Turning Bold Ideas into Tangible Results

Exclusive Interview with Robyn Bolton

Innovation doesn’t happen without the right kind of leadership, it’s not all about the lightbulb moment or the idea that results. Innovation begins with an insight and it is effective leadership that helps pay off my definition of innovation:

“Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative.” — Braden Kelley

It is no easy task to identify an insight worth investing in or to organize and lead a team to successfully pick the right idea out of a sea of possibilities, to develop it, to understand its potential advantages versus the alternatives it must displace, and to align the organization in the ways necessary to overcome any idea’s fatal flaw and shepherd it to successful launch and possibly even market development if the market for the solution does not already exist.

Innovation of course requires leadership, but do the same leadership principles apply to successfully leading innovation?

Today we will explore this question, along with many others surrounding culture, obstacles, process, strategy, and other aspects of innovation success with our special guest.

Unlocking Innovation for Leaders

I had the opportunity recently to interview Robyn Bolton, who works with senior executives at medium and large companies who are committed to using innovation to confidently and consistently drive revenue growth. She works with companies in various industries, including industrial goods, healthcare, consumer goods, and education under her consulting firm MileZero. She is also a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design in the Master of Design Innovation program. Prior to founding MileZero, Robyn served as a Partner at Innosight, the innovation and growth strategy consulting firm co-founded by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen, worked as a consultant and project leader for The Boston Consulting Group in both Boston and Copenhagen Denmark, and earned her MBA at Harvard Business School.

Below is the text of my interview with Robyn and a preview of the kinds of insights you’ll find in Unlocking Innovation: A Leader’s Guide for Turning Bold Ideas Into Tangible Results presented in a Q&A format:

1. Why do so many companies struggle to innovate?

Companies struggle because they think innovation is an idea problem. It’s not. It’s a leadership problem. What I mean by that is executives who excel at running the core business are often asked to innovate (create new things) while they operate (run the existing business). Naturally, these executives rely on the very instincts and behaviors that made them successful – making quick decisions based on data and experience, striving to rapidly eliminate risk, and repeatedly and consistently delivering results. The problem is that these behaviors doom innovation efforts. They demand detailed financial forecasts when no data exists, expect quick returns on long-term investments, and try to eliminate risk from an inherently uncertain process. Success requires leaders who recognize that innovation is the opposite of operations and are willing to do the opposite of what made them successful operators.

2. Why is it so hard for innovation labs to last more than a couple of years?

Innovation labs struggle because organizations treat them like startups but expect them to operate and produce results like the core business. Executives launch labs with promises of freedom and flexibility but quickly start demanding predictable results and quick returns. By the start of the second year, executives are anxious for tangible financial results, especially as economic pressures mount, core business results slip, or a new executive arrives questioning innovation investments. Without a plan to demonstrate measurable progress in Year 2, deliver tangible results in Year 3, and a leader willing to advocate for innovation and the organizational clout to stave off skeptics, labs are easy targets for cost-cutting.

3. What does it take to build a solid foundation for innovation?

A solid innovation foundation requires a holistic approach, what I call the ABCs: Architecture, Behavior, and Culture. Architecture includes the strategies, structures, and processes that guide how work gets done. Behavior – specifically leadership behavior – turns words into actions and demonstrates what the organization truly values and believes about innovation. Culture establishes, expands, and sustains an environment where creativity and experimentation can thrive. But behavior is the most critical element because without leaders modeling the right behaviors, the best architectures fail and cultures crumble.

4. What is it that makes innovation almost the opposite of operations?

Operations exist in what Rita McGrath describes as a high-knowledge, low-assumption environment where leaders can predict outcomes based on past experience. Innovation occurs in low-knowledge, high-assumption environments where no one knows what will work, and past experiences are more likely to be misleading than helpful. Operational excellence comes from eliminating variation and risk. Innovation requires embracing uncertainty and learning from failure. The mindsets and behaviors that make someone a great operator – decisiveness, risk elimination, decisions based on quantitative historical data – hinder innovation success.

5. What would your advice be to an innovation professional on how to prevent innovation zombie projects from emerging?

Zombies exist because managers are reluctant to kill projects because that may mean that they were wrong. Instead, they put the projects on pause or delay work until the next round of funding. The key to preventing zombie projects is recognizing and communicating that the decision to start wasn’t wrong. It was based on the information available at the time. New information is now available, resulting in a different understanding of the situation and, therefore, a different decision. This learning process becomes infinitely easier when you have a (relatively) objective and (completely) transparent decision-making tool outlining clear criteria for what makes an innovation attractive and worth pursuing – what I call an “innovation playground.” This framework defines what’s “in play” (attractive), “in bounds” (worth discussing), and “out of bounds” (not worth pursuing) across multiple dimensions like strategic fit, customer benefit, and required capabilities. Of course, this tool is only as useful as the people who use it, so leaders need the courage to make and stick to hard decisions about stopping projects that don’t meet the criteria.

