Category Archives: Leadership

Six Ways to Stop Gen-Z from Quiet Quitting

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

There has been a shift in the workplace culture. Some employees are going from “The Great Resignation,” in which they outright quit, to “quiet quitting,” which means they do the bare minimum and nothing more. While all ages have potential quiet quitters, Gen-Z seems to have earned the reputation (right or wrong) for this practice. The problem with employees participating in this movement of doing the bare minimum is that it can turn into a lack of engagement, and the impact could be felt by customers in the form of a bad customer experience.

I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Santor Nishizaki, author of the upcoming book Working with Gen Z: A Handbook to Recruit, Retain, and Reimagine the Future Workforce After Covid-19, and he has some great tips for leaders to help Gen-Z employees be more engaged at work and create a better customer experience. Here are six of his tips, followed by my commentary.

1. Have Clear Expectations

Dr. Nishizaki’s research found that 98% of Gen-Zs want clear expectations from their employer from day one. It’s frustrating for workers not to understand what is clearly expected of them. The expectations must be set on day one, if not during the hiring process. Proper onboarding is crucial. According to Gallup, clear expectations are essential for all generations. How can we best serve our customers if our employees don’t know what we expect?

2. Be Transparent and Show the “receipts”

Dr. Nishizaki refers to “receipts” as evidence. Just as a customer might get a receipt as proof of purchase, the same concept is relevant for Gen-Z employees, and is one of the significant challenges to getting them to come to work and do more than the bare minimum. Rather than proof-of-purchase, consider proof-of-value for employees. This is especially important as employees are being asked to return to the office after two years of remote work. Feeling valued must be more than words. True appreciation is needed to get workers to feel good about the company that employs them.

3. Help Them “glow up” by Investing in Their Strengths

Dr. Nishizaki believes in playing to Gen-Z’s strengths. Specifically, he uses the Gallup CliftonStrengths to help them grow to their potential. Focusing on your employees’ strengths and partnering them with coworkers whose strengths complement their weaknesses significantly impacts their enjoyment of work and serving customers. Spending extra time to let people do what they do best will make them happier, which translates to more engagement with fellow employees and customers.

4. Support Their Mental Health

Dr. Nishizaki heard from his clients and saw the rise of mental health challenges on college campuses and realized the need for leaders to respond. Recent data from McKinsey found that Gen-Zs are more likely than Millennials to feel stressed or anxious regularly (53% for women, 39% for men), and 82% want mental health days. Leaders must ensure that all employees are aware of resources available to them (mental health apps, therapy, etc.), and lead by example by taking mental health days and being open about burnout. Creating a positive and engaging customer experience is difficult when an employee’s basic needs aren’t met.

5. Build a Culture of Impact

What impact does your company or brand have on its customers—and even the world? Gen-Z is attracted to creating impact, and it doesn’t have to be a major impact. Taking a few extra minutes to explain why someone’s work is important to a customer or their colleagues can satisfy this need.

6. Be a Coach, Not a Micromanager

Dr. Nishizaki found that Gen-Zs ranked the skills necessary to be a good manager as a “coach and mentor” over “technical expertise” and a “task assigner.” If you’re managing Gen-Z (or employees from any generation), asking good questions will help them learn better and is less confrontational. Dr. Nishizaki quotes Timothy Gallwey, an author and performance coach, who said, “Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It’s helping them to learn rather than teaching them.” Customer service role-playing is a great training tool, but rather than offering a list of what they did wrong, ask them why they took their approach. Usually, they’ll figure out what they did wrong without any drama, and you’ll see your retention and customer satisfaction surveys improve.

Gen-Z wants its leaders to be engaged. Managers who can turn up the volume on their leadership skills will retain the best employees, win the war on talent and create a better experience for internal and external customers.

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Building the Business Case for Human-Centered Change

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Prove It

Building the Business Case for Human-Centered Change

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

As a thought leader in human-centered change and innovation, I spend my life advocating for the things that cannot be easily measured: empathy, psychological safety, and customer delight. These concepts are the bedrock of sustainable growth, yet when we walk into the C-suite, we often face the same skeptical glare and the two most powerful words in corporate budgeting: “Prove It.”

In today’s environment of rapid technological disruption, relying on faith and anecdote to justify human-centered investment is not just ineffective; it’s a competitive liability. Agile, customer-obsessed competitors are already translating human insights into exponential growth. To overcome resistance and secure the budget for innovation, we must translate human value into shareholder value. We must stop speaking the language of feelings and start speaking the language of finance. The strongest business case doesn’t just promise a better workplace; it quantifies the dollar cost of the status quo and the concrete returns of a human-first approach. This is about fiduciary imperative, not philanthropy.

The Cost of Inhumanity: Quantifying the Status Quo

Before presenting the benefits of change, the first step in building a compelling business case is to establish the current financial drain caused by inhuman, legacy systems and cultures. You must find the hidden taxes of the status quo:

Employee Friction Tax: Calculate the cost of replacing talent (high turnover due to burnout or bad processes), time wasted navigating complex internal systems, and lost productivity from low engagement. This is the dollar value of wasted human capital.
Customer Churn Tax: Calculate the lifetime value (LTV) lost when customers abandon a product due to poor user experience, excessive friction, or ineffective support. This tax represents the erosion of your future revenue base.
Rework and Failure Tax: Quantify the cost of failed projects, products built on faulty assumptions (due to lack of user empathy), and expensive technical debt incurred by non-agile, siloed teams. This is the direct cost of innovation risk.

By framing the discussion around these quantifiable losses, you shift the executive conversation from, “Should we spend money on this soft stuff?” to, “How quickly can we stop losing this money?”

“The most powerful business case doesn’t sell the future; it sells the urgent necessity of escaping a financially painful present.” — Multiple Potential Authors

Case Study 1: Transforming Legacy IT Systems at a Global Bank

The Challenge:

A major global bank needed to overhaul its decades-old internal IT infrastructure. The initial proposal was a purely technical, multi-year, multi-million dollar project focused on migrating servers—a classic IT modernization effort that often meets with fierce budget scrutiny. It lacked a compelling, human-centered justification, and was viewed purely as a cost.

