Aha! I've just discovered my notes from an interview I did with Gary Hamel, the strategy expert, academic and author. I've been trying to find them to post this extract for you, as too much writing about innovation says it is about predicting, forecasting, inventing the future. No, it's not. It's about understanding the present more deeply than your competitors do. I loved the way Hamel explained it in this interview. It's a good way to start 2007...

"People who innovate successfully are not forecasters. They are in touch with what’s happening, whereas the competition simply haven’t noticed. People who innovate successfully don’t see the future. They see beneath the surface of the present. And they pull together what they see into a proposition that has instant appeal for customers, but which customers didn’t even know they wanted until it appeared.

"They’re not customer-led; they understand what customers want better than customers do themselves. So, how do you do this? Nokia are a great example. Fifteen years ago the top people at Nokia got together in a cold room just outside the Arctic Circle and decided they were going to beat Motorola. Very funny. Motorola was and still is one of the most respected companies in the world, up there with GE.

Nokia succeeded because they saw what was changing and exploited it. There are three steps to doing this:

1. Find the fringe

2. Look for the pattern

3. Data is not enough: Experience, feel and understand what’s happening.

It’s at the margin that you notice change happening first. Nokia sent its engineers from Finland and told them to live in places where exciting things were happening. They sent them to spend time in nightclubs in Tokyo, in the King’s Road in London, on Venice Beach in southern California. Their brief was to observe marginal trend-setting lifestyles and blend in, then report back.

It was that experiential learning, getting under the skin of the ‘now’ by actually living it rather than conducting a questionnaire, that brought Nokia’s engineers back to Finland with an emphasis on aesthetics and design and on more elegant, user-friendly interfaces. And that was how they did, indeed, beat Motorola in the phone handset market.”

Source: An interview between me and Gary Hamel.

Labels: Gary+Hamel, innovation, Nokia

Well, have a great festive season.

I hope to have a new downloadable book of customer tips available for you in January. Will report here in a week or two on that. In the meantime, here is some great advice from Forrest Gump to help you focus on what's important in 2007:

"Don't lead no humdrum life."

Hmmm, looks like this brand wasn't designed to travel well in the new global economy.

Labels: brands, marketing

Heard Bob Geldof say this at Leaders in London couple of weeks ago. Clever man...

"In parts of Africa people don’t trust institutions. They keep their money in secret societies. Barclays did a clever thing. They went and found the people who hold money for their communities, who keep it safe for them. And they made them into local branches of Barclays. Globalism needs new forms like this."

Nice point about how to shape your customer offer to cultural mores; much more real-life than those stupid HSBC commercials suggesting cultural differences around the world consist of whether it's polite to put your feet on the table in public or not . Looks like Barclays understand the new globalism and how to shape yourself to fit customer needs better than that superficial nonsense:

- Bob Geldof, speaking at Leaders in London a couple of weeks ago.

Labels: Barclays, Geldof, globalism, HSBC

I heard this customer service announcement on the London Underground myself while running to catch a tube train at Westminster Station, so I know it’s true, as opposed to the ones that circulate in emails. Ah, the power of CCTV:

“Will the gentleman on the eastbound District Line platform stay exactly where you are. Yes, we can see you. We’re rushing a mop and bucket down to you right now and you can clean that up yourself”.

No, it wasn’t me.

We all know the power of sticking a senior executive in front of a customer and letting them absorb how the customer feels. It's how you bring them down from whatever ivory tower they are in and get them to 'confront reality' as Bossidy & Charan put it in their book of the same name.

Here's an example, from Renee Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim. Mauborgne was impressive at last week's Leaders in London conference. So, I dug this example out of my research notes for the 60 Second Leader book that I am supposed to be finishing off right this minute (manuscript submission deadline Friday week. Gulp...). It's an example of how to try and trigger an epiphany in people so they suddenly stand in their customer's shoes and see things the way they really are - from the customer's standpoint:

“Philips Lighting North America was a very proud company. So proud that the sales force were convinced they were doing a first-class job even though they weren’t gaining market share and General Electric dominated the industry.

“That’s when the new business head had his sales force listen in on a phone conversation between himself and Bernie Marcus, the founder of Home Depot, the largest retail customer in the US lighting industry.” On this occasion, the cognitive ‘kingpin’ the head of sales was looking to hit was the entrenched assumption by the sales force that they were better than they actually were.

'So, Bernie,’ he said, ‘How is our sales force doing?’ Marcus replied: ‘Your sales force?’ (His voice rose to a near-shout). ‘They never follow through with what they commit to, deliveries are late, quantities and styles are wrong. It’s a disaster. There are only excuses, no corrective action.’

A dramatic attitudinal and behavioural turnaround occurred fast, as there was no place left for the sales force to hide.”

SOURCE: Renee Mauborgne & W. Chan Kim, authors of the best-selling Blue Ocean Strategy, writing on how to achieve ‘Tipping Point Leadership’ – making big change happen despite few resources. You can find the full texts in their article Tipped For The Top, People Management magazine, April 2003 and the INSEAD Quarterly, 2004.

Labels: Blue Ocean, epiphany, Mauborgne

It's from the Gallup Management Journal, which measured customer attachment. See the post below for the link to the article.

It is often said we cannot measure customer emotions, so they remain elusive and intangible. ‘How satisfied are you on a scale of 1 to 5?’ doesn’t really cut it in the emotion measurement stakes. That’s head, not heart.

But back in 2001 Gallup created a customer emotion thermometer of sorts that sounds a lot more useful than the usual 'satisfaction' questions. It is made up of eight key measures, grouped into four 'constructs':

CONFIDENCE
XXX is a name I can always trust
XXX always deliver on what they promise

INTEGRITY
XXX always treats me fairly
If a problem arises, I can always count on XXX to reach a fair and satisfactory solution

PRIDE
I feel proud to be a XXX customer
XXX always treats me with respect

PASSION
XXX is a perfect company for people like me
I can’t imagine a world without XXX

The highest rung of the emotional ladder is passion, says Gallup, not surprisingly. You can instantly see how useful a tool an emotional thermometer like Gallup’s might be in assessing how warmly your customers feel towards you and in helping you focus on where you need to improve to heat the relationship up.

Source: A paper by Alec Applebaum called The Constant Customer , in the Gallup Management Journal. See also Amy Wong’s article ‘The role of emotional satisfaction in service encounters’, Managing Service Quality, Vol 14, Number 5, pp 365-376.

Labels: loyalty, measurement, satisfaction, service quality

Stephen Lukac over at the McGill International Executive Institute in Montreal has spotted a new way consumers can compare and search for what they want. It claims to be the world's first visual search engine.



Very clever, if a bit clunky for now. Are you watching, Google? www.like.com

Labels: consumer search, Google