6. Which is more important for innovation success? Leadership, strategy or culture?

Leadership behavior is the foundation for everything else. I’ve worked with companies that have brilliant strategies or are famous for their innovation cultures but are unable to get results from their innovation investments because their leaders don’t demonstrate the right behaviors – embracing uncertainty, making decisions with incomplete information, treating failure as learning. That’s why the “B” in the ABCs of Innovation (Behavior) comes first. Executives must recognize that their instincts and behaviors need to change before they can become successful innovation leaders.

7. Is there any such thing as a perfect innovation process? If not, what are the key components for any innovation process?

There is no perfect process. Innovation isn’t baking, where following a precise recipe guarantees success. However, there are essential components that every innovation process needs: diagnosing the real problem to solve, designing multiple potential solutions, developing and testing assumptions, de-risking through experimentation, and delivering value. The order of these steps matters, but everything else – the specific activities, tools, metrics, and timelines – can and should be adapted to your organization’s needs and culture.

8. What makes one innovation culture more successful than another?

Successful innovation cultures share three characteristics: First, they’re authentic to the organization rather than copied from another company. Second, they recognize that operators and innovators are equally important and valuable to the organization and work hard to strike the right balance between protecting innovation teams and connecting them to the core business. Third, and most importantly, they’re actively demonstrated through leadership behaviors, not just written on posters or mentioned in town halls.

9. Innovation labs/teams/groups often have a different culture from the rest of the organization. Is it possible to spread the culture out of the lab and infect the rest of the organization? How?

Yes, but it requires patience and intentionality. Start by sharing stories that make innovation relatable and relevant to everyone. If you can’t answer “What’s In It for Me” for each person in the organization, you can’t expect them to change their focus or behavior. When people express interest, invite them into your team’s traditions and events. Don’t force participation – remember that not everyone wants to or needs to be an innovator. Most importantly, teach and support those who are interested in innovation while celebrating the operators who keep the core business running. Culture spreads through pull, not push.

10. One of the most dangerous moments for any promising innovation project is the transfer of out of the lab and into an operational unit of the main organization to scale it. How can organizations do better at scaling up innovation experiments into equal members of the organization’s solution catalog?

The valley of death is real! The key to crossing it is to view it as a relay rather than just chucking something across the chasm. Historically, executives have been afraid of distracting core business teams with uncertain projects so they wait until launch to involve the people who will ultimately own the innovation. While this still occurs, I’m starting to see companies over-correct and bring operators into the process at the very start, including them in activities and decisions when the team is still operating in a highly ambiguous and uncertain space. Success requires meeting in the middle. When innovation teams know more than they don’t know, that’s when collaboration between innovation and operational teams starts. From that point through launch, innovators and operators should work hand-in-hand to understand and navigate uncertainty while adapting their plans, processes and metrics to ensure market success without losing the critical insights that sparked the innovation. Most importantly, Senior leaders must stay engaged, understanding and supporting the additional time and resources needed during the transition period.

11. Anything you wish I’d asked?

I wish you’d asked, “What does innovation leadership success really look like?” Because while revenue and survival rates are measures of success, I believe that the real measure is the lives you change. Given that only 0.002% of incubated ideas generate meaningful revenue, and 90% of innovation labs shut down within three years, there’s no guarantee that your work will become a wild, world-changing success. That doesn’t mean that you failed. For me and so many of the successful leaders with whom I’ve worked, success is also giving someone the courage to challenge the status quo because they see you doing it. It’s inspiring someone to take risks when you break the rules thoughtfully and responsibly. If you’ve helped even one person discover their potential as an innovator or creative problem-solver, you’ve succeeded.

Conclusion

Thank you for the great conversation Robyn!

I hope everyone has enjoyed this peek into the mind of the woman behind the insightful new title Unlocking Innovation: A Leader’s Guide for Turning Bold Ideas Into Tangible Results!

Image credits: MileZero (Robyn Bolton)

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Leading Through Complexity and Uncertainty

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Leading Through Complexity and Uncertainty

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Leaders need to make decisions and we rarely get to choose the context. Most often, we need to take action without all the facts, in a rapidly changing environment and a compressed time frame. We need to do so with the knowledge that if we get it wrong, we will bear the blame and no one else. It will be our mess to clean up.

That’s a hard bridge to cross and many, if not most, are never quite able to get there. I think that’s why we admire great leaders so much, because they have the courage to take responsibility on their backs and be accountable, to inspire confidence even in an atmosphere of confusion and to point the way forward, even if they aren’t sure it’s the right direction.

