Stephen Lukac over at the McGill International Executive Institute in Montreal has spotted a new way consumers can compare and search for what they want. It claims to be the world’s first visual search engine.
Very clever, if a bit clunky for now. Are you watching, Google? www.like.com
Communities of Practice (COPs) bring together people with knowledge and experience in a given subject. COPs tend to emerge and grow organically. Tendrils form between people; like seeks out like, and a network forms. COPs are self-organized and self-managed.
By contrast, when organizations try to bring together a concentration of knowledge and expertise they create Centres of Excellence (COEs). These are resourced by management, which sets goals and channels the thinking of its members. COEs tend to be exclusive. COPs are inclusive. Guess which work best as catalysts for innovative ideas and for accelerating learning.
Karl Moore, Professor of Management at McGill University, is exploring a third organizational form that leaders may find more useful than Centres of Excellence; a form that embraces the feeling that the best ideas emerge from the kind of voluntary sharing that is a feature of a Community of Practice, and cannot be as effectively mandated from on high, as with Centres of Excellence.
Moore’s new idea is Accelerated Communities of Practice (ACOPS, inevitably), which are a synthesis of COPs and COEs. (Still with me?)
“ACOPs combine aspects of COPs and COEs and operate as a middle stage between the two,” claims Moore, who is working on helping global organizations identify which COPs have the potential to morph into COEs and then on how to make it happen. He feels ACOPs may be the halfway stage that will lead eventually to Centres of Excellence that have grown organically out of COPs – emerged, in other words, with a little massaging – rather than created top-down.
Since emergent change benefits from a groundswell of power whereas top-down change mostly fails, I look forward to seeing how Moore’s experiments work out.
Source: Peter Fisk, who is great at spotting emergent ideas, has, on his Marketing Genius website, an article by Stuart Crainer from Business and Strategy Review, looking at what business thought leaders are working on at the moment. It’s about a year old now but, hey, a lot of it is news to me.
I heard this, recently, from Robert Putnam (via the radio, you understand, not in person). Putnam is the author of Bowling Alone, which focuses on the fragmentation of social capital. He uses the poignant image of how people often bowl alone in American bowling alleys where they would once bowl in a group. The book’s been around for a while.
Anyway, this is the bit that’s new to me. Apparently he said this:
“If you are a member of no groups and join one, you cut the risk of dying over the next year by 50%.”
I haven’t had the chance to source the research and check the quote (I guess I should buy the book), but it’s startling. Looks like my favourite quote, E. M. Forster’s ‘Only connect’ – that the point of the human condition is to connect positively with others – is even more powerful than I thought it was. It can be the difference between life and death.
Kris Murrin of the creativity consultancy ?WhatIf! tells a great story about how one of Disney’s imagineers brought to life a customer experience he was trying to create, but that the Disney board consistently refused to fund.
The imagineer had twice presented to the board a thick, bound proposal for a new park that featured live animals. Twice the proposal was thrown out on the grounds that “people don’t want to see live animals. Where’s the ‘wow’ in that?”
The third time, the imagineer didn’t bring a thick proposal into the boardroom with him. He brought in, on the end of a chain, a six-foot Bengal tiger. “Now do you get it?” he asked. They got it. Disney’s Animal Kingdom was the result.
I traced this story back, and it turns out it was Michael Eisner himself who was on the receiving end of the tiger. The imagineer was Joe Rohde, a senior creative executive at Disney, and an explorer who sports a handlebar moustache and an elongated ear lobe, stretched by a string of shells and bones collected from his visits to tribal villages in Africa, Thailand and Nepal.
“He once brought a tiger on a leash into a meeting with Disney CEO Michael Eisner to illustrate the allure of live animals. Stunned, and no doubt impressed, Eisner gave Rohde the go-ahead for Animal Kingdom, Walt Disney World’s fourth theme park”, it says in the Disney on-line talk forum on these pages. It’s fascinating reading.
This story also evidences epiphanies and how direct experience and emotion generate them. I’ll blog a bit more on epiphanies later, as they seem vital in the change process. Have been musing on epiphanies and the part they play in change since Johnnie Moore led me to a paper on leadership and change.
I’m looking forward to Eisner himself coming to talk at the European Customer Management World event in London next May that I’m involved with. He’s widely-demonized by Walt-lovers among the Disney-rati and clearly wasn’t a lot of fun to work for. But I think he has more in common with Walt in his laser-like focus on the pre-eminence of ideas than his detractors give him credit for.
