Darn It, I Cannot Resist New Year’s Resolutions

December 31, 2008 By 2 Comments

While I stand behind my post on Personal Quality Programs as the best way to make improvements in your life, I am a goal-oriented person and resolutions are like a challenge just daring me to achieve.  I confess that I cannot move through the New Year holiday without organizing my ambitions into a neat little list.

I’m also a big fan of making your goals public.  They seem to stick better when you’ve shared them with a few hundred of your friends.

In case you are interested, here are my goals for the upcoming year.

  • Complete and publish 1 e-book per quarter.  I’ve pussy-footed around this one long enough.  I love writing, I love publishing and I love the promotional opportunity with e-books.  I’m also a fan of the work and principles that David Meerman Scott espouses in the New Rules of Marketing & PR and his blog, Web Ink Now, and he’s convinced me of my need to publish in this format.
  • Read one book every two weeks cover to cover.  In this time-compressed, Tweet-driven (join me on Twitter) sound-bite world that we live in, I find myself reading the introduction, the first and second chapters and the conclusion.  Unfortunately, too many business books feed this formula by putting all the meaty content at the beginning and the end.
  • Launch my first on-line webinar/workshop modules.   Much like e-books, I’ve danced with this topic and not executed.
  • Increase work efficiency and manufacture more time for family.  Back to the Personal Quality program again.  Simple things, like saving minutes per hour by not monitoring e-mail in real time.  Ignoring blog stats and focus on content creation can help increase efficiency.  More efficient workouts at the gym can trim half an hour.  Getting up at 5 instead of 5:30 every morning is more time created.  With a bit of work, I can manufacture 2 additional hours per day to give back to work and family.
  • Make the tough decisions.  I preach about this in a business setting and yet I’ve held off on some key personal/professional decisions about my practice and career.  I’ve been staring at the cliff on pursuing a Ph.D. and have not jumped or stepped back.  It’s time to decide and keep moving.
  • Find more new professional experiences and conquer them. I’ve long wanted to teach in Grad school and last year it became a permanent part of my life.  I have a few more to knock out.

And last and not least, do a better job remembering how precious our time here is and to try and make every encounter in class, in workshops, in consulting engagements and in life, a good one.  Happy New Year.  Whether you are a goal-driven freak like me and have your own list, or you are satisfied to meander through your days, may you be happy and healthy.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Decision-Making, Marketing Yourself Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

So, What Are We Going to Call This Mess?

December 30, 2008 By 1 Comment

Note from the author: If you are easily offended, this social satire will likely succeed.

Every great disaster needs a name and it’s high time that we got on with naming this one. The sooner we name it, the sooner we can begin to put it in the rear view mirrors of our Toyota Hybrids. In fact, some enterprising souls might even be able to prosper from it.  The mind reels at the marketing opportunities.  I see sweatshirts and t-shirts.  Cool new logo wear, infomercials, evangelists and support groups.  But before the merchandising starts, we definitely need a cool name.

I’ve checked on the rules of naming disasters, and I can’t find any.  Someone somewhere is responsible for naming economic and natural disasters, but it’s a bit fuzzy as to which governmental office has the final say so.  The folks that dispense hurricane names refuse to take ownership of economic storms.

Around Chicago, we lay claim to: The Great Chicago Fire, The Eastland Disaster, The Iroquois Theatre, the 1968 Democratic National Convention (yep, it was  a true social and civic disaster) and the Chicago Cubs.

I suspect that it is a bit unconventional to name your disaster while you are living through it, but what the heck.  I doubt that our grandparents (and great grandparents for you generation Y’ers) referred to the economic calamity that launched with Black Thursday in 1929  by the label: The Great Depression until much later, but we can learn from their mistakes. Oh, and one point of clarification for those not up on ancient twentieth century history, Black Thursday was not a big shopping extravaganza like our more modern Black Friday on the day after Thanksgiving.

We still refer to the end of the insane phase of the late 1990’s as The Dot Com Bubble, and most associate that time with a period when we all momentarily lost our minds about most things including the laws of physics and economics.  Profits were tertiary, eyeballs were king and anyone with a ridiculous idea to spend money on something wrapped in a techno-buzzword could obtain financing.  The brand…Dot Com Bubble has meaning and staying power.

I’m generally not allowed to name things, and my good friend Mike who occasionally reads this (you know who you are), is also not allowed to name anything either.  We both come up with lousy ideas.  However, in the hopes of jump-starting the brainstorming, here are some thought-starters:

We’ve got the perfect storm (hey, that’s not bad, but it’s taken) of calamities hitting at the same time.  The mass collapse of the world’s formerly strongest capital markets; a housing market crash of remarkable proportions, the dissolution of Wall Street, the evaporation of our auto industry, the collapse of consumer spending, the biggest holiday season shopping disaster in 40 or more years, accelerating retail and corporate bankruptcies, remarkable greed on display, audacious con-men in play and the open market sale of a senate seat by an insane governor.

