Why Customers Pay More for Brands with Purpose

Why Customers Pay More For Brands With Purpose

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

How important is a social cause to your customers? More than half of the customers (62%) we surveyed for our 2025 annual customer service and customer service (CX) study said they prefer to do business with a brand that supports a social cause that is important to them. Fifty-two percent of customers said they would be willing to pay more to do business with a brand that gives back.

Patagonia is one of the most recognizable brands in business known for “giving back” to the world. Sustainability is a big part of its brand promise, and it is a model of how to practice commitment to the planet. For the customers who care about sustainability—and many of the brand’s customers do—this is an important reason they spend more money for a Patagonia product and remain loyal to the brand.

Money

Let’s start with money. Its 1% for the Planet program pledged 1% of sales to the “preservation and restoration of the natural environment,” and since starting the program in 1985, it has given back more than $140 million in cash and in-kind donations to environmental groups around the world.

Buying Back Used Merchandise

If you own used Patagonia or gear that’s in good shape, the company will pay you to send it back, provided it’s still usable. Patagonia’s Worn Wear program pays customers 25% of the MSRP in the form of credit that can be redeemed in-store or online.

Recycling

If you have worn-out Patagonia merchandise that is not usable, the company will take it back and recycle or repurpose it for you at no charge. All you do is send it back to its service center or drop the items off at a Patagonia store, and they will make sure it doesn’t end up in a landfill.

Repair Could Be a Better Option than Replacement

Imagine a company that would rather keep you using its merchandise and repair it for you or give you what you need to repair it yourself, even if it means you might not replace it for years. That would be Patagonia, which will do most of the repairs on its items at no charge. The company will also send free patch kits to repair tears and small holes in its apparel.

While Patagonia is a case study for sustainability, you don’t have to be an international brand to make an impact. Small, local companies give back to their communities. Regional chains support various charities and causes that are important to their customers. The size of your business doesn’t matter. A significant percentage of your customers care that you care.

Here are additional facts from our annual research that could compel you to start, continue or grow your cause and philanthropic efforts:

Trust

In the U.S., 52% of customers say a company’s involvement in a social cause increases their trust in that company. If you want customer loyalty, you must create trust. Without it, there’s no confidence. Caring for something more than the bottom line increases trust.

Customer Experiences Improves

Almost six in 10 customers (57%) in the U.S. believe that companies and brands that support social causes are more likely to treat customers better. When the customer has a great experience and the company gives back, you have a winning combination.

Know Your Customers

Some customers appreciate a company supporting a social cause more than others. Specifically, 53% of Gen-Z customers rate companies giving back as “important” compared to 29% of Baby Boomers. And price becomes less sensitive to Gen-Z’s as 60% of them say they would pay more, versus 27% of Baby Boomers. While there is a big difference between the generations, that doesn’t mean a company that caters to older customers shouldn’t be philanthropic. Twenty-nine percent of Boomers is almost one-third of the generation.

Conclusion: A Social Cause Is a Good Marketing Strategy

Social causes can be part of a company’s marketing strategy. There’s nothing wrong with that. More companies should “give back” if the result attracts and retains more customers. While the business benefits of supporting social causes are clear—increased trust, stronger loyalty and potentially higher sales—the most powerful social and charitable programs come from authentic commitment to the supported causes.

We can learn from companies like Patagonia. They make their cause part of their mission and core values, and customers feel their authenticity. Regardless of the type of business or industry you are in or how large or small your company is, when a social cause or charity matters to a company’s leadership, customers sense it and respond with their wallets. Yes, the financial returns are a natural byproduct, but not the primary goal. In today’s world, doing good is good business. It’s that simple.

Image Credit: Unsplash

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

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

Fueling Competitive Advantage Through Continuous Experience Improvement

3 Replies

Rise of the Experience Management Office (XMO)

Fueling Competitive Advantage Through Continuous Experience Improvement

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

In today’s hyper-competitive landscape, the battle for market share is no longer waged solely on product features or price points. It’s fought and won on the battleground of experience. From the first touchpoint to ongoing engagement, every interaction a customer, employee, or partner has with your organization shapes their perception and ultimately, their loyalty. As a human-centered change and innovation author, I’ve seen firsthand how organizations that prioritize experience improvement don’t just survive – they thrive. But how does an organization systematically achieve this? The answer, increasingly, lies in the strategic establishment and effective operation of an Experience Management Office (XMO).

For too long, experience initiatives have been fragmented, siloed within individual departments, or relegated to one-off projects. This piecemeal approach might deliver incremental gains in specific areas, but it rarely translates into a holistic, differentiating experience across the entire organizational ecosystem. This is precisely where the XMO steps in, acting as the central nervous system for all things experience-related.

What is an Experience Management Office (XMO)?

