The Secret to Endless Customers

Leave a reply

The Secret to Endless Customers

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Marcus Sheridan owns a pool and spa manufacturing company in Virginia — not a very sexy business, unless you consider the final product, which is often surrounded by beautiful people. What he did to stand out in a marketplace filled with competition is a masterclass in how to get noticed and, more importantly, get business. His most recent book, Endless Customers, is a follow-up to his bestselling book They Ask, You Answer, with updated information and new ideas that will help you build a business that has, as the title implies, endless customers.

Sheridan’s journey began in 2001 when he started a pool company with two friends. When the 2008 market collapse hit, they were on the verge of losing everything. This crisis forced them to think differently about how to reach customers. Sheridan realized that potential buyers were searching for answers to their questions, so he decided his company would become “the Wikipedia of fiberglass swimming pools.”

By brainstorming every question he’d ever received as a pool salesperson and addressing them through content online, his company’s website became the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world within just a couple of years. This approach transformed his business and became the foundation for his business philosophy.

In our interview on Amazing Business Radio, Sheridan shared what he believes is the most important strategy that businesses can use to get and keep customers, and that is to become a known and trusted brand. They must immerse themselves in what he calls the Four Pillars of a Known and Trusted Brand.

  1. Say What Others Aren’t Willing to Say: The No. 1 reason people leave websites is because they can’t find what they’re looking for — and the top information they seek is pricing. Sheridan emphasizes that businesses should openly discuss costs and pricing on their websites. While you don’t need to list exact prices, you should educate consumers about what drives costs up or down in your industry. Sheridan suggests creating a comprehensive pricing page that teaches potential customers how to buy in your industry. According to him, 90% of industries still avoid this conversation, even though it’s what customers want most.
  2. Show What Others Aren’t Willing to Show: When Sheridan’s company was manufacturing fiberglass swimming pools, it became the first to show its entire manufacturing process from start to finish through a series of videos. They were so complete that someone could literally learn how to start their own manufacturing company by watching these videos. Sheridan recognized that sharing the “secret sauce” was a level of transparency that built trust, helping to make his company the obvious choice for many customers.
  3. Sell in Ways Others Aren’t Willing to Sell: According to Sheridan, 75% of today’s buyers prefer a “seller-free sales experience.” He says, “That doesn’t mean we hate salespeople. We just don’t want to talk to them until we’re very, very, ready.” Sheridan suggests meeting customers where they are by offering self-service options on your website. For his pool and spa business, that included a price estimator solution that helped potential customers determine how much they could afford — without the pressure of talking to a salesperson.
  4. Be More Human than Others Are Willing to Be: In a world that is becoming dominated by AI and technology, showing the human side of a business is critical to a trusting business relationship. Sheridan suggests putting leaders and employees on camera. They are truly the “face of the brand.” It’s okay to use AI, just find the balance that helps you stay human in a technology-dominated world.

As we wrapped up the interview, I asked Sheridan to share his most powerful idea, and the answer goes back to a word he used several times throughout the interview: Trust. “In a time of change, we need, as businesses, constants that won’t change,” Sheridan explained. “One thing I can assure you is that in 10 years, you’re going to be in a battle for trust. It’s the one thing that binds all of us. It’s the great currency that is not going to go away. So, become that voice of trust. If you do, your organization is going to be built to last.”

And that, according to Sheridan, is how you create “endless customers.”

Image Credits: Shep Hyken

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

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

How Incumbents Can React to Disruption

Leave a reply

How Incumbents Can React to Disruption

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Think back a couple of years and imagine …

You are Jim Farley at Ford, with Tesla banging at the door. You are Bob Iger at Disney with Netflix pounding on the gates. You are Pat Gelsinger at Intel with Nvidia invading your turf. You are virtually every CEO in retail with Amazon Prime wreaking havoc on your customer base. So, what are you supposed to do now?

The answer I give in Zone to Win is that you have to activate the Transformation Zone. This is true, but it is a bit like saying, you have to climb a mountain. It begs the question, How?

There are five key questions executives facing potential disruption must ask:

1. When?

If you go too soon, your investors will lose patience with you and desert the ship. If you go too late, your customers will realize you’re never really going to get there, so they too, reluctantly, will depart. Basically, everybody gets that a transformation takes more than one year, and no one will give you three, so by default, when the window of opportunity to catch the next wave looks like it will close within the next two years, that’s when you want to pull the ripcord.

2. What does transformation really mean?

It means you are going to break your established financial performance covenants with your investors and drastically reduce your normal investment in your established product lines in order to throw your full weight behind launching yourself into the emerging fray. The biggest mistake executives can make at this point is to play down the severity of these actions. Believe me, they are going to show, if not this quarter, then soon, and when they do, if you have not prepared the way, your entire ecosystem of investors, partners, customers, and employees are going to feel betrayed.

