The article, “The Felt Need” by Dan and Chip Heath in the November, 2010 issue of Fast Company is worth the price of the annual subscription for it’s reminder value alone. The Heaths tackle a topic that just about all of us involved in selling, marketing or strategy have succumbed to at some point in our careers: the felt need versus the burning need. Here are four ideas to avoid being victimized by "The Felt Need."
One of my favorite, provocative business thinkers, Gary Hamel, says what we’ve all been thinking about in his Wall Street Journal blog post, “Too Many Industries Suffering from Detroititis.” Hamel appropriately skewers the U.S. Airlines as suffering from this malady of poor customer service and short-term thinking, all propped up by the government's artificial protectionist policies. I offer a few of my own thoughts on the "delightful" experience of flying U.S. carriers and what you can do in your organization to avoid the dreaded new disease, "Detroititis."
The Apple iPhone is a great device and our local AT&T Store service is fine. Too bad that AT&T forget to go the last yard for the customer. There are powerful marketing lessons to be learned by observing how a company executes for customers around a category and competition-killing product.
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.
Rethinking your customer segmentation model is a potentially powerful approach for differentiating versus key competitors and for finding new needs that you can fulfill with your core capabilities. Experiment with the various ideas and strengthen your team's execution skills in the process. In additional to the potential tremendous upside from solving customer problems, the energy and excitement generated during this process will convert the organization's "sense of fear" into a "sense of urgency."
Perhaps it is human nature, but we tend to eschew change either in our personal habits or in business settings until we are faced with mortality. In organizations, most significant change occurs during times of crisis when the threat of extinction sufficiently motivates individuals and groups to consider changing long-standing ways of doing things. The crisis brings into stark focus the fact that it is easier and less costly to accept or embrace change than it is to suddenly become extinct. Unfortunately, by the time this clarity is achieved at the top leadership levels, it is often too late.