At its core, an XMO is a dedicated, cross-functional entity responsible for orchestrating, governing, and continuously improving all facets of an organization’s experiences. Think of it as the strategic hub that connects the dots between customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), partner experience (PX), and even product experience (PX), ensuring a cohesive and compelling narrative across every interaction. It moves beyond simply collecting feedback to proactively designing, measuring, and optimizing experiences with a strategic lens.

The XMO isn’t just another committee; it’s a strategic imperative. Its mandate extends to:

Defining a Unified Experience Vision: Establishing a clear, organization-wide understanding of what “great experience” looks like and how it aligns with strategic business objectives.
Establishing Experience Governance: Setting standards, processes, and guidelines for experience design, delivery, and measurement across all functions and touchpoints.
Fostering a Culture of Empathy and Experience-Centricity: Championing a mindset where every employee understands their role in delivering exceptional experiences.
Driving Cross-Functional Collaboration: Breaking down silos to ensure seamless handoffs and consistent experiences across departments.
Leveraging Technology for Experience Management: Identifying and implementing tools for feedback collection, journey mapping, analytics, and personalization.
Measuring and Monitoring Experience Performance: Defining key metrics and establishing robust reporting mechanisms to track progress and identify areas for improvement.
Strategically Managing the Experience Improvement Backlog: Prioritizing and sequencing experience enhancement initiatives based on impact, feasibility, and strategic alignment.

Defining and Monitoring Experience Metrics: The XMO’s Data-Driven Approach

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. This timeless adage holds particularly true for experience. A mature XMO moves beyond vanity metrics to establish a comprehensive suite of experience metrics that provide actionable insights. These typically include a mix of:

Lagging Indicators: These reflect past performance and often include traditional metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), and employee engagement scores.
Leading Indicators: These provide foresight into future performance and can include metrics related to website navigation ease, call resolution rates, time-to-onboard new employees, or speed of partner response.
Operational Metrics: These track the efficiency and effectiveness of processes that impact experience, such as average handle time in customer service or employee training completion rates.
Financial Impact Metrics: Ultimately, experience must link back to business outcomes. The XMO tracks how experience improvements contribute to revenue growth, cost reduction, customer retention, and employee productivity.

The XMO is responsible for the systematic collection, analysis, and dissemination of these metrics. They establish dashboards, conduct regular reviews, and translate data into compelling narratives that drive action at all levels of the organization. This data-driven approach allows the XMO to identify pain points, celebrate successes, and most importantly, make informed decisions about where to focus improvement efforts.

Strategic Management of an Experience Improvement Backlog: Prioritization for Impact

One of the most critical functions of an XMO is the strategic management of the experience improvement backlog. In any large organization, there will be a seemingly endless list of ideas, suggestions, and identified issues related to improving experience. Without a centralized, strategic approach, these can become overwhelming and lead to a reactive, rather than proactive, improvement cycle.

The XMO brings discipline to this process by:

Centralizing Experience Feedback and Insights: Gathering input from all sources – customer surveys, employee feedback, market research, competitive analysis, operational data, and frontline observations.
Structuring and Categorizing Backlog Items: Organizing identified improvement opportunities by experience type (CX, EX, PX), impact area, customer journey stage, or strategic alignment.
Quantifying Impact and Feasibility: Working with relevant stakeholders to assess the potential impact of each improvement on key metrics and the feasibility of implementation (cost, resources, technical complexity).
Prioritizing Based on Strategic Value: Applying a strategic framework (e.g., Weighted Shortest Job First – WSJF, Kano Model, RICE scoring) to prioritize backlog items based on their potential to drive competitive advantage, address critical pain points, or capitalize on emerging opportunities.
Translating into Actionable Initiatives: Working with product teams, IT, HR, marketing, and other departments to translate prioritized backlog items into concrete projects and initiatives with clear owners and timelines.
Monitoring Progress and Measuring Outcomes: Tracking the progress of improvement initiatives and, critically, measuring the actual impact on the defined experience metrics to ensure the desired outcomes are achieved.

“An XMO transforms experience from a reactive afterthought into a proactive, strategic differentiator. It’s about building a muscle for continuous improvement, not just a one-time fix.”

Building and Maintaining Competitive Advantage Through Continuous Experience Improvement

In a world where products and services are increasingly commoditized, the truly sustainable competitive advantage lies in the experience you deliver. Organizations with a mature XMO don’t just react to market changes; they proactively shape customer expectations and employee capabilities. They build a culture of continuous learning and adaptation, where experience is not just a buzzword, but a measurable, managed asset.

