Managers - Don’t Answer That Question
June 24th, 2008The miraculous practice of not answering subordinates’ questions. A counter-intuitive strategy for high performance, yours and theirs.
Seize Your Time: the breakthrough first step in time management
June 5th, 2008A breakthrough first step in time management and becoming an effective manager.
Podcast
Customer Engagement in Product/Service Development - new hints from Nokia
June 4th, 2008It is widely accepted that the more closely tied, integrated even, customers are in your development process for new products and services, the more likely success will follow. An April 13, 2008 article in the New York Times Magazine, “Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty - why a corporate ‘user anthropologist’ is spending so much of his time in the shantytowns of the world” (by Sara Corbett) sets a new standard. Nokia has Jan Chipchase wandering about the world seeking out what the next three billion cell phone users desire.
The first billion cellphones sold in 20 years; the second billion in four years; and the third billion in two. 80% of the worlds population live within range of a cellular network. The uses cell phones are already being put to in the underdeveloped world are quite unlike those in the developed countries. The only way to understand these and to begin to elicit input from new users is to go out and ask them, face-to-face. So, Nokia has full time personnel, on the ground, sending reports back to headquarters and trying out mockups of potential new products with real people.
It would serve everyone who is envisioning a new product or service to ask themselves:
- “Have I actually asked real customers what they want or need?”
- “Have I tested my ideas and received direct feedback that my product actually delivers a value someone wants to pay for?”
- and so on.
Don’t let your engineers, marketers, sales people, or worse, you own enthusiasms, substitute for live human feedback.
Book Review: Outside Innovation by Patricia Seybold
May 5th, 2008
The transformation of “customer driven”, “customer-centered”, “customer-defined” from just empty buzzwords in the latest management books to central values, key strategic skills is continuing.
Patricia Seybold’s 2006 book Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future (Harper Collins, New York 2006) provides a broad review of many techniques used by a wide range of companies to incorporate customers and customer ideas into product design. The book is sufficiently current to include examples for web-centered customer environments. Ms. Seybold has gathered a large number of examples in varying market segments. This makes the book a worthwhile read just for these through examples. Unfortunately, the formalization of the ideas remains low. This makes this book look and feel like a collection of anecdotes. The book closes with “Five Steps to Outside Innovation”, “Five Core Competencies to Master”, and “Five Pitfalls to Avoid”. Unfortunately Ms. Seybold never really develops her copywrited, “Customer Scenario” to organize the methods and approaches to get beyond the notion that customer inputs to innovation are a series of “I want….” statements.
Getting the Right Things Done - the manager’s focus
April 24th, 2008Peter Drucker wrote a charming little book in 1967, The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting Things Done. I have now read it numerous times and each revisit rewards me.
Just this morning I was speaking with a manager about efforts to refocus a business on new services and the difficulty of dragging along the old, tried-and-true services that still have a customer base and generate revenues. Drucker had quite a bit to say about this problem of the past. In the chapter titled, First Things First, he wrote, “Systematic sloughing off of the old is the one and only way to force the new.” And, “Yesterday’s successes ….. always linger on long beyond the productive life.”
Drucker wrote in the same chapter, “It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve the problem — which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.” This seems like quite a provocation to most managers. After all, managers and management are all about problem solving. Or so we seem all to think. But, from Drucker’s perspective, problems are always about the past. This is very clear from his notion that solving problems only reestablishes the status of the past, some sort of guarantee that we can reproduce the results of the past. Whereas, opportunities are about the future. The future is where customers in the real world are, not in the past. Drucker sees the world as continually evolving and requiring new solutions to new problems, always defined by customers.
So, then, back to where I started. One of the hardest things for any manager to do is to look away from the products and services of the past. These may very well still be producing revenues and profits, though analysis and planning are telling them that future customers and revenues must come from elsewhere.