The Human-Centered Business Case:

Instead of focusing on server specifications, the new proposal quantified the Employee Friction Tax. The team spent two weeks interviewing high-value traders and back-office staff, finding that the slow, arcane IT systems required employees to spend an average of two hours per day manually reconciling data and waiting for systems to load. They calculated the cost of that lost labor—hundreds of thousands of hours annually—and then tied it to specific, high-risk operational errors caused by the frustration and complexity. The final proposal showed that by investing in a user-friendly, responsive new system, the bank would not just save money on maintenance, but would increase the productive capacity of its highest-paid employees by nearly 25%.

The Result:

The project was approved immediately. It was no longer an IT cost; it was a productivity and risk mitigation investment with a clear, measurable ROI tied to human efficiency. The focus shifted from infrastructure to Employee Experience (EX), which became the project’s success metric.

The Metrics Bridge: Translating Feelings into Finance

The secret to building the business case is creating a Metrics Bridge between the intangible human state and the tangible financial outcome. This is where the ROI is forged:

Intangible: Psychological Safety → Bridge: Employee Submission Rate of High-Risk Ideas → Financial Outcome: New Product Pipeline Value.
Intangible: User Empathy/Delight → Bridge: Reduced Support Ticket Volume & Higher NPS → Financial Outcome: Lower Cost-to-Serve & Increased Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).
Intangible: Clarity of Purpose → Bridge: Project Rework Hours & Time-to-Market → Financial Outcome: Faster Revenue Realization & Lower R&D Expense.

Case Study 2: Investing in Deep Customer Empathy (Fidelity Investments)

The Challenge:

Fidelity Investments sought to improve the experience for its customers navigating complex life events, specifically the process of settling an estate. The current digital process was logical but emotionally brutal, forcing grieving customers to repeat information multiple times and navigate dense legal jargon. The traditional business case focused on reducing call center volume, a valid but transactional metric.

The Human-Centered Business Case:

Fidelity’s internal innovation team adopted a human-centered design approach, spending time with customers during the bereavement process. They realized the problem wasn’t efficiency; it was emotional burden. The new business case was built around reducing the Customer Churn Tax and maximizing Trust Lifetime Value. They proposed investing in a radically simplified, empathetic digital pathway. The quantitative anchor became the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and, critically, the retention rate of high-value generational assets (the children of the deceased often take their inherited assets to new, more modern firms). They argued that reducing a moment of profound customer pain would create profound and lasting brand loyalty that translated directly into millions in future assets under management (AUM).

The Result:

The innovation, which included a new “empathy-first” platform, drastically reduced the time required to complete the process and improved customer satisfaction scores dramatically. Crucially, the program became the new gold standard for showing how an intangible benefit (empathy) generates a tangible, multi-generational financial return (retained AUM and referrals), proving that EX is directly connected to the bottom line.

The Fiduciary Imperative

Ultimately, the challenge of securing investment for human-centered change is a challenge of communication and perspective. You must treat every human-centered initiative as a financial strategy designed to mitigate risk and unlock latent value. By quantifying the financial pain of ignoring human needs and projecting the clear, measurable financial reward of prioritizing them, we shift from asking for permission to presenting a fiduciary imperative. The time for whispering about “culture” is over. We must now shout the truth: Caring for your people and your customers is the most profitable and strategically urgent decision your company can make.

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Overcoming Resistance: The Persuasive Power of a Well-Told Story

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Overcoming Resistance: The Persuasive Power of a Well-Told Story

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

As a thought leader focused on human-centered change and innovation, I’ve seen countless brilliant strategies—digital transformations, market pivots, organizational redesigns—fail not because of technical flaws, but because they ran headlong into the brick wall of human resistance. We, as change agents, often make a critical error: we speak in the cold, logical language of spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks, yet we expect people to respond with the emotional commitment required for true change. That gap, the gulf between data and devotion, can only be bridged by one thing: a powerful, well-told story.

Resistance to change isn’t malicious; it’s human. It’s born from fear of the unknown, loss of status, or the exhaustion of yet another corporate mandate. Facts and figures may convince the brain, but only a story can rewire the heart. Stories bypass the critical, analytical side of the brain that’s waiting to find fault, and instead engage the empathetic, imaginative centers. When you tell a story, you don’t just present a future state; you invite your audience to live in it—to experience the journey, feel the challenge, and ultimately claim ownership over the success. A compelling narrative acts as an organizational immune booster, inoculating the workforce against the cynicism and “this too shall pass” attitude that kills innovation from within.

The Three Essential Elements of the Change Story

A compelling narrative designed to drive change must contain three core, human-centered elements, regardless of whether you’re using a keynote speech or a short internal video:

1. The Crisis and the Call (Why Now?): Define the stakes. What is the burning platform—the threat or the monumental opportunity—that mandates change? This must be personal, illustrating what failure or success means for the audience, not just the balance sheet.
2. The Journey and the Hero (What’s the Path?): Establish the vision of the future, but focus on the process. Crucially, the hero of the story must be the audience. The leader is merely the guide or mentor. This element shifts the audience from passive listeners to active participants, increasing their willingness to take the risks necessary for innovation.
3. The Triumphant Future (What’s the Reward?): Paint a vivid picture of the world after the change. The reward must be meaningful to the individual: less friction, more time with family, a more meaningful job, or restored customer trust. It cannot simply be a higher stock price.

“People don’t resist change; they resist being changed. A great story allows them to choose their role in the transformation.” — Peter Senge and Braden Kelley

Case Study 1: Transforming Customer Service at Zappos

The Challenge:

In the early 2000s, Zappos made a massive, non-intuitive strategic bet: they would differentiate their online shoe company not through price or selection, but through obsessive customer service. This meant turning their call centers, often seen as cost centers in retail, into premium experience hubs. Internal employees and investors faced resistance: why invest in expensive 24/7, US-based call centers and offer free, 365-day returns? The data (initial costs) looked terrifying.

The Power of the Story:

CEO Tony Hsieh didn’t lead with cost projections; he led with the story of the “Wow” experience. He told tales of employees who were empowered to spend eight hours on a single customer call, or who sent flowers to customers whose feet had been injured. The story wasn’t about the transaction; it was about building a movement defined by happiness—for employees and customers alike. The narrative centered on the employee as the hero, capable of delivering magical moments. This story made the astronomical cost of service acceptable because it redefined service as the core, non-replicable brand innovation. The resistance dissolved as employees rallied around a story that gave their work meaning far beyond simply answering a phone.