By systematically defining and monitoring experience metrics, and strategically managing an experience improvement backlog, the XMO enables organizations to:

Increase Customer Loyalty and Retention: Delighted customers stay longer and refer more.
Improve Employee Engagement and Productivity: Empowered and positive employees deliver better experiences.
Enhance Brand Reputation and Equity: A consistently positive experience builds trust and a strong brand.
Drive Operational Efficiencies: Streamlined, user-friendly experiences often reduce costs and rework.
Accelerate Innovation: A deep understanding of experience pain points and desires fuels meaningful new solutions.

The journey to becoming an experience-led organization is not a sprint; it’s a marathon. But with an XMO leading the charge, equipped with the right metrics and a disciplined approach to improvement, organizations can systematically build and maintain a formidable competitive advantage. It’s time to stop treating experience as an afterthought and elevate it to the strategic imperative it truly is.

Contact me if you’re interested in working together to build or enhance your Experience Management Office (XMO).

Accelerate your change and transformation success

Content Authenticity Statement: The ideas are those of Braden Kelley, shaped into an article introducing the topic with a little help from Google Gemini.

Image credit: Gemini

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

Employees Are Calling BS on Customer-First Leadership

Leave a reply

Employees Are Calling BS on Customer-First Leadership

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

The data speaks for itself: Your employees don’t believe you practice customer-first leadership.

According to Gallup’s research, only one in five of your people think you make decisions with customers in mind. That means four out of five watch you say one thing and do another. Every. Single. Day.

And it’s getting worse. Fewer than three in ten of your employees feel proud of what they’re building for your customers. As a result, employee pride in what they create and deliver is at an all-time low.

You know what this means, don’t you? Your customer-first messaging isn’t inspiring anyone—it’s insulting them. Because they see the truth behind your town hall speeches, and the truth is that customers aren’t first.

How Are We Still Screwing This Up?

Customer-centricity has been business gospel for decades. We’ve got libraries full of case studies, armies of consultants, and enough “customer first” wall art to wallpaper the Apple HQ. So, how the hell are we getting worse at this?

Because most leaders treat customer focus like a box to check. They say the right words in town halls and analyst calls but make decisions that prioritize quarterly numbers, internal politics, and whatever shiny new idea they come up with.

Leaders say customers come first, then cut support staff to hit margins. They preach customer obsession, then ignore feedback that requires real change. They commission expensive customer journey maps, then never look at them again.

Employees see it all.

And when employees stop believing in what they deliver, customers know it immediately. Every burned-out support call, every half-hearted sales pitch, every policy that punishes the customer to boost the company’s profit.

You CAN do better

You only need to look as far as the telecom industry (?!?!?!) for an $800 million example.

In 2005, Arlene Harris co-founded GreatCall (now Lively) and did something radical: she built a company based on the Jobs to be Done of senior citizens. While everyone else chased flashy features for younger markets, she recognized that older Americans didn’t want a smartphone—they wanted a lifeline.

Harris delivered with the Jitterbug, a simple flip phone with giant buttons. But that was just the beginning. Focusing more on helping customers stay safe and connected than cool features for the tech geeks, she quickly built an ecosystem offering emergency response, health monitoring, 24/7 human support, and caregiver connectivity.

When Best Buy acquired GreatCall for $800 million in 2018, they weren’t buying a phone company. They were buying something rare: a trusted, high-value services company with intensely loyal customers.

Harris succeeded by doing precisely what the data shows most leaders aren’t doing: genuinely understanding and serving real customer needs.

WILL you do better?

Customer-first leadership isn’t a box to check. It’s basic leadership integrity. It’s the difference between meaning what you say and just saying what sounds good.

When four out of five of your employees don’t trust your customer commitment, the problem isn’t your strategy deck, digital transformation, or tariffs. The problem is you.

So here’s your moment of truth: When was the last time you listened to customer service calls? Not the sanitized highlights your team shows you—the raw, unfiltered frustration of someone who can’t get help. When did you last sit in a waiting room and watch how people navigate your system? Or stock a shelf and see what customers actually do?

If you can’t remember, that’s your answer. If you’ve never done it, that’s worse.

The question is: Will you keep performing customer-centricity, or start practicing it?

Image credit: Pixabay

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

Values Determine Your Competitiveness

Leave a reply

Values Determine Your Competitiveness

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When Lou Gerstner was chosen to lead IBM in 1993, he was an unlikely revolutionary. A McKinsey consultant and then the successful CEO of RJR Nabisco, he was considered to be a pillar of the establishment. He would, however, turn out to be as subversive as any activist, transforming the company and saving it from near-death.

Yet there was more to what he achieved than simply turning red ink to black. “The Gerstner revolution wasn’t about technology or strategy, it was about transforming our values and our culture to be in greater harmony with the market,” Irving Wladawsky-Berger, one of his chief lieutenants, told me.

Values are essential to how an enterprise honors its mission. They represent choices of what an organization will and will not do, what it rewards and what it punishes and how it defines success and failure. Perhaps most importantly, values will determine an enterprise’s relationships with other stakeholders, how it collaborates and what it can achieve.