The popular press is even jumping on board. Today’s Wall Street Journal carries an article that predicts the end of the United States during 2010. And from the school of I’m not sure where I heard it, some survey reported that more Americans are resorting to sex as a low cost entertainment alternative to shopping or dining out.  I didn’t realize it had gone out of fashion when times were good.  (Hey, I never claimed this was a family blog.)

All in all, these are powerful attributes to build a brand around.  For right now, I’m going with the: The Great Purge. Or maybe, The Great Bailout, or The Great What Were We Thinking?

OK, I’ll quit trying to do something I’m no good at.  You come up with the name.  I’m busy lining up my foreign sources for the logo-wear.  Call me when you’ve got the name and I’ll place the orders.  We can donate a percent of the profits to Congress to support the pay raise that they just voted themselves.

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The Last Yard: AT&T’s Failure to Fully Satisfy in Spite of A Competition Killing Product

December 28, 2008 By 2 Comments

I suspect from the crowd at the Crystal Lake, IL AT&T store on the day after Christmas, that I was not the only person in America that had decided to surprise someone in their family with a new Apple 3G iPhone.  While I cannot be certain what it was like at the Verizon store where they do not carry the iPhone, the AT&T location was filled with people seeking to port their numbers and accounts over to this exclusive provider for the iPhone.

Before I get too far, my issue and our learning opportunities come from AT&T’s System for on-boarding new customers with the iPhone.  The store team on the ground in Crystal Lake was great throughout the entire process.

My issue is more with AT&T’s seemingly incomplete and poor system (not the store’s) for helping customers ramp up on this season’s ultimate killer product.

Here’s a quick synopsis of what it took.

  • I started the process of acquiring a new iPhone for my college-age son a few weeks ago.  I use AT&T in my business, but the family was with the other guys.  I needed to find out how I could add a phone and deal with the texting, internet and voice needs of a serial texter.  I called AT&T and spoke with 2 reps who were completely incapable of confidently telling me what my options were and what the final costs would be to add a second line, switch to family talk and meet my son’s specs for usage.  Time investment…approximately one hour and no satisfaction whatsoever.
  • I tried the website.  Same result…no luck.  I defy anyone to pull off this simple transaction using their website.  Also, on this prime shopping day during prime daytime hours, the site was down for quite awhile undergoing maintenance.  Hmmm.  I wonder who scheduled that event?
  • I went to the store in Crystal Lake, IL and 45 minutes later I walked out with a new iPhone and Brett’s assurance that I could bring it back after Christmas to port my son’s Verizon number and move all of his contacts.  I also had the 800 number for the AT&T porting service in case I wanted to try that on my own.  Outstanding!  Score one for dealing with real live people face to face.
  • Christmas Day…the iPhone was a huge hit and a total surprise.  My wife and I had resorted to a little bit of Christmas present cruelty by just mumbling and groaning something about contracts every time my son raised the question of whether there was an iPhone in his future.  OK, it was mean, but the kid is tough, the world is not always kind, and it sure heightened his surprise!
  • Christmas Day again.  I wondered whether AT&T was aggressive enough to have people standing by to help their many, many new customers activate their freshly unwrapped products and start the meter running for billing purposes.  No such luck.  The recorded message indicated that they were closed for the day.  (OK, I feel a bit Scrooge-like here, but if I have a killer product like the iPhone and my success is a function of getting people smiling and dialing or texting as quickly as possible, I might have taken a different path on the holiday.)
  • December 26.  I power-dialed the 800 number at AT&T, put the speakerphone on and wrote a blog post, answered e-mail and reviewed the latest draft of a presentation.  After one hour and twenty minutes of being on-hold, I gave up. The next step was the store.
  • We were early, and got right up to the counter.  Another helpful Rep efficiently ported over my son’s 245 contacts from the Verizon phone (big score!) and then started the phone number port process.  The dedicated line for store reps must have been slammed.  He was on hold for 34 minutes before anyone answered.  During this time, the store filled, the line grew and everyone was after the same thing.  The family next to us had a shopping bag filled with iPhones needing numbers.  Before long, every rep in the store was on the phone and customer service ground to a halt.
  • Truth be told, once our rep was connected with someone on the AT&T side, the port was carried out smoothly and we were quickly on our way.  Probably not a moment too soon, as the people in line were getting a little feisty as the reps continued to be stuck on hold waiting for help.

My Points:

Again, this is not one of those 8 hours on the tarmac with no food or water and the toilets clogged, stories that the airlines are so good at creating.  And yet from this experience, I can’t help but think that AT&T doesn’t get it.

