Here's Your Mission Statement Checklist Hey <<First Name>>, Why Do Mission Statements Hate Customers? Mission drives experience. Mission statements are great opportunities to simultaneously inspire your employees and customers with a simple, powerful message. We open every meeting with it. Mission statements reflect the culture of your company. They show the world, and your employees, what you value as a company, and what they say between the lines can be very telling. What do you think of these actual mission statements? Here are a few examples of real mission statements our team has noticed recently. What about YOUR customer experience mission? I encourage you to think about the corner of the world you do control. Ready to place your mission statement at the core of your organization? A workshop is a great way to help you and your team deliver a customer experience that gets results. It's not too late to catch our Webinar on Spin Sucks Pro!
What Tesla Knows That Other Patent-Holders Don't - Walter Frick by Walter Frick | 5:15 PM June 12, 2014 Tesla made a seemingly unusual move today: it invited competitors to use its patents, for free. In a post on the company’s blog, CEO Elon Musk declared that Tesla’s “true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.” Rather than worrying about car companies copying their technology, Tesla now hopes they will do so, in order to expand the overall market for electric vehicles. This counterintuitive strategy is more than good PR — although that too — say several IP experts. The first thing to note is that Tesla is not truly giving away its secret sauce, the source of its competitive advantage. A Tesla vehicle is quite literally more valuable than the sum of the parts, even when the value of the patented technology is included. But there is another advantage to the strategy.
Strategy Is No Longer a Game of Chess - Greg Satell by Greg Satell | 9:00 AM May 27, 2014 Legendary strategists have long been compared to master chess players, who know the positions and capabilities of each piece on the board and are capable of thinking several moves ahead. It’s time to retire this metaphor. The first person to think seriously about how businesses function was Ronald Coase. In the 1980s, Michael Porter built on this idea and made it more possible for managers to act on with his concept of value chains. In effect, competitiveness was the sum of all efficiencies and you created those efficiencies by building greater scale. The world envisioned by Coase and Porter was relatively stable. Yet today we live in a world of accelerating returns, where cost efficiencies can improve exponentially, nullifying scale advantages. So we find ourselves in an age of disruption, where agility trumps scale and strategy needs to take on a new meaning and a new role. However, Amazon is not a conglomerate; it is a platform.
Simple Rules for a Complex World Artwork: Nuala O’Donovan, Pinecone Heart, 2008, porcelain, unglazed, 27 x 22 x 24 cm Photography: Sylvain Deleu A decade ago, in the course of studying why certain high-tech companies thrived during the internet boom, we discovered something that surprised us: To shape their high-level strategies, companies like Intel and Cisco relied not on complicated frameworks but on simple rules of thumb. This was true even though they were in extraordinarily complex, challenging, and fast-moving industries. The rules were not only simple, we found, but quite specific. We reported our findings in HBR (“Strategy as Simple Rules,” January 2001). Simple Rules in Action The story of América Latina Logística (ALL) illustrates how simple rules can help companies shape strategy in an uncertain environment. In the late 1990s the government of Brazil privatized the country’s freight lines. ALL was spun off from the Brazilian railway authority in 1997 to manage one of the country’s eight freight lines.
The New 4Ps of Marketing The 4Ps of marketing, also known as the producer-oriented model, have been used by marketers around the world for decades. Created by Jerome McCarthy in 1960, the 4Ps encourages a focus on Product, Price, Promotion and Place. Recently, the growing influence of the Web has made these classic principles look a bit archaic. First, we need to look at the potential problems with the old way of doing things. Where do the 4Ps of marketing fall short? According to a five-year study involving more than 500 managers and customers in multiple countries published in the Harvard Business Review, the 4Ps of marketing undercut B2B marketers in three important ways. It leads marketing and sales teams to focus too much effort on product technology and quality. If the 4ps of marketing are no longer agile enough to work for modern businesses, what framework should entrepreneurs and marketers look toward instead? S.A.V.E focuses on the Solution, Access, Value, and Education of a product or service. 1. 2. 3.