The truth is that you can never really be certain until you take that step forward. The simple and inescapable truth is that to accomplish anything significant you need to travel on an uncertain journey. It is tautologically true that the well-trod path will take us nowhere new. We can never fully control uncertainty, but we can learn to lead through it.

How Things Get So Complicated And Uncertain

Generally, we prefer to operate with some degree of predictability, which is why we build structure into daily life. On a personal level, we create habits and routines to give us a sense of grounding. On a societal level, we create laws and norms, so that we know what to expect from our interactions with each other.

Yet in Overcomplicated, mathematician Sam Arbesman gives two reasons why uncertainty is, to a great extent, unavoidable. The first is accretion. We build systems, like the Internet or the laws set down in the US Constitution, to perform a limited number of tasks. Yet to scale those systems, we need to build on top of them to expand their initial capabilities. As systems become larger, they get more complex and uncertain.

The second force is interaction. We may love the simplicity of an iPhone, but don’t want to be restricted to its capabilities alone. So we increase its functionality by connecting it to millions of apps. Those apps, in turn, connect to each other as well as to other systems. Every connection increases complexity and makes things harder to predict.

These two forces lead to what Benoit Mandelbrot called Noah effects and Joseph effects. Joseph effects, as in the biblical story, support long periods of continuity. Noah effects, on the other hand, are like a big storm creating a massive flood of discontinuity, washing away the previous order. Uncertainty, for better or worse, will always be somewhat unavoidable.

The Problem With Simplicity

The most straightforward solution to complexity and uncertainty is to boil things down and make them more simple. Politicians are fond of highlighting the thousands of pages pieces of legislation contain, because complexity is widely seen as a fatal flaw. “If it was thought through clearly, why couldn’t it have been devised more simply?” is the implication.

Yet while we yearn for simple rules, those rules often lead us astray. As Ludwig Wittgenstein explained in his rule following paradox, “no course of action could be determined by a rule because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule.” Simple rules tend to be necessarily vague, which limits their usefulness.

Something similar happens when we try to tame complexity by summarizing it through identifying patterns. Random points of data, if there are enough of them, will always generate patterns as well, so we can never be quite sure if we are revealing an underlying truth or just creating a convincing illusion. To discern between the two is, unfortunately, complex.

In Why Information Grows, MIT’s Cesar Hidalgo explains that it is through emergent complexity that we create value. To understand what he means, let’s take another look at an iPhone. Its simple design belies incredible complexity, not only in the technology it contains, but in what it connects to, a complex ecosystem of apps, servers and data.

Steve Jobs didn’t intend to create an App Store, because he wanted to keep the iPhone simple. However, eventually he was convinced that by limiting complexity he was curtailing the potential value of his creation and, ultimately, he relented. It is through managing complexity, not avoiding it, that we can most effectively impact the world.

Narrowing Scope And Limiting Variables

The Franciscan friar William of Occam is best remembered for Occam’s razor, which he didn’t exactly invent, but did much to popularize. The technique, which is often mischaracterized as “the simplest solution is often the best,” actually had a lot more to do with variables and assumptions, which he advises to keep to a minimum.

It’s an interesting distinction that makes a big difference. William wasn’t advising us to ignore complexity, but to avoid increasing it by injecting things that don’t need to be there. We can acknowledge the messiness of the world and still tidy up our little corner of it, by narrowing our scope and limiting the variables we deal with.

Steve Blank advises startups to develop minimum viable products to test assumptions, rather than investing resources into a full-featured prototype. The idea is by narrowing scope you can get a better idea of the marketplace and then increase complexity from there. In our work helping organizations drive transformation, we advise our clients to start out with a keystone change, rather than rolling out everything all at once.

Whatever strategy you use, the key, as William of Occam pointed out long ago, is to limit variables where you can, while still recognizing that the universe is far more complex than our scaled down model of it. Or, as the statistician George Box put it, “all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

Innovation Is Exploration

The truth is that uncertainty is only a problem if you try to control it. The framers of the US Constitution designed it to be a guide, not a blueprint. That’s been the key to its success. They recognized it would have to evolve and grow over time and designed a system of checks and balances to curb the human potential for malice.

We need to start thinking less like engineers, designing just the right combination of levers and pulleys to account for every eventuality, and more like gardeners, seeding and nurturing ecosystems, pruning as we go. Gardeners don’t need to know the exact outcome of everything they plant, but can seek to improve the harvest each season.

In a world driven by networks and ecosystems, we can no longer treat strategy as if it were a game of chess, planning out each move with near perfect precision and foresight. The world moves far too fast for that. By the time we’ve put the final touches on the master plan, the assumptions upon which it was made are often no longer true.

Rather, we must constantly explore, widening and deepening connections to ecosystems of talent, technology and information. That’s how we uncover new paths that are often unseen from our usual perch and leverage complexity to our advantage. Breakthrough innovations arise out of unexpected encounters.

