George Kohlrieser: An interview by Bob Morris
George Kohlrieser is an organizational and clinical psychologist. He is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behaviour at IMD and consultant to several global companies including Accenture, Alcan, Amer Sports, Barclays Global Investors, Cisco, Coca-Cola, HP, IBM, IFC, Morgan Stanley, Motorola, Nestlé, Nokia, Roche, Sara Lee, Tetra Pak, and Toyota. He is also a Police Psychologist and Hostage Negotiator focusing on aggression management and hostage negotiations. He has worked in over 100 countries spanning five continents.
Kohlrieser is Director of the High Performance Leadership (HPL) Program, an intense six-day IMD program for experienced senior leaders and the Advanced High Performance Leadership (AHPL) for former HPL participants. He completed his doctorate at Ohio State University where he wrote his dissertation on cardio vascular recovery of law enforcement leaders following high stress situations. His research has made significant contributions to understanding the role self-mastery and social dialogue has in helping leaders sustain high performance through life long learning.
He is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, adjunct faculty member of Union Graduate School, Antioch, Ohio, adjunct faculty member of Fielding Institute San Francisco, California, adjunct faculty member of Zagreb University, Croatia. He is past president of the International Transactional Analysis Association, San Francisco, California and is also a member of the Society of International Business Fellows (SIBF). He has consulted for the BBC, CNN, ABC, and CBS and his work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and other leading newspapers and magazines.
He is author of the internationally bestselling book, Hostage At The Table: How Leaders Can Overcome Conflict, Influence Others, and Raise Performance, and, more recently, co-author of Care to Dare: Unleashing Astonishing Potential Through Secure Base Leadership with Susan Goldsworthy and Duncan Coombe.
Here is an excerpt from my interview of him. To read the complete interview, please click here.
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Morris: Most change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original (perhaps unrealistic) expectations. More often than not, the resistance to change is cultural in nature, the result of what James O’Toole so aptly characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.” Your thoughts?
Kohlrieser: This is a very interesting and challenging point. In fact, research shows that people do not naturally resist change – they resist the fear of the unknown and the pain of the change. The human brain actually thrives on curiosity, innovation, new learning, challenge and change to create new neurons until the day we die. This has come to be known as brain plasticity. Followers with a secure base leader will be empowered to successfully navigate the uncertainty, ambiguity, and other unknowns associated with change. James O’Toole is correct: most people are hostages to the “ideology of comfort” and to the status quo. They do not dare themselves to do something new or different. The challenge for leaders is to build trust that enables them to drive change. If leaders are not driving change, they are not really leading. We must dispel the myth that people naturally resist change – it is simply not true.
Morris: Looking ahead what do you think will be the greatest challenge that CEOs will face?
Kohlrieser: The greatest challenge I see is the “paradox of caring” – being able to both care and also dare followers, teams and organizations to achieve their full potential and to be true innovators. How do leaders show enough caring and bonding, even with difficult people and those they don’t like? Giving regular feedback and conveying hard truths unlock the door to the highest levels of performance. Successful leaders challenge their people by inspiring them and building trust, not by coercion, control or threats.
Leaders must drive change. Without change organizations wither and die. Leaders who don’t drive change put their companies in grave danger. The challenge facing leaders is to explain the benefits that change will bring. I use the term ”secure base leader” to describe someone who gives a sense of safety as well as the inspiration and energy to encourage followers to explore and take risk. In other words, you must care enough to encourage daring by shutting down the defensive nature of the brain and invite the mind’s eye to seek opportunity and possibility. This combination is crucial, and it’s why my new book about unleashing astonishing potential is called Care to Dare.
Morris: In your opinion, why do so many C-level executives seem to have such a difficult time delegating work to others?
Kohlrieser: It comes down to focus and trust. Secure base leaders, referred to in my books, always look for underdeveloped talents and turn delegation into opportunities to stretch people. This means they have to trust people to learn, develop and possibly to fail. Letting go of control is often the most difficult thing for an executive to do. After all, their experience means they often assume they know how to do things better, which may or may not be true. Give people a secure base leader and they will achieve amazing things – delegating is one form of stretching another person to show what they can do. The executive must always be standing behind as a secure base. A good example is flight training. There is a moment when the flight instructor must relinquish the flight controls to the trainee.
Morris: When and why did you decide to write Hostage at the Table?
Kohlrieser: I have been held hostage four times. Early in my career it became clear that hostage negotiators have to establish a relationship with a very unlikeable, even despicable person. They must engage in a dialogue under high pressure and influence the hostage taker to give up their weapons and their hostages knowing that they will likely go to prison. The success rate of hostage negotiators doing this work is an extraordinary 95 per cent. When I described what hostage negotiators do to the executives and other professionals I work with at my IMD High Performance Leadership Program, they wanted to know if the secret of hostage negotiation can be applied to situations when one is being held a psychological hostage.
It is one thing to be a hostage with a gun to your head; it is another to be held hostage by a boss, spouse, situation or yourself. People wanted to know how hostage negotiations applied to everyday situations. So the “hostage” metaphor is a highly empowering concept that I wanted to describe in the book based on theory and actual stories. The fact is even when physically a hostage, you don’t need to feel a hostage. The techniques used to gain freedom in a hostage situation can be used by all of us in everyday life. Warren Bennis and Dan Goleman, my two wonderful mentors, colleagues and friends, encouraged me to formulate these ideas into a book, and I was honored to have Warren Bennis include it in his Leadership series.
