Paint it lean !!

Today i was at a conference by Niklas Modig on lean. As always it is difficult to find one purpose for using lean concepts. What is lean? Some had say that, and other might feel that they have already used all the methods and tools of lean. And thats where the catch is!!

As I understand it, there is no such thing as lean. There is no such thing as one method or one tool, but there is got to be one value and one purpose behind everything else - 'Reduction of waste and complexity'. 

In Niklas's words, it is increasing your flow-efficiency and increasing your resource efficiency that leads you to the path of success. You could always ask what is success? What is it that we are trying to achieve? Being a customer relationship person, the idea that most resonated with me was the idea of driving customer satisfaction. Well !!! Brrrrrrrrr!! wrong answer.

Isn't this just common sense. Which company would drive or do something that increases customer dissatisfaction? At least the ones in their sane minds wouldn't. So yes, this is a high level truth. But the goals behind implementing lean have to be more implementable and tangible in nature. For instance - find out if you want to lean out your physical products flow, or information flow or knowledge flow or ? + make sure that the process, the advantages/disadvantages and the results/progress are visible to everyone up to the bottom line each day of the business. 

Thats the true meaning of lean. Simplify, simplify and simplify !! 

One of the interesting things that came up during the discussion in the round table was the supporting eco-systems that need to support anything that we do to ensure that we become better each day. These are like life support systems - performance management and incentives & Trust + team work. Without these life support mechanisms, businesses will choke to a slow and steady death, if I can say so!!

Not to paint a bad picture, the important thing is to ensure that the values and principles of a business at the top level of strategy are aligned with what we try to do at the business strategy and operational strategy level. In absence of this alignment, the change would be so incongruent that it would never stick!!

Bring on more board meetings !!

The tension in the board room was building up as the board meeting progressed. Why have different people on the board? Why have people on the board who perhaps come for meeting only five times in an year and don't know about the day-to-day operations? - All this became so clear as the radically different approaches started to emerge from different sides of the round table. Very very interesting, high-energy, high-pressure talks - all of them trying to bring in more constructive feedback to the growth of the company. 

Language plays a very important role in these meetings. Ask the board members to converse in a foreign language and the limited vocabulary makes the talk abridged and limited. In the mother tongue, things get dirty and for the best more than often. 

It is simply so important to have this strong third perspective. It is so important to have the right people on the board who are able to take things professionally and keep their heart out of such discussions. People who can single minded focus on making their companies go in the right strategic direction. 

I loved it to be part of this meeting because I knew I was with the right people !!

Opinion: Are we incentivising our societies to becoming negative?

The more I explore customer analytics, consumer experience management and understand how we want to gauge who are the customer groups that a company should focus on, the more I worry about the vicious circle that we have built up in this world today. 

Let me explain using an attribute that is commonly used to understand the consumers - consumer sentiment. Large analytics teams and complex analytical softwares pay a hell lot of attention to this one parameter. Their logic is that the more negative a consumer's sentiment is, which is measured in the world of algorithms through certain key words for instance 'unhappy', 'highly disappointed', 'depressed' among others, the more important it is for a company to pay attention to this consumer if they want to retain the consumer. 'Red flags' and red traffic lights flash across the screens of call centre agents and customer representatives who want to service these customers at their best depending on the capabilities of their product or service. 

On the other side of the table is the consumer, who by the way is not stupid. The consumer knows that the more strong and negative he or she is in his/her response to anything that he/she is unhappy with, the faster and better service he/she will get, with a good chance to even win some credit back. And thats exactly what many consumers do. 

The result - our societies are becoming more and more negative. Patience has gone for a toss !! and don't get me wrong - it is definitely and absolutely important to be constructively critical about things that aren't the best because that is the only way to ensure that the things will improve. However, here the scenario is not the same. Millions, if not billions, are empowered today with the knowledge that the more critical and negative they become - the more credit they can earn. 