The Innovation Impact:

The story became the operational principle. The emotional commitment it generated led to legendary word-of-mouth marketing, turning customer service into the greatest driver of revenue and allowing Zappos to command a premium price. The company’s sale to Amazon for $1.2 billion validated that the emotional story of the “Wow” was the most valuable asset.

Case Study 2: NASA and the Moonshot

The Challenge:

In 1961, when President John F. Kennedy announced the goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the end of the decade, the scientific, technical, and logistical obstacles were almost insurmountable. NASA engineers faced skepticism, limited technology, and a public wary of the massive, unprecedented expenditure. The raw data said: “Impossible.”

The Power of the Story:

The story was the Moonshot itself. It wasn’t framed as a complex series of engineering tasks, but as an epic quest—a simple, audacious narrative that transcended budgets and deadlines. Kennedy’s challenge provided the clear Crisis and the Call (a race against geopolitical rivals) and the Triumphant Future (a bold step for mankind). The story made every engineer, technician, and administrative assistant—down to the janitor—feel like an essential hero on a grand, world-changing journey. When Kennedy asked a janitor at the space center what his job was, the man famously replied, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.” The story had successfully redefined his job description and purpose.

The Innovation Impact:

The compelling narrative drove innovation at a furious, impossible pace. It created a culture of extreme dedication, risk-taking, and cross-functional collaboration. The power of the story overcame the technical resistance and institutional inertia, directly impacting key innovation metrics like speed of execution and employee-driven solutions necessary to solve problems that had no known technical solution at the time.

The Leader’s Mandate: From Analyst to Author

If you are a leader charged with driving significant change, you must recognize that your job is not merely to delegate tasks; it is to craft the narrative. Stop trying to force change with directives and start creating stories that make the desired future irresistible. This narrative isn’t just a speech; it should be woven into every communication, from town halls to interactive digital campaigns.

Embrace the role of the author. Define the villain (the status quo, the market threat, the friction), outline the plot (the transformation journey), and most importantly, position your people as the central characters—the ones who will achieve the extraordinary. This human-centered approach is the single most effective way to overcome resistance and ensure that your innovation initiatives succeed, translating emotional buy-in into faster adoption and greater employee ownership. To change a culture, you must first change the conversation.

Extra Extra: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Pexels

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3 Steps to Find the Horse’s A** In Your Company (and Create Space for Innovation)

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3 Steps to Find the Horse's A** In Your Company (and Create Space for Innovation)

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Innovation thrives within constraints.

Constraints create the need for questions, creative thinking, and experiments.

But as real as constraints are and as helpful as they can be, don’t simply accept them. Instead, question them, push on them, and explore around them.

But first, find the horse’s a**

How Ancient Rome influenced the design of the Space Shuttle

In 1974, Thiokol, an aerospace and chemical manufacturing company, won the contract to build the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) for the Space Shuttle. The SRBs were to be built in a factory in Utah and transported to the launch site via train.

The train route ran through a mountain tunnel that was just barely wider than the tracks.

The standard width of railroad tracks (distance between the rails or the railroad gauge) in the US is 4 feet, 8.5 inches which means that Thiokol’s engineers needed to design SRBs that could fit through a tunnel that was slightly wider than 4 feet 8.5 inches.

4 feet 8.5 inches wide is a constraint. But where did such an oddly specific constraint come from?

The designers and builders of America’s first railroads were the same people and companies that built England’s tramways. Using the existing tramways tools and equipment to build railroads was more efficient and cost-effective, so railroads ended up with the same gauge as tramways – 4 feet 8.5 inches.

The designers and builders of England’s tramways were the same businesses that, for centuries, built wagons. Wanting to use their existing tools and equipment (it was more efficient and cost-effective, after all), the wagon builders built tramways with the exact distance between the rails as wagons had between wheels – 4 feet 8.5 inches.

Wagon wheels were 4 feet 8.5 inches apart to fit into the well-worn grooves in most old European roads. The Romans built those roads, and Roman chariots made those grooves, and a horses pulled those chariots, and the width of a horses was, you guessed it, 4 feet 8.5 inches.

To recap – the width of a horses’ a** (approximately 4 feet 8.5 inches) determined the distance between wheels on the Roman chariots that wore grooves into ancient roads. Those grooves ultimately dictated the width of wagon wheels, tramways, railroad ties, a mountain tunnel, and the Space Shuttle’s SRBs.

How to find the horse’s a**

When you understand the origin of a constraint, aka find the horse’s a**, it’s easier to find ways around it or to accept and work with it. You can also suddenly understand and even anticipate people’s reactions when you challenge the constraints.

Here’s how you do it – when someone offers a constraint:

Thank them for being honest with you and for helping you work more efficiently
Find the horse’s a** by asking questions to understand the constraint – why it exists, what it protects, the risk of ignoring it, who enforces it, and what happened to the last person who challenged it.
Find your degrees of freedom by paying attention to their answers and how they give them. Do they roll their eyes in knowing exasperation? Shrug their shoulders in resignation? Become animated and dogmatic, agitated that someone would question something so obvious?

How to use the horse’s a** to innovate

You must do all three steps because stopping short of step 3 stops creativity in its tracks.

If you stop after Step 1 (which most people do), you only know the constraint, and you’ll probably be tempted to take it as fixed. But maybe it’s not. Perhaps it’s just a habit or heuristic waiting to be challenged.

If you do all three steps, however, you learn tons of information about the constraint, how people feel about it, and the data and evidence that could nudge or even eliminate it.

At the very least, you’ll understand the horse’s a** driving your company’s decisions.

Image credit: Pixabay

Endnotes:

To be very clear, the origin of the constraint is the horse’s a**. The person telling you about the constraint is NOT the horse’s a**.
The truth is never as simple as the story and railroads used to come in different gauges. For a deeper dive into this “more true than not” story (and an alternative theory that it was the North’s triumph in the Civil War that influenced the design of the SRBs, click here

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Guiding Principles for Human-Centered Innovation

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The Ethical Compass

Guiding Principles for Human-Centered Innovation

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

We are living through the most rapid period of technological advancement in human history. From Generative AI to personalized genomics, the pace of creation is breathtaking. Yet, with great power comes the potential for profound unintended consequences. For too long, organizations have treated Ethics as a compliance hurdle — a check-the-box activity relegated to the legal department. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I argue that this mindset is not only morally deficient but strategically suicidal. Ethics is the new operating system for innovation.

