Who is your Guide and Mentor?

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton,

We should all have mentors. People who have taught us the fundamental values of life, its meaning and its ways. Of course many of us will look directly to our parents and siblings for they give us the very structure and meaning to our early learning. Beyond that we all come into contact, sometimes without knowing, of great minds and inspirational folks.

Steve Andreas and Steve Towers, Colorado 2005

I have been privileged in my life to meet and spend time with truly extraordinary (and to me mind blowing people) in many walks of life, personal, business, family and trusted friends. 

Today I want to link you with and share the thoughts of someone who I read, watched and subsequently met. An unsung hero to many he inspires us daily and I would say he his responsible for many of my thoughts and teachings on Successful Customer Outcomes and Outside In. 

If you are looking for that extra insight, that thing that can move your soul I can heartily recommend Steve’s work. You will find personal and spiritual guidance that hopefully, like me, provides you with a constant source of ah-ah moments and helps you with others. Enjoy.

This is lifted directly from Steve’s blog – you can link to the full article here and after the introduction.

Oh, and PS. – for client read also organization!

Client Intervention Planning Exercise

Many approaches to therapy are purely, or mostly, reactive. The classic example is Freud’s analytic method of sitting behind the couch out of sight of the client, quietly listening, and only occasionally making interpretations about what the client says. Carl Rogers listened and reflected back the words and feelings that clients expressed, in what was called “non-directive listening,” or “active listening.” In many other current approaches, the therapist allows the client to talk freely, and responds to what they say. These approaches usually result in a wandering dialogue that may have little relevance to the client’s outcome — what Fritz Perls often called “free dissociation.”

However, master therapists such as Milton Erickson, Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir were very, very active in interrupting the client’s problem trance state. And they used injunctive language — “Do this,” “Try this” — to elicit alternate states and understandings that were more useful. Erickson used overt hypnosis to create alternate realities, while Satir used her personal expressiveness and role-plays to achieve similar effects without overt hypnosis — and she didn’t like hypnosis. However, an instruction such as, “Get down on your knees to show that you are little,” was a pretty explicit instruction for age regression, a classic hypnotic method. Perls used the “empty chair” to embody troublesome people and events from the client’s past, evoking not only age regression, but what is supposedly one of the most difficult of hypnotic phenomena, positive hallucination, simply by saying, “Put your mother in the chair; what would she say?”

These therapists also deliberately planned the sequence of what they expected to do in a session to reach the client’s outcome, while at the same time respecting, utilizing, and responding to whatever the client did in the session.

In this article I want to present a description of what a client presented to a therapist, ask you to pause to consider what you might do, and make a “treatment plan” outline of what you would do with him.
In a recent article in the Psychotherapy Networker magazine, “Living with the Devil You Know,” (January/February 2013)                                    you can link to the full article here

 

Advanced BPM and Customer Centricity (india and the rest of the world)

Just published from a recent interview in India:

Steve Towers is a business process and customer satisfaction expert and the author of “Outside In – The Secret of the 21st Century Leading Companies”. 

In India, he advises the Tata group, Wipro and other BPOs on ways to organise their processes and people better to deliver customer outcomes successfully. Towers, a speaker at the Nasscom India Leadership Forum , took time off for a conversation with Goutam Das.

Q. Have organizations started to worry more about customer centricity these days? 
A
. It is top of the pile in terms of themes. Customer centricity, however, is not always understood. We tend to talk about it from a technology-centric point of view – we tend to think of information technology and front-end systems. We talk about CRM (customer relationship management) systems and things like that. Organizations need to move beyond what we refer to as ‘inside out’ thinking. One of the reasons to move forward is that customers themselves has changed. They have become promiscuous – they are not as loyal as they used to be. They have also become very rebellious – highly choosy in terms of who they want a product from. This causes them to move very quickly versus the longer-term relationships of the past. All our organizations are collections of customers and their expectations have risen with the availability of technology, which gives them access to a lot more information. Those organizations that understand that have been able to look at customer centricity in a different way. We refer to that way as “outside in”. 

Q. Explain your philosophy of ‘outside in’ and how companies have benefited from this. 
A.
 It means identifying what customer needs are and then working backwards to organise the company accordingly. Those organizations that are struggling – the Kodaks, the Nokias, RIM – they are still looking at the world inside out. Those who have been successful have seen the world outside in. They are aligning their business to deliver against customer needs, which can be created. Emirates Airlines creates that need by talking about the experience that they are going to give you once you arrive at the destination. Disney tells a very good story on the difference between wants and needs. They often say the customer does not know what they want. When you arrive at a Disney park, the first question a customer may ask is: “Where’s the toilet?” 