3. What can you say to mitigate the consequences?

Simply put, tell the truth. The category is being disrupted. If we are to serve our customers, we need to transition our business to the new technology. This is our number one priority, we have clear milestones to measure our progress, and we plan to share this information in our earnings calls. In the meantime, we continue to support our core business and to work with our customers and partners to address their current needs as well as their future roadmaps.

4. What is the immediate goal?

The immediate goal is to neutralize the threat by getting “good enough, fast enough.” It is not to leapfrog the disruptor. It is not to break any new ground. Rather, it is simply to get included in the category as a fast follower, and by so doing to secure the continuing support of the customer base and partner ecosystem. The good news here is that customers and partners do not want to switch vendors if they can avoid it. If you show you are making decent progress against your stated milestones, most will give you the benefit of the doubt. Once you have gotten your next-generation offerings to a credible state, you can assess your opportunities to differentiate long-term—but not before.

5. In what ways do we act differently?

This is laid out in detail in the chapter on the Transformation Zone in Zone to Win. The main thing is that supporting the transformation effort is the number one priority for everyone in the enterprise every day until you have reached and passed the tipping point. Anyone who is resisting or retarding the effort needs to be counseled to change or asked to leave. That said, most people will still spend most of their time doing what they were doing before. It is just that if anyone on the transformation initiative asks anyone else for help, the person asked should do everything they can to provide that help ASAP. Executive staff meetings make the transformation initiative the number one item on the agenda for the duration of the initiative, the goal being at each session to assess current progress, remove any roadblocks, and do whatever possible to further accelerate the effort.

Conclusion

The net of all of the above is transformation is a bit like major surgery. There is a known playbook, and if you follow it, there is every reason to expect a successful outcome. But woe to anyone who gets distracted along the way or who gives up in discouragement halfway through. There is no halfway house with transformations—you’re either a caterpillar or a butterfly, there’s nothing salvageable in between.

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

Image Credit: Slashgear.com

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

How Compensation Reveals Culture

Leave a reply

Five Questions with Kate Dixon

How Compensation Reveals Culture

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

It’s time for your company’s All-Hands meeting. Your CEO stands on stage and announces ambitious innovation goals, talking passionately about the importance of long-term thinking and breakthrough results. Everyone nods enthusiastically, applauds politely, and returns to their desks to focus on hitting this quarter’s numbers.  After all, that’s what their bonuses depend on.

Kate Dixon, compensation expert and founder of Dixon Consulting, has watched this contradiction play out across Fortune 500 companies, B Corps, and startups. Her insight cuts to the heart of why so many innovation initiatives fail: we’re asking people to think long-term while paying them to deliver short-term.

In our conversation, Kate revealed why most companies are inadvertently sabotaging their own innovation efforts through their compensation structures—and what the smartest organizations are doing differently.

Robyn Bolton: Kate, when I first heard you say, “compensation is the expression of a company’s culture,” it blew my mind.  What do you mean by that?

Kate Dixon: If you want to understand what an organization values, look at how they pay their people: Who gets paid more? Who gets paid less? Who gets bigger bonuses? Who moves up in the organization and who doesn’t? Who gets long-term incentives?

The answers to these questions, and a million others, express the culture of the organization.  How we reward people’s performance, either directly or indirectly, establishes and reinforces cultural norms.  Compensation is usually the biggest, if not the biggest, expenses that a company has so they’re very thoughtful and deliberate about how it is used.  Which is why it tells you what the company actually does value.

RB: What’s the biggest mistake companies make when trying to incentivize innovation?

KD: Let’s start by what companies are good at when it comes to compensations and incentives.  They’re really good about base pay, because that’s the biggest part of pay for most people in an organization. Then they spend the next amount of time and effort trying to figure out the annual bonus structure. After that comes other benefits, like long term incentives, assuming they don’t fall by the wayside.

As you know, innovation can take a long time to payout, so long-term incentives are key to encouraging that kind of investment.  Stock options and restricted shares are probably the most common long-term incentives but cash bonuses, phantom stock, and ESOP shares in employee-owned companies are also considered long term incentives.

Large companies are pretty good using some equity as an incentive, but they tie it t long term revenue goals, not innovation. As you often remind us, “innovation is a means to the end, which is growth,” so tying incentives to growth isn’t bad but I believe that we can do better. Tying incentives to the growth goals and how they’re achieved will go a long way towards driving innovation.

RB: I’ve worked in and with big companies and I’ve noticed that while they say, “innovation is everyone’s job,” the people who get long-term incentives are typically senior execs.  What gives?

Long-term incentives are definitely underutilized, below the executive level, and maybe below the director level. Assuming that most companies’ innovation efforts aren’t moonshots that take decades to realize, it makes a ton of sense to use long-term incentives throughout the organization and its ecosystem.  However, when this idea is proposed, people often pushback because “it’s too complex” for folks lower in the organization, “they wouldn’t understand.” or “they won’t appreciate it”. That stance is both arrogant and untrue.  I’ve consistently seen that when you explain long-term incentives to people, they do get it, it does motivate them, and the company does see results.