  • Any opportunity to capture a competitor’s subscribers must be a huge opportunity for the phone companies.  There has to be a natural motivation to create happy new customers.  All of those Verizon converts are viable prospects for internet, cable and any of the other products that they come up with to slowly bleed consumers dry.  The iPhone is the killer-app for converting customers, and its star power may not last forever.
  • The iPhone is a resonator…(Tuned In).  It is truly a remarkable device that practically sells itself.   And while the device offers a remarkable experience (not necessarily for the phone portion), AT&T missed the chapter on creating remarkable customer experiences.
  • If you are AT&T, what chucklehead decided that it was OK to staff the call center with a Rep level that had customers waiting for hours on the phone or almost an hour in-store to get their new products up and running? Someone somewhere focused on costs, kept the staff lean and forgot that they were in the business of creating great customer experiences.  And oh yeah, I would have had people working on Christmas Day to help satisfy their overwhelming urge to use this great new product.

The Bottom-Line:

Thanks to the team in Crystal Lake for helping us out so effectively, and thanks to Apple for such a great product.  As for you AT&T, I can think of other industries and companies that are disappearing because they failed to execute on the last yard.  Any leader or any company that is arrogant and complacent about taking care of customers is likely not a good long-term bet.  Perhaps they will figure out the “system” to satisfy customers with the next killer product that comes along once in a lifetime.

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Leader, What Are You Doing to Improve Your Value Creation?

December 26, 2008 By 1 Comment

How much value are you creating as a leader?

How much more value can you create?

How are you supporting the ability of your customers (employees) to create value? Where should you improve to strengthen your value creation?

What are your core processes as a leader?

How much waste do you generate through your leadership activities?

Borrowing from the principles espoused in “Lean” these are just a few of the key questions that every leader should ask himself/herself as part of their own personal development initiatives. Unfortunately, in my experience, few if any of these questions are asked or answered either by individuals or their direct leaders.  This has to change.

In a world that is begging for radical reinvention of business and leadership practices, the organizations and individuals that are diligent in pursuit of the answers to these and related questions will make it through the storm.

Leadership should be one of the principal value creation components of the management system, yet  poor leadership practices often result in increased complexity, added waste and blocked attempts to streamline processes and make improvements that would otherwise benefit the organization and its customers.

One of the key reasons that leaders and leadership practices often fail to create value (or to create more value) is the lack of a common operational and actionable definition for the role of a leader.  Another cause is the lack of top management commitment to ensuring that leaders are accountable for ever-increasing contributions to the firm’s value creation mission.  I’ll focus on the former in today’s post.

During the course of my career, I’ve developed and leveraged something that I describe as The Leader’s Charter, to help develop other leaders as well as to remind me of my True North as a leader. It reads as follows:

The Leader’s Charter:
Your primary role as a leader is to create an environment that:

•facilitates high individual and team performance against company and industry standards…

•supports innovation in processes, programs and approaches…

•encourages collaboration where necessary for objective achievement…

•promotes the development of your associates in roles that leverage their talents and interests and challenge them to new and greater accomplishments.

As I sit here and think about the Charter’s application and relevance for helping leaders in context of the questions at the top of the post and in light of the world situation, I suspect that it is time for another update.  The next update must add specificity to the people development issues covered in the current version, while incorporating all of the primary “value creation” processes that a leader controls and impacts.

I don’t intend on wordsmithing the 2009 version of The Leader’s Charter here in this post, but I will take a stab at identifying a broader universe of areas that leaders must be held accountable for in their roles.  I would love your inputs, additions and constructive suggestions via comments or by e-mail.

The Value Creation Processes/Activities of a Leader

  • Developing others through coaching, feedback and by encouraging and supporting the pursuit of developmental (stretch) activities.
  • Creating a working environment that draws out the collective knowledge and skills of team members in pursuit of solving customer problems.
  • Ensuring that the standards for accountability, values, general behavior and communication are understood and adhered to by all participants.
  • Clarifying and communicating a Vision that anchors organizational goals and aspirations and gives context to team and individual activities.
  • Creating forums to gain ideas and insights into customer issues as part of strategy formulation.  Involving everyone in capturing and translating the Voice of the Customer into strategies and actions.
  • Ensuring that individuals and teams have the resources they need to carry out their tasks.
  • Ensuring that teams and individuals gain access to skills development and educational opportunities.
  • Eliminating fear from the workplace (Deming) and replacing it with a focus on customers and improvements.
  • Determining what measures contribute to improving understanding and continuous improvement and implementing the systems to monitor and act on these measures.
  • Look at the workplace as a system and support the continuous improvement of the entire system. (genesis: Deming.)

It would be easy to keep adding to this list with a series of increasingly granular tasks.  My focus is on making this granular enough to be actionable and high-level enough to not be prescriptive.

Let me know your thoughts on other ways/areas that leaders must focus on to create value in their roles and for their organizations.

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Change, Management Innovation Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Merry Christmas!

December 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Peace on Earth and Good Will Towards All!

Filed Under: Uncategorized
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