Marketing Myopia Redux-Time to Recognize What Your Customers Really Need

March 30, 2012 By 4 Comments

It amazes and disappoints me all at the same time how many businesses have no clue what their customers really need from them.

This problem is epidemic in the technology world (consumer electronics and business technology) in particular, where feature, function and price wars continue to dominate the landscape in spite of the reality that we buy for many other reasons beyond feature, function or price.

While the old adage of the person seeking to buy a drill may be a bit trite, it’s true. Hint: you don’t need a drill…what you need are holes!

WE’RE BUYING TO SOLVE PROBLEMS!

Cases in Point-Webinar Service Providers:

I’m in the process of launching a Webinar Series as a means of better supporting my customers and yes, of marketing to those who have a problem that needs solving, and the search for a Webinar Service Provider is truly an odyssey.

These firms are at war with each other over feature, function and price, which is OK, except for the fact that the small business owners and solopreneurs they are seeking as customers are mostly worried about how to how to produce, promote and leverage these events to support their own business needs.

We don’t need a damned drill…we need some holes.

The providers are long on feature comparisons and most of them offer wonderful knowledge browsers to help you identify solutions to the most arcane technical problems. When I run into an arcane technical problem, I know right where to look. Right now, my problem in search of a solution is how to do this professionally and effectively. I respect my customers and prospects too much to do anything less.

Be Careful What You Ask For:

The theme of cluelessness on the part of one firm was underscored when I reached out to the support group  and the Rep’s sole emphasis was on ensuring that I didn’t call back again. He actually used the words, “we hope you don’t keep calling us,” as he attempted to push me to the knowledge browser which I had already tried before initiating the call.

Be careful what you measure and what you ask for, because you might actually achieve it. I won’t be calling or providing my credit card to this service provider.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

This issue transcends my own rather insignificant service provider search. It’s common for me to work with clients on strategy projects, and have to spend a good deal of up-front time getting them to quit defending how great their features and functions and products are versus their competitors. 

We seem to fall in love with our products and capabilities and lose sight of the real reasons we’ve invested all this time and money in growing our capabilities….the customers. The client’s problem is always the issue.

Take off your blinders and consider management surgery for your myopic view of the world. It doesn’t revolve around you.

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Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

 

 

 

Filed Under: Marketing, Strategy Tagged With: , ,

Leaders, Principles and the Pursuit of High Performance Teams

March 28, 2012 By 2 Comments

“In high-performance teams, the leaders managed the principles and the principles managed the teams.” –Carl Larson and Frank LaFasto via Jim Highsmith in Agile Project Management-Creating Innovative Products.

Larson and LaFasto in their assessment of high performance teams offer us a profoundly powerful and simple to comprehend answer to the question of how to support the emergence of effective teams: clear, strong, actionable, livable principles beget an environment for effective collaboration and innovation.

Every high performance team I’ve experienced as a participant, a sponsor or an outside advisor, was governed by an overarching set of principles or values that formed and framed the culture. And while good words alone don’t create success, the combination of the leaders and participants living and acting according to those words everyday made things work.

On successful teams, the team leaders…and ultimately the participants eat and drink the principles for breakfast, communicate them constantly and most importantly, they live them in how they collaborate, problem-solve and challenge themselves and their team members forward in pursuit of success.

And since as we all know, even the best of teams face dark days when nothing goes right, the guiding principles serve as bedrock for self-reflection and guidance for navigating the way forward.

There’s a cautionary tale here. As Highsmith warns us, “Grand principles that generate no action are mere vapor.”  When engaging with an organization for the first time, I make it a habit to understand a firm’s values, and all too often, what I find are nice words…unarguable in their intent, that serve only to occupy space on a wall in a conference room. It’s a wholesale failure on the part of the leadership of an organization, when the guiding principles aren’t a visible part of everyday life.

Teams are a fact of life. We execute strategy via projects. We innovate on teams. We develop new products, improve processes and search for ways to better serve our customers via projects and teams. We darned well better figure out how to succeed at this more often than not. Right now, in too many organizations, “not” is winning.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

This intangible, sticky, squishy topic of operationalizing guiding principles or values doesn’t lend itself well to a prescriptive list of steps-to-success. The onus is on you as a team leader, project leader, functional leader, informal leader or organizational leader to ensure that your best efforts are supported by meaningful, actionable guiding principles. If you can’t articulate what those principles are and what they mean for behavior, accountability and performance, then it’s time to take a step back and tackle this issue. The effort will pay dividends going forward. Larson and LaFasto are right…leaders should manage the principles and the principles will manage the team.

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Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

 

 

Filed Under: Leadership, Performance, Project Management, Strategy, Values Tagged With: , , ,

Systems Thinking Meets Platform Strategy and Social Media via Nike+

March 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

While I admit to being one of those people who views the idea of running as much more attractive than the actual running part (thus far, I’ve been satisfied to pass runners on my Specialized Road Bike, thank you), I’m blown away by Nike’s strategy with their Digital Plus business and specifically, their Nike+ program for runners.

