STRATEGY CENTRAL

Chris Anderson (The Long Tail) is out with a free preview of his next book on the concept of certain kinds of things "wanting to be free."  You can read his article right here.   I referred to the idea previously in Uncopyable Values, and this is a really important concept to understand.

Basic idea?  In the past some things were "free" because you bought another item (think razor blades).  Today the shift is to another kind of free.  Think email storage, youtube, the New York Times online, etc.

So if things truly "want to be free" how does anyone charge for anything?  There are things that become more valuable, like reputation and attention, and those things aren’t free.  You can read more about this in Uncopyable Values.

Anderson’s article on free is an interesting concept, packed with ideas that are important for all of us.  I particularly found these two paragraphs helpful:

Money
is not the only scarcity in the world. Chief among the others are your
time and respect, two factors that we’ve always known about but have
only recently been able to measure properly. The "attention economy"
and "reputation economy" are too fuzzy to merit an academic department,
but there’s something real at the heart of both. Thanks to Google, we
now have a handy way to convert from reputation (PageRank) to attention
(traffic) to money (ads). Anything you can consistently convert to cash
is a form of currency itself, and Google plays the role of central
banker for these new economies.

There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention
in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and
the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for
the sake of a business model to be identified later. Free shifts the
economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars
and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.

I don’t understand it all…but I know it applies to what all of us do.  In a way it has to do with the reallocation of what matters, "a realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today."

You can read the whole article right here.

Think you know what it takes to end up with really engaged employees?   Very similar to the understandings of Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, the research that forms the basis for Human Sigma has revealed that if you want engaged employees you must go beyond being clear about what they "get."  In fact, helping each employee see what they have to "give" is the next step…but only the next step.

Can you see how clarity on this concept might form the basis of a really great employee engagement program?

What do you think comes first?  Employee engagement or higher performance?  Are the members of your high performing teams engaged because that’s the team they’re on?  Or is their performance better because they’re highly engaged in the company’s mission or purpose?

This is a critical question for many of us.  Could it make a difference for your organization?   In a study of 2,178 companies it was found that "engagement predicts performance in key areas—including customer engagement, employee retention, sales, and profit—better than performance predicts engagement (p. 155)."  So the questions might be, "How engaged are your employees?"  or "What causes employee engagement?"

I’m finding Human Sigma: Managing the Employee-Customer Encounter to be very helpful on this front and it’s particularly good in combination with Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow.

I had a chance to check out Michael Port’s upcoming book on the flight to Chicago.  Beyond Booked Solid: Your Business, Your Life, Your Way is going to be very helpful in taking some next steps in my consulting practice.  Very helpful.  Wider margins in the advance copy meant more room to jot down ideas…and it’s pretty marked up after the first pass.

This is the kind of book that you need to read through once to get a feel for the whole concept and then again, slowly, to implement the ideas.  And it is packed with ideas and insights into how to work "on" your business.  If you’re familiar with the difference between working "in" and working "on" your business (Michael Gerber’s The E Myth) you’ll start writing in the margins right away.  This is all about building a sustainable, scalable business.

I know I’ll be writing more about it as I work my way back through.  For now, lets just say if you’re interested in building a service business you’re going to want to pick up a copy.  In addition, I can also say that all of us who are working "on" the systems of organizations…this book has great application.  You can pre-order your copy Right Here.

Branding.  Got it down?  Know what you’re talking about?  Maybe you’ve worked through a branding process with your organization.  Maybe you know you need to but haven’t gotten around to it.  Branding’s big.

But is it always going to stay big the way it is right now?

Read an interesting article by Umair Haque over at Harvard Business Online: The Shrinking Advantage of Brands.  Basic idea?  Back in the day, when print, radio and television were the only way to market your product, branding as we know it made sense.  You had to condense your message in order to get it across.  If you wanted "front of mind" you had to use things like logos and slogans that could be communicated in the mediums that were available and that’s not cheap.  Companies like Coke and P&G invest 10 to 15% of revenues into marketing. 

What’s happening now?  Those forms are still with us, but cheap interaction is changing the game.  The number one brand, according to Millward Brown’s Brandz report is Google.  And Google invests nothing in advertising.  What’s going on?  According to Haque "cheap interaction" (between customers) is causing the value of brands to decay.  "The cheaper interaction gets, the more connected consumers can talk to
each other – and the less time they have to spend listening to the
often empty promises of firms."

This is an interesting idea.  Has a lot to say about what all of us do.  Take a look at the article and let me know what you think.

What does it say when people Bring Their Own Desk Chair? How’s it work on the plane?

Think a satisfied customer is all you need?  Not hardly.  According to a multitude of studies customer satisfaction "is the cost of entry.  It will not differentiate the good from the great (Human Sigma, p. 137)."  But the question is, "What’s happening in your organization?"  Are you set up to generate "beyond satisfaction results"?

The reality for many of us?  We’re too busy getting through our normal routine to worry about anything beyond satisfaction.  Delighting the customer?  Not happening.  So what happens if you are simply focused on satisfying your customer?  According to Fleming and Asplund, "Focusing on creating satisfied customers is a one-way ticket to mediocrity (p. 137)."

Interesting?  How about scary.  The question we might all need to be asking is, "What am I doing to move beyond satisfaction?"

Here’s the kicker:  The same findings are true of employees.  Call them what you will (employees, associates, team members, etc.) simply giving them a satisfactory experience is not enough.  Helping them move into the next category is the goal.

So…what are you doing in your organization to move beyond satisfaction?

So here’s the question: If people have a tough time following your instructions, if you’re not connecting with your customers, if things just aren’t turning out like they used to, whose responsibility is it? 

No one says it better than Seth Godin.

I love this paragraph in today’s post:

What’s helpful is to realize that you have a choice when you
communicate. You can design your products to be easy to use. You can
write so your audience hears you. You can present in a place and in a
way that guarantees that the people you want to listen will hear you.
Most of all, you get to choose who will understand (and who won’t).

Oh my.  To actually choose who will understand.  What a thought.  I can think of some places that are choosing, not happy about the outcome, but unwilling to change…for fear of losing their existing customers.  Even though existing customers aren’t who they long to connect with.  And still they do nothing.  Wonder if this was the slowwww reaction to the ice age?

It must be uncool to smile if you’re from France. Havin’ a good time at California Adventure looks like this.

Catching up on my reading this a.m. I came across Bill Taylor’s first Video blog post for his Game Changers Blog over at Harvard Business Online.  A very good start.  If you’re not aware of Taylor, he was a co-author of what for me was the very best book of 2006, Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win.  By the way, if you haven’t read it, you really need to pick up a copy.  Be sure and have a pen though…because that book really is packed with great ideas and concepts that will connect immediately with what you do.

The video post is a good taste of the kind of writing Taylor does.  Insightful.  Very applicable to what all of us are grappling with.  Check it out.