General

AVIS – still the best

December 15, 2010By Mike Hohnen

Fair has got to be fair – a while back I posted a rant about looking after you core customers on this blog.
I have deleted it now. It is the least I can do. Because they other day I did something really stupid – it was so stupid that the result was that my AVIS car no longer functioned. I was 250k’s from home and had a heavy schedule ahead of me. I called AVIS and told them the story. The sweet lady on the phone told me not to worry, to leave the key with the car – get on with my meeting and she would have a new car with me within the next 2 hours.

WOW – I was so relived and so impressed – Thank you guys you saved my day you really did!

Big Shift – and how it will affect leadership

April 21, 2016By Mike Hohnen

If you have not yet stumbled across the book The power of Pull – make sure to make a note to get you hands on a copy and READ it.

If you don’t believe me take a look at the article here in Forbes:

Today You Can Only Be A Leader By Creating Leaders

A few quotes :

Rather than using persuasion to get others to follow predefined programs, the new generation of leaders will use persuasion to help people more effectively draw out their own individual potential. The really effective leader will be one who can persuade emerging leaders to join forces toward common goals and develop faster than they could on their own

Leaders will no longer be defined by the number of followers they have, but rather by the number of other leaders they have cultivated and mobilized across institutional boundaries. That is a profound shift

The authors also have a blog at HBR where they have chunked the key points of the book into digestible size – read one entry before breakfast for a week and you will see things differently …

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The impact of the service-profit chain

December 15, 2010By Mike Hohnen

Going through my notes in search of something else I found this. Short sweet and to the point it is the clearest resume of what we try to help companies create every day.

The impact of the service-profit chain
By Rebecca Hyde

Want to increase your profit and market share? Well, the first thing you need to do is forget about both – that’s according to The Harvard Business Review. A recent report from this eminent business school advises that in a service economy, customers and frontline workers should be your first priority.

No one disputes that profit margin and market share are crucial to the survival of your business, especially in the current climate, but the Harvard boys have got a point. To excel in a service industry your customers’ satisfaction must be your number one concern, hotly pursued by the happiness of your frontline workers. Sounds a bit too New Age for you? Then consider for a moment the lifetime value of a customer – add the value of repeat purchases of related products and referrals and now you’re getting the picture!

Few can dispute that happy staff are more productive, a fact which is fundamental when it comes to sales staff – who wants to deal with a surly customer services rep? Harvard’s research has directly linked employee satisfaction with customer satisfaction (OK, so it’s not rocket science…) and suddenly you can see the impact of the Service Profit Chain.

Customer loyalty, which only comes from “very satisfied” customers as opposed to merely “satisfied” customers, can do wonderful things to your bottom line. A 5% increase in customer loyalty can boost your profits by 25%-85! So how do you ensure that your customers remain very satisfied? By adding value, the cost of which will be more than covered by the increased profits they will produce. Adding value can be as simple as offering a watertight guarantee on your services or a simple after sales follow up call.

Employee loyalty drives productivity which drives value which drives your profit through the roof! Remember that by ensuring that your staff is nurtured and content you will not only gain an increase in immediate productivity, you are also less likely to lose staff. It’s common knowledge how much it costs to recruit staff but when you factor in the cost of lost revenue while you recruit and while your new employee begins his learning curve – you can see that investing time and energy in your staff is a profitable exercise!

Service workers are happiest when they are empowered to make their customers happy. This adds value to their job leaving both the employee and the customer satisfied which, as we know, will keep the CEO satisfied with his bottom line. By adding this responsibility to their role, frontline staff discover added depth to their work, keeping them interested in the challenge of their job longer.

The Mountain Coach

September 19, 2010By Mike Hohnen

We have spent a week in the Parc du Mercantour with a group of managers from diverse industries. We call it a Time-Out.

The concept is simple:

We all live busy hectic lives at full speed – but when do we get a chance to call a Time Out and reflect on what we are doing or even just think about if we are heading in the right direction.

The format is simple: Questions, dialog and reflection in nature. Healthy food, tons of fresh air and a bunch of delightful people.

Did I mention our coach?

In my mind a coach is someone who helps you reach your own conclusions – someone who will help you to gain those elusive insights on your self.

Well, this mountain is an expert coach – i promise you.

… and the lunch breaks were not to bad either ;-)

” Act alway as if the future of the Universe depended on what you did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that what ever you do makes any difference”

Purpose goes mainstream…

April 14, 2022By Mike Hohnen

There is a certain interesting buzz in the air.