RB: Are there any examples of organizations that are getting this right?

We’re seeing a lot more innovative and interesting risk-taking behaviors in companies that are not primarily focused on profit.

Our B Corp clients are doing some crazy, cool stuff.  We have an employee-owned company that is a consulting firm, but they had an idea for a software product.  They launched it and now it’s becoming a bigger and bigger part of their business.

Family-owned or public companies that have a single giganto shareholder are also hotbeds of long-term thinking and, therefore, innovation.  They don’t have that same quarter to quarter pressure that drives a relentless focus on what’s happening right now and allows people to focus on the future.

What’s the most important thing leaders need to understand about compensation and innovation?

If you’re serious about innovation, you should be incentivizing people all over the organization.  If you want innovation to be a more regular piece of the culture so you get better results, you’ve got to look at long term incentives.  Yes, you should reward people for revenue and short-term goals.  But you also need to consider what else is a precursor to our innovation. What else is makes the conditions for innovating better for people, and reward that, too.

Kate’s insight reveals the fundamental contradiction at the heart of most companies’ innovation struggles: you can’t build long-term value with short-term thinking, especially when your compensation system rewards only the latter.

What does your company’s approach to compensation say about its culture and values?

Image credit: Pexels

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

Learning Business and Life Lessons from Monkeys

Leave a reply

Learning Business and Life Lessons from Monkeys

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Franz Kafka was especially skeptical about parables. “Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life,” he wrote. “When the sage says: ‘Go over,’ he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place… he means some fabulous yonder…that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least.

Business pundits, on the other hand, tend to favor parables, probably because telling simple stories allows for the opportunity to seem both folksy and wise at the same time. When Warren Buffet says “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked,” it doesn’t sound so much like an admonishment.

Over the years I’ve noticed that some of the best business parables involve monkeys. I’m not sure why that is, but I think it has something to do with taking intelligence out of the equation. We’re often prone to imagining ourselves as the clever hero of our own story and we neglect simple truths. That may be why monkey parables have so much to teach us.

1. Build The #MonkeyFirst

When I work with executives, they often have a breakthrough idea they are excited about. They begin to tell me what a great opportunity it is and how they are perfectly positioned to capitalize on it. However, when I begin to dig a little deeper it appears that there is some major barrier to making it happen. When I try to ask about it, they just shut down.

One reason that this happens is that there is a fundamental tension between innovation and operations. Operational executives tend to focus on identifying clear benchmarks to track progress. That’s fine for a typical project, but when you are trying to do something truly new and different, you have to directly confront the unknown.

At Google X, the tech giant’s “moonshot factory,” the mantra is #MonkeyFirst. The idea is that if you want to get a monkey to recite Shakespeare on a pedestal, you start by training the monkey, not building the pedestal, because training the monkey is the hard part. Anyone can build a pedestal.

The problem is that most people start with the pedestal, because it’s what they know and by building it, they can show early progress against a timeline. Unfortunately, building a pedestal gets you nowhere. Unless you can actually train the monkey, working on the pedestal is wasted effort.

The moral: Make sure you address the crux of the problem and don’t waste time with peripheral issues.

2. Don’t Get Taken In By Coin Flipping Monkeys

We live in a world that worships accomplishment. Sports stars who have never worked in an office are paid large fees to speak to corporate audiences. Billionaires who have never walked a beat speak out on how to fight crime (even as they invest in gun manufacturers). Others like to espouse views on education, although they have never taught a class.

Many say that you can’t argue with success, but consider this thought experiment: Put a million monkeys in a coin flipping contest. The winners in each round win a dollar and the losers drop out. After twenty rounds, there will only be two monkeys left, each winning $262,144. The vast majority of the other monkeys leave with merely pocket change.

How much would you pay the winning monkeys to speak at your corporate event? Would you invite them to advise your company? Sit on your board? Would you be interested in their views about how to raise your children, invest your savings or make career choices? Would you try to replicate their coin-flipping success? (Maybe it’s all in the wrist).

The truth is that chance and luck play a much bigger part in success than we like to admit. Einstein, for example, became the most famous scientist of the 20th century not just because of his discoveries but also due to an unlikely coincidence. True accomplishment is difficult to evaluate, so we look for signals of success to guide our judgments.

The moral: Next time you judge someone, either by their success or lack thereof, ask yourself whether you are judging actual accomplishment or telltale signs of successful coin flipping. It’s harder to tell the difference than you’d think.

3. The Infinite Monkey Theorem

There is an old thought experiment called the Infinite Monkey Theorem, which is eerily disturbing. The basic idea is that if there were an infinite amount of monkeys pecking away on an infinite amount of keyboards they would, in time, produce the complete works of Shakespeare, Tolstoy and every other literary masterpiece.

It’s a perplexing thought because we humans pride ourselves on our ability to recognize and evaluate patterns. The idea that something we value so highly could be randomly generated is extremely unsettling. Yet there is an entire branch of mathematics, called Ramsey Theory, devoted to the study of how order emerges from random sets of data.