Are we driving our own societies to negativity? Shouldn't customer analytics be more psychological based analysis that can exactly figure out what and how real a consumer sentiment is? I feel there is not just a small flaw in this whole analytics technique - it is a huge risk looming around the corner that will perhaps make people more negative than they ought to be. 

Company Boards: Key Findings

Purpose of the board: "To steer the company in the right direction". A board has focus on making sure that the company is making the right strategy and more importantly it is obligatory for the board to ensure that the day to day management is the right management to have. 

Two main things: 

1. Have the right top management

2. Ensure that the capital of the company is secure

Usually the trick part is how to make a good board. There are no scientific performance evaluation criteria, but usually there is a good understanding if the management is good and if they are listening. So its almost like  putting up a good team together. 

Annual cycle: 5-7 meetings per year. 

If you are an international company, you should have an international board. Of course having the knowledge of the company is more important than the nationality. Particularly only national companies do not really need an international experience. 

Employee elected members usually help the board when the company is in trouble. In this situation, these people know what is wrong and that is good input. However, when there are good times then there is not so much value add to the board work to have employee elected presentation. 

In most cases the motivation for the board is to maintain their own reputation. 

Who steps into the board room: Someone who have had a real bottom line experience as a bottom line manager, and then has done something to be higher than the middle managers. Then is when you enter the board room. 

Sometimes you need to be at the right place at the right time to reach the right level. 

Ref: Agnete Raaschou

The fate of parasitic businesses

Recently Google announced that they are binning their google reader. As the news went out, the world went into a fury. B2B customers who were practically running their businesses based on Google reader estimate millions in loses. B2C customers are more worried about the millions of news feeds that they had painstakingly saved. 

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/03/end-google-reader

This act of Google is like a reaffirmation to people on how important originality of thought is. Basing businesses on Google, Facebook or any other company is not entirely wrong, because this can simply be viewed as a Supply Chain where one business caters to the needs of the second. However what is important to note here is that in a typical supplier-buyer relationship, there are contractual agreements to safeguard the interests of both parties. However lately, within the new web-world, such contracts have taken a back seat. Clearly there is no incentive for Google or for Facebook or others to continue providing any of their service, and they are likely to shed off their dying service the moment it stops making money for them, leaving other parasitic businesses gasping for breath. 

More importantly what worried me about this behavior from Google was their indifference to their own customers. This is little less known behavior, because even though there are no contracts between customers and businesses, businesses usually pay a lot of attention to fulfilling their customer's requirements. Having said this, it seems that google well knows that its customers are linked to it via multitudes of product propositions, and so binning one will not create a major loss for the giant. It is also an amazing realisation that humans adapt very fast, and so it is quite likely that people will find new ways to get to their favorite reads and will stay with Google. 

The worst hit, though, are the parasitic businesses, who have not just lost their business engine, but also have lost their customers. 

Trust is all that matters

When two people talk for the first time in a workplace, or otherwise, the relationship has just started to peep its head out from the nest and look for longer flights in the future. Flights that will be coupled with high winds (and may be storms), with strength, with will power, with pain and with trust. 

Sometimes a peculiar characteristic emerges from such relations. Situation 1: If in such a relation, I see person 1 always dominating over person 2, what strikes me is - Is person 2 stupid? Is there something like always? Is there something that is always not making sense when person 2 says it? Why is person 1 always saying the right things and dominates? 

As complicated as it is, studies of people's behavior is complicated. In more than often cases, person 2 is a better leader as he is not leading from his/her ego point. He/She lets the person 1 to ride the high wave on purpose. The danger of doing and accepting this behaviour in long run, however, is that in such cases, one: many good ideas are never brought forward or smashed, two: person 2 might as well lose confidence. And this is the point where the trust starts to deplete. 

Its interesting how all the studies teach managers that trust is essentially the most vital element of any relationship in the workplace, yet people revert to their ways of chiding each other, and operating from their egos to run such relationships.