a way to measure future performance in college. And nervous parents and competitive kids everywhere embraced the metric, and stick with it, even after seeing (again and again) that all the SAT measures is how well you do on the SAT. It's easier to focus on one number than it is to focus on a life.

"The genius of leadership is its humanness and heart." ~Lolly Daskal

"The best advice that I can offer you is to learn the language of the C-Suite when making the case for what it is you believe is the right thing to do." ~Brian Solis

Why can't Amazon make a profit?

Why can't Amazon make a profit? The answer is, they choose not to. Now to some extent this defies logic on several levels. First, they are a publicly traded for profit corporation. Second, you would think the stockholders would demand it. Yet, Amazon has been one of Wall Street’s darlings in the past decade. Amazon’s stock price jumped 234 percent in the past five years alone, giving the company a valuation of around $120 billion.

In those five years, Amazon’s sales have tripled to more than $60 billion a year, while its profits stayed remarkably flat. The reason for Amazon’s stagnant profit is its founder’s notorious commitment to long term growth. Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon in 1994 and has lead the company ever since, has a track record of investing everything his company earns right back into it. Defending his investment strategy in his latest letter to shareholders, Bezos wrote:

  “Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in new business arenas.”

This way, Amazon became the largest online retailer in the world and in the same way the company is now striving to become a dominant force in the distribution of digital media.  So far, investors seem to believe in Amazon’s long term success, but some day the company is going to have to proof it can turn a sizeable profit.

It is as Bezos recently noted:

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine. We’re always working to build a heavier company.”

Can you BLUF?

We all spend a lot time in meetings, sending and responding to emails and talking with others on the phone. More and more we need to cut through the clutter and get to the point quickly in meetings - and in messages.

Let's take a lesson from the Navy. We could all take advantage of BLUF. That’s the acronym they use in the military for Bottom Line Up Front. In a military setting, BLUF communications allow people to grasp the essence of a situation immediately and seek details only as necessary. It’s like a Cliff Notes for every situation.

Here is another nifty list, also from the military. Always describe:

• What’s what.


• So what.


• What next.

If you’re in a meeting that is focused on getting to the bottom of an important situation, these are great guides. Encourage people to cite their headlines from the start. It not only saves time, it ensures the communicator has a point in the first place.

Collaboration gone wild?

Is this what collaboration looks like in your organization?



The CEO and the C-Suite can set reasonable limits on what can feel like collaboration gone wild. For most decisions, a form of RACI, decided up front, can help. The key is discipline to stick with it.

R - Recommend (Who, hopefully an individual, makes the recommendation)

A- Approve (Who, hopefully an individual, approves the decision)

C - Consult (Who needs to have input before the decision is made)

I - Inform (Who needs to be notified of the decision)

Your desk job makes you fat, sick and dead ...

Podio co-founder Jon Froda along with panelists Cali Williams Yost, CEO and Founder of Work+Life Fit Inc, Kate Lister from Telework Research & Richard Leyland, Founder of Worksnug explored the potential of ‘workshifting‘ and how working from anywhere has immense possibilities when it comes to productivity & work-life balance.

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Will you shape the vision?

IT is like business engine, CIOs are accountable for critical part of business that is constantly changing and evolving. Contemporary CIOs should be capable of evolving leadership skills to not only match pace with the changes in technology and the pace at which organization can effectively manage these changes, but also proactively drive changes in business transformation.

Shape the Vision: CIO and his/her team can play a large role in shaping a vision of the firm as a place where passionate individuals want to connect with and learn from one another. CIO offices also have a significant responsibility to choose and deploy the IT that will help their firms realize the vision. Simply put, IT can no longer just be about numbers and algorithms; it has an opportunity to be a significant catalyst for passion and a tool for encouraging questing and connecting the innovation dots.

Ignite Passion: The range of technologies have emerged that can help foster a deeper sense of connection and purpose in employees, ignite latent worker passion and bring together disparate parts of the organization. But these new tools also necessitate a new way of thinking, a creative way to do things and a flexible way to work smartly.

Set Evolution: The emergence of the CIO coincided with the birth of the PC and end user computing. That role certainly matured as the Internet age unfolded. Now, it’s social, mobile, consumerization of IT, Big Data and a major shift in how IT services are delivered (cloud). These changes are inspiring spiritual conversations around the role of the CIO, these are all evolutionary and in some ways even predictable.

Hirable like me?

