Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

Training & Development

Wishfull thinking…

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The quote below, is from the 4Hoteliers site – you can read the full post here

In spite of the popularity of new electronic media, we expect the face-to-face meetings industry to continue to grow and to continue to contribute more to the US GDP. We also believe that were the studies available for other parts of the world, we would see similar, if not greater, increases.

It just reminded me of a few other famous quotes in history:

“I think there is a world market for as many as 5 computers.” – Thomas Watson, head of IBM,1943.

“The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty.” – President of Michigan Savings Bank, 1903, advising Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Company.

“Television won’t be able to hold onto any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” – Darryl F Zanuck, 1946.

As we all know there are many more like this.

My point is, yes we would all love to see f2f meetings grow, but the reality is that most of the professionals that I talk too are experiencing exactly the opposite. That be people in the meetting industry or their clients. Big corporations are talking about ‘travel avoidance’ as a way to cut costs. IKEA has an internal slogan ‘Meet more travel less’ – encouraging employees to use the electronic media for instead of traveling.

Personally I have never ever received so many offers of webinars and other online forms of ‘meeting’ that I do at the moment.

Yes we all prefer the quality of a a face to face meeting, the same way we prefer a delicious home cooked meal to industrialized fast food – but if what we prefer was equal to what we do there would be no fast food business…

New survey: Customer Experience Management

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New research shows that organisations can differentiate themselves especially in terms of the emotional element of the experience. Up to 60% of customer loyalty is created by the customer’s emotional experience, according to Professor Lars Grønholt, CBS.

The study’s main conclusions are:

  • Strong relationship between Customer Experience Management ability and financial performance Customer Experience Management generates increased differentiation. High differentiation improves the companies? ability to create high market performance and financial performance.
  • Customer Experience Management contribute to create significant financial performance If Customer Experience Management is improved by 10% differentiation capabilities will increase by 9%, that subsequently will improve financial performance by 5%.
  • ?Top management involvement and implementation of customer focus in all customer touch points are the most important Customer Experience Management dimensions The two dimensions account for more than 40% of the companies? ability to differentiate from competitors and are the starting point for better market performance and financial performance.
  • A balanced emotional and rational customer experience creates better results
    Overall, top performing companies balance rational and emotional elements when creating customer experiences.

You can request the full study from Stig Jorgensen & Partners here

This all fits very well with our own experience working with The Service Profit Chain

Read more about our approach to the Service Profit Chain here

Corporate University for smaller chains…

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In creating its corporate university in 1985, Accor was the first service company in Europe to set up an integrated training center.
Twenty-five years later, Accor Academy locally trains 135,000 students a year through a catalogue of 120 different courses delivered in 16 Academies around the world.

However – you don’t need to be a giant like Accor to have your own corporate University!

If you belong to a smaller chain or association of independent hotels you can partner with us. We deliver custom made service management training at university level. This is what the association of Danish Conference Centers has done with result of now having educated more than 150 managers since 2004

Courses can be designed according to student levels on bachelor or masters level and with or without official accreditation. Also students can get certificates at both levels or go for full degrees. Programmes are accredited by the University of Chester(UK).

All GROW programmes are based on action learning. This means that students stay on their job while studying and have as their main focus to add value to their organisation and work towards solutions to real worklife challenges.

For more information drop me a note.

The value of consistency

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Consistency (or lack of ) is one of my pet rants.

Ask any newly hired hospitality employee what the name of the game is and they will tell you that happy customers is all about exceeding expectations. And it is.

But that also means that if I had this fantastic experience last week in your restaurant (or your: insert your business here ) and I tell my friends at the office about it and we all decide to go for a friday after work dinner – then that experience MUST at least match then one i had on my first visit – if not it is a huge flop and you have lost me for ever.

If I take a client out or book them a hotel or what ever I need to know that this will be not just OK but excellent – And I will pay more to be sure

Seth Godin in his blog asks:

“…how much extra would you pay for a plane that was guaranteed to be always on time, or a surgery that was always guaranteed to work? …. That’s because we’re often willing to pay a significant premium to avoid risk”

And he has a point.

In David Rock’s latest book your Brain at Work ( which i highly recommend ) Rock writes :

.. The one thing that is certain is that people will always pay lots of money to feel less uncertain. That is because uncertainty feels to the brain like a threat to your life..”

Excellent, is useless if is not consistent.

There is a fortune to be made in consistency.

ProAction Cafe – a wonderful tool

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We kicked of Module 3, on our 3 year 6 module Service Management training this week. Seventeen energetic and ready-to -go ‘students’ worked for the days getting to grips with marketing of services and the role of loyalty and satisfaction.

We wrapped up the 3 days with a ProActionCafe – a great new tool that we learned at our Art of Hosting training in Aarhus in August. The cafe combines the best of World Cafe, Open Space Technology and Action Learning.

Four students hosted 4 workshop on developing the focus for their action learning question – the question they will work on for the next 16 weeks and that will form the basis of their final written assignment in December. The Proaction Cafe was hosted by Kathrine Procter who is the Program Manager on this module and works with structured questioning in three rounds. Each round has 3 new expert help the host develop depth, perspective and action items on the chosen question.

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The feed back afterwards was awesome – not only did the 4 hosts declare that for the first time did they have a clear focus on their assignment at a very early stage but the other participants also felt that they had learned a lot about how they could approach their learning question.