It’s low tech (the shoe) meets media (Apple devices) meets social networking (the Nike+ community) meets platform strategy for Nike and potentially, marketing nirvana, based on the data and insights gained about their most passionate customers.  (Check out the Nike+ site to tune into the scale and scope of this initiative.)

There are strategy and marketing lessons here for all of us.

In the recent Fortune article, Nike’s New Marketing Mojo, the firm’s CEO, Mark Parker, describes a visual he had created awhile ago, depicting a dozen video game “Pac Men” consuming the Nike swoosh, as an indicator of how easily the company could be overtaken by competitors. A good many purveyors of commodity-like products are struggling to find differentiation in this world. Nike’s example offers an approach with massive dividends.

Digital Sport (the business unit) and its biggest hit, Nike+ is described in Fortune as, “not just about creating must-have sports gadgets. Getting so close to its consumers’ data holds exceptional promise for one of the world’s greatest marketers: It means it can follow them, build an online community for them, and forge a tighter relationship with them than ever before.”

The stats filled website offering indications of total miles run, calories consumed, steps taken and something called Nike Fuel earned, is a fascinating testament to how much engagement they’ve created. Fortune reports that 5 million runners now log onto Nike+ to check their status, set new goals, compete with friends and engage….all in the Nike ecosystem.

Watch for a rapid expansion in new offerings (complements) to support this platform strategy.

Questions and Thought Prompters for the Rest of Us:

  • Systems and platform thinking can have a profound impact on a commodity business. What’s your potential play?
  • The integration solves an interesting problem that few probably could have articulated. It connects like minded enthusiasts with each other and gives them tools that are useful and fun.  And it afforded Nike massive differentiation in a crowded market without resorting to the potentially most destructive of all tools, price-cutting.
  • The shoes and the ipod integration is interesting, the social media, data gathering power and the dialogue created in the Nike ecosystem is priceless. What is it about your customers and ecosystem that might lend itself to a rich dialogue and connectivity?
  • How might this strategy change your marketing approaches? If you are anything like Nike, it has meant a wholesale shift in marketing tactics. (Note: that doesn’t mean a reduction in marketing expenditures…just a shift in where they are spending.)

The Bottom-Line for Now:

I’m  a big fan of analogic reasoning and using one example to stimulate creativity in completely different environments. How might Nike’s example be adapted or extended to serve your purposes?

And, I confess that I might give the road bike a rest this Spring and join the Nike+ community. I’ll be slow moving dot on the Nike map!

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Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

 

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

Leaders, Tattoo this Causal Relationship on Your Forearms

February 22, 2012 By 6 Comments

I’ve been mildly surprised that the book, Beyond Performance-How Great Organizations Build Competitive Advantage by Scott Keller and Colin Price, hasn’t commanded more attention in mainstream business circles. Perhaps we’ve grown numb to the almost endless number of books purporting to show us the way to sustained success. However, don’t let the existence of 25,000 or so books published on managing change during the past two decades, blind you to some of the important and data-backed conclusions of Beyond Performance.

The book is the outcome of a massive McKinsey research initiative that suggests that the ability of an organization to gain and sustain success is a function of a focus on traditional performance tools and measures AND something they describe as Organizational Health. 

Organizational Health is defined as, “the ability of your organization to align, execute and renew itself faster than your competitors.”  

The authors backed by research that encompasses 600,000 survey respondents from more than 500 organizations; surveys and interviews with 6,800 CEO’s and an exhaustive literature review, put forth a powerful claim “On the strength of our research and analysis, we assert that the link between (organizational) health is more than a correlation, and is in fact causal.”

We’ve moved beyond correlation to a place where most of the 25,000 aforementioned books never go. The authors are stepping out on the statistical limb (a fairly sturdy, data-supported limb) in suggesting a causal relationship between performance and Organizational Health.

They take their conclusion one step further: “We argue that the numbers show that at least 50 percent of your organization’s success in the long term is driven by its health.”

What’s Organizational Health?

The short form: Organizational Health is described by three key components:  internal alignment on direction, quality of execution and capacity for renewal.

These three break down into 9 elements:

  1. Direction
  2. Leadership
  3. Culture and Climate
  4. Accountability
  5. Coordination and Control
  6. Capabilities
  7. Motivation
  8. External Orientation
  9. Innovation and Learning

The 9 further subdivide into 37 distinct management practices that can be measured, monitored and evaluated.  The 37 practices comprise the Organizational Health Index (OHI) survey, “a tool for measuring the health in rigorous and comprehensive manner.”

My Quick Takes:

Invest the time and read the book.  The book, the data, the OHI and the inherent management practices merit our time and attention!

