Month: June 2021

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Why “We’re Number One!” Goals Have Become Useless

In times past it was fashionable for corporate leaders to craft vision statements with commitments to be “number one” and “world class”. Lately, these have become less popular, with good reason. They are a sign of lackluster thinking which signals a lack of detailed planning.

Corporate leaders tend to fit a particular profile. They show strong Type A tendencies: energetic over-achievers who are time-sensitive and impatient. They drive themselves hard to accomplish great things, often bringing others behind them for the ride, ready or not.

However, if you have this trait, there may be an added one which gets you in trouble: your tendency to be competitive. If you get a lot of juice from beating other people, this approach works when goals are simple. It stirs up lots of extra effort and leads to reliable, continuous improvements.

Most CEO’s use this characteristic to grab the corner office ahead of others, at which point they often shift their focus to defeating other companies. This compulsion to be the captain of a winning team creates three kinds of problems.

Challenge #1 – CEO’s Play Games Employees Find Irrelevant

Part of being an effective executive involves learning the language of the C-Suite. Over time, this new lingo separates leaders from lower-level employees.

But the big problem is that what excites you, a Type A executive, is unlikely to inspire others. While staff knows there is a connection between EBITDA and their job security, it’s all a theory. Certainly, they feel no emotional bond.

As such, when you conduct a town hall you’re likely to speak glowingly of achievements in words that don’t resonate. You staffs’ needs are far more human, and it’s easy to lose track of them.

To build engagement, you’ll need to uncover employees’ actual aspirations, in order to satisfy them. For example, if getting their kids a decent education and making ends meet is a major part of their lives, you must start there.

Challenge #2 – CEO’s Craft Imaginary Competitions

The world is changing so rapidly that the old ways of thinking about competitors have become stale. In the past it was easier: ultra-competitive CEOs would find similar companies to compare themselves against. Then, they’d choose metrics such as profitability, stock price or revenue to be their yard-stick of accomplishment.

However, in a fast-changing landscape, your “competitors” are actually imaginary: made up. As industries and circumstances evolve, it becomes impossible to find other companies which are just like yours. There may be some overlap, but no perfect fit. Your orange ends up racing to a make-believe finish line against their apple.

As such, your claims to be (or plans to become) “Number One” are increasingly empty. They are a simplistic way to motivate yourself that may suit you, as a Type A executive, but no-one else.

Even aspirations to claim a “World-Class” standard look silly in today’s world. Anyone who cares can achieve this goal by defining a narrow standard. But even then, customers don’t care about such claims.

Challenge #3 – CEO’s Forsake Customers

While most MBA programmes are built around competition, that approach is becoming a distraction…at best a sideshow. It’s far better to develop a sharper focus on meeting customer’s unmet needs.

But this is no solid target. Customers’ needs are evolving due to new technologies so it’s become harder than ever to discover a customer’s “Job-to-be-Done”. (The term refers to the actions a customer takes to meet their unmet needs.)

The pandemic has led to shifts in many customers’ Jobs-to-be-Done, as they adopted new behavior patterns. Many companies unwittingly fell out of touch, and haven’t re-established a unique understanding. They run the risk of missing the mark.

Just observe the way Uber and AirBnB disrupted their respective industries before the pandemic. They used modern technology to tap into idle, low-cost resources (i.e. people’s cars and rooms). Now, they are shifting their processes to accommodate the new customer need for sanitized environments.

In short, they have been adjusting their companies’ business models, in concert with changes in their customers’ needs.

There are other ways your company can meet unmet needs, but when it happens, don’t be confused by your success. Definitely don’t claim it as proof of being “Number One” or “World Class” to start a new round of chest-beating.

Instead, use it as fuel to fire up a fresh cycle of customer research which, in the end, is the best insurance policy against disruptions of all kinds.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

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Shifting to online methods of reaching prospects

Too many executives are unaware of game-changing ways their markets are shifting. Their post-COVID audience of prospects and customers now expects more than message blasts. Instead, they require your company to become better attuned to their unmet needs. Fail to do this and they switch to competitors.

Remember the days when advertising meant print, display, and broadcast messaging? The core idea? Deliver to you a blast of information from the company, targeted at your attention. Then, cross their fingers, hoping that you would respond favorably at a later time and date.

Contrast that method with the effectiveness of social media advertising. On Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, your clickable behaviour is tracked and analyzed. Then, an algorithm decides which advertisements to send. As such, you receive a highly customized and targeted set of messages.