Morris: Obviously, much of the material in the book seems to be based on what you learned from your extensive experience as a police psychologist and hostage negotiator. What were the most valuable lessons learned from that experience?
Kohlrieser: I have learned a number of lessons in my 40-year career. The most powerful lessons for me have been:
1. The power of bonding and the impact dialogue can have on an adversary, a hostage taker, or a person threatening violence.
2. The paradox of caring. Hostage negotiation succeeds because the hostage taker feels genuine care, interest and concern from the hostage negotiator.
3. The power of focusing on the goal and not on the danger or the problem. When facing a gun, the brain will naturally focus on the weapon unless you train your brain to focus on the person and the goal.
4. The power of language, dialogue and of asking questions.
5. Making concessions within a negotiation.
6. The power of loss in motivating people and in driving violence, especially hostage taking. There is always a loss that precedes a hostage-taking situation.
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To read the complete interview, please click here.
George cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites:
His home page
His faculty page
His Amazon page
IMD “Big Think” interview
YouTube videos
Simple Rules for a Complex World
Here is an excerpt from an article written by Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.
Artwork: Nuala O’Donovan/Photography: Sylvain Deleu
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We reported our findings in HBR (“Strategy as Simple Rules,” January 2001). At the time, we knew that simple rules worked in practice, but now—as a result of subsequent research that we and others have done—we have a much richer understanding of why they are effective and how to construct them.
Simple Rules in Action
The story of América Latina Logística (ALL) illustrates how simple rules can help companies shape strategy in an uncertain environment. It also demonstrates that this approach can be useful in a setting beyond the technology sector—such as a dilapidated freight railway in southern Brazil.
The team decided to adopt a simple-rules approach to the work ahead. Let’s look at how that approach helped ALL’s executives achieve alignment, adapt to local circumstances, foster coordination across units, and make better decisions.
Carmine Gallo on “the Apple experience”: An interview by Bob Morris
Carmine Gallo is the communications coach for the world’s most admired brands. A former journalist for CNN and CBS, Gallo works directly with the world’s top business leaders to craft compelling messages, tell inspiring stories and share innovative ideas. Gallo is a popular keynote speaker and has addressed executives at Intel, Cisco, Medtronic, Hewlett Packard, SAP, Pfizer, Linked In, Chevron, and other global brands. Gallo writes bestselling books including The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs, the winner of an Axiom award for one of the best business books of 2011. The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs has become an international bestseller, translated into 14 languages. Gallo’s subsequent book, The Power of Foursquare, reveals how businesses leverage new mobile marketing tools to attract, reward and engage customers. His latest book is The Apple Experience: Secrets to Building Insanely Great Customer Loyalty, published by McGraw-Hill in 2012. He graduated from UCLA and has a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern. Gallo lives in Pleasanton, California, with his wife and two daughters.
Here is an excerpt from my second interview of him. To read the complete interview, please click here.
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Morris: Who are Apple’s “internal” and “external” customers? To what extent (if any) does Apple treat them differently? Please explain.
Gallo: The Apple Store “internal” customer refers to Apple Store employees. “External” customers are you and me, the folks who walk into the store to buy a product. Apple likes to say the soul of the Apple experience is in its people: the internal customer who is hired, trained, motivated, and empowered to do what is right for the customer.
Morris: What are the defining characteristics of Apple’s “insanely great customer experience” both internally and externally?
Gallo: I believe you can understand the Apple Store experience in two words: enriching lives. Those are the first two words on the Apple Store credo card that all employees are encouraged to carry. When you “enrich lives,” magical things start to happen. You hire employees who are passionate about serving the customer. You empower employees to spend as much time with a customer as they deem necessary. You design interesting spaces and multimedia displays in the store so customers can see and touch the devices. You can create innovative programs like One to One to help customers unleash their inner genius. It all starts with the vision to enrich lives; a vision that was very important to both Steve Jobs and former Apple head of retail, Ron Johnson (now CEO of J.C. Penney).
Morris: In two of your previous books, the focus is on Steve Jobs: his innovation and presentation “secrets.” To what extent does Apple’s “insanely great customer experience” illustrate any of those secrets? Please explain.
Gallo: I wrote The Apple Experience because we had much more to learn from Steve Jobs. In fact, some Apple Store employees told me they had read The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs and applied the principles to the sales floor, the “red zone,” as its known. That made me think: If the Apple Store is creating the next generation of customer service and some employees are using my book as a guide, then I have a real opportunity to capture and perhaps even influence the next level of the customer experience!
Morris: To what extent did Disney stores provide a model for Apple stores? To what extent did Apple stores provide a model for AT&T stores?
Gallo: I think it was just the opposite. Believe it or not, Apple inspired Disney! An executive who had the task of reinventing and revitalizing the Disney Store asked Steve Jobs for advice. Jobs’ response: Dream bigger. No better advice has ever been given. The new Disney Store will look a lot like Apple Stores complete with immersive, multisensory experiences, open space, uncluttered, and more. AT&T was also directly inspired by the Apple Store model. For example, walk into an AT&T retail location and you will be greeted within ten feet or ten seconds of entering the store. You’ll find the same approach in the Apple Store. The first “step of service” in the Apple Store is to greet a customer with a “personalized, warm welcome.” The way someone is greeted significantly impacts that person’s perception of the brand.
Morris: What are the basic tenets of “Disney’s People Management Philosophy”? What is its relevance to the Apple organization?