The next big thing always starts out looking like nothing at all. Today, competitive advantage is no longer the sum of all efficiencies, but the sum of all connections.

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

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Empathy is a Vital Tool for Stronger Teams

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Empathy is a Vital Tool for Stronger Teams

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

In the fast pace of today’s organizations, it’s easy for teams to focus solely on tasks, deadlines, and results. However, truly high-performance teams – and their leaders – understand that their strength lies not just in productivity but in the relationships they build.

Empathy plays a crucial role in this process, enabling teams to build trust, foster open communication, and maintain resilience, even in challenging times.

This is why empathy is not just a “soft skill” – it’s a powerful leadership tool that can elevate team dynamics to new levels. Whether you’re navigating tough decisions, managing conflicts, or trying to boost morale, applying empathy can enhance collaboration and performance.

This card is designed to guide you in bringing more empathy into your team’s dynamics.

As part of our Team Dynamics Cards, it belongs to a comprehensive suite of leadership growth and team dynamics tools aiming to boost team collaboration, performance, and communication. We develop such tools and approaches to ignite team discussions, inspire self-reflection and guide actionable steps.

Check it out below and get in touch if you would like some guidance on how to work with this for your team(s).

Today’s Card: Empathy in Team Dynamics

Stefan Lindegaard Empathy Quote Category: Culture & Mindset

We delve into the significant role of empathy in fostering positive team dynamics. Empathy, the ability to understand and share others’ feelings, can foster a team environment characterized by collaboration, understanding, and productivity. It’s a crucial ingredient for managing individual roles, decision-making, performance under pressure, and the creation of shared values and goals.

Principles:

Promoting Understanding and Respect: Foster an environment where team members understand and respect each other’s perspectives and recognize each member’s unique contributions.
Empathy in Conflict Resolution: Use empathy to address and resolve conflicts, helping teams navigate disagreements in a respectful, satisfactory manner.
Fostering Psychological Safety through Empathy: Build a psychologically safe space where individuals comfortably express thoughts and emotions, assured of empathetic understanding.

Reflection Questions (10 mins):

Reflect on a situation where empathy within your team led to a significant positive outcome. What was the situation, and how did empathy play a role?
How would you rate the level of empathy within your current team? What impact does it have on your team’s dynamics?

Action Questions (30 mins):

Identify specific ways your team can foster understanding, respect, and empathy in day-to-day interactions. How can these actions lead to improved team dynamics?
Consider a recent or upcoming challenge your team is facing. How can empathy play a role in the decision-making process, conflict resolution, and maintaining morale under pressure?

Get in touch if you and your team would like to know more about our Team Dynamics Cards and how we can tailor this to your needs and interests. You can read more about our learning hub and community on https://www.stefanlindegaard.com

Image Credits: Pexels

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It is Okay to Feel Stuck

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It is Okay to Feel Stuck

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When you’re stuck, it’s not because you don’t have good ideas. And it’s not because you’re not smart. You’re stuck because you’re trying to do something difficult. You’re stuck because you’re trying to triangulate on something that’s not quite fully formed. Simply put, you’re stuck because it’s not yet time to be unstuck.

Anyone can avoid being stuck by doing what was done last time. But that’s not unsticking yourself, that’s copping out. That’s giving in to something lesser. That’s dumbing yourself down. That’s letting yourself off the hook. That’s not believing in yourself. That’s not doing what you were born to do. That’s not unsticking, that’s avoiding the discomfort of being stuck.

Being stuck – not knowing what to do or what to write – is not a bad thing. Sure, it feels bad, but it’s a sign you’re trekking in uncharted territory. It may be a new design space or it may be new behavioral space, but make no mistake – you’re swimming in a new soup. If you’ve already mastered tomato soup, you won’t feel stuck until you jump into a pool filled with chicken noodle. And when you do, don’t beat yourself up because your lungs are half-filled with noodles. Instead, simply recognize that chicken soup is different than tomato. Pat yourself on the back for jumping in without a life preserver. And even as you tread water, congratulate yourself for not drowning.

Unsticking takes time and you can’t rush it. But that’s where most fail – they climb out of the soup too soon. The soup doesn’t feel good because it’s too hot, too salty, or too noodly, so they get out. They can’t stand the discomfort so they get out before the bodies can acclimate and figure out how to swim in a new way. The best way to avoid getting stuck is to stay out of the soup and the next best way is to get out too early. But it’s not best to avoid being stuck.

Life’s too short to avoid being stuck. Sure, you may prevent some discomfort, but you also prevent growth and learning. Do you want to get to your deathbed and realize you limited your personal growth because you were afraid to feel the discomfort of being stuck? Imagine getting to the end of your life and all you can think of is the see of things you didn’t experience because you were unwilling to feel stuck.