There are practical implications for you and your firm now. Often, big  research studies seem to come back and confirm the obvious. There’s a little of that here, but the data backing of the conclusions allows us to move from conjecture about these practices to confidence that we need to focus our energies around promoting organizational health.  Anyone reading this or any other leadership and management blog will intuitively get that the 9-elements (and 37 practices) are essential. The book offers few epiphanies from an intellectual perspective. From a practical perspective, it clubs us over the head and reminds us that we tend to ignore much of the softer stuff (beyond performance activities and measures). Translation, too many business and leaders suck at cultivating organizational health.

It’s broader than employee engagement.  The OHI is comprehensive enough to bypass my gag reflex on employee engagement surveys serving as proxies for organizational health. If I see one more question asking me whether I have friends at work or whether I have the tools to do my job, the gag reflex will fail!

See also the last decade. Ignoring organizational health has in large part contributed to the creation of the lost decade we’ve just lived through. This past decade guarantees heartburn many years into the future.

Reminds you of your priorities. The authors and their concept of Organizational Health speak to the pieces we all intuitively know are essential for survival in this world…alignment on direction, focus on getting great people supporting execution, and promoting a culture that learns and adapts. The encouragement to work on the practices that beget health is an important reminder for all of us.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

No magical answers, but strong support for what the best leaders and managers have long known…the soft stuff of culture, climate and environment and all the inherent management practices are critical. Organizational health begets performance. Is it time for a check-up?

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Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

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

Lessons in Management Innovation from Main Street

February 8, 2012 By 4 Comments

In their July, 2011 Harvard Business Review Article, Adaptability: The New Competitive Advantage (great article, worth the $ IMO), Martin Reeves and Mike Deimler make a solid case for our need to cultivate critical soft organizational skills to survive and prosper in today’s turbulent business environment.

Reeves and Deimler suggest that leaders and firms shift their focus away from the traditional approach to strategy (creating an enduring and relatively static competitive advantage through price, positioning or differentiation), and instead focus on cultivating four critical capabilities:

  1. The ability to read and act on signals of change,
  2. The ability to experiment rapidly and frequently-not only with products and services but also with business models, processes and strategies.
  3. The ability to manage complex and interconnected systems of multiple stakeholders.
  4. The ability to motivate employees and partners.

On a grand scale, these four read like the playbooks in use at Apple, Google, Amazon and other Masters of the Universe who seemingly morph their businesses and business models at a torrid pace, capturing more of our attention and more of our consumption along the way.

On a more local and relevant for the rest of us scale, these organizational capabilities are nothing more or less than the outcomes of effective leadership coupled with an entrepreneurial spirit.

Most start-ups rely on their skills in all four of those areas, almost by instinct. Their business agility is keen due to resource limitations and because they are driven to experiment with their ideas and approaches until something sticks and they move beyond survival towards success.

Local Lessons In Winning Approaches to Business Strategy:

During the past few years, I’ve marveled at the start-ups and small to mid-sized businesses in my community who didn’t need an army of consultants or MBAs to teach them the very relevant and important lessons that Reeves and Deimler share in their article.

They live in a world where agility is survival. They understand, experiment, learn and iterate. They know to seize upon what works and build it out while the building is good. And they get that they need to continuously be looking for new approaches to innovate based on failures and successes and the inevitable copycats and disruptions.

  • There’s the wildly successful local Coffee Roaster, where the founders tackled the daunting task of starting a coffee business in the era of Starbucks, and have succeeded. They continue to morph their business model and strategy…and they experiment like fiends with new approaches to serving their clientele and shifting their business through licensing and distribution.
  • And then there’s the Hair Salon that was the dream of a group of young professional women that has become the go-to place in the county. From start-up to juggernaut. Now, growth is the problem and appointments are hard to come by. I continue to get all 311 remaining hairs on my head cut at a ridiculous price premium here because the culture rocks, the senior partner is the smartest business person I know to not have a business degree, and I leave there every time feeling great and with three new ideas to write about based on their management, hiring, marketing and customer-service approaches.
  • Someone I admire tremendously runs a growing manufacturing concern focused on an offering into the display side of the retail industry. They make products you wouldn’t think twice about, yet to tour the factory is to be amazed at the thought and investment in innovation. To meet and work with the people is to know that there’s something special in the leadership and the culture.

3 Critical Common Characteristics of these Main Street Successes: 

1. Leadership that gets it. They are led by individuals who view the top and bottom lines as outcomes of doing the right things for and with their employees and customers.

2. Change is embraced. They intuitively get the guidance offered by Reeves and Deimler on building strength and they live it every day. Instead of fearing change, they find ways to leverage and promote it.

3. They are big thinkers looking to harness big ideas in small ways. They are born strategists who think beyond the here and now and take their cues not only from their customers but from observing and anticipating what some of these macro-changes in our world mean for their businesses.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

The lessons from the big firms in the news are visible and exciting. However, don’t discount the lessons in management innovation that are being taught on and around Main Street. The sharpest small business owners that I know have long understood the secrets that the rest of us in the corporate world are now discovering.

 

 

Filed Under: Leadership, Strategy Tagged With: , , ,
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