If you are a typical executive, you may be dimly aware of the difference between old and online methods. An interesting factoid.

However, you should pay closer attention.

The companies who are using online messaging are “learning” more about their customer’s unmet needs than you can imagine. They’re analyzing the details to draw powerful conclusions.

It’s an improvement over the prior state of affairs, captured by John Wanamaker’s joke: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half!”

With today’s technology, one can actually tell. How should your business use this capability?

  1. Track changing customer behaviour

If your company isn’t doing business online yet, you may explain that your customers are not to be found there in large numbers.

But that’s not a valid reason: you can use online interactions to learn about your customer’s behaviors, even if their numbers are small.

For example, your firm can test a hundred marketing messages to see which ones bring people into your funnel. Then, in your next step, apply different followups to determine how they react.

Consider it to be a cheap way to do critical research.

This level of detailed information puts your ads on broadcast media to shame in terms of its feedback value. Better yet, you should be able to learn where behavior changes lead to long-term habits that didn’t exist before.

This kind of precision is taken for granted by online advertisers, but few traditional marketing executives understand its power firsthand. The learning curve is too steep. As such, COVID has catalyzed changes they can’t track.

Consequently, many companies are being left in the dark by competitors who are gaining deep intelligence. Your best customers may be at risk.

  1. Conduct experiments on fresh innovations

A side-effect of this new capability is that your organization can shorten the time it takes to confirm an original product or service. This solves an age-old problem: how can you determine which offerings to bring to market?

In the online era, you actually don’t even need to sell anything to find out. Simply create advertisements for a new imaginary offering and see how an audience responds.

It’s a form of advanced market research that works far better than asking people whether they like something or not.

Imagine, you can bring prospects all the way to the point where they enter credit card numbers, revealing their intent to pay. In this approach, you are following their actual behavior, not their surveyed opinions.

Plus, you should gather groups of likely customers in a single place and partner with them to build the first version of your introductory offering.

As your fans, they give you valuable feedback that helps you craft the new product or service for the larger mainstream market.

These experiments deliver you invaluable data quickly, giving you a powerful advantage. The cost? Minimal.

  1. Anticipate Unmet Needs

Finally, you can even track the precursor to prospect’s new behaviours – unmet needs. By definition, these make up a moving target. Why? As customers absorb your prior innovations, they outgrow your existing solutions. Breakthrough technologies accelerate this process, leading them to start looking earlier than ever for replacements.

COVID has accelerated these changes, but many organizations will close down waiting for old behaviours to return. For most, the “new normal” is one they can’t anticipate: they just don’t have the information necessary.

Better, smarter companies will arrive at the same point in time with a bunch of data on their new customer’s needs. They’ll have innovations lined up which might be in demand by customers who know when they’ll be released.

Does your firm believe that after COVID finally departs it plans to launch a big, traditional advertising blast? If so, you could be making an egregious error.

Instead, take action now to develop the sophisticated information to build deep relationships that anticipate customer’s unmet needs.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

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How Is It Important But Not Urgent?!

Using the Eisenhower Matrix Productivity Method Longtime productivity technique, Eisenhower Method, is often tied to the myth of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. After all, it’s named after him! But, there’s much more to the prioritization method than meets the eye. In this episode, the ProductivityCast team explains the Eisenhower Matrix (or more aptly, the Merrill-Covey Matrix) and analyzes the use cases for the time-tested tool. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/114 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing How Is It Important But Not Urgent?!: Using the Eisenhower Matrix Productivity Method from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Using the Eisenhower Matrix Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. https://youtu.be/tT89OZ7TNwc How to be More Productive by Using the “Eisenhower Box”Avoid the "Urgency Trap" with the Eisenhower Matrix TodoistRemember the Milk Raw Text Transcript | Using the Eisenhower Matrix Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your host Ray Sidney-Smith and gousto been out with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:22I'm Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:24And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivity cast. Today, we are going to be talking about what is colloquially known as the Eisenhower method or the Eisenhower matrix. And what I wanted us to do is to cover kind of the origin and the outline of what the Eisenhower matrix is. So we all have a better understanding of it. There's a little bit of mythology around the Eisenhower matrix and the methodology underpinning it, then we're going to talk about our experiences with the Eisenhower matrix and how matrices generally can help us be more productive. And then talking a little bit about when and why you should use it. Where are the contexts in which the Eisenhower matrix can work? And then, of course, how we can blend it with other methodologies, productivity methodologies that we all use in our own productive worlds. So let's start out with what the Eisenhower matrix or what the Eisenhower method is. I'll start with the fact that in 1954, former US President Dwight D, Eisenhower quoting someone else, he was actually quoting Dr. Roscoe Miller, who was the president of Northwestern University. And so he was speaking to the second assembly of the World Council of Churches, it turns out and he was he is quoted as quoting Dr. Miller as saying, quote, I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important, the urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent and quote, this has come to be known as the Eisenhower principle or the Eisenhower matrix. Many people have then mythologized that somehow Eisenhower had developed this whole entire methodology around it. But the reality is,
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How to Tackle the Problem of Conglomerate Strategy