While the infinite monkey theorem is, of course, theoretical, technology is forcing us to confront the very real dilemma’s it presents. For example, music scholar and composer David Cope has been able to create algorithms that produce original works of music that are so good even experts can’t tell they are computer generated. So what is the value of human input?

The moral: Much like the coin flipping contest, the infinite monkey theorem makes us confront what we value and why. What is the difference between things human produced and identical works that are computer generated? Are Tolstoy’s words what give his stories meaning? Or is it the intent of the author and the fact that a human was trying to say something important?

Imagining Monkeys All Around Us

G. H. Hardy, widely considered a genius, wrote that “For any serious purpose, intelligence is a very minor gift.” What he meant was that even in purely intellectual pursuits, such as his field of number theory, there are things that are far more important. It was, undoubtedly, intellectual humility that led Hardy to Ramanujuan, perhaps his greatest discovery of all.

Imagining ourselves to be heroes of our own story can rob us of the humility we need to succeed and prosper. Mistaking ourselves for geniuses can often get us into trouble. People who think they’re playing it smart tend to make silly mistakes, both because they expect to see things that others don’t and because they fail to look for and recognize trouble signs.

Parables about monkeys can be useful because nobody expects them to be geniuses, which demands that we ask ourselves hard questions. Are we doing the important work, or the easiest tasks to show progress on? If monkeys flipping coins can simulate professional success, what do we really celebrate? If monkeys tapping randomly on typewriters can create masterworks, what is the value of human agency?

The truth is that humans are prone to be foolish. We are unable, outside a few limited areas of expertise, to make basic distinctions in matters of importance. So we look for signals of prosperity, intelligence, shared purpose and other things we value to make judgments about what information we should trust. Imagining monkeys around us helps us to be more careful.

Sometimes the biggest obstacle between where we are now and the fabulous yonder we seek is just the few feet in front of us.

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

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






7 Things Leaders Need to Know About Team AI Usage

Leave a reply

7 Things Leaders Need to Know About Team AI Usage

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Leaders, we need to talk about intelligence.

By now you’ve–hopefully–started to take it as seriously as many leaders of industry have been. Either way you look at artificial intelligence, good or bad, it is here to stay. And so we need to start thinking of answers for several questions at the intersection of leadership and AI.

How can it be used effectively, not just to cut costs but to supercharge productivity? How can we use artificial intelligence to supplement our solid foundational leadership? Where should we NOT be using artificial intelligence?

It’s still early in the new world of artificial intelligence in the workplace. A lot of companies are delaying hiring, some are already cutting teams to embrace the optimistic promises AI will bring. But I don’t think we should be all in…yet.

I do know one thing to be true: Leaders using AI will quickly outpace leaders who don’t. And it’s important you get equipped, and in the right way.

Artificial intelligence will make good managers better, but not mediocre bosses better

They say a great actor can bring a C+ movie script up to a B+ or even an A if they are really good. But if a C+ actor is given a C+ script, then it’s going be a C+ movie. The same goes for artificial intelligence and leadership. You need to be a great leader before you start implementing artificial intelligence. AI will not bump up a mediocre manager and turn them into a great leader. It’s not some miracle machine. The truth is you need to have your foundations as a manager be solid first. AI is a good supplement for already successful managers.

Don’t use artificial intelligence to monitor

Often the first temptation of leaders experimenting with AI is to find a productivity AI tool out there, plug it into their IT systems, and start virtually looking over their team’s shoulders to monitor output. There are already dozens of stories…horror stories…of companies doing just that. And it’s not a good look, and deeply hurts morale.

If you need a technology tool to ensure your people are actually working when they say they are, you screwed up a long time ago—back during the hiring process.

And the current research on this isn’t in artificial intelligence’s favor. If AI is used to “collect and analyze data about workers,” then eight out of ten workers say AI use on them would definitely or probably make them feel inappropriately watched. In addition, about a one third of the public does not think AI would lead to equitable evaluations. A majority also agrees this would lead to the information collected about workers being misused (66%).

Artificial intelligence is good at turning anything and everything into a metric. Time is an easy metric. Number of sales calls is an easy metric. Messages on slack is an easy metric. How often you move your mouse is an easy, and terrifying, metric. But just because you have easy numbers to pull on your team doesn’t mean they are the right metrics to be pulling.

Leadership is really about people, not the metrics. How you solicit and give feedback is important. How you support and grow individual employees is important. Inspiring your team and being transparent is important. If you monitor your team endlessly, and your team knows that you’re outsourcing the process of harvesting that data with artificial intelligence, it creates distance between you and them.

And that ultimately works against you in the long run. People don’t like leaders who seem far from them and far from…reality.

Become fluent in artificial intelligence, or risk getting lost in translation

There’s some interesting data from Deloitte on AI that came out in Spring 2024. Organizations reporting “very high” Generative AI expertise expect to change their talent strategies even faster, with 32 percent already making changes. According to their findings, a lot of companies are redesigning work processes and changing workflows to integrate AI at different points.