Stuck is not bad, it just feels bad. Instead of seeing the discomfort as discomfort, can you learn to see it as the precursor to growth? Can you learn to see the discomfort as an indicator of immanent learning? Can you learn to see it as the tell-tale sign of your quest for knowledge and understanding?

If you’re not yet ready to feel stuck, I get that. But to get yourself ready, keep your eye out for people around you who have dared to get stuck. Learn to recognize what it looks like. And when you do find someone who is stuck, tell them they are doing a brave thing. Tell them that it’s supposed to feel uncomfortable. Tell them that no one has ever died from the discomfort of being stuck. And tell them that staying with the discomfort is the best way to get unstuck. And thank them for demonstrating the right behavior.

Image credits: Unsplash

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MrBeast and the Customer Experience Audit

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MrBeast and the Customer Experience Audit

by Braden Kelley

There is a reason why Walmart is flipping the typical retail salary model on its head to pay managers in stores MORE than some managers at its corporate headquarters. The stores pay for the HQ, not the other way around! AND, the stores is where the best information lives for manufacturers selling to Walmart and other retailers.

Enter MrBeast, who sells most of his Feastables chocolate through Walmart. So, what has he been doing since launching the product – over and over and over again?

Conducting a partial customer experience audit by visiting stores all around the country to see how the displays look, sometimes enlisting third parties (even customers and impromptu GoPro cameras) to help him gather information when he isn’t doing it first-hand.

Here is a snippet of a recent video podcast interview of him talking about it:

Some other retailers, like Starbucks, try, but not very hard, to have corporate managers spend time in the stores (a few hours when they first join, never to return) but I think the last CEO might have done away with it completely. It will be interesting to see if the new CEO encourages corporate HQ staff to get out into the stores more – after he finishes laying off 10% of the headquarters staff.

Does your company require headquarters staff to spend time in the field?

Or, do a high percentage of them voluntarily do it regularly?

Doing so does not replace regular independent customer experience audits, but it helps.

Do you need someone to come conduct an independent experience audit of your customer, employee and/or partner experiences?

Accelerate your change and transformation success

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The Worst British Customer Experiences of 2024

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The Worst British Customer Experiences of 2024

by Braden Kelley

Every year The Guardian, a newspaper in the United Kingdom (UK) looks not just at companies delivering stellar customer service, but APPALLING customer service as well.

In this article we’ll look at some of the organizations they highlighted in their latest iteration and what we can learn from them.

In looking at the article, the first thing that jumps out – primarily from the tongue in cheek approach of the author – is that many customer service mishaps come from employees following rules instead of sensibilities.

From pensioners being denied their walking sticks, blind athletes being denied their service dogs, to academics writing the occasional book being denied auto insurance – when companies demand that their employees serve their rules more than they serve their customers, bad customer experiences follow.

Without further ado, here are the seven organizations rewarded, ahem honored, ahem shamed by the article:

1. Teachers Pensions, run by Capita (a Business Process Outsourcing firm (BPO)) earned the glorious honor of being the first organization celebrated for their dubious practices of regularly requiring recipients to confirm that they are not dead and to answer whether or not they have taken on a new lover.

2. U.K. Government launched a program to encourage homeowners to insulate their homes, but spray foam insulation (one of the options) when poorly installed can cause roofing materials to rot and for the home if it fails inspection to become illegal to sell until the homeowner pays to have the insulation removed.

3. Eurostar in their brilliance decided it was too dangerous for their employees to push personal wheelchairs any longer and neglected to tell customers booking assistance of this change, leaving them stranded on the station concourse unless they had paid for a companion to travel with them. Eurostar eventually changed this new policy after the Observer reported the issue to U.K. regulators.

4. British Airways landed on the list with two tales of woe, the most egregious being that of a passenger that was prevented from reaching her grandmother’s deathbed by preventing her from boarding, forcing her to buy a new ticket to fly the next day, and canceling her return flight for good measure. They finally provided compensation after the fact once presented with a lawyer’s opinion by the staff of The Guardian on behalf of the customer.

5. Sheffield Council towed a car, didn’t notify the owner, forgot they had it, and then when they discovered it in their impound yard a year later (badly degraded) they demanded the owner collect it in two days and paid storage fees of about $6,000 it would be destroyed. The owner had reported the car stolen, received an insurance settlement and the insurance company, as you might expect, wanted its money back when they learned of the situation.

6. Amazon showed up on their list because their employees (or agents) began engaging in a scam where one-time passwords (OTP) were said by delivery drivers not to be working and so they wouldn’t deliver the item, but then the item showed as delivered in Amazon’s systems and so people were being told there was nothing they could do because it looks like the customer received their product. Amazon finally relented in the case of the one customer in question when Guardian Money intervened.