Gallo: Disney employees deliver a consistent experience because the organization is dedicated to a 4-step approach to people management: selection, training, communication and care. The same four tenets apply to Apple and to any other organization committed to improving the customer experience. You must select people who can deliver a superior experience, train them to do so, teach them to communicate effectively with customers, and care for them so they enjoy working with the company.
Morris: What is the three-step process by which Apple hires people? Why is being “fearless” a necessary trait?
Gallo: This is very powerful. The Apple Store likes to hire people who (1) display grit. Grit means they can handle pressure. (2) Can deliver a Ritz-Carlton level of customer service with the proper training and (3) could have gone toe-to-toe with Steve Jobs. Let me clarify the last point. Few people could have gone toe-to-toe with Steve Jobs. But it’s a question meant to gauge whether or not the job candidate displays fearlessness. In order for an effective feedback loop to occur, a company must have employees who are not afraid of giving and receiving feedback. They must be ‘fearless.’
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To read the complete interview, please click here.
Carmine cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites:
http://www.appleexperiencebook.com
http://www.carminegallo.com
Andrea Kates: Part Two of an interview by Bob Morris
Andrea Kates
Andrea Kates (akates@BusinessGenome.com) is the founder of the Business Genome® project and author of the visionary bestselling business innovation book, Find Your Next (McGraw-Hill, November 2011). As a business strategist, facilitator, and speaker, Andrea has led more than 250 business innovation initiatives for global corporations, entrepreneurs, and organizations including Royal Dutch Shell (Asia-Pacific), Audi, Allstate, Continental Airlines, GM/OnStar, Hewlett-Packard, JP Morgan Chase, KPMG, the Houston Texans (NFL), and P.F. Chang’s. Find Your Next was based on her original research with top leaders of rapidly growing companies including GE ecomagination, IndieGoGo, LunaTik, Autodesk, Cisco, Sharp Healthcare, and Autodesk. Find Your Next reveals the keys to a revolutionary model of business innovation that has the capacity to change business as we know it.
Known to many as the next generation’s “brand whisperer,” Andrea created the Business Genome project to help companies adapt to a rapidly-changing global business environment and to gain a competitive advantage by discovering cross-industry opportunities for innovation. Her hallmark CoLabs immerses organizations in the hands-on application of cross-industry insights.
Andrea is a member of the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) community and featured 2012 TED speaker (short talk).
Here is an excerpt from the first of a two-part interview of her. To read the complete interview, please click here.
To read Part One of my interview of her, please click here.
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Morris: When and why did you decide to write Find Your Next?
Kates: I decided to write it because it needed to be written. Because it didn’t exist. Because I couldn’t find a book to recommend to clients and colleagues that explained how companies were actually finding their way out of feeling stuck—that could actually delineate a process for moving forward and deliver on what everyone was looking for—a path to sustainable revenue growth.
On the one hand, we have classic literature like Michael Porter’s work, but it didn’t focus on discovery and wasn’t written for a world as unpredictable and fast as ours, today
On the other hand, we have books on innovation—by people like Clayton Christensen and Tom Kelley. When you read those books, it’s as if a pure innovation approach is for a particular type of person. An innovator. Born, not made. We can’t all be Steve Jobs (and we shouldn’t try to be).
We needed a book that everyone could relate to, that would help us realize our own innate ability to observe changes in our markets and do something about them. That would help us translate insights into growth.
Morris: Were there any head-snapping revelations while writing it? Please explain.
Kates: I love that phrase, “head-snapping revelations.” Yes. I discovered three about today’s companies that make traditional MBA thinking obsolete: 1.The speed of the market 2. The transparency of today’s business dynamic—we’re connected and social media introduces many new voices into the purchase decision and 3. The globalization of commerce.
With all three revelations in mind, I literally hit myself on the side of my head and realized why we were all so stuck. No process existed for dealing with them. And the book changed as I was writing it.
Morris: To what extent (if any) does the book in final form differ significantly from the one you originally envisioned?
Kates: I was recently on a panel with Sean Moffitt, author of Wikibrands, and he asked me a similar question. He asked me why I hadn’t written the book earlier. I told him I thought I had to crack the code on all of business genomics before I could even get started.
Well, that was never going to happen—I was paralyzed and overwhelmed thinking that I couldn’t write the book until I had all of the answers. I’m sure all authors feel that way when they start out. And we all have to learn when to sit down and just write.
I took a dose of my own medicine. I always tell clients that asking better questions can be the key to unlocking new answers, new opportunities. So, I decided that instead of waiting for the perfect answers to be ready, I would ask the questions with my readers. The power of the book would be the interviews themselves. My asking questions and my readers, or people that represented my readers, answering them. It was the honest telling of the messy stories that didn’t fit neatly into a 7 habits type of list. Conversations with business executives from P.F. Chang’s, GE ecomagination, Placecast, IndieGoGo, EMC Corporation, J&J Global, Korn/Ferry International, GM/OnStar told the real story of how people found their “nexts”—whether it was a multi-billion dollar “next,” like GE, or an entrepreneurial “next,” like Cooper’s Hawk Winery and Restaurant.
Find Your Next went from being yet another academic model or collection of case studies to a very down-to-earth, approachable collection of stories—and the four steps that everyone’s process has in common—whether large or small, business or nonprofit, local or global.
Morris: For those who have not as yet read Find Your Next, to what does the title refer?
Kates: It’s all about taking our organizations from point A to point B. Finding your “next” means just that—how we move toward tomorrow. How we figure out what to do next. When can we see right now? What does it mean about what might happen tomorrow? It’s not as farfetched as it sounds. It isn’t predicting the future, but really looking at the present…and looking at it differently.