You’re probably already experiencing this with Google, Microsoft and others integrating artificial intelligence into their core products like email and chats.

Another big focus is going to be on AI fluency. Deloitte found that 47 percent of respondents are dedicating time towards it. The leadership who gets educated on AI early, and keeps training consistently on as it develops, will be the best equipped to shepherd their teams going forward. It’s inevitable that career paths and job descriptions are going to evolve. It’s up to you to stay current.

You NEED to know what the technology is, how it’s being used, and how it’s helping those you’re serving. Be it clients, customers, the public–whomever. Saying you just typed some words into a text box and out came some more words….is not a good answer. Or a good look for you. You sound like you’re treating it like magic, when it’s actually just code.

Turn your conversations and meetings into a database

Middle managers spend a lot of time, arguably too much time, sending progress reports up the chain to the C-Suite and marching orders down to the individual contributors at the bottom. And there’s a fair amount of investigating to find out where things really stand, and time can be spent having to meet multiple people to get all the correct and current information. This is a time slog.

Meanwhile, there are dozens of AI tools now that just take notes. Notes from meetings. Notes from calls. They take the transcript and pair it down to the key takeaways, action items, attendance –a full brief for your records.

So, instead of asking someone to take notes during a meeting or having all your notes in the chat only to evaporate once the zoom call ends, you have a searchable document that you can reference, build on, and keep track of. New hires can use the database to catch up, and senior leaders can get a quick read of the progress and where everything stands.

Use AI/Chat bots to offload small, clerical questions

Here’s a situation: You run a small team and maybe you have a few new hires. You’re going to get a bunch of clerical questions from them over their first 90 days. That’s normal. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Onboarding takes time. “Who’s the point person for this? What’s so and so’s email from HR? What’s the policy for remote days at the company?”

Here’s where artificial intelligence can be really useful. Depending on the sort of chat platform you use– Slack, Teams, whatever, you could make a simple chat bot that you upload a full archive of the company’s policies and your own team norms, clerical details– everything new hires will probably ask you about. So, when those quick questions, quick stop-and-chats happen, the chat-bot can take care of that.

This shouldn’t subtract your time with your new hires. This just subtracts the lower stakes conversations. Now, you have more time for the high-level conversations with them. More coaching. More mentorship. More progression towards team goals. It might sound simple but…that’s because it is.

Use AI as an audience for decisions before taking them public

Being in a leadership role requires making decisive decisions. You include feedback and perspectives from your team as much as possible. Do the research. Talk to people. But then comes the actual decision making. And that is often just you, alone, with your thoughts.

Instead of making your pros and cons list, one practical thing to try is inputting proposed decisions or actions in an AI tool and then asking for all the counterpoints and possible outcomes.

You could even scale this out to your whole team. Ideally, teams should be leveraging task-focused conflict in team discussions to spark new and better ideas. But conflict can be tricky. So, what if AI is always the devil’s advocate? As your team is generating or discussing ideas, you can be feeding those ideas into an AI tool and asking it for counterpoints or how competitors might respond.

Don’t let it make the decision for you but do let it help guide you to possible solutions.

Get the legal clearance before going too deep

One last disclaimer: check with your human resources or your senior leadership, your informational technology (IT) people—or honestly, all of them—to know the boundaries you can work within when using AI tools.

Many of the tools out there are free and still in beta mode or come with a small fee. And most of the larger AI companies are taking whatever data you input and using it to better refine their product. Your company may have rules on the books about data privacy. Certainly, if you work in legal, healthcare, or government services, you’re dealing with sensitive data that may be protected.

Get clear answers before using any AI tools. Until someone above you with authority gives you the OK, you should probably just play with the tools on your own time with your own personal projects.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence is just getting started in the workplace. And it’s all playing out in real time. If you’re a manager starting to get your hands dirty with these new tools, acknowledge to your team that this is all a work in progress and the norms around AI are likely to evolve. Be sure to keep the playing field level with your team. Practice that transparency, onboard everyone to the tools you’re using and that they can use and see where this takes you. Remember, AI, at its best, is here to enhance our human capabilities, not replace them.

AI will never take the place of a great boss…. but it might be better than being managed by a bad one.

Image credit: David Burkus

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on September 9, 2024.

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






The Future of Military Innovation is Analog, Digital, and Human-Centered

Leave a reply

The Hybrid Advantage

The Future of Military Innovation is Analog, Digital, and Human-Centered

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In the high-stakes world of defense and security, the innovation conversation is often hijacked by the pursuit of the most complex, esoteric, and expensive technology — hypersonic weapons, next-generation stealth fighters, and pure AI command structures. But as a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I argue that this obsession with technological complexity is a critical strategic mistake. The future of military innovation isn’t a matter of choosing between analog or digital; it’s about mastering Hybrid Resilience — the symbiotic deployment of low-cost, human-centric, and commercially available technologies that create disproportionate impact. The best solutions are often not the most advanced, but the ones that are simplest to deploy, easiest to maintain, and most effective at leveraging the human element at the edge of the conflict.