7. Taylor Swift, administered by AXS, sold VIP ticket packages for more than $650 each that rewarded paying customers with seats behind the stage obstructed by equipment and a celebrity tent and upon complaining resulted in the customers being moved to the cheap seats way in the back that they could have purchased for a fraction of what they paid.

So, as you consistently look to maintain, or create, an excellent customer experience make sure you are minding the details (annual or quarterly independent experience audits can be a great way to do this).

One of the marketing clients I worked with always called the phone numbers, visited the URL’s and emailed any email addresses mentioned in any creative we designed for her at the agency because the one she didn’t when working with a different agency, a typo meant that the marketing materials in market ended up being the number of a phone sex line. The details matter.

It is important that you spend time in the field listening to employees about the real world impact of policies that might land differently than how they were envisioned. Also, managers should make sure they are properly training staff to understand the reasons why the company has certain policies and when they need to be flexible. The lifetime value of a customer is nearly always greater than the value of any individual transaction.

How important is it for your employees to understand that it is better to lose the battle to win the war?

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Be Better or Be Different?

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Be Better or Be Different?

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Do you want to be better or different? That’s the question that Sally Hogshead, an amazing professional speaker who specializes in being fascinating, shared in a recent speech I had the pleasure of experiencing. While most of her work is about how to be fascinating, this speech came from a different place. She talked about the power of being different versus better than others.

Sally shared research that found 73% would rather be better versus 27% who would choose to be different.

It’s one thing to be better than your competition. What makes you better? Is it your product? Is it the customer service or experience you provide? Is there something tangible that your customer could describe that proves you are better?

And then there is being different. As I listened to Sally share her wisdom, I realized that as much as we would like to be better than a competitor – and we should strive to do so – being different is more obvious.

I have a crazy idea. Why not both – especially as this idea applies to customer service and experience?

First, let’s talk about being better. It’s likely that you sell what others also sell. It’s a similar product. It may or may not be better, and it could be exactly the same, as in a commodity. So, how can you be better? Provide a better customer experience (CX). Yes, it’s always better to be better, but maybe you don’t have to be better than your competition. Maybe you just have to be better than what is expected.

Shep Hyken Different Better Cartoon

And here’s the interesting thing about your customer’s expectations – at least as it applies to CX. As important as customer service and CX are, the bar is fairly low. There are rockstar companies that have taught customers what a good CX looks like, but many companies struggle to create a similar experience. So, consider this idea: Delivering a better customer experience is as simple as consistently meeting customers’ expectations – with an emphasis on the word consistently. By the way, I used the word simple. That does not necessarily mean it’s easy, but if you meet expectations, you’re already better than most.

Being different will make a difference – no pun intended. Being different allows you to stand out. Yes, it could be your service and CX that makes you different – think Chick-fil-A. Whatever it is, it needs to be something that customers notice and care about. That gives customers a reason to choose you over your competition.

Sally’s short speech made me think. If there’s a way to be both better and different, you’ve got a winning combination that is hard to beat. However, even if all you do is meet the customers’ service and experience expectations, which already makes you better, continue to find a way – or ways – to stand out with something that makes you different.

Image Credits: Pixabay

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Brand Evangelists Make You More Money

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GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

It’s important to differentiate between a “brand evangelist” in a business context, and an “evangelist” in a religious context. When discussing how companies make money, we’re focusing on the business role.

A brand evangelist is more than just a customer or advocate; they are passionate champions who actively promote a company’s products or services through genuine enthusiasm and personal connection. Unlike traditional marketers, they operate from a place of authentic belief, sharing their positive experiences and advocating for the brand within their own networks and communities. Their role is to ignite excitement, build trust, and foster a sense of belonging, ultimately driving brand loyalty and organic growth.

Here’s how hiring a brand evangelist can boost a company’s revenue:

Increased Brand Awareness: Evangelists create buzz and excitement, expanding the brand’s reach to new audiences.
Enhanced Customer Loyalty: They build strong relationships with customers, fostering loyalty and repeat business.
Improved Product Adoption: Evangelists effectively demonstrate the value of a product, driving adoption rates.
Positive Word-of-Mouth Marketing: They generate authentic recommendations, which are more persuasive than traditional advertising.
Community Building: Evangelists cultivate communities of passionate users, increasing engagement and advocacy.
Valuable Feedback and Insights: They gather customer feedback, providing valuable insights for product development and improvement.
Sales Enablement: Evangelists can support sales teams by providing expert product knowledge and building customer trust.
Content Creation: They create engaging content, such as blog posts, videos, and social media updates, that attract and retain customers.
Event Participation: They are able to represent the company at events, and conferences, generating leads and making connections.
Influencer Marketing: They act as influencers, or they create relationships with other influencers, that can help to broaden the companies reach.

In essence, a brand evangelist’s role is to create passionate advocates for a company’s products or services, which ultimately drives revenue growth.