How did Nikon see photos changing once mobile phones added cameras, and Flickr and Picasa added photo sharing? Easy.
Morris: What are the core components and major benefits of the business genome?
Kates: You get ahead of the shifts in customer preferences. You evaluate your current performance with creativity, like “trendability”—how well you’re adapting to changes that will affect your company. And your industry.
Morris: Briefly, how can the Business Genome approach help to achieve various organizational transformations? First, of innovation?
Kates: Don’t get seduced into the “let’s create purple tacos” side of innovation. There’s a balance to be achieved between stagnation and pure creativity. The insight here is that innovation can mean recombining things that are in plain sight and accessible, even in another industry—like Zappos customer service.
Morris: Of marketing into a world where customers can be inside?
Kates: Think of your company as an open book or a “glass house” where authenticity rules. We have to observe and listen to our customers—they’re part of our brands now.
Morris: Of talent, culture, and leadership?
Kates: Engagement comes from real buy-in-to ideas. You don’t get buy-in from employee manuals and policies. You get buy-in from real communication with the people you work with.
Morris: Of process by collaboration?
Kates: You need to get all of the players in the room at the same time when you’re designing any new process. The analogy I like is airport design—you can design an airport to streamline baggage handling or make the distance from security to gate the shortest for flyers, but one size doesn’t necessarily fit all.
Morris: Next, the transformation – and proliferation and distribution – of what you call “the secret sauce”?
Kates: Brand is a contact sport these days—everyone (management, front line, customers, competition) has a hand in the molding of your product’s market perception.
Morris: Of the emergence of trendability?
Kates: Business moves at warp speed today. We don’t have to be intimidated by forecast models or wait for the perfect strategy to hit us between the eyes. We can all put “trendability”—the ability to see signs of change before it happens—on our radar screens and build our cultures to respond fast.
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To read all of Part Two, please click here.
To read Part One of my interview of Andrea, please click here.
She cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites:
http://www.businessgenome.com/
http://www.youtube.com/businessgenome
http://www.facebook.com/BusinessGenome
Andrea Kates: Part One of an interview by Bob Morris
Andrea Kates
Andrea Kates (akates@BusinessGenome.com) is the founder of the Business Genome® project and author of the visionary bestselling business innovation book, Find Your Next (McGraw-Hill, November 2011). As a business strategist, facilitator, and speaker, Andrea has led more than 250 business innovation initiatives for global corporations, entrepreneurs, and organizations including Royal Dutch Shell (Asia-Pacific), Audi, Allstate, Continental Airlines, GM/OnStar, Hewlett-Packard, JP Morgan Chase, KPMG, the Houston Texans (NFL), and P.F. Chang’s. Find Your Next was based on her original research with top leaders of rapidly growing companies including GE ecomagination, IndieGoGo, LunaTik, Autodesk, Cisco, and Sharp Healthcare. Find Your Next reveals the keys to a revolutionary model of business innovation that has the capacity to change business as we know it.
Known to many as the next generation’s “brand whisperer,” Andrea created the Business Genome project to help companies adapt to a rapidly-changing global business environment and to gain a competitive advantage by discovering cross-industry opportunities for innovation. Her hallmark CoLabs immerses organizations in the hands-on application of cross-industry insights.
Andrea is a member of the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) community and featured 2012 TED speaker (short talk).
This is an excerpt from the first part of a two-part interview of her. To read the complete Part One interview, please click here.
To read Part Two, please click here.
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Morris: Before discussing Find Your Next, a few general questions. First, which person has had the greatest influence on your personal growth? How so?
Kates: No one has ever asked me that question before–it’s not something I generally share with clients. But now that you’ve asked, I’d have to say Twyla Tharp, a choreographer I studied with when I was a teenager. She was trained in both classical ballet and contemporary dance and was one of the first crossover choreographers—she incorporated nontraditional music like Billy Joel’s and David Byrne’s into her works and blended ballet moves with modern and even pop culture dance moves. That’s right, dancing. I may be a business analyst now, but I’ve lived a lot of lives, and one was as a dancer. What does dancing have to do with business? What could a dancer teach a business strategist? She taught me to have tenacity and fierceness, and her influence didn’t stop there. She actually taught me—through dance—three skills that would impact my career and success in amazing ways:
1. BUILD ON A CLASSICAL, TRADITIONAL DISCIPLINE (ballet) to CREATE A NEW GENRE (modern choreography). Twyla Tharp was never afraid to challenge conventional thinking about classical disciplines (in her case, ballet). That’s what she was known for. That’s what made her something singular. She built on what she knew about classical ballet—which was a lot—and transformed it through works like Movin’ Out—a piece set to Billy Joel music—and Deuce Coupe—a dance set to Beach Boys songs—into something that had popular appeal. She pioneered an entirely new form of creative expression that was much more dynamic and innovative. Her dance transformed the discipline of classical ballet into something that modern audiences could relate to—it fit modern times and modern themes.
2. BRING A TIRELESS WORK ETHIC TO THE JOB, EVERY DAY. Her dedication to her work combined with that radical vision inspired me to look at business—and, really, everything—with the same spirit. She worked hard, and set the bar high. You knew better than to ever come to rehearsal unprepared. Ever. You’d never whine. You’d be thrown out. There were hundreds of people who wanted your spot, so the competition was fierce. And she knew it.