The true measure of innovation effectiveness is not its unit cost, but its cost-per-impact ratio. When simplicity meets massive scale, the result is a disruptive force that can overwhelm even the most sophisticated, closed-loop military industrial complexes. This shift is already defining modern conflict, forcing traditional defense giants to rethink how they invest and innovate.

The New Equation: Low-Cost Digital and The Power of Speed

The most devastating innovations often come with the smallest price tags, leveraging the widespread accessibility of digital tools and talent. The goal is to maximize chaos and damage while minimizing investment.

Operation Spiderweb: Asymmetric Genius Deep Behind Enemy Lines

The coordinated drone attacks known as “Operation Spiderweb” perfectly illustrate the principle of low-cost, high-impact hybrid warfare. This was not a cyberattack, but an ingenious physical and digital operation in which Ukrainian Security Services (SBU) successfully smuggled over 100 small, commercially available FPV (First-Person View) drones into Russia, hidden inside wooden structures on trucks. The drones were then launched deep inside Russian territory, far beyond the reach of conventional long-range weapons, striking strategic bomber aircraft at five different airbases, including one in Eastern Siberia — a distance of over 4,000 km from Ukraine. With a relatively small financial investment in commercial drone technology and a logistics chain that leveraged analog disguise and stealth, Ukraine inflicted an estimated sizable financial damage — potentially billions of dollars — on critical, irreplaceable Russian military assets. This was a triumph of human-centered strategic planning over centralized, predictable defense.

This principle of scale and rapid deployability is also seen in the physical domain. The threat posed by drone swarms that China can fit in a single shipping container is precisely that they are cheap, numerous, and rapidly deployable. This innovation isn’t about the individual drone’s complexity, but the simplicity of its collective deployment. The containerized system makes the deployment highly mobile and scalable, transforming a single cargo vessel or truck into an instant, overwhelming air force.

The Return of Analog: Simplicity for Survivability

While the digital world provides scale, the analog world provides resilience. True innovation anticipates technological failure, deliberately integrating low-tech, human-proof solutions for survivability.

Take, for example, the concept of drones connected with physical connection (optical fiber cables). In an era of intense electronic warfare and GPS denial, a drone linked by a physical fiber-optic cable is uncorruptible by jamming. The drone’s data link, command, and control remain secure, offering an unassailable digital tether in a highly contested electromagnetic environment. This is an elegant, human-centered solution that embraces an “old” technology (the cable) to solve a cutting-edge digital problem (signal jamming). Similarly, in drone defense, the most effective tool for neutralizing small, hostile drones is often not a multi-million-dollar missile system, but a net gun. These net guns in drone defense are a low-tech, high-effectiveness solution that causes zero collateral damage, is easily trainable, and is vastly cheaper than the target itself. They are the ultimate embodiment of human ingenuity solving a technical problem with strategic simplicity.

The Chevy ISV: Commercial Off-the-Shelf Agility

The Chevy ISV (Infantry Squad Vehicle) is a prime example of human-centered innovation prioritizing Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) solutions. Instead of spending decades and billions designing a bespoke vehicle, the U.S. military adapted a proven, commercially available chassis (the Chevy Colorado ZR2) to meet the requirements for rapid, light infantry mobility. This approach is superior because COTS is faster to acquire, cheaper to maintain (parts are globally accessible), and inherently easier for a soldier to operate and troubleshoot. The ISV prioritizes the soldier’s speed, autonomy, and operational simplicity over hyper-specialized military complexity. It’s innovation through rapid procurement and smart adaptation.

The Human-Augmented Future: Decentralized Command

The most cutting-edge military innovation is the marriage of AI and decentralized human judgment. The future warfighter isn’t a passive recipient of intelligence; they are an AI-augmented decision-maker. For instance, programs inspired by DARPA’s vision for adaptive, decentralized command structures use AI to process the vast amounts of sensor data (the digital part) but distribute the processed intelligence to small, autonomous human teams (the analog part) who make rapid, contextual decisions without needing approval from a centralized HQ. This human-in-the-loop architecture values the ethical judgment, local context, and adaptability that only a human can provide, allowing for innovation and mission execution at the tactical edge.

The Innovation Ecosystem: Disruptors on the Front Line

The speed of defense innovation is now being set by agile, often venture-backed startups, not just traditional primes. Companies like Anduril are aggressively driving hardware/software integration and autonomous systems with a focus on COTS and rapid deployment. Palantir continues to innovate on the data side, making complex intelligence accessible and actionable for human commanders. In the specialized drone space, companies are constantly emerging with highly specialized, affordable solutions that utilize commercial components and open-source principles to achieve specialized military effects. These disruptors are forcing the entire defense industry to adopt a “fail-fast” mentality, shortening development cycles from decades to months by prioritizing iterative, human-centered feedback and scalable digital infrastructure.