Maybe it is more than a buzz – maybe it is a fundamental shift..

It started out some years back as just a murmur or a slight rumbling from the initiated. But lately is has slowly risen in volume and my prediction is that before too long it will have gathered further momentum to become an unavoidable roar.

The shift is the call for ‘Purpose’

In a world with limited natural resources, huge inequality, and financial scandals galore, it is no longer comme il faut to do stuff just for money. That applies not just to companies that produce goods and services but is increasingly demanded by individuals as well – a job is no longer just for the money.

A new generation is emerging (see the generation M manifesto). They demand that we do stuff for a reason and it better be a good one – and just in case you are in doubt money is an outcome not a purpose.

The first time this was brought to my attention was 4 years a go sitting on a tree stump in the Rocky Mountains with my friend Lothar Friis. We were having a profound talk about life, business, gigs and all that. And Lothar said “you know in the end it all boils down to one thing: Purpose. If you have a clear purpose you will almost always bee successful in what you do.” That chat stayed with me rumbling around in my subconscious and I started becoming more aware of purpose as a concept.

The next time I noticed purpose was reading Fred Kofmans book Conscious Business.

A conscious business seeks to promote the intelligent pursuit of happiness in all its stakeholders. It produces sustainable, exceptional performance through the solidarity of its community and the dignity of each member.

In the book he says: “People do not consider Business an area to demonstrate their values .. Why not?”. Kofman asks you to think about a person you admire. Why do you admire that person? List the traits on a pice of paper (try it now by the way) What are the values on that list – probably words like integrity, honesty, caring, love, selfishness, you go on… Is that how business and work relations are run – probably not in most cases. Why not ?

He has a point why can’t we run our business with the same set of values that we would like to see in our local community. Well, five year ago you would be told that that is not the best way to maximize profits, but now it seem it just may turnout to be the only way to maximize profits – read on.

Then I read Peter Block’s “The answer to how is Yes” This opened my eyes to the need to ask ‘why’ before we ask ‘how’. The penny dropped. When we ask ‘Why’ we are looking at purpose (If you have not read it please do – it is a very important book.)

“We too often ask “How?” which focuses too closely on the practical way of getting something done and is actually a subconscious expression of society’s emphasis on control of people, time, and cost. Instead, our concentration should be focused on “Why?”. In other words, we need to pay attention to what really matters to us personally, from heart-felt commitments in our private lives to the creation of projects in the workplace. To be able to act on what matters, explains Block, we must reclaim specific qualities, such as intimacy and idealism. Then we can tackle purposeful work as if we were social architects seeking engagement and change.” (Amazon.com)

In 2006 Nikos Mourkogiannis published the book ‘Purpose – the starting point of great companies’ – a book that according to himself influenced John Mackey in his thinking and contributed to the creation of a new ‘movement’ called Conscious Capitalism that now holds thoughtful, exclusive by-invitation-only gatherings (Introduction to Conscious Capitalism).

FOLLOW YOUR HEART – John Mackey

In 2007 the book Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose is published – a book that was later adopted as the foundation for The Conscious Capitalism Institute (CCI)

“Conscious Capitalism is defined to have three elements; that companies should have a purpose transcending profit maximization, are managed for the benefit of all stakeholders and led by evolved, conscious servant leaders.”

By and by purpose has come out of the shadows of idealism and is going mainstream – obviously the financial meltdown of 2007/2008 has help this thinking a lot and contributed to more people have asking the crucial question: Why do we do what we do?

At TED 2010 Simon Sinek presented his ‘Golden Circle’ and showed that the way to the consumers heart starts with ‘why’ and not ‘how’.- Not as new a concept as he would like us to think but he deliveries the message in a very elegant and convincing way. Sinek has also written a great book on this called ‘Start With WHY’ that I can highly recommend.

SIMON SINEK

Then this spring Umair Haque made the case on his Harvard Business Review blog that doing good is not just good per see – it is just better business. The better Business Manifesto and Why Betterness Is Good Business

Clayton M. Christensen, the Author of The Innovators Dilemma, (also on a HBR blog) then shows us all how important purpose is on a personal level. How Will You Measure Your Life?

“Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success”

And finally this summer Dave Ulrich – not exactly a tree hugger – is out with a new book: The why of Work. Arguing in essence that if your employees don’t understand what you greater purpose is and how they can contribute to that they will be less motivated.

