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The Emerging Strategy of Innovative Service

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The world of the customer has dramatically changed. The tough economy has made customers more value conscious, demonstrating far more caution in how they spend their hard-earned dollar. The proliferation of self-service (while a blessing when it works) has made customers more frustrated when they feel trapped in a process with no live person to help. And the Internet, with its social media reach, has empowered customers with strong influence over other customers and the reputation of companies.

Such a plethora of challenges has required all organizations to rethink their strategy. Since revenue from customers and the power of their advocacy dramatically impacts organizational growth and profits, assuming “we know what’s best for our customers” is akin to a death knell.

But, the largest challenge today is not the changing expectations of the new, normal picky, fickle, vocal and wired customer. It is their requirement for an experience that heightens their emotional connection and ramps up their affinity. Customers are bored and want their hearts to race and their spirits to soar. And, here is the backstory.

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About the Author

Chip R. Bell is a customer loyalty consultant and the author of several national best-selling books. His last three books include The 9 ½ Principles of Innovative Service, Managers as Mentors (with Marshall Goldsmith) and Wired and Dangerous (with John Patterson). He can be reached at www.chipbell.com

Human Performance Management Best Practice 9 – Procedure Use and Adherence

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StrategyDriven Human Performance Management Best Practice ArticleUsing procedures drives consistency, reducing risk and increasing quality. Whether an activity is performed by different individuals or multiple times by the same person, proper procedure use and adherence ensures the prescribed activities are performed in the same manner, in the same order, and from the same starting conditions every time thereby yielding the same expected result. Furthermore, past operating experience can be incorporated into procedures so that lessons learned information is passed from user to user helping ensure mistakes of the past are not repeated in the future. All that said, procedures only drive this type of desired performance if used and adhered to correctly.

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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Human Performance Management Best Practice 8 – Procedure Level of Use Standards

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StrategyDriven Human Performance Management Best Practice ArticleUse of procedures and work instructions helps increase performance consistency between individuals conducting these documented activities and between repetitive performances by one person. Such consistency promotes the error-free performance necessary for high-risk and high-quality operations. However, the use of procedures slows progress and limits productivity. Since not all activities demand a high degree of consistency, a graded approach to the application of a procedure use standard is warranted.

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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

The Big Picture of Business: Why a Company Would Improve? The Art of Learning From Failure to Get Better.

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Success is just in front of our faces. Yet, we often fail to see it coming. Too many companies live with their heads in the sand. Many go down into defeat because it was never on their radar to change.

A colleague recently complained about her corporation: “Things are much the same at this company, and I don’t see much changing unless leadership does.”

The answer is that companies need not roll over and accept less than the best. And yes, it takes courage to get management unstuck in their ways. Ninety-two (92) percent of all problems in organizations stem from poor management decisions.

The Biggest Mistakes Which Many of Us Have Made

Abilities, Talents

  • Making the same mistakes more than twice, without studying the mitigating factors.
  • Taking incidents out of context and mis-diagnosing situations.
  • Rationalizing occurrences, after the fact.
  • Appearing self-contained, therefore precluding others from wanting to help me.
  • Inability to cultivate other people’s support of me at the times that I needed it most.

Resources

  • Attempting projects without the proper resources to do the job well.
  • Not knowing people with sufficient pull and power. Thinking that friends would help introduce me or help network to key influentials.
  • Failure to effective networking techniques early enough in my career path.
  • Inability to finely develop the powers of people participating in the networking process.

Other People

  • Accepting people at their words without questioning.
  • Showing proper respect to other people and assuming that they would show or were capable of showing comparable respect to others.
  • Doing favors for others without asking anything in return… if I expected quid pro quo at a later time. Not telling people what I wanted and then being disappointed that they did not read minds or deliver favors of their own volition.
  • Befriending people who were too needy… always taking without offering to reciprocate. Continuing to feed their needs… a one-way relationship.
  • Picking the wrong causes to champion at the wrong times and with insufficient resources.
  • Working with the false assumption that people want and need comparable things. Incorrectly assuming that all would pursue their agendas fairly. A better understanding of personality types, human motivations and behavioral factors would have provided insight to handle situations on a customized basis.
  • Offering highly creative ideas and brain power to those who could not grasp their brilliance… especially to those who were fishing for free ideas they could then market as their own.

Circumstances Beyond Our Control

  • Working with equipment, resources and people from a source without my standards of quality control… trying to make the best of bad situations.
  • Changing trends, upon which I could not capitalize but which others could.

Mis-Calculations

  • Incorrectly estimating the time and resources necessary to do something well.
  • Getting blindsided because I did not do enough research.
  • Failure to plan sufficiently ahead, at the right times.
  • Setting sights too low. Not thinking big enough.

Timing

  • Offering advice before it was solicited.
  • Feeling pressured to offer solutions before diagnosing situations properly.
  • Not thinking of enough angles and possibilities… sooner.

Marketplace-External Factors

  • Not reading the opportunities soon enough.
  • Not being able to spot, create or capitalize upon emerging trends at their beginnings.

Stages of Mistakes

  1. Discovering errors (sensory-motor, sounds-language and logical selection).
  2. Recognizing mistakes.
  3. Separating successful elements from failures we do not need to duplicate.
  4. Learning from mistakes.
  5. Learning from success.
  6. Mentoring yourself and others toward a higher stream of knowledge.
  7. The wisdom that comes from making mistakes, comprehending their outcomes, and developing a knowledge base to achieve success.