Conclusion: The Strategy of Strategic Simplicity

The future of military innovation belongs to those who embrace strategic simplicity. It is an innovation landscape where a low-cost digital intrusion can be more damaging than a high-cost missile, where resilience is built with fiber-optic cable, and where the most effective vehicle is a clever adaptation of a commercial pickup truck. Leaders must shift their focus from what money can buy to what human ingenuity can create. By prioritizing Hybrid Resilience — the thoughtful integration of analog durability, digital scale, and, most importantly, human-centered design — we ensure that tomorrow’s forces are not only technologically advanced but also adaptable, sustainable, and capable of facing any challenge with ingenuity and strategic simplicity.

Disclaimer: This article speculates on the potential future applications of cutting-edge scientific research. While based on current scientific understanding, the practical realization of these concepts may vary in timeline and feasibility and are subject to ongoing research and development.

Image credit: Pexels

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






Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of September 2025

Leave a reply

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of September 2025Drum roll please…

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

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

  1. McKinsey is Wrong That 80% Companies Fail to Generate AI ROI — by Robyn Bolton
  2. Back to Basics for Leaders and Managers — by Robyn Bolton
  3. Growth is Not the Answer — by Mike Shipulski
  4. The Most Challenging Obstacles to Achieving Artificial General Intelligence — by Art Inteligencia
  5. Charlie Kirk and Innovation — by Art Inteligencia
  6. You Just Got Starbucked — by Braden Kelley
  7. Metaphysics Philosophy — by Geoffrey Moore
  8. Invention Through Co-Creation — by Janet Sernack
  9. Sometimes Ancient Wisdom Needs to be Left Behind — by Greg Satell
  10. The Crisis Innovation Trap — by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

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

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

Build a Common Language of Innovation on your team

Have something to contribute?

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

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

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






An Industrial Call-To-Arms for the Environment

Leave a reply

An Industrial Call-To-Arms for the Environment

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

What is your obligation to improve the health of our planet?

For the CEO – Look around. Look at Europe. Look at China’s plans. Look at the startups. I know you want to achieve your growth objectives, but if you don’t take seriously the race toward cleaner products and services, you’ll go out of business. You can see this as a problem or an opportunity. Bury your head or put on your track shoes and run! It’s your choice.

Look at the oceans. Look at the landfills. Look at the rise in global temperatures. Just look. This isn’t about ROI, this is about survival. Growth objectives aside, no one will buy things when they are struggling to survive in an uncertain future. Your same old dirty products won’t cut it anymore. So, what are you going to do?

For an example of a path forward, look to the companies in the oil business. Their recipe is clear. They’ve got to use their large but ever-diminishing profits to buy themselves into technologies and industries that will ultimately eat their core business. Though the timing is uncertain, it’s certain that improvements in cleaner technologies will demand they make the change.

Whatever you do, don’t wait. You don’t have much time. Cleaner technologies are getting better every day. It’s time to start.

For Marketing – Look at the upstarts. Look at the powerful companies in adjacent markets who will soon be your direct competitors. Look at your stodgy, unprofitable competitors who are now sufficiently desperate to try anything. Their next marketing push will be built on the bedrock of an improved planet. They’ll be almost as good as you in the traditional areas of productivity and quality and they’ll blow your doors off with their meaner and greener products. Customers will choose green over brown. And they’ll look for real improvements that make the planet smile. The time for green-washing is past. That trick is out of gas.

You need to help customers with new jobs to be done. They care about their environment. They care about their carbon footprint. They care about clean water. And they care about recycling and reuse. It’s real. They care. Now it’s up to you to help them make progress in these areas. It will be a tough road to convince your company that things need to change, but that’s why you’re in Marketing.

You’re already behind. It’s time to start. And it’s up to you to lead the charge.

For Manufacturing – Look at your Value Stream Maps (VSMs). Assign a carbon footprint to each link in the chain. And do the same with water consumption. Assess each process step for carbon and water and rank them worst to best. For the worst, run carbon kaizens and improve the carbon footprint. And run water kaizens for the thirstiest processes.

And look again at your VSMs, and look more broadly. Look back into the supply chain, rank for carbon and water and improve the ones that need the treatment. And teach your suppliers how to do it. And look forward into your distribution channels and improve or eliminate the worst actors. And then propose to Marketing that you teach your customers how to use VSMs to clean up their act. And challenge Engineering to change the design to eliminate the remaining bad actors.

You’ve made good progress with your value streams. Now it’s time to help others make the progress that must be made. As subject matter experts, it’s your time to shine. And, please, start now.

For Engineering – Look at your products. Look at how they’re used. Look at how they’re delivered. Look at how they’re made. Look at how they’re recycled. Sure, your products provide good functionality, but throughout their life cycle they also create carbon dioxide and consume water. And you’re the only ones that can design out the environmental impact.