Values Incur Costs And Constraints

At his very first press conference, Gerstner famously declared: “the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.” It was an odd, even shocking statement for a new CEO charged with turning around a historic company. But what he understood, and few others did, was that unless he changed the culture to honor the values its success was built on, no strategy could succeed.

“At IBM we had lost sight of our values,” Wladawsky-Berger would later tell me. “For example, there was a long tradition of IBM executives dressing formally in a suit and tie. Yet that wasn’t a value, it was an early manifestation of a value. In the early days, many of IBM’s customers were banks, so IBM’s salespeople dressed to reflect their customers. So the value was to be close to customers.”

Gerstner had been a customer and knew that IBM did not always treat him well. At one point the company threatened to pull service from an entire data center because a single piece of competitive equipment was installed. So as CEO, he vowed to shift the focus from IBM’s “own “proprietary stack of technologies” to its customers’ “stack of business processes.”

Yet he did something else as well. He made it clear that he was willing to forego revenue on every sale to do what was right for the customer and he showed that he meant it. Over the years I’ve spoken to dozens of IBM executives from that period and virtually all of them have pointed this out. Not one seems to think IBM would still be in business today without it.

The truth is that if you’re not willing to incur costs and constraints, it’s not a value. It’s a platitude. “Lou refocused us all on customers and listening to what they wanted and he did it by example,” Wladawsky-Berger, remembers. “We started listening to customers more because he listened to customers.

Values Signal Trust And Credibility

In South Africa, the Congress of The People was held in June, 1955. The gathering, which included blacks, mixed race, Indians and liberal whites, convened to draft and adopt the Freedom Charter, much like the Continental Congress gathered to produce the Declaration of Independence in America. The idea was to come up with a common and inclusive vision.

However, the Freedom Charter was anything but moderate. It was a “revolutionary document precisely because the changes it envisioned could not be achieved without radically altering the economic and political structure of South Africa… In South Africa, to merely achieve fairness, one had to destroy apartheid itself, for it was the very embodiment of injustice,” Nelson Mandela would later write.

Yet despite its seemingly radical aims, the Freedom Charter spoke to common values, such as equal rights and equal protection under the law—not just among the signatories, but for anyone living in a free society. It was powerful because of how it signaled to outside stakeholders, such as international institutions, governments and corporations that they shared more with the anti-apartheid movement than they did with the regime.

It was because of those values that activists were able to successfully boycott firms, such as Barclays Bank and Shell Oil, that did business in South Africa. When those companies pulled their investments out, the dominoes began to fall. International sanctions and political pressure increased markedly and Apartheid became politically untenable.

Here again, values would play a crucial role. Much like Gerstner’s willingness to lose revenue on every sale to keep his commitment to IBM customers, Mandela’s commitment to the Freedom Charter, even during 27 years in prison, signaled to stakeholders—inside and outside of South Africa—that supporting his cause was the right thing to do.

Shared Values Drive Collaboration

In the 1960s and 70s, Route 128 outside of Boston was the center of technology, but by the 1990s Silicon Valley had taken over and never looked back. As AnnaLee Saxenian explained in her classic, Regional Advantage, the key difference had less to do with strategy, technology and tactics than it did with values and how the firms saw themselves.

Dominant Boston firms such as DEC, Data General and Wang Laboratories saw themselves as warring fiefdoms. The west coast startups, however, saw themselves as part of the same ecosystem and tended to band together and socialize. “Everybody worked for the same company — Silicon Valley,” Saxenian would later tell me.

This difference in values translated directly into differences in operational practice. For example, in Silicon Valley if you left your employer to start a company of your own, you were still considered part of the family. Many new entrepreneurs became suppliers or customers to their former employers and still socialized actively with their former colleagues. In Boston, if you left your firm you were treated as a pariah and an outcast.

When technology began to shift in the 80s and 90s, the Boston firms had little, if any, connection to the new ecosystems that were evolving. In Silicon Valley, however, connections to former employees acted as an antenna network, providing early market intelligence that helped those companies adapt.

When you value competition above all else, everyone is a potential enemy. However, when you are willing to forsake absolute fealty in the service of collaboration, you can leverage the assets of an entire ecosystem. Those may not show up on a strategic plan or a balance sheet, but they are just as important as any other asset.

Moving From Hierarchies to Networks

The truth is that IBM was not devoid of values when Gerstner arrived. It’s just that they’d gone awry. “IBM had always valued competitiveness, but we had started to compete with each other internally rather than working together to beat the competition,” Wladawsky-Berger remembers. Certainly it valued technology and profits, just not customers.

