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Trading Places: A Smart Way To Change Your Mind
excerpts from Bill Taylor's article in Harvard Business Review
The editors of Fortune came up with a fun idea for the magazine's "Best Companies to Work For" issue: Invite the CEOs of two employee-friendly retailers to trade places for a day. Maxine Clark (founder and CEO of publicly held Build-a-Bear) and Kip Tendell (cofounder and CEO of the privately held Container Store) agreed to give it a try.
Despite obvious differences in each business, the temporary job-swap yielded valuable insights. When the two leaders spent a day working on the front lines of each other's operations, they encountered all kinds of ideas about merchandising, employee motivation, and in-store communication that worked in one place, and might just work in the other if those ideas were exported to and adapted for the new environment.
Leaders who are hungry for new ideas don't just aspire to learn from the 'best in class' in their narrowly defined field. They also aspire to learn from organizations outside their field as a way to shake things up and make real change.
Indra Nooyi, the change-minded CEO of PepsiCo, has her own language to capture the same phenomenon. She describes the new logic of innovation as "lift and shift." That is, search for great ideas in unrelated fields, lift them out of the context in which they took shape, and shift them into your company. Which is precisely what Kindell and Clark did. According to Fortune, the CEO of the Container store was struck by the effectiveness of Build-a-Bear's "Strive for Five" sales technique - aiming to sell customers five items during their visit. The CEO of Build-a-Bear was impressed by how well the Container Store communicated with its front-line associates - lots of simple gestures that sent big signals through the ranks. Both CEOs vowed to apply these (and other) outside ideas inside their organizations.
Here's the basic message: You can't let what you know limit what you can imagine. As you try to do something special, exciting, important, don't just look to other companies in your field (or to your past successes) for ideas and practices. Look to great organizations in all sorts of fields to see what works with for them - and how you can apply their ideas to your problems. Do you have new ideas about where to find new ideas?
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| Greetings!
What are your plans for the summer? My good friend and professional colleague, Tamela Rich is setting off on a summer adventure of a lifetime Saturday, June 26. She'll be traveling 8,000 miles through 20 states (Charlotte to California) on a motorcycle, a BMW G650 to be exact!
The trip is inspired by a book she is co-authoring titled, Tradeoffs: Leveraging the Longs and Shorts of Life As research for the book, Tamela will interview financial traders across the US on the life lessons or tradeoffs they have learned through their profession: time for money, freedom for convention, risk for reward, and money for goods and services.
I'm not sure which is more impressive, writing a book or cycling across country (having just learned to ride a motorcycle 60 days prior to the trip). One thing is for sure, this will be her summer to remember. Bon Voyage, Tamela!
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Why Social Media Doesn't Matter Anymore
excerpts from John Jantsch's article in Duct Tape Marketing
 We don't need social media tools, social media plans, social media agencies, or social media departments, we need marketing strategies and tactics that are informed by a terribly heightened customer expectation. It's time to drop the term, concept, and confusion and focus on what really matters.
Prospect engagement matters If we've learned one thing over the last year or two, it's that prospects are drawn to the ability to interact with the companies, brands, and messages that they choose to absorb. Marketing and sales must include this desired behavior in order to even get an invitation into the prospect's decision making world.
Customer experience matters Traditional lead generation is dead, we've all accepted this by now, but what's replaced it? If being found by prospects is the new form of lead generation awareness, then trust is the new form of lead conversion. Trust happens rapidly when customers have an experience worth talking about. A remarkable customer experience is the most effective form of lead generation
Collaboration matters The Internet has enabled a world where we can work in conjunction with prospects, customers, suppliers, mentors, advisors, and staff in ways that make the finished work a personalized experience infused with the real time input. Community sourcing is a practice that underpins all product, service and business development activities.
Fusion matters Another powerful lesson gained over the last few years is that offline activity is enhanced, rather than replaced, by online activity. The careful fusion of high touch business building that's done face to face with high tech business building that enables more frequent, personalized contact and communication is the secret to delivering the most advanced customer experience.
Let's stop measuring adoption of social media and go to work on simply measuring effective interaction in marketing.
Special thanks to Ira Bass, IB Media for sharing this article with me. |
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