Tag Archives: speed

Better Decision Making at Speed

Leave a reply

Better Decision Making at Speed

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you want to go faster there are three things to focus on: decisions, decisions, and decisions.

First things first – define the decision criteria before the work starts. That’s right – before. This is unnatural and difficult because decision criteria are typically poorly defined, if not undefined, even when the work is almost complete. Don’t believe me? Try to find the agreed-upon decision criteria for an active project. If you can find them, they’ll be ambiguous and incomplete. If you can’t find them, well, there you go.

Decision criteria aren’t just categories -like sales revenue, speed, weight – they all must have a go-no-go threshold. Sales must be greater than X, speed must be greater than Y and weight must be less than Z. A decision criterion is a category with a threshold value.

Second, before the work starts, define the actions you’ll take if the threshold values are achieved and if they are not. If sales are greater than X, speed is greater than Y and weight is less than Z, we’ll invest A dollars a year for B years to scale the business. If one of X, Y or Z are less than their threshold value, we’ll scrap the project and distribute the team throughout the organization.

Lastly, before the work starts, define the decision-maker and how their decision will be documented and communicated. In practice, there is usually just one decision-maker. So, strive to write down just one person’s name as the decision-maker. But that person will be reluctant to sign up as the decision-maker because they don’t want to be mapped the decision if things flop. Instead, the real decision-maker will put together a committee to make the decision.

To tighten things down for the committee, define how the decision will be made. Will it be a simple majority vote, a super-majority, unanimous decision or the purposefully ambiguous consensus vote. My bet is on consensus, which allows the individual committee members to distance themselves from the decision if it goes badly. And, it allows the real decision-maker to influence the consensus and effectively make the decision without making it.

Formalizing the decision process creates speed. The decision categories help the team avoid the wrong work and the threshold values eliminate the time-wasting is-it-good-enough arguments. When the follow-on actions are predefined, there’s no waiting there’s just action. And defining upfront the decision-maker and the mechanism eliminates the time-sucking ambiguity that delays decisions.

Image credits: misterinnovation.com (1 of 850+ free quote slides for download)

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Business Pundits Love to Say These 4 Untrue Things

Leave a reply

Business Pundits Love to Say These 4 Untrue Things

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Go to just about any business conference and you will see a pundit on stage. He or she will show some company that failed and explain the silly mistakes that they made, then follow-up with a few basic rules to help you avoid those pitfalls and become super successful. You leave feeling confident, because it all seems so simple and easy.

Yet look a little closer and the illusion falls away. Very few of these pundits have ever run a successful business. At the same time, many of the executives that are shown to be so silly today, were hailed as visionaries of their time, often by the same pundits that ridicule them now. Some went on to great success later on.

The truth is that managing a successful enterprise is a very hard and complex thing to do well. It can’t be boiled down to a few simple rules. For every great enterprise that does things one way, you will find one that’s equally successful that goes about things very differently. So to succeed in the long term, we often need to ignore the myths pundits love to repeat.

1. You Need To Move Fast And Break Things

When the iPhone came out in 2007, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dismissed it, saying, “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” The tech giant recognized the switch too slowly and largely missed out on the mobile market. Microsoft, it seemed, was a dinosaur, soon to become extinct.

Yet actually the opposite happened. Over the next 10 years, the company grew revenues at the impressive annual rate of better than 10% and maintained margins of nearly 30%. Those are very strong numbers. How can a company miss such an enormous opportunity and still survive, much less thrive?

They key to understanding Microsoft’s business isn’t what it missed, but what it was patiently building. While the world was obsessed with mobile, it was developing its servers and tools division, which eventually became the core of its cloud business that is now growing at stellar rates. That’s why Microsoft is once again vying to be the world’s most valuable company.

While agility can be an important asset for developing applications based on technology that is well understood, it is not a great strategy for developing technology that is truly new and different. To do that, you need to explore, discover and invent from scratch. That takes time and patience.

2. Innovation Is About Ideas

There is nothing that pundits and self-styled gurus like to talk about more than the power of ideas. They put up a picture of someone famous, like Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. or, most enthusiastically, Steve Jobs, and revel the audience with a fascinating story about how their ideas changed the world.

The implication is that you can change the world too if only you could find the right idea. So they suggest all manner of exercises, from brainstorming techniques to meditation and mindfulness, designed to get your creative energy flowing so that you can generate more ideas and rise to greatness, just like those fabulous and famous people.

Yet that’s not how innovation happens. Consider Einstein. He didn’t start with an idea, but with a problem. More specifically, he wanted to know what would happen if you shined a lantern while traveling at light speed. It took him ten years to solve that problem with his theory of special relativity. It took him another ten to solve his next problem and arrive at general relativity.

The truth is that if you want to make a real impact, you don’t start with an idea, but by identifying a meaningful problem to be solved. Revolutions don’t begin with a slogan, they begin with a cause.