This is a tip from Ron Kaufman’s brilliant Up Your Service newsletter, which you can subscribe to at www.ronkaufman.com
Ron writes:
“The manager who tells the team “Get out there and serve!” while he stays comfortably in back is not a service leader at all. The real service leader gets out on the frontline to help whenever she can, especially when times are busy, customers are angry or staff are overloaded.
At a leading hotel in London, the General Manager spends one day every three months dressed in a bellman’s uniform and doing the bellman’s job. Here’s what happens:
1. The General Manager meets customers in a completely different way.
He asks real questions, and gets honest answers. The bellman hears a lot of unvarnished feedback that guests may be reluctant to share with the General Manager.2. The General Manager gets a first hand taste…
of what it’s like to work on the frontline. He wears the uniform, stands by the door, carries the bags, and eats in the staff cafeteria. This first hand experience means small things that might irritate staff get noticed quickly, and fixed quickly.3. Most of all, the hundreds of other staff working in the hotel
…see their General Manager doing frontline work with dignity and respect for the customers, and their colleagues. This respect is returned with a shared dedication to providing superior service.”
SOURCE: Ron Kaufman, a customer service consultant and teacher based in Singapore whom I have a lot of respect for
This may be old news to you. In which case excuse my slowness in catching up…
I like the way the new thinking on the neuroscience of leadership (or, more accurately, some old thinking, updated with a sprinkling of interesting new brainwave evidence thanks to MRI scanners) confirms that leading by asking questions is more effective than leading by telling.
Finding solutions through using questions to direct our attention goes all the way back to Socrates. David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz’s highly-readable article in the summer for Business + Intelligence magazine has been followed up by a very good webinar on the neuroscience of leadership. (It’s about 30 minutes of them plus 30 minutes of good questions – appropriately enough).
Thanks to Mark Goulston for pointing me at the webinar.
A while ago I posted The New Golden Rule. The classic Golden Rule is ‘do as you would be done by’ or, in the Christian tradition ‘do unto others…’. Every major religion has an equivalent at its heart, saying treat others as you want to be treated yourself.
But it needs updating. You need to treat customers as THEY want to be treated, not as you would like. There are universal basics about how people should treat each other, yes, of course. But beyond the basics of politeness, attentiveness, friendliness, efficiency, etc…You need to discern what the customer wants and how they want it.
Chris Daffy has come to the same conclusion (which is reassuring, as I respect Chris’s view and get a bit worried if I am out on a limb and don’t notice anyone else independently saying the same thing). Chris gives one or two nice examples in his latest email newsletter, which I’d recommend. Chris concludes:
“…great service is not the service you would like, it’s the service the customer would like.
Tips #1 and #2 on this, from the great Horst Schulze, founder of the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain, are below this post. Here’s the third tip based on his practice:
“So, after hiring and orientation you have training. Here’s something powerful and simple that we do:
“The best room service waiters write the training manual for the new room service waiters.”
Source: My shorthand notes from a talk given by Horst Schulze at a conference I helped organize in London
This tip is a sample from a book series I am putting together calledOne A Day
365 Practical Ways to
Get Closer
to Your Customers
I like Tim Sanders. He has some great things to say on leadership and has revived the old ‘abundance mentality beats scarcity mentality’ argument and is convincing when he says this is the new zeitgeist we all operate in now.
So, why do I not quite buy into it whenever he does this Mother Theresa impersonation (see below)? Is it because he looks and sounds just like the villain Gary Oldman plays in the movie The Fifth Element? Or that he seems to be ripping off the line that Bill Hicks often used to end his sets with? I don’t know. I’m just not convinced by his facial language and body language that he’s completely comfortable with what he’s saying. Or maybe he’s just not convinced that the audience will buy into it. In which case he’s being brave.
Tip #1 on this, from the great Horst Schulze, founder of the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain, is below this post. Here’s his second tip for after you’ve hired:
“Orientate them to WHO WE ARE so they can become part of the company, not just work for the company. This applies to everyone, even, say, dishwashers. I have only ever fired three General Managers. One of them was a man who said to me ‘You want to give a dishwasher a process?’ How arrogant of him!
“At every new hotel, I gave the orientation myself. I have done it at 45 hotels so far.
“From the busboy to the housekeepers to the room service chefs, I line up the new hires and say to them:
” ‘Who’s more important to this hotel, you or me? It’s you! If I don’t go to work on Monday morning, nobody knows. Nobody cares. If you don’t, the food doesn’t get served, the beds don’t get made. You are far more important than me!’
Source: My shorthand notes from a talk given by Horst Schulze at a conference I helped organize in London
This tip is a sample from a book series I am putting together called
One A Day
365 Practical Ways to
Get Closer
to Your Customers
LinkedIn