What Gerstner did was, as noted above, bring the company’s culture and values back into “harmony with the market.” The company no longer wielded monopoly-like power. It had to collaborate with a wide array of stakeholders. It was this realization that led it to become the first major technology company to embrace open source software and support Linux.

Traditionally we’ve seen the world as driven by hierarchies. Kings and queens ruled the world through aristocracies that carried out their orders. Corporate CEO’s outlined strategies that underlings would have to execute. Discipline was enforced through a system of punishments and rewards. Power was valued above all else.

Yet as Moisés Naím pointed out in The End of Power, “Power is easier to get, but harder to use or keep.” Therefore, the ability to attract has become more important than the power to compel or coerce. That’s why today, strategy has less to do with increasing efficiencies and acquiring resources and more to do with widening and deepening networks of connections.

Power no longer lies at the top of hierarchies, but emanates from the center of networks. What determines whether we will get there or not is our values.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pexels

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

Optimizing Employee One-On-Ones

Leave a reply

Optimizing Employee One-On-Ones

GUEST POST from David Burkus

One-on-one meetings with employees are a crucial aspect of effective leadership. Organizations spent countless hours, money, and other resources trying to find the most qualified talent on board, and then spent more money to keep that talent motivated and engaged. And yet, the single most time time-efficient and effective way to invest in the growth and development of employees is a simple feedback session with their direct supervisor.

In this article, we will delve into the three main sections that make up a successful one-on-one meeting: expectations, feedback, and growth and development. By following this structure, you can ensure that your meetings are productive and meaningful, leading to improved performance and employee satisfaction.

Expectations

The first part of your one-on-one meetings with employees should focus on expectations. Setting clear objectives and expectations is the foundation of any successful working relationship. During one-on-one meetings, it is essential to discuss and align on these expectations to ensure that everyone is on the same page. By doing so, you can monitor progress, celebrate achievements, and identify any factors that may be affecting performance.

By setting clear objectives and roles, you provide your employees with a sense of direction and purpose. This clarity allows them to focus their efforts on the most important tasks and prioritize their work effectively. Monitoring progress and celebrating achievements not only boosts morale but also provides an opportunity to recognize and reward outstanding performance. Additionally, by identifying factors that may be affecting performance, you can work together to find solutions and remove any obstacles that may hinder progress.

Feedback

The second part of your one-on-one meetings with employees should focus on feedback. Feedback is a powerful tool for growth and improvement. During one-on-one meetings, it is crucial to provide fair feedback that highlights both areas of high performance and areas for improvement. By acknowledging and appreciating the employee’s strengths, you motivate them to continue excelling in those areas. Simultaneously, by providing constructive feedback, you help them identify areas where they can grow and develop.

This section is also meant to be a two-way conversation. This is a time for employees to give you feedback as well. How are you doing as their manager? What resources do they need that you can provide? Encourage your employees to share their thoughts and ideas, and actively listen to their feedback. By fostering a safe and supportive environment, you can build trust and strengthen the relationship with your team members.

Growth and Development

The final part of your one-on-one meetings with employees should discuss the employees’ growth and development. Take the time to discuss their long-term career goals, the skills they want to develop, and potential future roles they aspire to. Understanding your employees’ career aspirations allows you to tailor their development plans and provide them with the necessary resources and opportunities to achieve their goals. By identifying the skills and knowledge they need to grow, you can offer targeted training and development programs. Additionally, supporting employees in their current roles by assigning challenging projects or providing mentorship opportunities can facilitate their growth and prepare them for future roles within the organization.

This section should focus on the real and accurate career objectives of employees. Unfortunately, too often employees who lack trust in their boss or the company invent false ambitions (“I want to be a manager” or “I’m here for the long-term.”) It’s okay if some employees decide their long-term goals will take them away from the organization. Leaders can still invest in their growth, and they can still be high performers in the meantime.

One-on-one meetings with employees are a valuable investment of time and effort. By following the threefold structure of expectations, feedback, and growth and development, you can create a supportive and engaging work environment. Candid and honest conversations in these meetings can lead to faster growth and better results than formal annual reviews or performance improvement plans.

Remember, the order of the three sections is important, as ending on growth and development helps make the conversation forward-looking and motivating. By setting clear expectations, providing constructive feedback, and supporting your employees’ growth, you can foster a culture of continuous improvement and help everyone on your team do their best work ever.

Image credit: Pexels

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on September 18, 2023.

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

Summer Sale on Charting Change

Leave a reply

Wow! Exciting news!

My publisher is having a summer sale that will allow you to get the hardcover or the digital version (eBook) of my latest best-selling book Charting Change for 25% off!