3. WORK WITH ONLY “A” TEAM PLAYERS. Twyla worked only with the best—“A” Team players—dancing greats like Mikhail Baryshnikov, who was a super star in the world of ballet. Twyla was an “A” team player, so that meant I needed to do more than just work with them, with great people. I had to be great. I didn’t make the cut the first time I auditioned for her. I didn’t give up, either. I looked around, I analyzed what the dancers who’d gotten in had that I didn’t, and I trained myself for months to have it by the next round. That process of goal-oriented self-examination forced me to get where I needed to go. It made me disciplined. It taught me, again and again, how to take principles and ideas applied to one pursuit and reconfigure them on to another. It was about talent and dedication and people and creativity.
Wouldn’t you know it, Twyla Tharp went on to write two books on creativity for business leaders: The Creative Habit and The Collaborative Habit.
Morris: The greatest impact on your professional development?
Kates: My dad, Phil. He was a psychiatrist who became a stand-up comic when he retired. Of course, as you can guess, that combination made him a great role model because he taught me the power of translating insights into universal stories. It’s what all comics do, really, the really good ones. If you can take an insight and distill it down to something that gets a response from a large audience, you’re onto something powerful.
Dad had an incredible track record for understanding what makes relationships work and what makes people happy. My world is the world of commerce, but I ascribe to the same mindset in what I do—I understand what makes businesses thrive and the people within those businesses successful. I try to help people in a similar way by attempting to translate what makes businesses work into elements that can work for every kind of business person or organization, from entrepreneurs, to large companies, to nonprofit organizations, to government groups, or even think tanks. Anything that works should work for everyone, no matter how large or small they are. How famous or how underrated. If I can take a complicated set of decisions and boil them down into simple questions like “Do you want to buy low and sell high or buy high and sell low?”, then I—with them—can cut to the heart of the issue and formulate a game plan for their “next”—that non-obvious opportunity for growth.
In essence, something I’ve only just realized, I’m doing just what Dad did when he refined a joke until it hit just the right note. You can do the exact same thing with business strategy. With everything.
Morris: Years ago, was there a turning point (if not an epiphany) that set you on the career course you continue to follow? Please elaborate.
Kates: Yes, there was. Isn’t there always? To explain, let me first talk about how I got to where I am in my business thinking. I’ve been doing market research a long time, and when I first started, I focused on how to get businesses somewhere new and different, how to uncover untapped opportunities. I didn’t want to be one of those tired consultants that told their clients what was obvious to anyone who was paying any attention. I worked with so many different kinds of companies—in industries as diverse as telecom, energy, consumer goods, manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, technology, and even nonprofit. No matter what the assignment was, I always had a knack for asking a slightly different set of questions than I was assigned to ask, because I always believed that the really powerful answers couldn’t result from asking obvious, either/or types of questions. Perhaps that came from my dad, too.
As an example, when I first got involved in focus groups years ago, I didn’t like the kinds of questions we were asking. The questions were simple multiple choice questions like, “Which do you prefer, Cheer or Tide?”, instead of what I ended up asking and I thought would tell us a lot more, “What do you wish you could change about how you do laundry today?” What if they didn’t want Cheer or Tide at all?
Back then, we were somewhat limited to that kind of yes/no, binary thinking. We were driving our questions towards our solutions. It makes sense to do that, and it’s way easier. Analysis is always easier when you can fit answers into neat categories. Life is easier that way, but it doesn’t reflect the real world. Easier wasn’t better, or more insightful. All Cheer and Tide tells you is that the big nut to crack has to do with things like chemical formulations, fragrance, and price. It’s based on an assumption that customers worry about the same things that companies do: the product’s formula.
It wasn’t until later, when we learned how to evaluate “fuzzy data” and answers to open-ended questions came along, that we could finally start to do something with answers that were less black and white. And more informative.
It turns out that my early intuition was spot on, but it took almost ten years for everything else to catch up. So, the turning point was all about asking the right questions—the ones that told you what you actually wanted to know, not just the ones that were problems you could solve right then with whatever you had. Plus, for someone like me—and I suspect for my clients, too—it’s a lot more fun, and a more interesting way of looking at business.
The most significant business growth doesn’t come from incremental thinking. The most significant business growth comes from reading between the lines. That’s what I learned. If customers are honest and say that they don’t want either Cheer OR Tide, but instead don’t want to deal with laundry at all and would rather hire someone to do it for them, we need to be able to listen, understand, and act on that actual preference. P&G did just that recently when it launched Tide’s Pop-Up laundry services—companies are finally finding out what people want and crafting their product and service lines to give it to them. I love it when that happens. When companies listen with new perceptions to what will appeal to customers or when they uncover an unmet need and figure out a way to meet the need. That’s what I mean by reading between the lines.
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To read the complete Part One interview, please click here.
To read the second part, please click here.
Andrea cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites:
http://www.businessgenome.com/
http://www.youtube.com/businessgenome
http://www.facebook.com/BusinessGenome
http://twitter.com/#!/businessgenome
The Network Is Your Customer: A book review by Bob Morris
The Network Is Your Customer: 5 Strategies T\to Thrive in a Digital Age
David L. Rogers
Yale University Press (2010)
Here’s the challenge: our future networks can “make us not only more connected but, let us hope, more human.”
I am grateful to Thomas Kuhn and then to Joel Barker for filling one of my several knowledge gaps, in this instance the dual concepts of paradigm and paradigm shift. They have prepared me well for books such as this one in which David L. Rogers observes, “Today, business needs a new paradigm: the customer network. In customer networks, customers are no longer viewed as isolated individuals but are seen as dynamic and interactive participants in a network…To succeed, businesses, nonprofits, and organizations of all kinds need new strategies that match the behavior of customer networks. But first we need to rethink our image of customers, from individuals to networks. We need to stop thinking about the bees and focus on the hive.”