3. Lowering Costs Will Make You More Competitive

Not all pundits are pie-in-the-sky dreamers. Some are hard-nosed realists and they will tell you that the key to success is focusing on the bottom line. That means a relentless drive toward efficiency and driving down costs so that you can increase margins and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

Yet as MIT Professor Zeynep Ton, explains in The Good Jobs Strategy, that’s often not the case, even in the notoriously stingy retail industry, she points to companies like Costco, Trader Joe’s and Spain’s Mercadona as examples of how you can get better results by investing in training and retaining employees to better serve your customers.

The problem with a relentless drive to cut costs and drive efficiency is you often end up impeding the interoperability and exploration it takes to create value. That’s the efficiency paradox. The more we try to optimize operations, the less we are able to identify improvements, react to changes and discover new possibilities.

This is becoming even more important in the age of automation, where it is all too easy to replace employees with robots and algorithms. The truth is that racing to the bottom of the cost curve will almost guarantee that you will become a commodity business. Value never disappears, it just moves to a new place. To compete for the long term, you need to identify value at a higher level, develop new business models and redesign work.

4. Companies That Fail Weren’t Paying Attention

The one thing that you can almost guarantee at any conference is that at least one of the fancy pants gurus will tell a story about a great big company, usually Blockbuster, Kodak or Xerox, that was run by eminently silly people. Because these dull executives were asleep at the wheel, they failed to notice the change swirling around them and drove their enterprises into the ground.

The problem is that these stories are almost never true. Make no mistake, it takes talent, intelligence and ambition to run a significant enterprise. So whenever anybody tells you that there was a simple fix to a complex problem, you should raise your B.S. antenna. You’re probably being sold a fairy tale.

Reality is never simple or clear cut. Executives need to make tough decisions with incomplete information, often in a complex time frame. So rather than looking for easy answers, you would do yourself a much greater service by trying to uncover why smart, diligent leaders with good intentions so often get it wrong and learning from them.

Most of all, you need to internalize the fact that success or failure never boil down to a single decision or event. Even the best of us have bad moments and sometimes the least deserving get lucky. The best you can do is to keep moving forward, continue to learn and, most of the time, ignoring the pundits.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credit: Dall-E on Bing

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of May 2023

Leave a reply

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of May 2023Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are May’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. A 90% Project Failure Rate Means You’re Doing it Wrong — by Mike Shipulski
  2. ‘Innovation’ is Killing Innovation. How Do We Save It? — by Robyn Bolton
  3. Sustaining Imagination is Hard — by Braden Kelley
  4. Unintended Consequences. The Hidden Risk of Fast-Paced Innovation — by Pete Foley
  5. 8 Strategies to Future-Proofing Your Business & Gaining Competitive Advantage — by Teresa Spangler
  6. How to Determine if Your Problem is Worth Solving — by Mike Shipulski
  7. Sprint Toward the Innovation Action — by Mike Shipulski
  8. Moneyball and the Beginning, Middle, and End of Innovation — by Robyn Bolton
  9. A Shortcut to Making Strategic Trade-Offs — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  10. 3 Innovation Types Not What You Think They Are — by Robyn Bolton

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in April that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last three years:

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Today’s Customer Wants to Go Fast

Leave a reply

Today's Customer Wants to Go Fast

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Customers don’t want to wait. Specifically, they don’t want you to waste their time. If you do make them wait, you risk losing them. Making your customers wait sends the message that you don’t respect them or their time.

Jay Baer, a customer experience and marketing expert, proves this in his latest study, The Time to Win, which measures the impact of speed and responsiveness on customer experience and loyalty.

Just how important is speed? Consider these findings from Baer’s report:

  • Two-thirds of customers say speed is as important as price.

  • More than half of the customers surveyed hired the first business to respond to their requests, even if it was more expensive.

  • Half of all customers will not wait more than three minutes in a store.

I had a chance to interview Baer on Amazing Business Radio, where he shared some important insights that should be considered. Here are six of my favorites, followed by my commentary:

  • Speed is the most important component of customer experience and the only one that never pauses or goes backward – Calling it the most important component of the customer experience is bold, but consider a key finding from the report: 50% of customers are less likely to spend money with a business that takes longer to respond than they expect. Baer says, “Customers’ expectations for speed and responsiveness escalate every year without fail.”

  • Everyone has the same amount of time, 1,440 minutes a day, and there is nothing we can do to get more – Time is the same for everyone. Nobody gets more than anyone else. It has nothing to do with being rich, poor, young or old. And once it’s gone, you can’t get it back. Starting with that premise, business leaders should ask themselves, “What can we do to make sure we’re not to blame for wasting our customers’ time?”

  • Age makes a difference – In our interview, I was surprised when Baer shared the generations that were most and least patient. I would have thought Baby Boomers (the older generation) would have been more patient, but I was wrong. Gen-Z is the most patient generation. Boomers are the least patient. The point is to know your customers. Who do you cater to? Understand the demographics and improve your response time accordingly.

  • The first company that responds to a customer has an incredible advantage – If your company is the first to respond, you could win the customer’s business, regardless of price. Specifically, 53% of consumers hired the first business that responded to them. Customers want to make decisions and move on. If you give them what they want, they can skip the hassle and time of comparing all the competition.