Most managers would like to think they base their hiring decisions on candidates’ skill. But new research suggests that once a candidate passes through an initial HR screening, a bigger factor comes into play: how similar the interviewee is to the person doing the hiring. Kellogg School of Business assistant professor Lauren Rivera spent nine months embedded in a professional service organization and noted three key reasons why this takes place: the "Will this person fit in?" question; the fact that people define merit on the basis of their own experiences; and that managers get excited by candidates who have similar passions and interests. Hiring managers forget that "there are other ways people can a) be likeable and b) be socially skilled other than being a mirror image," Rivera says.

More here: Hirable Like Me (Kellogg Insight)

What is your new ecosystem?

The need for change is obvious. The CIO as change agent not only touches his/her own function, but also need make influence on entire organization and business ecosystem as well, it takes strategic planning, methodology and practice in orchestrating such transformation. This is a big deal. If the business isn't strategic it will be impossible for technology to be strategic as well.

Define Roadmap: In fact, the required changes, at the most fundamental level, need be well documented. A clearly defined roadmap is available, and industry best practices are in place to serve as a framework upon which the solution can be implemented over time. The transformation to a more proactive service/solution delivery organization with repeatable management processes in place of the 'crisis of the day' leadership model, can be a reality, but only if the CIO is the proactive, visible and charismatic sponsor.

Optimize Process: Meanwhile, to compete, business unit leaders need IT to ensure the availability and reliability of their business process automation tools/technology, so their staff can function as efficiently as promised, back when they justified the tool purchase. In fact, many organizations have little insight into their cost structures and who is consuming the assets. They have no idea where they are spending their money on and often assume it is mainly being spent on items which are actually much lower on the list. Every IT finance group can capture costs but the challenge is to have visibility and traceability between costs and the assets consuming those costs. The leadership team needs IT to be the business process optimization expert for the company, to find creative sources for competitive advantages, to better compete.

Ask for Help: One of the first things a CIO must do in a transformation initiative of this magnitude is to ask the business for help. The effort will fail if the business units are unwilling to invest resources and accept a "period of pain" where service levels may be adversely impacted. CIO can envision themselves talking with business unit leaders, selling them on the challenges and the vision for the future. Will CIO be open to new perspective, willing to adapt the new skill set to the demands of evolving technology or adapt their role to the evolving business requirements for technology? Will CIO be learning agile to understand business ecosystem and connect innovation dot cross-functional, cross-industrial and cross-cultural border? It takes both attitude and aptitude.

Will you transform the culture?

Many IT departments are still reeling from the "slam it in and fix it on the fly" approach that was required by the rush to automate all core business processes (late 1990s & early 2000s). A reactive, crisis-driven and internally focused 'systems management' culture evolved as a result, such culture becomes barrier for IT to reach higher level maturity.

From “Heroic effort” to “Collaboration Effect”: IT department-wide culture is maintained by a 'Heroic effort' reward system, a value system that is proving to be nearly intractable. Along with the Hero mentality, expertise silo evolved a non-collaborative, finger-pointing culture that renders truly effective SLAs impossible to measure & enforce. A fundamental change in the heroic effort rewards culture is required to put an end to the reactive, crisis-driven and technology systems focused role for the IT department, and shift to business-driven, collaborative IT mentality because the business requirements for technology management have changed. The rapid push for offering ‘cloud-based’ services and the need to retool IT to centrally manage these, is certainly a perfect opportunity to rethink the role of IT and make a cogent case for a service-level driven rewards and recognition culture

The transformation journey must start with the CIO. However, very few CIOs are willing to step away from the existing IT management paradigm and hero-based rewards culture to adopt a new role as a culture change transformation sponsor. This has not been a required leadership skill-set for the CIO role to date. It is a dramatic change in skills, priorities and rewards tactics. Can veteran CIOs who came up the ranks accept this need for a dramatic change in IT culture? Will they have the required skill set to sponsor such a change? Do they have the charisma to achieve buy-in from the current IT staff. Or will it take a crisis? CIOs must drive the elimination of the heroic effort reward culture. This is the principal challenge for current “up through the ranks” CIOs. Recognizing the need for this fundamental change has not been easy for most veteran CIOs.

Be Change Agent to retool Organizational Culture: Culture is perhaps the most invisible, but powerful fabric surrounding organization, the toxic culture like water, which can sink the enterprise ship, IT is also at unique position to well align people, process and the latest technology to empower talent, enforce communication, enhance governance, and enable cross-functional collaboration, to retool organizational culture for achieving high business performance potential.

 

Will you be the Change Agent?

Change is the second most popular word in 21st century. Why change is so tough and what really keeps (C-suite) executives from embracing organizational transformation is FEAR: fear of letting go of heroic leadership, fear of losing control, fear of navigating through uncharted territory, fear of chaos.

