At the height of the Industrial Age we didn’t have to do the right things, we just needed to do things. Commercial success resulted for many who were able to organize a business and produce goods.
As the Industrial Age gave way in the 1960’s to the Information Age competition started increasing. It was no longer good enough to do things, we had to do things right. This was the genesis of the management approaches (Industrial Engineering, TQM, Porter’s Value Chain, Management by Objective, Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard, Lean, etc.) in wide practice today.
However you won’t find these approaches at the heart of most successful companies in the 21st Century because we’ve now moved past these inside-out management techniques.
We are now in a Customer-Driven Economy and the only way to excel here is through outside-in techniques that lead with the customer. Succeeding in the Customer-Driven Economy comes from doing the right things, and those right things are in fact Successful Customer Outcomes.
“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
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 theNasscom 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
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
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
We are all aware of the seismic shifts underway. The decline of the west and the (re)emergence of India and China. People in the west are fond of the idea that the Chindia is emerging, however before the industrial revolution the East was the major economic force on the planet. It is a re-emergence then, and where is it going?
Back in 2010 when I was writing the book, Outside In (click here) we determined a couple of fundamentals as leaders of the Customer Process One Council:
Outside-In is a philosophy and method of managing an organization by understanding and delivering Successful Customer Outcomes.
Outside-In Process optimizes value-delivery to customers. By fusing customer-driven process with customer-centric strategies, O-I creates successful customer outcomes (SCOs) – the foundation for achieving sustainable growth and profitability in an increasingly buyer-driven marketplace.
Of course everything evolves 🙂
We have the annual updater webinar soon (click here) and this year there are more than 50 specific advances to the techniques and tools, derived from organizations across all sectors. The webinar is interactive and limited in attendance so if you wish to join move swiftly.
You may wish to remind yourself of some of the fundamentals that underpin Outside In thinking and practice. If so review these 2-5 minute vids:
PS. Prefer in class attendance either open or inhouse? Review http://www.bpmrus.com There are eight levels including Certified Process Practitioner, Professional, Master, Advanced Master & Champion.
According to MIT innovation expert and thought leader Michael Schrage, if you aren’t asking this question, your strategic marketing and innovation efforts will fail.
In this latest HBR Single, Schrage provides a powerful new lens for getting more value out of innovation investment. He argues that asking customers to do something different doesn’t go far enough—serious marketers and innovators must ask them to become something different instead. Even more, you must invest in their capabilities and competencies to help them become better customers.
Schrage’s primary insight is that innovation is an investment in your client, not just a transaction with them. To truly innovate today, designing new products or features or services won’t get you there. Only by designing new customers—thinking of their future state, being the conduit to their evolution—will you transform your business.
Schrage explains how the above question (what he calls “The Ask”) will incite you and your team to imagine and design ideal customer outcomes as the way to drive your business’s future. The Single is organized around six key insights and includes practical exercises to help you apply the question to your current situation. Schrage also includes examples from well-known companies—Google, Facebook, Disney, Starbucks, Apple, IKEA, Dyson, Ryanair, and others—to illustrate just what is possible when you apply “The Ask.”
Marketing executives, brand managers, strategic innovators, and entrepreneurs alike should understand how successful innovation rebrands the client and not the product. A requisite question for its time, Who Do You Want Your Customers To Become will liberate you and your team from ‘innovation myopia’—and turn your innovation efforts on their head.
He argues that asking customers to do something different doesn’t go far enough—serious marketers and innovators must ask them to become something different instead. Even more, you must invest in their capabilities and competencies to help them become better customers.
As we say here at BPM Towers – If you can figure what the right thing to do is you will innovate to do it!
A good read for gaining even more Customer Insight.
Horatio Nelson is one of the greatest heros in British history, an honor he earned by defeating Napoleon’s fleet in the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar. His victory at sea over the French fleet ultimately proved to be the start of the end of the Napoleon era, which finished with another famous battle at Waterloo in 1815.
So what has Lord Nelson got to do with SCO’s? To answer that question we need to understand how an out gunned, out manned and apparently demoralized British fleet could turn the tide of war.
Battles at sea had until Nelsons leadership been conducted by Admirals and Commanders often ashore dispensing orders as if playing a game of chess. Move from here to there and engage that ship. The signals from the command were conveyed by flag wavers, strategically placed across the battle front to provide a visual instruction to ships captains. Sea battles tended to be well planned and predictable affairs with naturally the fleet with greater resources usually victorious. And so it seemed would be the case as the two largest sea going battle fleets in the world approached a pivotal conflict.
Nelson who was more than familiar with hardship both physical from earlier war wounds (blind in one eye with a crippled arm) and the burdensome politics of the Admiralty brought his captains together to review the battle plans…. Clearly understanding the dilemma he articulated an approach “sink the French fleet at all costs” which in retrospect seems a statement of the blindingly obvious, however tactics and strategy was the domain of the Admirals, not the captains who simply acted out orders provided by flag wavers. Asking the captains what would that involve brought forward the idea of individual ships acting ‘in the moment’ to take advantage of the slower moving, albeit more powerful French ships. If the British ships could ‘get alongside’, rather than waiting for extended orders there was a chance for victory.
And so it was that the flag wavers remained ashore and the captains, seeking to align everything they did to achieve the successful outcome “sink the French fleet” acted in unison and yet with discretion to strike boldly. The rules of the game where changed forever when the British fleet attacked the French in the dead of night. The incredulous French were taken unawares as sea battles traditionally stopped for the night because no one could see the flags….
We can encapsulate Nelsons commitment as just before the battle of Trafalgar Nelson sent a famous signal to his fleet: “England expects every man will do his duty and sink the French fleet“… Nelson’s own last words were “Thank God I have done my duty”… Because of the distance from Trafalgar to England, Nelson’s body was placed in a cask of brandy to preserve it for the trip. So there we have it. A clear articulation of the successful outcome (think outside of the box). An understanding and actioned desire to make that happen through the technology, people and processes.
It literally changes the rules of the game – forever.
So how much flag waving goes on in your organization? Have you truly articulated the SCO and is everyone and everything aligned to achieving it?
About the Author
Steve Towers, Co-founder and Chair of BP Group (www.bpgroup.org), is an expert on process and performance transformation. Steve founded the first community focused on business process management in 1992.
