If You Must…F.A.I.L. Quickly
A friend of mine whom I respect highly told me about a recent experience of his that frustrated him greatly. My friend, a top technologist with a global company, had a couple weeks of his tremendously busy schedule redirected to help fix a disastrous project failure elsewhere in the organization. As one of his company's most nimble problem-solvers and effective "clean-up people" my friend was a natural --and perhaps essential -- expert on whom for his superiors to rely. For my friend though, this experience caused him to contemplate a common challenge, namely when confronting a program failure or struggling to fix a damaged project, should there be a graceful way to admit defeat quickly and begin anew or must the dedicated professional soldier on despite the collateral damage to parallel projects, commitments and employee engagement?
Pull Around, That’ll Be One Lost Sale…
I don't patronize fast food establishments often, but when my family and I drive on long road-trips we sometime opt for the convenience and speed that quick-serve restaurants (QSR, industry euphemism) drive-throughs offer. On one such trip I pulled into the drive-through lane of a popular, national chain and experienced a notable interaction with the attendant. As I mentioned, I don't visit QSRs regularly so the fact that during the past 3-4 times over the trailing 6 months or so I have experienced the same dynamic, got me thinking. At the risk of straining this QSR example too much I think this seemingly minor front-line customer experience offers a telling lesson for all of us seeking to optimize our customers' experiences and to capture value at all levels of our sales and marketing processes.
Level III Learning For A Change
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about creating and sustaining positive change for individuals and organizations. Many of us may wish to transform ourselves in some manner or lead change within our organizations, but oftentimes are frustrated with the results we achieve. Understanding how to assess and harness human behavior to help people improve and sustain their improvements is a fascinating exercise and is fundamental to human progress. Creating change whether for ourselves or when motivating others as part of a much larger effort, requires communicating, learning and support.
Of course, much has been written about how people and companies change for the better. In many ways, however, these models are too cumbersome to be practical for the average person or manager. At core, though, a change agent needs to foster Level III learning before he or she can hope to witness the fruits of their personal or enterprise-wide change effort.
A Priority By Another Name
Employees come first! They are our greatest asset! We love our customers! Understanding them and communicating with them authentically is essential to our business!
These are common refrains that I am sure are familiar to most readers (even to the extent of seeming trite) and are ones I heard repeatedly throughout my management consulting career. Why is it then that if we were to analyze how many business leaders today act upon these statements we would likely be highly disappointed by the gap between words and deeds, between rhetoric and results?
The Handcuffs of Creativity
In whatever endeavor you are pursuing -- professional or personal -- chances are you would benefit from more productive creativity. By productive creativity, I mean generating fresh ideas or perspectives and developing this new thinking into complete, well-designed final products ready to share with the world. When pursuing productive creativity, though, many of us are not hindered by too few raw ideas; rather, are progress is slowed by wading through far too many early concepts and the absence of structure to focus our efforts.
Ironically, one of the best ways to unleash your productive creativity is to first seek to bind your thinking.
A New Business Market Inefficiency?
With the economy still suffering and the glimmers of recovery darkened by persistently high unemployment much talk and type has been dedicated to promoting entrepreneurialism. The thinking is that we are not going to spend or lend our way to growth and jobs, rather we will rebuild and create prosperity when the public, private and non-profit sectors do everything possible to foster an environment where people can invent and innovate, and create market-worthy new products and services that solve actual problems or meet real needs.
I agee wholeheartedly, but I see a tremendous market inefficiency between the supply of entrepreneurial talent and skill and the best uses of those abilities and experience. I contend that there are many people with the requisite attititudes, behaviors and skills who would likely make successful entrepreneurs -- either as leaders or valuable new venture team member -- but these individuals are not matched with viable market opportunities, likeminded invididuals or support resources efficiently or effectively.
Art imitating art? Part 1
Watching TV -- scheduled programming or commercials, it doesn't matter -- I oftentimes return to the same question. As a culture have we lived through sufficient generations of content that writers today are more influenced by others' imaginations than by communicating their own experiences? Take the average police or medical drama we see today, are the doctors, lawyers, and other characters we see less like depictions of actual surgeons, judges, detectives and criminals than they are like previous generations of such fictional characters?
Have many writers today lost the ability to relay reality or to speak with an authentic voice because they are so influenced by all that has come before? Of course, this is not confined only to television, but rather to any media type or creative act and the cause is surely more complicated than just multiple generations feeding on a steady diet of passive entertainment from sundry sources.
Is there Value in the land of Free?
Free!...but valuable?
More and more [online] businesses today hope to generate an audience rapidly by stoking the psychological triggers associated with the term "free" and giving away all or much of their offerings to create a massive user- or fan-base. Many of these businesses hope that once they establish a substantial base, people will find the service so essential that they'll be willing to subscribe eventually or to generate enviable cash flows via advertising and business intelligence services.