What's Best Next

You are here: Home / 2009 / Archives for July 2009

Archives for July 2009

Don't Follow the Customer

by

Good companies should be close to the customer and fanatical about customer service. But this doesn’t mean that they should let the customer lead. Joseph Morone, President of Bentley College, notes that if you only follow the voice of the customer, “you’ll get only incremental advances.”

Doug Atkin, a partner at Merkley Newman Harty, rightly puts it this way:

These days, you can’t succeed as a company if you’re consumer-led — because, in a world so full of so much constant change, consumers can’t anticipate the next big thing. Companies should be idea-led and consumer-informed.” (Quoted in Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age, 297).

That is an excellent insight:

Be consumer-informed, but idea-led.

How Much Sleep Do You Get Each Night?

by

Great discussion on exercise habits in the previous post.

It sounds like most people exercise in the morning and that a lot of people are early risers. Which leads to another question that would be great to hear people’s thoughts on: How much sleep do you tend to get each night? In your opinion, what is the best time to get up in the morning and the best time to go to bed at night?

Changing the Profile of HR

by

Great perspective from Tom Peters on HR, once again from Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age (pp 256-257; as before, all the punctuation like the  “…” is his, with the exception of any brackets):

I have long believed that human resources people should sit at the Head Table. I’m a fan of “HR.” It is … after all … an age of talent.

Problem [big problem, IMO]: All too often “HR folks” are viewed (all too) correctly as “mechanics.” Not as … Master Architects … who aim to … Quarterback the Great War for Talent.

I’ve devoted my career to the “people thing.” I desperately want “HR” to “WIN.”

Why doesn’t it happen?

Simple: A FAILURE OF IMAGINATION.

I wasn’t born yesterday. I understand there are thousands upon thousands of pages of petty laws and regulations that HR “must administer.” But that still does not excuse HR from … Re-imagining itself.

As leaders!

As … THE … leaders. [I don’t know if I would go that far.]

So work to “deserve it.” [There’s a stunning indictment.]

Please.

His next point is “Forge a Bold HR Strategy!,” where he goes on to say:

If you work for a big company, it no doubt has a “strategic plan,” a voluminous document that is the offspring of ceaseless deliberation.

Question: HOW BIG A “CHAPTER” (AND WHICH CHAPTER?) OF THAT “STRATEGIC PLAN” IS DEVOTED … EXPLICITLY … TO THE “HR STRATEGY”?

Maybe I’m out of touch. But most “strategic plans” I’ve seen don’t even have an “HR Strategy.”

That’s criminal.

There needs to be one.

With teeth.

And bravura.

Our “strategic approach” to tackling the “talent thing” is more important than our market analysis. (Or surely as important, eh?) (Forget that: MORE IMPORTANT!)

HR … I … WANT YOU … at … the … Head Table.

Filed Under: HR

WOW Projects

by

Tom Peters is well-known as a proponent of doing WOW projects. Here’s how he describes them in Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age:

The road to success is paved with … WOW Projects. Project: a task that has a beginning and an end, as well as deliverables along the way. WOW Project: one that has “goals and objectives” that inspire.

WOW Projects are:

  • Projects that Matter.
  • Projects that Make a Difference.
  • Projects that you can Brag About … forever. [I really, really, really dislike bragging, but you see the point. Very interesting spin if you interpret this in a God-centered way and take “forever” literally…]
  • Projects that Transform the Enterprise.
  • Projects that Take Your Breath Away.
  • Projects that make you/me/us/”them” Smile.
  • Projects that Highlight the Value that You Add … and Why … You Are Here on Earth. (Yes. That Big.)
  • WOW Projects are … not hype.
  • WOW Projects are … a necessity. (New necessity.)

What Time of Day Do You Exercise (if you do)?

by

I’d be interested in hearing from you on when you exercise. What time of day works best for you?

For years I would jog and lift weights right when getting home from work. For the last year or so I’ve been getting up early to exercise.

Both have their drawbacks — when I exercise in the morning, it feels like it delays the start of my day; when I exercise after work, it feels like it delays the start of my evening with my family.

What works best for you?

Knowing Talent

by

Yesterday I posted on Tom Peters list of how to attract talent to your organization from his book Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age. But how do you identify talent? Peters covers that as well. He argues that a “true exemplar of talent:

  1. Displays passion.
  2. Inspires others.
  3. Loves pressure.
  4. Craves action.
  5. Knows how to finish the job.
  6. Thrives on WOW.
  7. Exhibits curiosity.
  8. Embodies “weird.”
  9. Exudes a sense of fun.
  10. Thinks at a high level.
  11. “Gets” talent.