Gradations of Failing

  1. Not seeing the warning signs.
  2. Distinguishing among friends, enemies and the majority group, those who could care less about you but who will tap whatever resources available to get their needs met.
  3. Never seeing victories as quite enough.
  4. Feeling that someone else – everyone else – wins when you fail.
  5. Repeating self-defeating behaviors.
  6. Holding unrealistic views.
  7. Thinking that you never fail… that failing is for other people and organizations.

Why We Must Fail… in Order to Succeed

Learning the stumbling blocks of failure prepares one to attain true success. Fear is the biggest contributor to failure, and it can be a motivator for success. You cannot make problems go away, simply by ignoring that they exist.

Everybody fails at things for which they are not suited. The process of learning what one is best suited to do is not a failure…it is a great success. Learn from the best and the worst. People who make the biggest bungling mistakes are showing you pitfalls to avoid.

Many of us make the same mistakes over and over again. That is to be expected and teaches us volumes, preparing us for success. There is no plan that is fool-proof. One plans, learns, reviews and plans further.

One learns three times more from failure than success. One learns three times more clearly when witnessing and analyzing the failures of others they know or have followed. History teaches us about cycles, trends, misapplications of resources, wrong approaches and vacuums of thought. People must apply history to their own lives-situations. If we document our own successes, then these case studies will make us more successful in the future.

Gradations of Learning from Mistakes

  1. Distance one’s self from one’s actions.
  2. Become self-critical.
  3. Recognize that actions have consequences.
  4. Begin accepting responsibility for the consequences.
  5. Learn how to eliminate errors.
  6. Learn how to learn from mistakes.
  7. Accept fallibility, become open to critical feedback and modify actions accordingly.

About the Author

Power Stars to Light the Business Flame, by Hank Moore, encompasses a full-scope business perspective, invaluable for the corporate and small business markets. It is a compendium book, containing quotes and extrapolations into business culture, arranged in 76 business categories.

Hank’s latest book functions as a ‘PDR of business,’ a view of Big Picture strategies, methodologies and recommendations. This is a creative way of re-treading old knowledge to enable executives to master change rather than feel as they’re victims of it.

Power Stars to Light the Business Flameis now out in all three e-book formats: iTunes, Kindle, and Nook.

StrategyDriven White Paper Advises Leaders on Preventing Catastrophic Industrial Accidents

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StrategyDriven’s Preventing Catastrophic Industrial Accidents reveals how high-risk industry leaders can reduce their significant event risk exposure through application of safety-first principles.
 
 
StrategyDriven Safety Culture Point of View DocumentStrategyDriven released Preventing Catastrophic Industrial Accidents, a white paper revealing how high-risk industry leaders can reduce their significant event risk exposure through the cost effective adaptation of key aspects of the U.S. nuclear industry’s safety-first principles.

After the several recent catastrophic industrial accidents within the United States, including the devastating explosions at a Texas fertilizer plant and Louisiana chemical plant, StrategyDriven wanted to help industrial and utility leaders reduce the risk of similar accidents at their facilities.

“Many of today’s significant industrial accidents are preventable, the byproduct of human errors made when safety was subordinated to other priorities,” explains Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “By fostering an organizational culture that puts safety-first, executives and managers create a workplace environment where errors are recognized and proactively corrected before they result in a material event.”

“An effective safety culture is far more than slogans and posters,” continues Greg Gaskey, StrategyDriven’s Chief Operations Officer. “It permeates the organization’s performance standards, operating processes, training programs, rewards systems, and, most importantly, the decisions and behaviors of everyone from the C-Suite to the shop floor.”

Nathan and Greg authored Preventing Catastrophic Industrial Accidents based on their decades of experience managing nuclear and industrial complex operations. Additionally, Nathan led the development of the nuclear industry’s operational risk management, high-risk decision management, and plant operations performance standards while working at the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations.

Highlights from Preventing Catastrophic Industrial Accidents include:

  • Safety Culture Attributes – safety focused executives, managers, and employees collectively assume responsibility for both their and their co-workers’ safety; embody a questioning attitude; encourage issue reporting and priority-based resolution; employ error reduction techniques; embed safety-first features within operational, training, and rewards programs; and embrace ongoing organizational learning
  • Identifying the Strength of Your Safety Culture – artifacts of the safety-first values are not only found in the outcomes achieved, but also reside in the organization’s goals and performance measures, standards and expectations, policies and procedures, rewards systems, training, and organizational learning and continuous improvement programs
  • Improving Your Safety Culture – individuals at all levels of the organization must be engaged in order to foster a robust safety culture; originating from executive defined attributes and goals and translated to the day-to-day decisions and actions of all employees

Preventing Catastrophic Industrial Accidents is being distributed to StrategyDriven’s clients, including some of the world’s largest utility operators. Download the white paper by clicking here.

About the Authors

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal, and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Greg Gaskey, StrategyDriven PrincipalGreg Gaskey is a StrategyDriven Principal with over twenty years of nuclear plant operations, maintenance, and large-scale program and project management experience. An experienced Operations Manager, he has managed critical Department of Defense programs, projects, and business lines; spanning multiple engineering maintenance disciplines including mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, and instrumentation and controls systems. To read Greg’s complete biography, click here.