Including FREE SHIPPING WORLDWIDE! *

I created the Human-Centered Change methodology to help organizations get everyone literally all on the same page for change. The 70+ visual, collaborative tools are introduced in my book Charting Change, including the powerful Change Planning Canvas™. The toolkit has been created to help organizations:

Beat the 70% failure rate for change programs
Quickly visualize, plan and execute change efforts
Deliver projects and change efforts on time
Accelerate implementation and adoption
Get valuable tools for a low investment

You must go to SpringerLink for this Cyber Sale:

The offer is valid until June 27, 2025 only using code SNSUM25

Click here to get this deal using code SNSUM25 and save 25%!

Quick reminder: Everyone can download ten free tools from the Human-Centered Change methodology by going to its page on this site via the link in this sentence, and book buyers can get 26 of the 70+ tools from the Change Planning Toolkit (including the Change Planning Canvas™) by contacting me with proof of purchase.

*This offer is valid for English-language Springer, Palgrave & Apress books & eBooks. The discount is redeemable on link.springer.com only. Titles affected by fixed book price laws, forthcoming titles and titles temporarily not available on link.springer.com are excluded from this promotion, as are reference works, handbooks, encyclopedias, subscriptions, or bulk purchases. The currency in which your order will be invoiced depends on the billing address associated with the payment method used, not necessarily your home currency. Regional VAT/tax may apply. Promotional prices may change due to exchange rates.

This offer is valid for individual customers only. Booksellers, book distributors, and institutions such as libraries and corporations please visit springernature.com/contact-us. This promotion does not work in combination with other discounts or gift cards.

Innovation is Unknowable Not Uncertain

Leave a reply

Innovation is Unknowable Not Uncertain

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Where’s the Marketing Brief? In product development, the Marketing team creates a document that defines who will buy the new product (the customer), what needs are satisfied by the new product and how the customer will use the new product. And Marketing team also uses their crystal ball to estimate the number of units the customers will buy, when they’ll buy it and how much they’ll pay. In theory, the Marketing Brief is finalized before the engineers start their work.

With innovation, there can be no Marketing Brief because there are no customers, no product and no technology to underpin it. And the needs the innovation will satisfy are unknowable because customers have not asked for the them, nor can the customer understand the innovation if you showed it to them. And how the customers will use the? That’s unknowable because, again, there are no customers and no customer needs. And how many will you sell and the sales price? Again, unknowable.

Where’s the Specification? In product development, the Marketing Brief is translated into a Specification that defines what the product must do and how much it will cost. To define what the product must do, the Specification defines a set of test protocols and their measurable results. And the minimum performance is defined as a percentage improvement over the test results of the existing product.

With innovation, there can be no Specification because there are no customers, no product, no technology and no business model. In that way, there can be no known test protocols and the minimum performance criteria are unknowable.

Where’s the Schedule? In product development, the tasks are defined, their sequence is defined and their completion dates are defined. Because the work has been done before, the schedule is a lot like the last one. Everyone knows the drill because they’ve done it before.

With innovation, there can be no schedule. The first task can be defined, but the second cannot because the second depends on the outcome of the first. If the first experiment is successful, the second step builds on the first. But if the first experiment is unsuccessful, the second must start from scratch. And if the customer likes the first prototype, the next step is clear. But if they don’t, it’s back to the drawing board. And the experiments feed the customer learning and the customer learning shapes the experiments.

Innovation is different than product development. And success in product development may work against you in innovation. If you’re doing innovation and you find yourself trying to lock things down, you may be misapplying your product development expertise. If you’re doing innovation and you find yourself trying to write a specification, you may be misapplying your product development expertise. And if you are doing innovation and find yourself trying to nail down a completion date, you are definitely misapplying your product development expertise.

With innovation, people say the work is uncertain, but to me that’s not the right word. To me, the work is unknowable. The customer is unknowable because the work hasn’t been done before. The specification is unknowable because there is nothing for comparison. And the schedule in unknowable because, again, the work hasn’t been done before.

To set expectations appropriately, say the innovation work is unknowable. You’ll likely get into a heated discuss with those who want demand a Marketing Brief, Specification and Schedule, but you’ll make the point that with innovation, the rules of product development don’t apply.

Image credit: Unsplash

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

Don’t Do These Things When Giving Gifts to Customers and Employees

Leave a reply

Don't Do These Things When Giving Gifts to Customers and Employees

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

It feels like Valentine’s Day was just yesterday. It is a time when you acknowledge the people you love and care about, often with a gift. I’ve written a number of articles about customer and employee gifts on Valentine’s Day and other obvious gift-giving holidays. It seems that the traditional holidays toward the end of the year are when companies or employees typically send or exchange gifts and cards.

Valentine’s Day is interesting. For personal relationships, it’s almost an obligation to give a gift. While it’s not directed toward professional or corporate relationships, some companies have found a way to have fun and send a card or gift to customers and employees. Unlike personal relationships, the choice to do so is optional. The same goes for other holidays throughout the year. How many companies send their customers or employees gifts for Independence Day or Thanksgiving? Depending on your country, there are plenty of holidays to give gifts outside of the traditional celebrations.