Attracting Talent

by

A good point from Tom Peters’ Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age:

To attract, retain, and obtain the most from Awesome Talent, organizations will need to offer up … an Awesome Place to Work: A place where people not only get paid “their due,” but also … get to initiate and execute great things.

Peters then offers up his “Talent 25” for how to do this (he expands on each of these points; I won’t do that here, but do recommending getting the whole book):

  1. Put people first! (For Real.)
  2. Be obsessed!
  3. Pursue the best!
  4. Weed out the rest!
  5. Focus on intangibles!
  6. Change the profile of HR!
  7. Forge a bold HR strategy!
  8. Take reviews seriously!
  9. Pay up!
  10. Set sky-high standards!
  11. Train! Train! Train!
  12. Cultivate leadership aspirations from the get go!
  13. Foster open communication!
  14. Lead by “winning people over”!
  15. Reward “people skills”!
  16. Show respect!
  17. Embrace the whole individual!
  18. Measure for uniqueness!
  19. Honor youth!
  20. Create opportunities to lead!
  21. Relish diversity!
  22. Liberate women! (There is a talent shortage — do not overlook 50% of the population.)
  23. Celebrate the weird ones!
  24. Provide a setting for adventure!
  25. Revealing the big secret! (Although Malcolm Gladwell might want to nuance this [see his Outliers: The Story of Success], Peters puts it this way: some people are more talented than others in an area, and some are way more talented in that areas.)

The Good Intention that Undermines New Business Ventures

by

From Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management:

There is no surer way to undermine a new business venture than to measure it by the profits generated, rather than by the learning accumulated.

He gives IBM as an example of a company that has learned this lesson:

IBM’s top-level growth team understood that when it comes to building a new business, you have to learn before you earn. Given this, they wanted to counter the debilitating assumption that if you’re not holding a new venture accountable for profits, you’re not holding it accountable for anything. Many of IBM’s past growth efforts had stalled when an early push for profits limited a venture’s potential upside by prematurely truncating the learning and experimentation that would have, in time, yielded a more powerful, and better targeted, business model.

No Tasks?

by

From Organized for Success: Top Executives and CEOs Reveal the Organizing Principles That Helped Them Reach the Top:

After studying a number of organizational leaders at close range, I discovered that they operate in a highly distinctive mental realm when it comes to organization and time management.

In my opinion, what CEOs are really doing in this different realm — the real focus of their time, their core and ongoing project — is what I call managing influence. I first started to understand this phenomenon during an interview with a CEO in which I repeatedly pressed him to describe his “tasks.” Finally he got a bit testy and replied, “Look, there’s just one traditional task I do: I edit drafts of speeches prepared by my speechwriter — and I do that mostly when I’m on a plane. Otherwise, no tasks.”

His retort brought me up short. I finally got it. No tasks.

But in the next breath, I asked myself, “These guys aren’t sitting around watching the flowers grow. So if they’re not doing tasks, then what exactly are they doing?”

Because virtually all their time is spent with others, I deduced that their work had to be conducted in some way through these contacts. By shadowing them, I had discovered, as described earlier, that these contacts were very free-form, consisting mostly of suggestions, questions, observations, and eliciting their direct reports’ views, interwoven with occasional chat about golf, family activities, etc.

What the CEOs were doing, I concluded, was not primarily ordering others, but influencing them through constant contact. So that became my focus: how CEOs use their time to guide their company by influencing others.

What's Not Best: When Customer Service Makes You Provide Your Info Twice

by

We’ve all experienced it: you call your credit card company or some other such company, and are prompted to enter your account number into the keypad. Then, when a real person comes on, they ask you for your account number again.

This is a poor customer experience. Why ask the first time if they are simply going to ask again? I can understand that, for security reasons, they might want the live person to get the number from you. But what possible benefit can it be to them to have you key it into the pad initially if they are only going to ask for it again later?

That’s a rhetorical question. I’m sure the companies have lots of good reasons. But, there are good reasons behind every poor customer experience. We need to get beyond allowing “good reasons” to complicate the customer’s life. And if we say “what’s the big deal with requiring the customer to do another 30 second action,” we aren’t truly thinking of the customer first.