The second most asked question is “What time is the Three O’clock Parade?” Customers are articulating a need within that question and the answer is in the context of that question. A woman with two small kids is not asking what time the parade is – she already knows the time – what she really needs to know is a place where she can go and stand with the kids, where there is a water fountain, an ice-cream vendor. She wants to be away from the hot sun. She hasn’t articulated that but the organization understands that need. Disney works on the basis of needs, not wants. Similarly, Nokia was very successful 10 years back and went on building devices that customers wanted. Other organizations thought differently. Apple made an observation on how many interactions one needs to pull up a telephone number. In an inside out phone, that will be seven-eight key presses. Everyone of those key presses is a moment of truth. And you have to build functionality to support that moment of truth. More functionality means a more complex system. Apple redesigned the interface and there are three moments of truth instead of seven-eight. It is less expensive to do that and offers a better customer experience. That is a principle Nokia has missed. 

Q. Do Indian companies have an outside in perspective?
A.
 There are two kinds of organizations. One: those who are carrying on building efficiencies and effectiveness and use things like Lean (a methodology of eliminating waste in a company) and Six Sigma to remove waste. Eventually, you get to a point where you optimize processes and can’t go any further. Other organizations say Lean and Six Sigma are fine but we want to challenge if a process actually deserves to exist. In India, there is a clear distinction between those organizations that are getting it and those that don’t. 

Q. How do you measure who is getting it right? 
A.
 It is winning the triple crown, which is simultaneously growing revenues, reducing costs and enhancing service. The triple crown can be directly linked to customer success. Instead of starting with resources a company has, then going to market strategy and then finding customers, you start with customers and their needs and then align everything in the organization to deliver that. In India, IndiGo (Airlines) is a prime example of looking at the world in a different way. Contrast IndiGo with Kingfisher – they talk about the customer being the king but the customer can’t be king at the expense of your business. The reason customer is king is that we can grow shareholder value, can create profits and deliver service. Other examples of companies looking outside in are Tata Motors and the transformation of Jaguar. 

For more information see : http://www.bpgroup.org and http://www.advancedbpm.com
 

Recent Video Resources for BPM Professionals

 
Business Process Management – what is it?
http://youtu.be/NO54KXxTp9I

Moments of Truth – what are they?
http://youtu.be/OT_2cqMtrUw

Breakpoints and Business Rules?
http://youtu.be/_8KSN_McWIg

Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO’s) http://youtu.be/u4keI_kmdxM 

Voice of Customer? http://youtu.be/bTbHrxi1Vq4  


Latest CPP program – Levels 1-8
http://www.bpgroup.org/certification-by-
city.html


Linked In (Over 10,000 members now)  BP Group overall 85,000
Certified Process Professionals 25,000+

Business Process Management – an Overview

Derek Miers (Chair) presents Iain Ramsay of ITSA with the Annual Award
I never cease to be amazed by the self-styled experts in Business Process Management (BPM) who want to tell me what we really meant.

And depending on whether you are a vendor of software, a consultant or just somebody trying to get on with improving processes determines how you describe BPM. Back during the genesis we stated “BPM is a new management philosophy to reorganize the work of a business to better achieve successful outcomes” (BP Groups 3rd Annual Conference, Edinburgh in 1990’s). Some of you will recognize a certain Derek Miers (left, now with Forrester) who chaired that conference.

Needless to say that description of BPM holds true. In fact technology can be regarded just as the 21st C. pen and paper, and while it contributes to BPM it doesn’t of itself create success. As part of the ongoing series of Certified Process Professional program we have created a series of short videos, the one here is Business Process Management – an Overview. Enjoy.

BPGroup Update Number 3 – 2013 Milestone | Conferences | Top Articles | Video Downloads | Annual Webinar Update

BIG milestone this week – passed 10,000 members on LinkedIn.
That plus the other 75,000 non linked in moves us onward towards 100K 🙂 Well done everyone and power to your elbows!

CPP Masters & Champions in London
this week with James Dodkins
http://londonmasters2013.eventbrite.com/

PLUS 18 Certified Process Professional sessions in Pune, Kolkata, Bangalore, Dubai, Moscow, Delhi, Hyderabad, London, Toronto, Vancouver, Brisbane, Lagos, Sydney, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Atlanta in the next 8 weeks http://www.bpmrus.com

with been there and done it Lead Coaches Dr. Samir Asaf, Laxman M, Jennifer van Wyk, James Dodkins, Steve Towers, Alex Nevski and Maxx Kochar

Excellent South Africa IT Web CPP workshop
with Jennifer van Wyk last week – contact Jen for the download http://www.bpgroup.org/jennifer.html

Annual CPP Refresher webinar
with Steve Towers
http://cpprefresh2013.eventbrite.com/

Video overviews
(download and circulate freely) of:
Business Process Management
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO54KXxTp9I

Moments of Truth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT_2cqMtrUw

Successful Customer Outcomes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4keI_kmdxM

Voice of Customerhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTbHrxi1Vq4
BPM Certifcation on Apple and Android

And the top articles on Linked In
From:  Jackie Messersmith, Ryan Lopez, Veronica Araujo, Dr. Mohan K. Bavirisetty, MS, MBA, Ph.D., Reint Jan Holterman, Brad Power and more…..
http://www.linkedin.com/groups/BP-Group-1062077

Have a fantastic month!!
Steve