After identifying and briefly discussing four basic mistakes to avoid (Page 11), he shifts his attention to “Five Customer Network Behaviors” (12-15) and “Five Customer Network Strategies (15-20), then alerts his reader to 10 of the examples customer network strategies that are featured within the remaining narrative. They include a few of the usual suspects (Apple, Nike, Dell, Cisco, and Ford) but also a few unexpected exemplars such as author Stephanie Meyer (the “Twilight” series) and the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. All this is included in the first chapter (1) and by then, Rogers has begun to generate some momentum that carries him (and his eager reader) through more than 100 mini-case histories in Part II: Five Strategies to Thrive with Customer Networks, previously introduced (Pages 12-15). Briefly:
1. ACCESS: Be faster, easier, everywhere, “and always on.”
2. ENGAGE: Become a source of valued, preferably indispensable “content” [e.g. information, advice, constructive criticism].
3. CUSTOMIZE: Make offering adaptable to various customer needs.
4. CONNECT: Become included during your customer’s most important conversations and considerations.
5. COLLABORATE: Involve your customers at “every stage of your enterprise” [e.g. brainstorming to meet a specific need].
Rogers is dead-on. All of the customer feedback studies I have examined agree that “feeling appreciated” and “easy to do business with” are among the highest rated by respondents. With regard to #5, one of the most neglected opportunities to strengthen a customer relationship is to help each customer to strengthen its relationships with each of its own customers.
In Part III: Leadership and the Customer Network-Focused Organization, Rogers answers two separate but related questions with thorough explanations: “How specifically to plan and then execute a complete customer network strategy?” and “How to create the customer network-focused organization?” By now the reader understands that the five core strategies are appropriate for almost any organization, whatever its size and nature nay be. He introduces the “Five Step Customer Network Planning Process” and patiently guides his reader through each step. In the final chapter, he explains how to complete a transition from a customer focus to a customer network focus. He again stresses the importance of (a) intelligence generation, (b) intelligence dissemination, and (c) responsiveness to intelligence. Rogers then illustrates several key points when discussing Dell, SAP, and the aforementioned Obama campaign in 2008.
No brief commentary such as this can possibly do full justice to a book that contains such an abundance of valuable information, insights, and counsel. However, by now, I hope I have at least suggested the scope and depth of the potential benefits of the new paradigm that Rogers calls for. He expresses dismay (but not astonishment) when acknowledging that “we have not yet seen more customer network-focused organizations.” He suggests a few reasons for that, then concludes the book with still another affirmation of his faith in what needs to occur: a call to defend and strengthen digital access, equal access to knowledge and ideas, “those digital expressions, and our digital freedoms. If we do, then our future networks will continue to make us not only more connected but, let us hope, more human.” Amen.
Doing Both: A book review by Bob Morris
Doing Both: Capturing Today’s Profit and Driving Tomorrow’s Growth
Inder Sidhu
FT Press/Pearson
Organizational transformation is not — repeat not – a zero-sum game
One of the most self-defeating mindsets is suggested by the admonition, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” Obviously there are situations when there are two options that are mutually-exclusive. However, most of the time, when facing a choice, it is a mistake to select only one and dismiss all others. Inder Sidhu does not advocate “a balanced compromise between two objectives, but [rather] a mutually reinforcing multiplier in which each side makes the other better.” He cites comments included in Built to Last (1994) co-authored by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras when discussing a highly visionary company “that doesn’t want to blend yin and yang into a gray indistinguishable circle that is neither highly yin nor highly yang; it aims to be distinctly yin and distinctly yang – both at the same time, all the time. Irrational? Perhaps. Rare? Yes. Difficult? Absolutely.”
Sidhu devotes the bulk of his lively narrative to explaining how exemplar companies such as Apple, BYD, Cisco, GE, Google, IBM, and Procter & Gamble achieve these strategic objectives:
• Improving the core business while conducting disruptive innovation
• Strengthening current account relationships while adding new ones
• Fine-tuning what is done well while transforming or eliminating what isn’t
• Creating customer evangelists while creating steadfast partners
• Thriving on “Main Street” while exploring “the road less traveled”
• Doing it right and doing what is right (i.e. what matters)
Obviously, doing both (of whatever) is not always possible or, when possible, advisable. Also, any lessons learned from the exemplar companies such as those Sidhu examines (especially Cisco) must be modified to accommodate the specific needs and resources of much smaller organizations.
With all due respect to the value of these lessons, I think the single greatest benefit of this book is the mindset it can help its reader to develop. Although Sidhu does not cite them and their books, he has clearly been influenced (albeit indirectly) by business thinkers such as Henry Chesbrough (Open Innovation and Open Business Models) and Roger Martin (The Opposable Mind) as well as Venkat Ramaswamy and Francis Gouilllart (The Power of Co-Creation). The most effective executives an open mind in combination with insatiable curiosity, emotional intelligence, and highly-developed skills for integrative thinking. Organizations as well as individuals must never play a zero-sum game. Long-term growth and short-term profitability are NOT mutually exclusive.