Just before Valentine’s Day, I was interviewed for an article by Bored Panda about corporate gifts that are “tacky, cheap, and insulting.” This made me reflect on my mentor of gift giving, the late John Ruhlin, author of Giftology, and his latest book, Beyond Giftology (released posthumously), who taught me the dos and don’ts of corporate gifting.

Shep Hyken cartoon on gifts

The point of gifting to customers and employees is to be remembered. However, not everyone does it right. So, for this article, I’ll share a few ideas on what NOT to do.

For Customers:

Don’t turn your gift into a marketing promotion with logos branded all over the gift.

For Customers and Employees:

Be careful about sending food. First, once they eat it, it’s gone and will soon become a distant memory. Second, if the customer or employee is on a specific diet, they may not appreciate or enjoy the gift.

Be careful about sending alcohol. Unless you know what they will enjoy (such as a favorite bottle of scotch or a special bottle of wine), avoid alcohol. Some choose to abstain from alcohol. Whatever their reason for doing so, you don’t want to appear to be insensitive.

For Employees:

Money is nice and a pleasant surprise, but it may be quickly forgotten and considered part of their compensation and not a true gift. Instead, consider giving employees a bonus day (or two) off or an experience, such as tickets to a sporting event or concert. Those are memorable.

Swag in the form of clothing is nice, and employees are proud to wear a logo on their sleeve but don’t turn your employees into walking billboards of your products and services. Subtle logos are the classy way to go.

So, those are some of the “don’ts” of corporate gift giving. There are many ways to do it right, and for an over-arching gifting strategy, consider that the gift should be unexpected, appreciated and memorable.

I’d like to close by mentioning my friend John Ruhlin once more. He left us on August 15, 2024, at the young age of 44. He was the greatest relationship builder I’ve ever met. Everyone who knew him felt a connection. He had many “best friends.” While he was a master at gift-giving for corporate relationships, every gift he ever gave, including his love for his friends, was genuine. John will be missed, but his legacy lives on. Thank you, John, for your gifts, which include knowledge, friendship, and love for all.

Image Credit: Shep Hyken, Unsplash

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

Overcoming the Fear of Innovation Failure

Leave a reply

Overcoming the Fear of Innovation Failure

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

Let’s explore one of the biggest barriers to innovation – fear of failure – and share actionable steps to help your organization overcome it. Your perspectives, ideas, and feedback are much appreciated.

What is the Challenge?

One of the biggest barriers to innovation is the fear of failure. Many organizations, especially large corporations, develop cultures where taking risks is discouraged because failure is often met with negative consequences. This results in stagnation, as employees and leaders shy away from innovative ideas that carry potential risk.

Why Does This Matter?

Without risk, there is no innovation. Companies that focus too much on avoiding failure end up missing opportunities for growth and transformation. Fear of failure leads to risk-averse behavior, stifling creativity and preventing teams from experimenting with new ideas.

How to Overcome It

The key enabler to overcoming the fear of failure is psychological safety—when team members feel safe to express ideas, take risks, and make mistakes without fear of being judged or penalized, they are more likely to experiment.

Here are some steps to foster psychological safety and address the fear of failure:

Model Vulnerability: Leaders should share their own past failures and the lessons learned, showing that failure is a stepping stone to success.
Encourage Small Experiments: Allow teams to run small, low-stakes experiments where failure carries minimal risk. This builds a culture of learning and exploration.
Celebrate Learnings, Not Just Successes: When a project doesn’t achieve the desired outcome, recognize and celebrate the learning gained rather than focusing on the failure itself.
Establish a Feedback Culture: Implement regular feedback loops where employees can openly discuss what went wrong, why it happened, and how to improve without fear of blame.
Create Safety Nets: Ensure that failure doesn’t have punitive consequences by offering support and framing failures as essential learning experiences for future innovation.

What This Means for Your Teams / Organization

By reducing the stigma around failure, you empower your teams to think more creatively and push boundaries. This mindset shift can lead to more breakthrough innovations and a more dynamic, agile organization.

More Inspiration – Thought Leaders, Case-Study

Thought Leader: Tom Kelley of IDEO on Creative Confidence
Case Study: How Google’s “Moonshot Factory” (X) embraces failure as part of its process to develop groundbreaking technologies and new ways of doing things.

This post is part of my Corporate Innovation Explained series. You can also follow my Leadership Growth Explained and Team Dynamics Explained series if you like this kind of inspiration.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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

Building Transformation Momentum from the Middle

Leave a reply

Five Questions to Liz Wiseman

Building Transformation Momentum from the Middle

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Conventional wisdom tells us that transformation flows from the C-suite down because real change requires executive mandates and company-wide rollouts. But what if our focus on building transformation momentum is exactly backward?