True Human-Centered Innovation demands that we look beyond commercial viability and technical feasibility. We must proactively engage with the third critical dimension: Ethical Desirability. When innovators fail to apply an Ethical Compass at the design stage, they risk building products that perpetuate societal bias, erode trust, and ultimately fail the people they were meant to serve. This failure translates directly into business risk: regulatory penalties, brand erosion, difficulty attracting mission-driven talent, and loss of consumer loyalty. The future of innovation is not about building things faster; it’s about building them better — with a deep, abiding commitment to human dignity, fairness, and long-term societal well-being.

The Four Guiding Principles of Ethical Innovation

To embed ethics directly into the innovation process, leaders must design around these four core principles:

1. Proactive Transparency and Explainability: Be transparent about the system’s limitations and its potential impact. For AI, this means addressing the ‘black box’ problem — explaining how a decision was reached (explainability) and being clear when the output might be untrustworthy (e.g., admitting to the potential for a Generative AI ‘hallucination’). This builds trust, the most fragile asset in the digital age.
2. Designing for Contestation and Recourse: Every automated system will make mistakes, especially when dealing with complex human data. Ethical design must anticipate these errors and provide clear, human-driven mechanisms for users to challenge decisions (contestation) and seek corrections or compensation (recourse). The digital experience must have an accessible, human-centered off-ramp.
3. Privacy by Default (Data Minimization): The default setting for any new product or service must be the most protective of user data. Innovators must adopt the principle of data minimization — only collect the data absolutely necessary for the core functionality, and delete it when the purpose is served. This principle should extend to anonymizing or synthesizing data used for testing and training large models.
4. Anticipating Dual-Use and Misapplication: Every powerful technology can be repurposed for malicious intent. Innovators must conduct mandatory “Red Team” exercises to model how their product — be it an AI model or a new biometric sensor — could be weaponized or misused, and build in preventative controls from the start. This proactive defense is critical to maintaining public safety and brand integrity.

“Ethical innovation is not about solving problems faster; it’s about building solutions that don’t create bigger, more complex human problems down the line.”

Case Study 1: Algorithmic Bias in Facial Recognition Systems

The Ethical Failure:

Early iterations of several commercially available facial recognition and AI systems were developed and tested using datasets that were overwhelmingly composed of lighter-skinned male faces. This homogenous training data resulted in systems that performed poorly — or failed entirely — when identifying women and people with darker skin tones.

The Innovation Impact:

The failure was not technical; it was an ethical and design failure. When these systems were deployed in law enforcement, hiring, or security contexts, they perpetuated systemic bias, leading to disproportionate errors, false accusations, and a deep erosion of trust among marginalized communities. The innovation became dangerous rather than helpful. The ensuing public backlash, moratoriums, and outright bans on the technology in some jurisdictions forced the entire industry to halt and recalibrate. This was a clear example where the lack of diversity in the input data (violating Principle 3) directly led to product failure and significant societal harm.

Case Study 2: The E-Scooter Phenomenon and Public Space

The Ethical Failure:

When ride-share e-scooters rapidly deployed in cities globally, the innovation focused purely on convenience and scaling. The developers failed to apply the Ethical Compass to the public space context. The design overlooked the needs of non-users — pedestrians, people with disabilities, and the elderly. Scooters were abandoned everywhere, creating physical obstacles, hazards, and clutter.

The Innovation Mandate:

While technically feasible and commercially popular, the lack of Anticipation of Misapplication (Principle 4) led to a massive negative social cost. Cities were forced to quickly step in with restrictive and punitive regulations to manage the chaos created by the unbridled deployment. The innovation was penalized for failing to be a responsible citizen of the urban environment. The ethical correction involved new technologies like integrated GPS tracking to enforce designated parking areas and mandatory end-of-ride photos, effectively embedding Contestation and Recourse (Principle 2) into the user-city relationship, but only after significant public frustration and regulatory intervention demonstrated the poor planning.

The Ethical Mandate: Making Compassion the Constraint

For innovation leaders, the Ethical Compass must be your primary constraint, just as budget and timeline are. This means actively hiring for ethical expertise, creating cross-functional Ethics Design Boards (EDBs) that include non-traditional stakeholders (e.g., anthropologists, ethicists, community advocates) for high-impact projects, and training every engineer, designer, and product manager to think like an ethicist.

The best innovations are those that successfully navigate not just the technological landscape, but the human landscape of values and consequences. When we prioritize human well-being over unbridled speed, we don’t just build better products — we build a better, more trustworthy future. Embrace ethics not as a brake pedal, but as the foundational gyroscope that keeps your innovation on course and your business resilient.

Image credit: Pexels

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Overcoming the Top 3 Barriers to Customer-Centricity

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Overcoming the Top 3 Barriers to Customer-Centricity

GUEST POST from Alain Thys

I just finished a presentation for the leadership team of a European travel company that wanted to better understand the barriers they would face on their journey to true customer-centricity. And what they could do about it.

It was a good excuse to give a 2022 update to some of my older thinking on the topic. And while I can’t really share the presentation, I’m including as summary of the Top 3 barriers below. In case you find them of interest.

BARRIER #1: Lack of Clarity

Everyone wants to be customer centric, but no one explains what that means in practice. Not just to agree on what a great customer experience looks like. But also to think through its implications for the business.

What changes does Aïsha need to plan in her logistics department? What return can shareholders expect for investing in ‘happy faces’? What new developments do distributors and ecosystem partners need to plan for? And are any of these implications realistic within available timelines and budgets?

Without this clarity, everyone will interpret ‘being customer-centric’ in its own way, so initiatives will go in a thousand directions. Or simply grind to a halt because of an operational or financial disconnect.

Either way, with the best of intentions, the only certainty is that customers will have a variable experience depending on the touchpoint, person or time of day.

Overcoming the Barrier: Clearly describe your customer experience. What are you promising? How will you make it happen? And what does it mean for each of your internal and external stakeholders? And before you hit the ‘start’ button, check whether all of your ideas are realistic.

BARRIER #2: Lack of Empathy

Whenever a leadership team embraces customer-centricity, the buzzwords and targets start flying around. Metrics like Net Promoter, customer ease or new kid on the block TLM appear in PowerPoint decks and we focus everything on driving the numbers.