This morning in Fast Company we can read : Alex Bogusky Tells All: He Left the World’s Hottest Agency to Find His Soul

“Alex Bogusky, advertising Dadaist, postmodern media manipulator, pop-culture Houdini, daddy of 21st-century advertising, and now a seeker of meaning on the dirt path of life “ .. “ I guess I just don’t aspire to corporate legacy. I’m convinced that the greatness that matters more is the greatness people achieve through helping each other, through collaborating, more than the greatness that’s achieved by grabbing all you can or getting all you can or building all you can”

If you haven’t heard the cry for purpose – you are not listening – and very soon your customers (and your potential employees) are going to be asking you: “What is your purpose by the way?”. And if you don’t have a compelling answer, they will find someone else who does…

Time out – All set for september 2010

April 14, 2022By Mike Hohnen

We have spent the past 3 days checkking out the location for our next Time Out – Tucked away high up in the mountains above Nice in the beautiful Parc du Mercantour.

You can just spot the hotel in right hand part of the picture. The road winds its way up from the village of Belvedere a distance of about 10 k’s and ends here at the entrance to the Parc. Once you reach this spot there is no longer mobile phone cover and the locals smile overbearingly and shake their heads when we ask for a high speed internet connection. No chance in this part of the world.

We all need to see the world from 2800m from time to time – it gives a different perspective and that is the whole idea behind this project

The surroundings are breathtaking and I am convinced that this setting will give our participants the opportunity to participate in a reflective process while at the same time getting to enjoy a series of physically challenging outdoor activities that we have planned – which is why we call it: Time-Out.

We shall be publishing more details on this event in the weeks to come – if you are very impatient drop me a note and I will tell you what I know at this point in time.

Are we suffering from Institutional sclerosis?

January 22, 2010By Mike Hohnen

Florida:

“It’s almost as if everyone is stuck in the same place. It seems to me that the mental models and frameworks of the Fordist economy, of the mass production economy, are so powerful and so deeply engrained in the way we think, it’s hard to think in other terms.”

Maybe we are managing ourselves to death – our core competency , managing, is becoming our major incompetency.

We need less management and more leadership.

Watch the inspiring interview with Richard Florida

Is Forbes asking the wrong question?

May 21, 2016By Mike Hohnen

FORBES INSIGHTS asks the question:

Can webconferences, videoconferences and other virtual meetings really take the place of face-to-face contact?
With travel budgets slashed in the wake of recessionary belt-tightening, companies are increasingly turning to technology as a substitute for in-person contact. Yet business executives overwhelmingly agree that face-to-face meetings are not just preferable but necessary for building deeper, more profitable bonds with clients and business partners and maintaining productive relationships with co-workers.

Predictably the answer to their own survey is that 84% prefer F2F meetings.

But is that the right question to ask if you are trying to understand what is happening in the meeting industry?

Not in my mind it isn’t!

This is the kind of question Kodak asked photographers 5-8 years back: Do you think that digital photos will replace film based photography? No way they all hollered.
This is the question big newspaper publishers asked thier readers 3-4 years ago: “Can you imagine not having a daily morning news paper in print form” Since then a large number of them no longer exist.
This is the question publishing houses where asked 24 months ago “Will the eReader replace books?” – that was before Amazon sold 2 million Kindel’s in 6 months. Now they are not so sure. More on eReaders here

But the reality is this:

This is borne out in Forbes Insights survey, where 58% of respondents said they were travelling for business less today than they were at the beginning of the recession in January 2008, with more than a third (34%) indicating they were travelling much less frequently.

This is my point, it may not be what they prefer – but this is what they do – not because it is better but because it is cheaper, and more convenient.

Surevy: would you prefer to fly Business or Turist?… No brainer right?
But why is tourist class then jam packed and Business reduced to 2 rows that are half empty on many European flights? It is not what we would prefer. It is what we do.

The big danger is that we in the industry stick our heads in the sand as a result of surveys like this – pat each other on the back and knowingly nod to each other: “f2f meeting are better – we know that – they know that. All will return to normal soon, you just wait and see….”

I don’t think so

That is what KODAK thought

The question we should be asking is : Is the market broken? – see this by Seth Godin: “What every mass marketer needs to learn from Groucho Marx”

Read the Forbes Insight survey here

What do you think?