But change is inevitable, due to the CHANGE nature of technology, CIOs shouldn’t get pushed for change, they are actually at better position to play such a role as change agent in leading organizations’ transformation.

Will you be the change agent?

What is the real cost of email?

Tom Cochran  believes that email is the most abused method of communication in every office environment. And the widespread perception that it has no incremental cost is chronically damaging workplace efficiency. According to Tom, the challenge we are facing isn't an aversion to technology, but change. I think that sums it up very well.

Tom suggests there is an entrenched level of comfort with email, making it habitual and a communications crutch. We have to take a holistic view and see email as one of many channels for collaboration. Adopt a breadth of tools to connect people, teach them the appropriate use of each and encourage smarter use of the right technology.

I also find that an open office environment creates less of a dependency on email as "literally" walls come down and teams naturally collaborate.

More here: Email Is Not Free - Tom Cochran - Harvard Business Review.

Why are the most successful leaders also givers?

Inc. editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan talks to organizational psychologist Adam Grant about his new book, Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. Expect to sit through heated conversations in the next few months about who in your circle is generous to a fault, who expects a quo for every quid, and who is out for what he can get.

That's how Adam Grant categorizes the ways people use interactions to succeed--or not--in their careers and lives. Grant's book, Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, is already garnering plaudits for the rigor of its science, the freshness of its arguments, and the pleasure of its prose. Inc. editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan spoke to Grant, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, about how giving can help you lead.

More here: Why the Most Successful Leaders Are Givers | Inc.com.

As a leader, do you have more than two modes of operating?

Any great leader faces a multitude of challenges every day. Whether it's communicating strategy, helping people through change, holding on to excellence in the face of compromise, or just navigating the leadership environment, there is no shortage of development opportunities lurking in each day's schedule.

Les McKeown has worked over the years with leaders on all of the challenges above--and many, many more. But surprisingly, the skill that he sees more leaders struggle with more than any other is relatively mundane (but very important): the ability to work with their team as an equal. To be "merely" a resource, rather than the team leader.

As we've seen, many leaders can only operate in one of two modes--in charge, or not there. In other words, once they join their team (virtually or otherwise), the team instantly defers to them, and they take the lead.

Truly great leaders have a third mode: The ability to sit with their team without needing to be in charge, using their subject matter knowledge just the same way as anyone else around the table would. More here.

Is it productive to work at home or anywhere other than the office?

Certain subjects just naturally incite opinion wars. The big ones, like political preferences, or whether you’re Team A or Team B, are better left out of polite conversation. But when it comes to doing your job effectively, where do we draw the line? Should the nature of a person’s autonomy — or lack thereof — be at the whim of the boss, or the discernment of the employee?

The four corners of the Internet nearly came to blows recently when tech-world darling and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer boldly put a stop to employees working remotely. Needless to say, people are a little upset.

I'm definitely in the let them work at home camp. Here is a pretty good infographic on the state of things.

Why was Readers Digest bound to fail?

This blog by Seth Godin is worth reading in it's entirety. What is your Readers digest idea?

Heartfelt criticism of your idea or your art is usually right (except when it isn't...)

Check out this letter from the publisher of a magazine you've never heard of to the founder of a little magazine called Readers Digest:

But, personally, I don't see how you will be able to get enough subscribers to support it. It is expensive for its size. It isn't illustrated... I have my doubts about the undertaking as a publishing venture.

Of course, he was right--given his assumptions. And that's the except part.

Criticism of your idea is usually based on assumptions about the world as it is. Jackson Pollock could never have made it as an painter in the world as it was. And Harry Potter was rejected by just about everyone because for it to succeed the way kids read would have to change.

The useful element of this sort of criticism isn't that the fact that people in the status quo don't like your idea. Of course they don't. The interesting question is: what about the world as it is would have to change for your idea to be important?

In the case of Readers Digest, the key thing that changed was the makeup of who was reading magazines. Most of the people (and it was a lot of people) who subscribed to the Digest didn't read other magazines. And so comparing to other magazines made no sense, except to say, "this is so different from other magazines, the only way you're going to succeed is by selling it to millions of people who don't read those magazines." And Starbucks had no chance if they were going to focus on the sort of person who bought coffee at Dunkin Donuts or a diner, and the iPad couldn't possibly succeed if people were content to use computers the way they were already using them.

Keep that in mind the next time a gatekeeper or successful tastemaker explains why you're going to fail.

Seth's Blog: Interpreting criticism