But as management teams get excited, those around them care a lot less. Employees prefer meaningful work and decent salaries over KPIs. Shareholders may not see why they should sacrifice short-term profit for customer smiles. Distribution and ecosystem partners have got their hands full in running their own business.

The result is that strategies are implemented because you say so as a leader. This compliance often works in the short-term. But it disintegrates when processes, negotiations, and culture get in the way. Or when the next budget cut or senior executive comes around.

Overcoming the Barrier: Anchor your customer-centricity drive in the culture by reframing it into what matters to your different stakeholders. Connect the customer experience to the values and culture of those who work for you. Show your shareholders how smiles and money go hand in hand. Engage your ecosystem to create a common vision, instead of imposing yours. Make the strategy theirs, instead of yours.

BARRIER #3: Lack of Vision

Customer teams focus most, if not all, of their attention on improving the customer’s experience based on feedback and competitive benchmarks. Rightly so. Dropping the ball on a touchpoint or moment may cost dearly in both loyalty and revenue.

But too much focus on ‘continuous improvement’ can blind us to the experience that ‘should exist’ tomorrow. In today’s economy, the last best experience the customers had anywhere, become their expectation everywhere. It’s just that they can’t tell what it is before they’ve had it. At which point, we’re too late.

Unfair? Totally. But also reality.

Overcoming the Barrier: Keep improving today, but allocate at least 20% of your time to imagining the customer’s future that ‘should exist’. Look at life through the eyes of your customer and prototype experiences they cannot imagine today. Be the one who raises the expectation bar, so it forces others to follow.

I’m not saying these are the only barriers. But if you tackle them, you’ve probably avoided some of the biggest pitfalls to customer-centricity out there.

May the customer force be with you!

Image credit: Pixabay

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If You Can Be One Thing – Be Effective

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If You Can Be One Thing - Be Effective

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you’re asked to be faster, choose to be more effective. There’s nothing slower than being fast at something that doesn’t matter.

If you’re given a goal to be more productive, instead, improve effectiveness. There’s nothing less productive than making the wrong thing.

If you’re measured on efficiency, focus on effectiveness. Customers don’t care about your efficiency when you ship them the wrong product.

If you’re asked to improve quality, that’s good because quality is an important element of effectiveness.

If you’re asked to demonstrate more activity, focus on progress, which is activity done in an effective way.

If you’re asked to improve your team, ask them how they can be more effective and do that.

Regardless of the question, the answer is effectiveness.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Innovate for Good – Breaking Paradoxes

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GUEST POST from Teresa Spangler

At the time of my writing this, the world is in the midst of unprecedented triple crises. The COVID-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc on healthcare and on the personal lives of people globally. The economic impacts of this pandemic are crippling nations, small towns, and people all over the world. And to top it off we are experiencing incredible social unrest – protests for Black Lives Matter are taking shape all around the world, with the goal of peaceful protests for change – but they’ve been hijacked by anarchists of varied profiles… individual crusaders, terrorists acting solo, antagonists of the left and the right wings… so many different factions creating chaos. All of this to say, change is happening at paces unimaginable, and ‘INNOVATION for Good’ – of all types, centered on human, economic, and environmental impacts – is a dire necessity.

The world faces many great challenges. For example, the World Economic Forum reports that “by 2050, global food systems will need to sustainably and nutritiously feed more than 9 billion people while providing economic opportunities in both rural and urban communities. Yet our food systems are falling far short of these goals. A systemic transformation is needed at an unprecedented speed and scale.”

Speed and scale, these days, are the operative words prioritized in innovation investments. When and how are the big questions that investors and stakeholders primarily ask? Of course, these are important questions. Breaking the cycle of ‘profit first’ is not an easy shift for capitalist societies. Social Entrepreneurism, Social Innovation Organizations, and Non-Governmental Organizations are charting courses toward innovating in new and socially impactful ways, but they need the support, collaborative partnership, and help from investors and from the public and private sectors. The world of business has been groomed for years to drive everything fast, faster, and fastest – fail-fast, rapid prototype, accelerated stage gates, hire-slow-fire-fast, rapid returns… and so on. Measured return on investments drives innovation decision-making from new cure-all drugs to the closet full of patents that sit in the coffers of giant industry leaders never making it out into the commercial world, even though these may be game-changing, lifesaving, humanity-improving innovations.

This chapter looks at examples of how to shift from ‘profit first’ to ‘ethics and innovation for good and safety first’. If you build it safely, ethically, and build it to serve humanity, improve the environment, and support socially good causes, the profits will come. But investors and stakeholders need to understand the WHYs – why safety, ethics, and serving are so important. How are we innovators sharing these three critical priorities in the stories we build to gain buy-in on new ideas? So often, safety and ethics are afterthoughts. Responsible Innovation: Ethics and Risks of New Technologies, Joost Groot Kormelink, TU Delft Open, 2019 note:

“If we do not critically and systematically assess our technologies in terms of the values they support and embody, people with perhaps less noble intentions may insert their views on sustainability, safety and security, health and well-being, privacy and accountability.”

Also in the textbook, Responsible Innovation: Ethics and Risks of New Technologies, it sites are case study examples of how conflicting values can open up new opportunities to innovate responsible. As a learning method, the case study opens up our minds to the point of view or moral foundations as an opportunity:“Moral dilemmas can help stimulate creativity and innovation, and innovative design may help us to overcome problems of moral overload.”

In the case study excerpt below: “Smart meters and conflicting values as an opportunity to innovate.” The case study points to an example of smart meter design.

The smart meter 3.0, which is what we are ideally looking for, is designed to accommodate both of the functional requirements in order to make energy use more efficient, while also protecting personal data. It gives us privacy and sustainability. In this respect, innovation in smart metering is exactly this: the reconciliation of a range of values, or moral requirements, in one smart design, some of which were actually in conflict before. Similarly, if we would like to benefit from RFID technology (enabling to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects) in retail, but fear situations in which we might be tracked throughout the shopping mall, it has been suggested we can have it both ways. A so-called ‘clipped chip’ in the form of a price tag with clear indentations would allow customers to tear off a piece of the label, thereby shortening the antenna in the label so as to limit the range in which the label can transmit data.