Ever since reading Multipliers, where Liz Wiseman revealed how the best leaders amplify their people rather than diminish them, I’ve wondered if, like innovation, organizational transformation and change also require us to do the opposite of our instincts.

I recently had the opportunity to dig deeper into this topic with her, and I couldn’t resist exploring how change really happens in large organizations.

What emerged wasn’t another framework—it was something more brilliant and subversive: how middle managers quietly become change agents, why sustainable transformation looks nothing like a launch event, and the liberating truth that leaders don’t need to be perfect.

Robyn Bolton: What’s the one piece of conventional wisdom about leading change that you believe organizations need to unlearn?

Lize Wiseman

Lize Wiseman: I don’t believe that change needs to start, or even be sponsored, at the top of the organization. I’ve seen so much change led from the middle management ranks. When middle managers experiment with new mindsets and practices inside their organizations, they produce pockets of success—anomalies that catch the attention of senior executives and corporate staffers who are highly adept at detecting variances (both negative and positive). When senior executives notice positive outcomes, they are quick to elevate and endorse the new practices, in turn spreading the practices to other parts of the organization. In other words, most senior executives are adept at spotting a parade and getting in front of it! (Incidentally, this is one of several executive skills you won’t find documented on any official leadership competency model.) If you don’t yet have the political capital to lead a company-wide initiative, run a pilot with a few rising middle managers. Shine a spotlight on their success and let the practices spread to their peers. Expose their good work to the executive team and make yourself available to turn the parade into a movement.

RB: In your research and work, what’s the most surprising pattern you’ve observed about successful organizational transformation?”

LW: As mentioned above, I believe the starting point for transformation is less important than how you will sustain the momentum you’ve generated. Unfortunately, most new initiatives—be they corporate change initiatives or personal improvement plans—begin with a bang but fizzle out in what I call “the failure to launch” cycle. Transformation that is sustained over time usually starts small and builds a series of successive wins. Each win provides the energy needed to carry the work into the next phase. These series of wins generate the energy and collective will needed to complete the cycle of success. As that cycle spins, nascent beliefs become more deeply entrenched and old survival strategies get supplanted by new methods to not just survive but thrive inside the organization.

Each little success requires careful support and an evidence-backed PR campaign to build awareness and broad support for the new direction. Nascent behavior and beliefs are fragile and will be overpowered by older assumptions until they are strengthened by supporting evidence. The supporting evidence forms a buttress around the budding mindset or practices, much like a brace around a sapling provides stability until the tree is strong enough to stand on its own.

RB: How has your thinking about what makes an effective leader evolved over the course of your career?

LW: When I began researching good leadership, most diminishing leaders appeared to be tyrannical, narcissistic bullies. But as I further studied the problem, I’ve come to see that the vast majority of the diminishing happening inside our workplaces is done with the best of intentions, by what I call the Accidental Diminisher—good people trying to be good managers. I’ve become less interested in knowing who is a Diminisher and much more interested in understanding what provokes the Diminisher tendencies that lurk inside each of us.

RB: When you consider all the organizations you’ve studied, what’s the most powerful lesson about driving meaningful change that most leaders overlook?

LW: One of the dangers of trying to lead change from the top is that most leaders have a hard time being a constant role model for the changes they advocate for. Even the best leaders can’t always display the positive behaviors they espouse and ask their organizations to embody. It’s human to slip up. But when behavior change is led primarily from the top, these all-too-natural slip-ups can become major setbacks for the whole organization because they provide visible evidence that the new behavior isn’t required or feasible, and followers can easily give up. Wise leaders understand this dynamic and build a hypocrisy factor into their change plans–meaning, they acknowledge upfront that they aspire to the new behavior but don’t always fully embody it, yet. They set the expectation that there will be setbacks and invite people to help them be better leaders as well. They acknowledge that the route to new behavior typically looks like the acclimation process used by high-elevation climbers. These climbers spend some of their days in ascent, but once they reach new elevations, often have to descend to lower camps to acclimate. It’s the proverbial two-steps-forward, one-step-back process. When leaders acknowledge their shortcomings and the likelihood of their future missteps, they not only minimize the chance that others give up when they see hypocrisy above them, but they create space for others to make and recover from their own mistakes.

RB: Looking ahead, what do you believe is the most important capability leaders need to develop to help their organizations thrive?

LW: Leading in uncertainty, specifically the ability to lead people to destinations that they themselves have never been.

I love that Liz’s insights flip the script, calling on people outside the C-Suite to stop waiting for permission and start running quiet experiments, building proof points, and letting success do the selling.

The next time you want a change or have change thrust upon you, don’t look for a parade to lead. Look for one person willing to try something different and get to work.

Image credit: Unsplash

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