How do you craft a strategic plan for a group of companies? Why do so many efforts end up with nothing more than “last-year’s-plan-plus-5%?” Discard this path of least resistance if you hope to capitalize on COVID opportunities.

Conglomerates are, in the best of times, difficult to plan for. Units compete for resources in different markets, creating a headache for whoever must make an optimal allocation. It’s a challenge of comparing apples to oranges by executives who don’t specialize in either fruit.

The hope is that by the end of the day, each business unit has a unique set of marching orders: a custom “breakthrough strategy”. It should be powerful enough to meet customer’s unmet needs, conform to disruptive technology trends and prevent competitors from gaining a foothold.

Furthermore, at the group level, the overall strategy shouldn’t be just a grab bag of ideas. Each individual plan should be part of a puzzle that makes up a single coherent picture.

However, I have sat in group meetings in which business unit MD’s flounder when asked for their organization’s strategy. After a bunch of PowerPoint slides, it becomes clear: they have no real strategy. At most, they have a list of tactics.

Furthermore, in these pandemic times, most are facing game-changing disruptions. This requires them to engineer the “next normal.” More often than not, they simply aren’t equipped to get the job done.

Before your business units drift into becoming another Nokia or Blackberry (i.e. a has-been), how can your group of companies prevent its component businesses from failing?

Step 1 – Engage business units in long-term planning

The simplest request is for business units to lengthen their planning horizons. Ask them to look 15-30 years out. Give them the examples, support and templates they need to produce a feasible, detailed plan. While it needs to account for current trends, the team shouldn’t be limited by them.

After all, this is not an exercise in predicting the future, but crafting one which includes preferred outcomes.

For the average MD of a business unit, this is likely to be a tough activity. But even clumsy attempts will push executives into the right zone of discomfort.

Step 2 – Develop leaders’ everyday planning skills

To improve C-suite skills, don’t turn strategy into a onetime or annual event. Instead, train them to think strategically at all times.

Some group CEO’s mistakenly assume this is easy. In their role, they spend 80% of their time on strategy, and 20% on daily operations. However, the reverse is true for their business unit MD’s. The fact is, in their progress up the ranks, the drumbeat for immediate results kept them awake at night. Their ability to adapt quickly helped them get promoted.

As such, your organization may not be organized to think strategically, and MD’s will find this to be a challenge. Don’t let them languish.

Instead, give them the training and coaching to implement their strategy from month to month. Their environment is changing so fast that if they don’t keep the big picture in mind, they could miss out on opportunities created by disruptions like COVID.

What if they fail to grow the required skills? Expect big mistakes that destroy value and produce a “diversification discount” in which the sum of the parts of your company is greater than the whole.

Step 3 – Make Clear Proposals

Once a business unit has completed its planning, MD’s must advance proposals to the central group organization. This is pure lobbying: an appeal to support the business unit’s strategic plan with tangible resources.

Your leaders may also need to be trained to become balanced, fact-based advocates of the specific value they can bring in the mid to long term.

Their clarity is essential. Why?

As group executives hear a range of proposals, they need to make collective decisions about the direction of the entire organization. Consequently, business units will receive good news or bad news depending on decisions made to allocate funds, attention and power.

As such, MD’s must be clear as the future of the organization relies on the quality of their analysis. If they do a poor job, bad decisions will be made: a harsh reality.

But the worst decision of all is not to make any. Some companies drift along, sitting back to watch what happens next.

By then, the savviest staff members have found jobs elsewhere, looking for real leaders to follow. Customers uncover better products and services, and value is destroyed.

While it’s hard to marshal a conglomerate strategy, it’s a problem which must be tackled to assure the future of the entire organization.