  • Fast response impacts your bottom line – Just as customer service and convenience make price less relevant, so does quick response or fast service. The research found that customers would pay an average of 19% more for “always immediate service,” which includes no waiting in line, not waiting on hold, etc. In other words, customers put a premium on speed. It’s about convenience. Furthermore, 27% of customers are more likely to spend money when the brand responds faster than expected.

  • Right now is not really right now – As customers’ expectations and their need for speed increase, the concept of “right now” can seem daunting. According to Baer, the concept of “right now” is the optimal amount of elapsed time in every customer interaction throughout the entire customer journey. If that sounds technical, here’s a simpler way of putting it: “Right now” is simply slightly faster than the customer expected.

With only 1,440 minutes available each day, customers want to devote as few minutes as possible to waiting, as Baer’s research proves. This is so important that people will pay more for it. The security lines in airports are perfect examples of this. If you’ve taken a flight in a major U.S. airport, you’ll notice three lines to get through security. The TSA security line is for most passengers. This is free. Then there is TSA PreCheck. For a small investment of $78 (which covers you for five years), you can get pre-qualified to use a shorter line where you don’t have to take your computer out of your bag, take off your shoes, and more. And for a bit more money, you can sign up for CLEAR, which allows you to jump to the front of the TSA lines.

Baer’s research makes an important point. If you want a competitive edge in business, respect your customer’s time. Don’t make them wait. Respond quickly to their questions, requests, and problems. Find ways to incorporate speed into your customer experience and you’ll reap the benefits of returning customers who spend more and say, “I’ll be back!”

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Velocity, Speed and Innovation

1 Reply

Velocity, Speed and Innovation

Flying for 12 hours at a stretch can give you a lot of time to think, in between in-flight meals, movies and other on-board entertainment.

The more I thought about the current state of innovation, the more I realized that many of us have it all wrong. We at OVO often talk about innovation as an enabler to strategy, not a strategy itself. But I think there’s something much deeper going on than that. First, we know that many executives WANT more innovation. But they don’t want innovation for its own sake. They want innovation that drives more revenue growth, more differentiation and more creation of compelling products and services than what would otherwise happen. This means that innovation must create solutions with more return than existing methods, with only incrementally greater risk.

Executives want to be Innovative, they don’t want Innovation

In the final analysis, CEOs and senior executives don’t want INNOVATION, they want the benefits and outcomes of well-pursued innovation activities, namely, growth, differentiation, market penetration, disruption of adjacent markets and so forth. If there are easier ways to achieve these outcomes, CEOs and organizations will gladly pursue the alternatives, and forgo the risks that surround innovation. What risks? Because of the investments in management tools, techniques and training to improve efficiency and effectiveness, many businesses have very efficient but very brittle and fragile operating models. Innovation introduces risk, uncertainty and change into organizations and business models honed to avoid these issue. Further, most work teams have been right-sized and down-sized to the point where incremental work is almost impossible to engage. No, what executives want is not innovation per se, but they would like to be viewed as INNOVATIVE and enjoy the benefits of meaningful, valuable new products and services.

Why Velocity is more important than Speed

Perhaps what I’ve come to realize is that what most organizations need more than anything is VELOCITY. Let me explain what I mean by Velocity. My daughter’s physics class was working on the definition of motion and speed. Speed measures how fast an object is moving, so many feet or miles divided by the amount of time it takes to complete the distance. Physics and calculus distinguish SPEED from VELOCITY, by taking the stance that VELOCITY is Speed in a specific direction. Physicists and scientists would say that VELOCITY is a Scalar concept.

When we think about most businesses, VELOCITY is exactly what they need. They need speed to compete with a host of changes occurring in their markets, from increased competition to lowered trade barriers to a rapid increase in the abilities of individuals and firms in developing countries and markets. However, speed isn’t all that valuable if it’s in the wrong direction. VELOCITY is speed in a specific direction, and that’s what many organizations need. They need to be faster, more effective, more innovative, and end up in a place that was intentional.

VELOCITY connotes the idea that the firm is going somewhere that matters. How a firm knows where to go is dependent to some extent on corporate strategy and how well that strategy is communicated. Further, how it knows where to go is dependent on the firm’s ability to assess market trends, develop scenarios and understand customer needs. These final factors are innovation tools, which help describe a range of possible futures and help decipher which ones are relevant and important.

Speed kills, Velocity Wins

Over the next few posts I will write about speed, velocity and their relationship to innovation. Because increasingly innovation is just a method to help a firm increase its speed in a particular direction. Speed will become the new competitive weapon in a highly competitive market, but speed in and of itself is useless without intentional direction and guidance. We’ll look at why speed is ever more important, and how good innovation contributes to speed and velocity.

Another way to think of this is that innovation is a feature, and speed or velocity are the potential benefits. I’m increasingly convinced that velocity in a business sense – getting to the right markets and opportunities faster than others, and doing so intentionally – is the capability that will distinguish winners from losers in the coming years.

Image credit: Pixabay

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.