Clarity of Values-Based Purpose

In the case above, there is clear purpose-driven innovation. Study after study has shown clarity of purpose is key to engaging people in new ideas.

A Kin&Co survey conducted by Populus points out that “Not embedding purpose properly also alienates customers, because in this age of transparency employee problems leak out online, and into the press. Over a third of employees surveyed (34%) said they’d consider writing a negative review online.” One example cited is of “… the Etsy employee who started a petition against the company’s leaders for not living their purpose and values, which was signed by thousands of employees and then went viral.” From: Why purpose matters and four steps companies can take to get it right”, Rosie Warin, 14 February 2018, Ethical Corporation Magazine, Reuters Events – Sustainable Business, the conclusion was thus that …

Having a purpose and not living it will actually hurt your business more than not having one at all! Why Purpose Matters

There is a hunger for more transparency, having our work be meaningful, and knowledge that ethics and privacy are forethoughts, not afterthoughts. It’s good for business, and certainly will drive better profits in the long run.

Breaking the ‘Fast Profit’ Addiction and Adapting Innovation for Social Benefits – Seeking Purpose

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse. Winston Churchill

What if we asked the BIG ‘What if?’ What if we were more focused on the benefits of our innovations to humans, the environment, and society – making these priorities over profits first? Can it be proven that if you build it, the profits will come?

The United Nations: Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

The chapter Foundations of Moral Innovation (Chapter 3 – page 57) mentioned the ‘triple bottom line’ that socially conscious companies focus on serving – People / Planet / Profit… the social, environmental, and financial aspects of an organization’s impact. In 2015 the United Nations cast a vision (and put actions to their words) to build a better world for all people by 2030. Engaging a world of collaborators is key to the success of these 17 Development Goals (noted below).

“The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are one of the world’s best plan to build a better world for people and our planet by 2030. Adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, the SDGs are a call for action by all countries – poor, rich and middle-income – to promote prosperity while protecting the environment. They recognize that ending poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies that build economic growth and address a range of social needs including education, health, equality, and job opportunities, while tackling climate change and working to preserve our ocean and forests. See Transforming A World: A 2030 Agenda.

The Division for Sustainable Development Goals (DSDG) within the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) provides substantive support and capacity-building for these SDGs and their related thematic issues.

To say the least, as we read these 17 audaciously massive and impactful goals, the goals feel incredibly lofty; the actions to innovate solutions for three of the goals, much less 17 of them, feels nearly unachievable (in our fast prototyping, rapid release, ROI-focused, capitalistic mind-sets) and CFOs around the world sense that acting on these in any way may weigh heavily on profits. Yet many companies are collaborating to drive solutions to these goals. The United Nations built a values-based and purpose-driven platform to participate in solving these world challenges. They provide guidelines, research, information on other collaborators, tools, data, and so much support to help those that choose to participate. And participating they are! Noted from a press release in July 2019: “28 companies with combined market cap of $1.3 trillion step up to new level of climate ambition. Ahead of the UN Climate Action Summit, companies commit to set 1.5°C climate targets aligned with a net-zero future, challenging Governments to match their ambition”.

Here are a few of the participating companies from this release: AstraZeneca, Banka BioLoo, BT, Dalmia Cement Ltd., Eco-Steel Africa Ltd., Enel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Iberdrola, KLP, Levi Strauss & Co., Royal DSM, SAP, Signify, Singtel, Telefonica, Telia, Unilever, Vodafone Group PLC, and Zurich Insurance, amongst others. The release goes on to note that this collectively represents over one million employees from 17 sectors and more than 16 countries.

It seems that the United Nations has created an intensely collaborative framework that offers a moral ground to innovate. It’s just one example, and as complex as these goals are, the framework is simple… build a mission-driven platform, engage thought-leaders around the world, set up metrics and measures for success, provide as much data as possible, offer support when and where needed, and provide as many tools as possible to encourage collaboration amongst them.

ESG – A Moral Compass

Social investors are a group growing in popularity and size. These investors focus their investments and their portfolios on corporations around the world with metric-driven processes to ensure they are building sustainable and responsible companies – a practice known as environmental, social and corporate governance, or ESG.

An example of such an organization is Philips Corporation, which has made a commitment to ESG and thus to ethics over profits. In the article, “Good business: Why placing ethics over profits pays off”, they share “When companies work ethically, they will naturally outpace competition. Why? Simply because customers, as we’ve discovered, will see them as a trusted partner, not only for what they do, but how it is delivered. Commitment from management is a key factor to effectively deal with these situations.”

In Stanford Social Innovation Review, authors Chris Fabian and Robert Fabricant write, “An ethical framework – ‘a way of structuring your deliberation about ethical questions’ – can help to bridge disparate worlds and discourses and help them work well together.” Their article further notes that, “Ethical questions might include: ‘Is this platform / product actually providing a social good?’ or ‘Am I harming / including the user in the creation of this new solution?’ or even ‘Do I have a right to be taking claim of this space at all?’”11 Such a strong ethical framework can help innovators to plan for ‘value-based collaborations’. Establishing such a framework within your innovation practice also provides a process whereby collaborators can monitor the work, and consistently ensure that ethics are intact. Moreover, planning for positive outcomes and managing to an ethical framework gives customers, buyers, stakeholders, users, and investors some comfort that the ‘net new disruptive innovations’ will be safe for all, which will result in strong profits and longevity in due time.

Very importantly, this article also points out that while ethics may involve subjectivity, nevertheless “an ethical framework can bridge the worlds of startup technology companies and international development to strengthen cross-sector innovation in the social sector.”

Fabian and Fabricant outline a 4-model framework in this article:

Innovation is humanistic: solving big problems through human ingenuity, imagination, and entrepreneurialism that can come from anywhere.

Innovation is non-hierarchical: drawing ideas from many different sources and incubating small, agile teams to test and iterate on them with user feedback.

Innovation is participatory: designing with (not for) real people.

Innovation is sustainable: building skills even if most individual endeavors will ultimately fail in their societal goals.

“Critical to the world’s innovation effort is harvesting the Human Imagination!” Patrick Reasonover – writer and producer of They Say It Can’t Be Done

Incorporating any of the above four models provides the basis for forethought and planning. There may be additional considerations accompanying the above framework to drive even better outcomes yet – especially for those with big audacious visions of disruptive innovation. But often there are unexpected barriers. So how can one plan for the unexpected? There is a documentary film that explores some of these barriers, and four companies working to overcome them.