The authors’ recommendations in the aforementioned books track almost seamlessly with Sudhu’s own:
1. Be open-minded to possibilities, whenever/wherever they occur
2. Respect and examine those that are plausible, especially if unorthodox
3. Seek out collaborations that are mutually-beneficial
4. Welcome each “failure” as a precious learning opportunity
5. Juxtapose (for rigorous scrutiny) contradictory ideas and options
6. Embrace change as an ally, not as a threat
7. Achieve constant improvement with a discovery-driven process
8. Welcome and support principled dissent
9. Cultivate and nourish an insatiable appetite for learning
10. Constantly challenge what James O’Toole characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom”
I highly recommend all of the aforementioned books as well as Dean Spitzer’s Transforming Performance Measurement; also Enterprise Architecture as Strategy co-authored by Jeanne Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson.
Peter Sims: An interview by Bob Morris
Peter Sims (Photo: Mona T. Brooks)
Peter Sims is an author, speaker, and entrepreneur. He is the author of is Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, from Simon & Schuster: Free Press. Previously, he was the co-author with Bill George of True North, the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek best-selling book, and he worked in venture capital with Summit Partners, a leading investment company, including as part of the team that established the firm’s London Office.
His work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Tech Crunch, and Fortune and he’s a contributor to the Reuters, Fast Company, and Harvard Business Review blogs. He received an M.B.A. from Stanford Business School where he and several classmates established a popular course on leadership and has had a long collaboration with faculty at Stanford’s Institute of Design (the d.school). He frequently speaks or advises at corporations, associations, and universities, including Google, Eli Lilly, Cisco, ConAgra, Pixar, and Stanford University.
He lives in San Francisco and his great-great-great grandfather, Jacob Gundlach, founded Gundlach Bundschu (GunBun) in Sonoma, California’s oldest family-owned winery, which is run today by his cousins who, unlike Peter, know a lot about wine.
* * *
Morris: Before discussing any if your books, a few general questions. First, when and why did you begin your association with Stanford’s Institute of Design (the d.school)?
Sims: I was introduced to George Kembel, the cofounder and Executive Director of the d.school in 2002. George became my design thinking teacher and mentor, while I shared about my experiences as an entrepreneur, investor, and student of leadership and entrepreneurship with George and his d.school colleagues. Understanding design methods literally changed the way I think; all of a sudden, I was immensely more creative, and the key insight I had was that those methods overlapped with the way entrepreneurs worked in the unknown. That became the basis for Little Bets.
Morris: What business lessons have you since learned from that association that have direct relevance to successful change initiatives in almost any organization, whatever its size and nature may be? For example, is it possible to design initiatives that will avoid or overcome cultural resistance?
Sims: There are a few principles from design that will influence the business world for years to come. The first is the ability to do rapid, low-cost prototyping at the early stages of developing ideas. We never learned that in business school, yet planning in PowerPoint and Excel is often a terrible waste of time when the answers exist outside the office, in the unarticulated needs of potential users of that idea. That’s where ethnographic observation and need-finding techniques from design, the kind used by anthropologists, play an important role. People in business are surprisingly bad at truly understanding their customers’ needs. Market research doesn’t work for identifying unarticulated needs; just ask Steve Jobs who often says, “People don’t know what they want if they haven’t seen it.”
Morris: Thomas Edison once observed, “Vision without execution is hallucination.” Here’s my question: Even after having designed the best strategy, what should leaders do if there is no buy-in?
Sims: I’ve experienced this; it happens all the time. If there is no buy-in, leaders should wonder if they are hallucinating. That’s one reason I’m very happy to see the rise of a number of schools of thought featured in Little Bets, such as design, lean startups, and counterinsurgency that advocate failing quickly to learn fast, in order to test assumptions and build on gains that work. We’re living in an era that rewards bottom up innovation, yet top-down thinking is still the dominant management norm, an outgrowth of industrial management. The world is far too uncertain for top-down management – just ask Generals in the Army as they’ve learned in the Middle East, where they don’t know the problems they’ll encounter each day. They have to be able to rapidly adapt.
Morris: In your opinion, are investment opportunities for venture capital firms better, worse, or about the same today as they were when you were associated with Summit Partners? Please explain.
Sims: The market is far more competitive and saturated with capital today than it was several years ago. As the investment hold periods get longer, and the return profiles fall, venture capital as an industry is going through a recalibration, where name brand firms will make it, while a lot of dumb money will go away. In addition, the social media valuations we see today, such as Linked In at 30+ times revenue, or Facebook valued the way it is indicates a bubble. The only question I cannot answer is how long that bubble will last.
Morris: Now please shift your attention to True North, a book you co-authored with Bill George. For those who have not as yet read it, what is “true north” and what is its significance?
Sims: Your True North represents your most deeply held values and aspirations.
Morris: What are the defining characteristics of “authentic leadership”?
Sims: Bill George defined authentic leadership along five dimensions in his book Authentic Leadership, most importantly leading from an ethical set of values, and a sense of purpose.
Morris: Throughout history, who do you think offer the best examples of an “authentic” leader? Please explain.
Sims: Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Jane Adams, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Oprah and Pixar’s Ed Catmull is a great modern day example, as are the leaders Jim Collins profiles as Level 5 Leaders in Good to Great.
Morris: Were Hitler and Stalin authentic leaders? Please explain.
Sims: No, because they weren’t ethical.
* * *
To read the complete interview, please click here.