Quantifying the Return on Investment (ROI) of a Brand Evangelist

It’s true that precisely quantifying the ROI of a brand evangelist can be challenging, as their impact often intertwines with other marketing efforts. However, there’s strong evidence supporting their positive influence on business outcomes. Here’s a breakdown:

Key Factors Contributing to ROI:

Word-of-Mouth Marketing: Studies consistently show that consumers trust recommendations from friends and family far more than traditional advertising. Brand evangelists are powerful generators of this authentic word-of-mouth. This translates to increased brand credibility and customer acquisition, which directly impacts revenue.
Increased Customer Lifetime Value: Evangelists foster deep customer loyalty. Loyal customers are more likely to make repeat purchases, spend more, and remain customers for longer periods, thus increasing their lifetime value.
Reduced Marketing Costs: By generating organic buzz and referrals, evangelists can reduce the need for expensive advertising campaigns.
Enhanced Brand Perception: Positive advocacy from evangelists strengthens brand reputation and credibility, which can lead to increased customer trust and willingness to pay a premium.

Evidence and Supporting Points:

Trust in Recommendations: Research indicates that a significant percentage of consumers place high trust in recommendations from people they know. This underscores the value of evangelists who provide those trusted endorsements.
Referral Impact: Data shows that referred customers often have a higher lifetime value than those acquired through other channels. This highlights the financial benefit of evangelist-driven referrals.
Social Proof: In the digital age, social proof is crucial. Evangelists provide that social proof by sharing their positive experiences on social media and other platforms.

Challenges in Measurement:

Isolating the precise impact of an evangelist from other marketing activities can be difficult.
The effects of evangelism may be long-term and cumulative, making it challenging to measure immediate ROI.

While a precise, universally applicable ROI figure may be elusive, the evidence strongly suggests that brand evangelists contribute significantly to positive business outcomes.

Hiring a Brand Evangelist:

Hiring a successful brand evangelist requires careful consideration. Look for individuals who are genuinely passionate about your product or service and possess strong communication and interpersonal skills. They should be authentic, relatable, and able to build genuine connections with your target audience. Focus on candidates who:

Demonstrate a deep understanding of your brand’s values and mission.
Have a proven track record of building and engaging communities.
Are active and influential on relevant social media platforms.
Possess excellent storytelling and presentation abilities.
Show a genuine desire to help others and provide value.

Identifying Potential Evangelists on LinkedIn:

Search and Analysis:
- Use LinkedIn’s advanced search to identify relevant individuals.
- Analyze profiles for:
  - Consistent, positive engagement with your content.
  - Participation in industry discussions.
  - Valuable content sharing.
Employee Advocacy:
- Empower employees to be brand evangelists.
- Provide content, guidelines, and training.
- Recognize and reward their efforts.
Influencer Identification:
- Identify industry influencers aligning with your brand.
- Engage with their content and build relationships.

For more information on the different types of evangelists and how to hire them, please be sure and check out Braden Kelley’s previous articles on the importance of evangelists to your success (who, by the way, would make a great evangelist if you can lure him away):

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Content Authenticity Statement: Usually I use Open AI Playground, but today I was feeling rebellious and decided to use Google Gemini to create most of this article instead.

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Unlocking Trapped Value with AI

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Unlocking Trapped Value with AI

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Anyone who has used Chat GPT or any of its cousins will testify to its astonishing ability to provide valuable responses to virtually any query. This is hardly a threat—indeed, it is a boon. So, what are we worrying about?

Well, there is the issue of veracity, of course, and it is true, GPT-enabled assistants can indeed make mistakes. But, come on—humans don’t? We are not looking for gospel truth here. We want highly probable, highly informed answers to questions where we need guidance, and it is clear that GPT-enabled applications are outstanding at meeting this need, for at least three reasons. They are remarkably well-informed. They are available 24/7 on demand with no hold time. And they have infinite patience. So, let’s not kid ourselves. We are massively better off for their emergence on the scene.

What we should be worrying about, on the other hand, is their impact on jobs to be done, employment, and career development. A simple way to think about this is that for any of us to earn money, we have to release some form of trapped value. A bank clerk helps a customer get access to the trapped value in their savings account. A bus driver helps a passenger cope with their trapped value by transporting them to the location where they need to be. A lawyer helps a client get access to trapped value by constructing a contract that meets their needs while protecting against risk. A teacher helps a student access trapped value by helping her solve problems she couldn’t handle before. The principle applies to every job. All systems have points of trapped value, and all jobs are organized around releasing and capturing that value.

Now, let’s introduce generative AI. All of a sudden, a whole lot of trapped value that funded a whole lot of jobs can now be released for free (or virtually for free). Those jobs can be protected in the short term but not forever. In other words, the environment really has changed, and we must assess our new circumstances or fall behind. This is Darwinism at work. Evolution never stops. It can’t. As long as there is change, there will be dislocation, which in turn will stimulate innovation. That’s life.