Avoiding Stupidity is Easier than Seeking Brilliance Simon Ramo, a scientist and statistician, wrote a fascinating little book that few people have bothered to read: Extraordinary Tennis Ordinary Players. The book isn’t fascinating because I love tennis. I don’t. In the book Ramo identifies the crucial difference between a Winner’s Game and a Loser’s Game. Ramo believed that tennis could be subdivided into two games: the professionals and the rest of us. Players in both games play by the same rules and scoring. Professionals win points whereas amateurs lose them. In his 1975 essay, The Loser’s Game, Charles Ellis calls professional tennis a “Winner’s Game.” Amateur tennis is an entirely different game. The amateur duffer seldom beats his opponent, but he beats himself all the time. ***Two Games Ramo found this out because he gave up trying to keep track of conventional scores — “Love,” “Fifteen All,” etc. In expert tennis, about 80 per cent of the points are won; in amateur tennis, about 80 per cent of the points are lost. ***Avoid Stupidity
Staying Resilient Through the Ups and Downs Resilience is that ineffable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever. Rather than letting failure overcome them and drain their resolve, they find a way to rise from the ashes.- Psychology Today My favorite part: They find a way to rise from the ashes -- a quality entrepreneurs need to possess. You have big ideas. That said, it isn't always easier. 1. 2. Related: 5 Keys for Maintaining Your Entrepreneurial Vision 3. 4. 5. Related: 4 Tips for Maintaining Balanced Motivation This article was edited from its original format
Win at Workplace Conflict - Jeffrey Pfeffer by Jeffrey Pfeffer | 2:00 PM May 29, 2014 No matter how sound or well-intentioned your ideas, there will always be people inside — and outside — your organization who are going to oppose you. Getting things done often means that you’re going to go head to head with people who have competing agendas. In my career studying organizational behavior, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing some incredibly effective conflict management techniques. 1. It’s easy to become aggravated by other people’s actions and forget what you were trying to achieve in the first place. When Crew was verbally attacked by Representative Rafael Arza, a Florida legislator, who used one of the nastiest racial slurs to describe Crew, an African-American, Crew filed a complaint with the legislature but then essentially went on with his work. 2. For a while, Dr. 3. As the previous example illustrates, sometimes people fight over personalities, but often they have a reason for being in conflict. 4. 5. Focus On: Conflict
You Need to Start Measuring How Much Time Your Company Wastes How much time is your company wasting? It's a serious question. If your day-to-day operations and meetings are frittering the day away, you should realize that you're essentially giving away money. Ryan Fuller, CEO and co-founder of workforce management software company VoloMetrix, writes in the Harvard Business Review that a typical tech executive spends 44 hours per week in meetings and another twenty-two hours fielding email. To combat the problem, many businesses are turning to people analytics, a way to quantify where company time goes. Fuller says you can also use a method called time fragmentation to break down how many hours a week your employees are able to devote to productive work. Below, read about the benefits Fuller says people analytics can afford a company. Pinpoint expensive mistakes Errors, no matter how small, can turn into huge costs. Manage partner relations How many companies has your company partnered with? Personalize feedback Don't expect a cure-all
Zappos Killed the Job Posting – Should You? - John Boudreau by John Boudreau | 12:00 PM May 28, 2014 Zappos is often out in front of new and unusual HR policies. It originated the “pay employees to quit” policy adopted by Amazon.com. And now, Zappos will abandon job postings, according to Stacy Donovan Zapar, Zappos’ Social Recruiting and Employer Branding Strategist. So does this mean you should abandon job postings too? An important piece of context is that Zappos has long used social channels to describe their culture, people, and events. Another context element is that this policy applies to call centers, which employ a large number of people doing jobs that are similar, easily described, and familiar to most applicants. These policies can be effective for Zappos, but how should you decide if they are right for you? Zappos has a “labor pool” with some applicants who “spam post” resumes. The staffing supply chain also reveals why the policy may not work for everyone.