They Say It Can’t Be Done, written and produced by Patrick Reasonover, is an excellent documentary exploring how innovation can solve some of the world’s largest problems. The film tracks four companies on the cutting edge of technological solutions that could promote animal welfare, solve hunger, eliminate organ wait lists, and reduce atmospheric carbon. The film explores often unexpected challenges and barriers that are potentially keeping these companies from realizing success. They each share steps and strategies on how to break through the ‘concrete walls’.

The compelling theme from these companies is innovation for good – innovation with a moral foundation to improve humanity. One of the first questions typically asked by stakeholders is “When will these companies or their new innovations become profitable?” Here’s the BIG ‘What if’ question. What if we changed this question to, “What will it take to make this successful, and how can we help you get there faster?” These are fairly typical questions. But what about roadblocks potentially challenging even the most knowledgeable and experienced teams and proven technologies? I recently spoke with Patrick Reasonover about his mission and the documentary. Reasonover shares, “Faced with similar challenges to the companies in the documentary, I felt if more people understood barriers, the world would see more successful outcomes that could save people, improve human conditions, and the environment.” Reasonover went on to share four themes that would greatly help disruptors in their innovation practices. These four themes are summarized as follows:

One of the most important points he made in our discussion was to engage regulators and government agencies – collaborating with them very early on in the process and all along your path. Help them to understand; listen and take in their input.

Institute what Reasonover calls an ‘Ambassador of Imagination’. We need more imagination in the world and in our own world. It’s too easy to get boxed into an innovation framework and forget to take the blinders off in order to think and create big things!

Optimism is sorely needed in the world and especially for innovators. Getting new things out the door is daunting. Infuse your efforts with doses of optimism grounded in reality.

CELEBRATE… hitting milestones should be celebrated along the way. It’s a long road, and all too often we get push back from doubters, investors wanting faster outcomes, governing approval agencies, and so on. Celebrate and move forward!

These four practices create a culture that encourages and celebrates imagination, innovation, success, and all the collaborators helping you get there. And involving agencies early on in the process helps them to understand that you are taking safety and ethics seriously. Take for example 3D-printed organs for those needing transplants. There is so much at stake. Stepping through the approval process to prove it out on less risky organs – for example, 3D printed ears – helps to chart the course for other organs as the technologies and the discovery of new methods continues to develop.

The article “On The Road To 3-D Printed Organs” in TheScientist reports, “There are a number of companies who are attempting to do things like 3-D print ears, and researchers have already reported transplanting 3-D printed ears onto children who had birth defects that left their ears underdeveloped, notes Robby Bowles, a bioengineer at the University of Utah. The ear transplants are, he says, ‘kind of the first proof of concept of 3-D printing for medicine.”

Ethics First

All in all, there is much evidence pointing to success, longevity, scale, and profits when building a framework that places ethics, safety, values, and purpose as planned practices in any innovation effort.

These practices do not have to slow the process of innovation in the least. On the contrary… they will often speed up the effort, as in the example of engaging regulators as collaborators early on in your efforts. Engaging imagination and optimism are sorely needed, and keeps teams engaged and enthused. And.. leveraging one of Stanford’s four models could save a great deal of pain by monitoring outcomes all along your development stage gates. It all just makes good and safe business sense!

*Article is an excerpt contribution (chapter 6): The Other Side of Growth: Innovator’s Responsibilities in an Emerging World

Image credit: Pixabay

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Shark Tanks are the Pumpkin Spice of Innovation

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Shark Tanks are the Pumpkin Spice of Innovation

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

On August 27, Pumpkin Spice season began. It was the earliest ever launch of Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte and it kicked off a season in which everything from Cheerios to protein powder to dog shampoo promises the nostalgia of Grandma’s pumpkin pie.

Since its introduction in 2003, the Pumpkin Spice Latte has attracted its share of lovers and haters but, because it’s a seasonal offering, the hype fades almost as soon as it appears.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for its counterpart in corporate innovation — The Shark Tank/Hackathon/Lab Week.

It may seem unfair to declare Shark Tanks the Pumpkin Spice of corporate innovation, but consider the following:

They are events. There’s nothing wrong with seasonal flavors and events. After all, they create a sense of scarcity that spurs people to action and drives companies’ revenues. However, there IS a great deal wrong with believing that innovation is an event. Real innovation is not an event. It is a way of thinking and problem-solving, a habit of asking questions and seeking to do things better, and of doing the hard and unglamorous work of creating, learning, iterating, and testing required to bring innovation — something different that creates value — to life.
They appeal to our sense of nostalgia and connection. The smell and taste of Pumpkin Spice bring us back to simpler times, holidays with family, pie fresh and hot from the oven. Shark Tanks do the same. They remind us of the days when we believed that we could change the world (or at least fix our employers) and when we collaborated instead of competed. We feel warm fuzzies as we consume (or participate in) them, but the feelings are fleeting, and we return quickly to the real world.
They pretend to be something they’re not. Starbucks’ original Pumpkin Spice Latte was flavored by cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove. There was no pumpkin in the Pumpkin Spice. Similarly, Shark Tanks are innovation theater — events that give people an outlet for their ideas and an opportunity to feel innovation-y for a period of time before returning to their day-to-day work. The value that is created is a temporary blip, not lasting change that delivers real business value.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

If you’re serious about walking the innovation talk, Shark Tanks can be a great way to initiate and accelerate building a culture and practice of innovation. But they must be developed and deployed in a thoughtful way that is consistent with your organization’s strategy and priorities.

Make Shark Tanks the START of an innovation effort, not a standalone event. Clearly establish the problems or organizational priorities you want participants to solve and the on-going investment (including dedicated time) that the company will make in the winners. Allocate an Executive Sponsor who meets with the team monthly and distribute quarterly updates to the company to share winners’ progress and learnings
Act with courage and commitment. Go beyond the innovation warm fuzzies and encourage people to push the boundaries of “what we usually do.” Reward and highlight participants that make courageous (i.e. risky) recommendations. Pursue ideas that feel a little uncomfortable because the best way to do something new that creates value (i.e. innovate) is to actually DO something NEW.
Develop a portfolio of innovation structures: Just as most companies use a portfolio of tools to grow their core businesses, they need a portfolio of tools to create new businesses. Use Shark Tanks to the surface and develop core or adjacent innovation AND establish incubators and accelerators to create and test radical innovations and business models AND fund a corporate VC to scout for new technologies and start-ups that can provide instant access to new markets.