But here’s the good news. The universe can never eliminate trapped value, it can only move it from place to place. That is, there are always emergent problems to solve, always new opportunities to capitalize on, because every system always traps value somewhere. What Darwinism requires is that we detect the new value traps and redirect our activity to engage with them.

Publicly funded agencies sometimes interpret this as a mandate for training programs, but we have to be careful here. Training works well for disseminating established skills that address known problems. It does not work well, however, where the problems are still being determined and the skills are as yet undeveloped. Novelty, in other words, demands creativity. It is simply not negotiable.

Getting back to the impact of generative AI, we should understand that it is an advisory technology. It is not automation. That is, it is not eliminating the need for human beings to make judgment calls. Rather, it is accelerating the preparation for so doing and framing the options in ways that make decision-making more straightforward. By solving for the old value traps, it is giving us the opportunity to up our game. It’s our job to step up to add net new value to the equation.

The best way to do this is to ferret out the emerging new value traps. Who is the customer now? What is the bottleneck that is holding them back? How could that bottleneck be broken open? What is the reward for so doing? These are the fundamental questions that drive any business model. We know how to do this. It’s just that we have been riding on the inertia of the past set of solutions for so long we may have atrophied in some of the muscles we need now. One thing we need not worry about is the universe running out of trapped value. If you are ever in doubt, just read the day’s headlines and be reassured. The world needs our help. Any tool that helps us do our part better is a blessing.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

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Your Innovation Team Doesn’t Have to be Dead

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Your Innovation Team Doesn't Have to be Dead

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

When times get tough, the first things most companies cut are the “luxuries.” That includes their innovation teams. But as companies dismantle their labs, teams, and other structures, a crucial question emerges: Who’s working on growth?

Cutting innovation teams doesn’t just cut a branch off the org chart, it eliminates capabilities that are fundamental to sustaining and growing a business and culture.

So why throw the baby out with the bathwater? Here’s a scenario that might sound familiar: Your innovation team created something brilliant. The prototype works, early users love it, and the business case is solid. But six months later, its gathering dust because no one in the core business knew how to – or wanted to – take it forward.

This isn’t a failure of innovation. It’s a failure of integration.

Wait, I thought integrating innovation with the core business was bad

The traditional innovation team structure – a separate unit with its own space, processes, and culture – solved one problem but created another.

As innovation teams were given the freedom to think differently, they were also given shiny, new, fun, and amenity filled spaces cordoned off from everyone else. Meanwhile, “everyone else” was stuck in their usual offices and doing the usual things that keep the business running and, apparently, fund the innovation team’s luxe life.

The resulting Us vs. Them mentality fueled resentment that made it easy for “everyone else” to stonewall the innovation team’s efforts by pointing out flaws, uncertainties, and risks.

To be fair, they weren’t doing this to be mean – they were protecting the business. The innovators, meanwhile, grew frustrated, sought help from higher-ups who were happy to help until times got tough and cuts had to be made.

So, one team should work on both innovation and the core business?

Just like we need multiple words to describe the what and why of innovation, we need different operating models that embed innovation capabilities across the organization while protecting the space for them to flourish.

Here’s what it looks like:

For Core Improvements: Let your operational teams lead. They know the problems best, but give them innovation tools and methods. Think of it as equipping your existing workforce with new superpowers, not replacing them with superheroes.
For Adjacent Expansions: Create hybrid teams that mix operational experience with innovation expertise. When expanding into new markets or launching new products, you need both the innovative mindset and the operational know-how. Neither alone is sufficient.
For Radical Reinvention: You still need dedicated teams – but not isolated ones. Their job is to create offerings that reinvent the company and the culture that enables everyone to be part of the reinvention. Establish bridges that connect them with business units and enforce quarterly meetings to share progress, insights, and tools.

This isn’t theory.

Companies like Amazon have been doing this for years with their “working backwards” innovation process that’s used by all teams, not just a special innovation unit. When I worked at P&G, the brand teams worked on core improvements, the New Business Development teams (where I worked) physically sat next to the brand teams and worked on Adjacent expansion, and the radical reinvention teams were co-located with R&D at the technical centers.

Put it into practice

Here’s where to start:

Map your innovation portfolio to understand what types of innovation you need to hit your goals
Match your team structures to your innovation types
Start embedding innovation capabilities across the organization
Create clear paths for innovations to move from idea to implementation

The transition isn’t easy. It requires rethinking roles and reimagining how innovation happens in your organization. But the alternative – watching your innovation investments evaporate because they can’t cross the bridge back to the core business – is far more painful.

What’s your experience? Drop your stories and strategies in the comments. Let’s figure this out together.

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