Learn how to do a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Learn which elements of the product create the largest problems. For all the parts that make up the product, sort them worst to best to prioritize the design work. It’s time for radical part count reduction. Try to design out half the parts. It’s possible. And the payoff is staggering. What’s the carbon footprint of a part that was designed out of the product?

Or, to make a more radical improvement, consider an Innovation Burst Event (IBE) to make a fundamental change in the way your products/services impact the environment. With this approach, your innovation work, by definition, will make the planet smile.

It’s time to be open-minded. Ask Manufacturing for the worst processes (including supply chain and distribution) and try to design them out. Design out the part, or change the material, or change the design to enable a friendlier process. Manufacturing can only improve a bad process, but you can design them out altogether. There’s power in that, but with power comes responsibility.

And it’s time for you to take responsibility.

For Everyone in Industry – Regardless of your company, your country or your political affiliation, we can all agree that all our lives get better as the health of our planet improves. And everyone can agree that cleaner air is better. And everyone can agree it’s the same for our water – cleaner is better. And that’s a whole lot of agreement.

As industry leaders, I challenge you to build on that common ground. As industry leaders, I challenge you to improve our planet one product at a time and one process at a time. And as industry leaders, I challenge you to help each other. There’s no competitive disadvantage when you help a company outside your industry. And there’s no shame in learning from companies outside your industry. And it’s good for the planet and profits. There’s nothing in the away. It’s time to start.

As an industry leader, if you want to make a difference in the health of our planet, drop a comment.

Image credit: Pixabay

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






Four Keys to a World-Class Customer Experience

Leave a reply

Four Keys to a World-Class Customer Experience

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

I’m going to start this article with a theme I’ve preached for years: When it comes to customer service and experience, our customers no longer compare us just to our competitors. Their mental benchmark, whether they know it or not, comes from the best experience they have had from any company or brand. It’s companies like Amazon, Apple, Costco, Chick-fil-A, and others that excel in providing an experience that gets customers to come back, that become our customers’ standard for service. When they have anything other than a positive experience, they may say something like, “Why can’t they be as good as _____?” (Fill in the blank with their favorite company.)

With that in mind, I’d like to offer up the idea that if we focus on creating an experience based on trying to be better than a competitor, and that may mean you are the best in your industry, it still may not meet a customer’s expectations. All you are is the best dog in a horse race.

Being best in your industry means best in class, but as I just mentioned, it may not be enough. What you want to do is start comparing yourself – as in your company – to the obvious customer experience leaders. No, you may not be able to do what Amazon or Apple do, but using them as a model can help you move from best in class to world class.

Best in Class Shep Hyken Cartoon

So, how can you make this shift? Start by identifying what makes world-class companies so appealing to their customers. In my annual customer service and customer experience (CX) research, we find the best companies and brands share certain traits:

  1. Consistency – Customers can predict their experience every time. It’s not great one time and the next time just average. Consistency creates predictability, and if the consistent experience is what customers want and know they will get, they come back.
  2. Quick Response – Whether it’s Amazon’s instant confirmation emails or a faster-than-expected returned phone call or email, customers love it when the companies they do business with are fast in their communication.
  3. Empowered Employees – Your customers are frustrated when they are dealing with employees who aren’t allowed to make decisions. If you hire good people and train them well, let them do their job. Not only will customers be happy, but your employees will appreciate the company they work for even more.
  4. Friction-Free – I wrote an entire book on this topic, The Convenience Revolution. Find ways to be easy to do business with. Eliminate anything that is a hassle or has friction associated with it.

Here’s why I love these ideas. You don’t have to be Amazon or Apple to implement any of these. Any company, regardless of size or industry, can do this. You don’t need a technology budget to respond to customers quickly or empower your team.

Look at your customer journey and ask: What would world-class companies, such as Amazon, do at this touch point?” Or, “How would Apple handle this situation?” This exercise can reveal the opportunities you might miss when you’re only comparing yourself to your direct competitors.

Image Credits: Pixabay

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






FLASH SALE – 50% off the best book for Planning Change & Transformation

Leave a reply

48 hours only!

Charting Change Second EditionExciting news!

The publisher of my second book – Charting Change – is having a 24-hour FLASH SALE and so you can get the hardcover, softcover or the eBook for 50% off the list price using CODE 50FLSH until October 3, 2025, 11:59PM EDT. The new second edition includes loads of new content including additional guest expert sections and chapters on business architecture, project and portfolio management, and digital and business transformations!

I stumbled across this and wanted to share with everyone so if you haven’t already gotten a copy of this book to power your digital transformation or your latest project or change initiative to success, now you have no excuse!

Click here to get your copy of Charting Change for 50% off using CODE 50FLSH

Of course you can get 10 free tools here from the book, but if you buy the book and contact me I will send you 26 free tools from the 50+ tools in the Change Planning Toolkit™ – including the Change Planning Canvas™!

*If discount is not applied automatically, please use this code: 50FLSH. The discount is available through October 3, 2025. 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.

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