Conclusion

Whether you love or hate Pumpkin Spice Lattes you can’t deny their impact. They are, after all, Starbucks’ highest-selling seasonal offering. But it’s hard to deny that they are increasingly the subject of mocking memes and eye rolls, a sign that their days, and value, maybe limited.

(Most) innovation events, like Pumpkin Spice, have a temporary effect. But not on the bottom-line. During these events, morale, and team energy spike. But, as the excitement fades and people realize that nothing happened once the event was over, innovation becomes a meaningless buzzword, evoking eye rolls and Dilbert cartoons.

Avoid this fate by making Shark Tanks a lasting part of your innovation menu — a portfolio of tools and structures that build and sustain a culture and practice of innovation, one that creates real financial and organizational value.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Leading Your Way Through Crisis

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Leading Your Way Through Crisis

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

There’s a passage in Ernest Hemingway’s 1925 novel, The Sun Also Rises, in which a character is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he answers. “Gradually, then suddenly.” The quote has since become emblematic of how a crisis takes shape. First with small signs you hardly notice and then with shocking impact.

That’s certainly how it felt to me in November, 2008, when I was leading a media company in Kyiv. By that time, the financial crisis was going full throttle, although things had been relatively calm in our market. Ukraine had been growing briskly in recent years and, while we expected a slowdown, we didn’t expect a crash.

Those illusions were soon shattered. Ad sales in Ukraine would eventually fall by a catastrophic 85%, while overall GDP would be down 14%. It was, to say the least, the worst business crisis I had ever encountered. In many ways, our business never really recovered, but the lessons I learned while managing through it will last a lifetime.

Build Trust Through Candor and Transparency

Our October revenues had come through fairly strong, so we were reasonably confident in our ability to weather the crisis. That all changed in November though, when ad sales, our primary source of revenue, dropped precipitously. By mid-November it had become clear that we were going to have to take drastic measures.

One of the first things that happens in a crisis is that the rumor mill goes into high gear. As if the real news isn’t bad enough, unimaginably crazy stories start getting passed around. To make matters worse, the facts were moving so fast that I didn’t have a clear picture of what the reality actually was, so couldn’t offer much in the way of consolation.

Yet what I could do was offer clarity and transparency. I called my senior team into an emergency meeting and told them, “This is bad. Really bad. And to be honest I’m not sure where we stand right now. One thing that I can assure you all of though is this: Like everything else, eventually this crisis will end and, when it does, you are going to want to look back at how you acted and you are going to want to be proud.”

A good number of those in the room that day have since told me how much that meeting meant to them. I wasn’t able to offer much in substance, or even any condolence for that matter. What I was able to do was establish a standard of candor and transparency which made trust possible. That became an essential asset moving forward.

Create An Imperfect Plan

Creating an atmosphere of transparency and trust is essential, but you also have to move quickly to action. In our case, that meant restructuring the entire company over the next 36 hours in order to bring our costs somewhat back in line with revenues. We weren’t even close to having a plan for the long-term, this was about survival.

We still, however, wanted to limit the damage. Although we were eliminating some businesses entirely, we recognized that some of our best talent worked in those businesses. So to lay people off indiscriminately would be a mistake. We wanted to keep our top performers and place them where they could have the most impact.

Over the next day and a half, we had a seemingly never-ending and excruciating series of meetings in which we decided who would stay and who would go, where we could increase efficiency by combining functions and leveraging our scale. Our goal was to do more than just survive, but to position ourselves to be more competitive in the future.

The plan we created in that short period of time was by no means perfect. I had to make decisions based on poor information in a very compressed time frame. Certainly mistakes were made. But within 36 hours we had a plan to move forward and a committed team that, in many ways, welcomed the distraction of focusing on the task in front of them.

Look for Dead Sea Markets

In their 2005 book, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne popularized the notion of a Blue Ocean Strategy, which focuses on new markets, rather than fighting it out in a “red ocean” filled with rabid competition. As MIT Professor David Robertson has described, however, sometimes markets are neither a red or blue ocean, but more like a dead sea, which kills off existing life but provides a new ecosystem in which different organisms can thrive.

He gave the example of LEGO’s Discovery Centers, which has capitalized on the abrupt shift in the economics of mall space. A typical location is set up in an empty department store and features miniature versions of some of the same attractions that can be found at the Toy giant’s amusement parks. The strategy leverages the fact that many mall owners are in dire need to fill the space.

We found something similar during the Ukraine economic collapse of 2009. Because the country was a major outsourcing center for web developers, demand for those with technical talent actually increased. Many of our weaker competitors were unable to retain their staff, which gave us an opportunity to launch several niche digital brands even while we were cutting back in other parts of our business.

Every crisis changes economic relationships and throws pricing out of whack. In some cases that turns cheap commodities, such as Lysol and hand sanitizer amid a Coronavirus pandemic, into highly demanded products. In other cases, however, it makes both assets and market share surprisingly affordable. That can create great opportunities.

Prepare for the Next Crisis

By the fall of 2009, our company was financially stable and things were returning to some form of normalcy. We had a strong management team, a portfolio of leading products and our survival was no longer seriously in question. However, I was exhausted and decided to leave to pursue other opportunities.

The founder, who had started the company almost 15 years before, was as exhausted as me and was ready to sell the company. Given our highly political sensitive portfolio of news brands, I urged him to seek a deal with a multinational firm. However, for various reasons, he decided to go with a local group led by Petro Poroshenko and Boris Lozhkin.

In my book Cascades, I describe what happens next. Due to the hard-hitting coverage of our news journalists, the company came under pressure from the oppressive Yanukovych regime. In 2013, the new owners were forced to sell the company to an ally of the Ukrainian President. A few months later, the Euromaidan protests broke out and Yanukovych was unanimously impeached. Later, Poroshenko was elected President and named Lozhkin as his Chief of Staff.

I still keep in touch with a core group of my former colleagues. Many have started families or new businesses. Quite a few have moved to different countries. Yet we all share the bond of working through the crucible of crisis together, some pride in what we achieved and the satisfaction that, when it was called for, we gave it our honest best.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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