Peter Sims cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites:
Wikibrands: A book review by Bob Morris
Wikibrands: Reinventing Your Company in a Custiner-Driven Marketplace
Sean Moffitt and Mike Dover
McGraw-Hill (2011)
How the new levers of brand development achieve customer participation
What is the meaning of the noun wikibrand(s)? According to Sean Moffitt and Mike Dover, it refers to a “progressive set of organizations, products, services, ideas, and causes that tap the powers of customer participation, social influence, and collaboration to drive the business value.” They go on to suggest, “Derived from the Hawaiian word wiki, traditionally meaning `quick’ but more currently meaning `tribal knowledge’ and `a collaborative website,’ and the Middle English word torch, whose current business meaning is `a distinctive name identifying a product or a manufacturer.’”
My take is that the most powerful brands, wikibrands, are those that create multi-dimensional participation and multi-sensory experience in co-creation with an organization’s most loyal and most engaged customers. “In a connected world and cluttered marketplace,” Moffitt and Dover note, “brands are tapping into the instinctual human need for genuine participation, peer-to-peer dialogue, and shared media to survive and thrive.” They explain how to “get true brand engagement, customer experience, and social collaboration into the very nucleus of an organization and not leaving them hanging out on the periphery.” They make it crystal clear that this is not a marketing opportunity; rather, this is a business opportunity. “It’s a big, cultural driving force…a pragmatic road map for winning in the current marketplace.”
As I worked my way through the lively and eloquent narrative, these are among the portions that attracted my attention in Chapters 3-8.
• “The Seven Divides: Compelling Reasons to Change” (Pages 21, 23, 25-30)
• “Top Factors in the Changing Importance of Social Media, Word of Mouth, and Community Building (Figure 2.1, Page 22)
• “Eight Customer Experience Norms” (Table 2.2, Page 24)
• “The Six Benefits of Wikibrands” (Pages 50-62)
• “Seven Key Language Principles” (Pages 107-112)
• “Community Participation Motivations” (Table 8.1, Page 132)
• “Six Classes of Influencer” (Pages 136-138)
Note: An influencer is someone who has significant influence on the values, opinions, preferences, and consumer behavior of others.
It is important to keep in mind that the information, insights, observations, caveats, and recommendations provided by Moffitt and Dover were revealed during wide and deep research and are anchored in real-world situations, many of which involve global “wikibranders” such as Accenture, Best Buy, Cisco, Disney, FedEx, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Nokia, and Procter & Gamble.
That said, I presume to suggest that the core principles as well as the most effective strategies, and tactics of wikibranding can also be of substantial value to much smaller companies such as family-owned retail franchises. Those who doubt that are urged to check out “Eleven Ways to Develop a Wikibrand” (Pages 278-286) and “Fifty-Question Assessment: Readiness for Brand Community” (Pages 286-2388) in which Sean Moffitt and Nike Dover provide material that, all by itself, is worth far more than the cost of several copies of this book. Is it that valuable? Read it and judge for yourself.
Inder Sidhu’s Doing Both: A book review by Bob Morris
Doing Both: How Cisco Captures Today’s Profit and Drives Tomorrow’s Growth
Inder Sidhu
FT Press/Pearson (2010)
One of the most self-defeating mindsets is suggested by the admonition, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” Obviously there are situations when there are two options that are mutually-exclusive. However, most of the time, when facing a choice, it is a mistake to select only one and dismiss all others. Inder Sidhu does not advocate “a balanced compromise between two objectives, but a mutually reinforcing multiplier in which each side makes the other better.” He cites comments included in Built to Last (1994) co-authored by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras when discussing a highly visionary company “that doesn’t want to blend yin and yang into a gray indistinguishable circle that is neither highly yin nor highly yang; it aims to be distinctly yin and distinctly yang – both at the same time, all the time. Irrational? Perhaps. Rare? Yes. Difficult? Absolutely.”
Sidhu devotes the bulk of his lively narrative to explaining how exemplar companies such as Apple, BYD, Cisco, GE, Google, IBM, and Procter & Gamble achieve these strategic objectives:
• Improving the core business while conducting disruptive innovation
• Strengthening current account relationships while adding new ones
• Fine-tuning what is done well while transforming or eliminating what isn’t
• Creating customer evangelists while creating steadfast partners
• Thriving on “Main Street” while exploring “the road less traveled”
• Doing it right and doing what is right (i.e. what matters)
Obviously, doing both (of whatever) is not always possible or, when possible, advisable. Also, any lessons learned from the exemplar companies such as those Sidhu examines (especially Cisco) must be modified to accommodate the specific needs and resources of much smaller organizations.
With all due respect to the value of these lessons, I think the single greatest benefit of this book is the mindset it can help its reader to develop. Although Sidhu does not cite them and their books, he has clearly been influenced (albeit indirectly) by business thinkers such as Henry Chesbrough (Open Innovation and Open Business Models) and Roger Martin (The Opposable Mind) as well as Venkat Ramaswamy and Francis Gouilllart (The Power of Co-Creation). Their major recommendations track almost seamlessly with Sudhu’s own:
1. Be open-minded to possibilities, whenever/wherever they occur
2.Respect and examine those that are plausible, especially if unorthodox
3. Seek out collaborations that are mutually-beneficial
4. Welcome each “failure” as a precious learning opportunity
5. Juxtapose (for rigorous scrutiny) contradictory ideas and options
6. Embrace change as an ally, not as a threat
7. Achieve constant improvement with a discovery-driven process
8. Welcome and support principled dissent
9. Cultivate and nourish an insatiable appetite for learning
10. Challenge what James O’Toole characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom”
I also highly recommend the aforementioned books by Chesbrough, Martin, and Ramaswamy and Gouilllart as well as Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From, Henry Mintzberg’s Management? It’s Not What You Think!, and The Talent Masters co-authored by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.
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