An unexpected bonus that we had not thought of was that participants felt that working in the ProAction Cafe format also gave them a great opportunity to recapitulate the learning from the three previous days as they wove these topics into the problem solving discussion at the tables. It does not get much better in my world.

Powerful stuff – that we will develop further.

The shift from teaching to learning

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Learning by discovery and collaboration once again proved its value.
This week we spent time in Oman working with COWI Gulf. Together with their finance department we developed a 2 day training on the ins and outs of running a project from the financial point of view.I.e. are we on track financially, does this tally with our budget and that sort of stuff

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The challenge here is always: how does one make a subject fun and engaging when it is already considered drab and dull before we even get started.

The traditional approach is of course to arm yourself with a large deck of power-points outlining the does and don’t of financial management.

That may be how you teach finance – but that is not necessarily the best way to actually learn finance.

So instead we created a scenario that very much resembles their day to day situation, with the problems and pitfalls of real life and had them work through that in teams of 3 – if they got stuck they could ask questions – but essentially they worked it out between themselves – collaborative learning in full bloom – what a pleasure!

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Next week we shall take it up a notch…

What does this imply for training?

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What does it imply for the way we organise, hold meetings and…

“Conversations are the way workers discover what they know, share it with their colleagues, and in the process create new knowledge for the organization.
In the new economy, conversations are the most important form of work …so much so that the conversation is the organization.”
—Alan Webber, “What’s So New About the New Economy,” Harvard Business Review

Is the meeting industry doomed?

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Kodak did not loose the market for paper film because of Fuji or Agfa. The market for film was replaced by digital cameras. British Airways need not worry to much about Lufthansa or SAS – Ryan Air is a problem and so on.

In these examples what has happened is that competition has come from where it was least expected and in both cases this competition was initially ignored as not significant – “they are not delivering the kind of quality that we do” – and bam! One day we wake up and Ryan Air is a huge airline business and we all have digital cameras in our pockets – even the pro’s

This has happened in industry after industry ever since the buggy whip business was exterminated by automobiles. Why and how this happens is well documented by Clayton Christensen in his wonderful book : The Innovators Dilemma

The same shift in client behavior is now occurring in the meeting and conference industry. The competition is not from other regular players in the market but from a combination of events that together have created a perfect storm. Once the storm is over the market will never be the same again.

The elements that are causing this are:

1. The financial crisis has forced business to be more careful how they spend their money so they question the value of every thing – if it is not adding value why are we doing it? ROI i now a key requirement – see more here

2. CSR – The realization that we need to curb our Co2 emissions and one of the big sinners in this is of course travel. (It is also a convenient excuse to cut travel cost)

3. Time pressure on every one means that we are are all looking for ways to cram more into the same 24h/7d week /360d year frame – there is now mores stuff to do, read, see than we have ever experienced before and that means prioritizing. Asking one self hard questions like: is this worth the effort ( travel, money, another night away from home etc).

4. Web 2.0 the big shift from web 1.0 is the ability to interact – real time two way communication on the web. Virtual classrooms, breakout rooms – web casts etc. There is a whole new industry that is growing rapidly and that sees a huge opportunity to replace the traditional meeting environment with a virtual environments. Brush up on Web 2.0 and learning here

Points one 1-3 are the problems we would all like to see solved and point 4 seems to be a possible solution. Not perfect but it works and is easy ( Just like digital cameras)

“At IKEA Virtual Meetings should always be first choice”

Progressive business are responding fast. IKEA has a campaign running called Meet More Travel Less

Tandberg, TNT and Vodaphone are others also working on this.

TANDBERG – 100 000 video calls per month – 2500 flights avoided, 2,5M$ saved on business trips (30M$per year) – 17500 man-hour saved per month – 275 tons of CO2 saved per month

TNT – On track to save nearly11,5 $ in 4 years by replacing travels with videoconferencing – ROI:71%

VODAFONE – 25% reduction in business trips in 2 years – Resulting in double digit millions of cost savings

The response from the meeting industry is ahh.. no need to worry, virtual meetings will never be as good as f2f meetings.

Perhaps not but that is exactly what Kodak said about digital cameras, What BA said about the zero service concept from Ryan Air and what the vinyl record producers said about music on CD’s.

So is there no hope for the meeting industry – yes there is but we need to understand how to deliver value. Class rooms and serial power point monologue are not the solution.

The problem with creating value in the traditional meeting and conference set up is that it is very limited – there is often a short term entertainment value, the odd aha experience – but that’s it.

In a situation where we are all under pressure. Supply, by far, outstrips demand in virtually all industries and services – most business’ create meetings and conferences in order to help participants change – but as any one who has tried to get a teenager to clean up their room by telling them to do so, will recognize, we do not change because someone tells us to do so ( there would be no smokers left in the world if that where the case) Telling does not work.

We change when we arrive at our own conclusions. ( if you do not believe me read Change or Die that will help you reach your own conclusion)

So having one or even worse a series of speakers stand up and tell us what to do, think or feel in order to cope with change is relatively useless – the ROI is negligible – and in that connection the speakers fee is not the main cost, it is the time and travel of the participants.

In order to create real change we need to gather people in order for them to interact. Change requires learning and learning is collaborative – no I do not mean 10 min of ‘networking at the coffee break – but real meaningful conversations – deep dialog.

Only through dialog will you get people to reach their own conclusions and then hopefully act on them. Yes we can have inspirational input if it is short, sweet and to the point AND gets people thinking and talking.

But this will require the meeting industry to radically change their formats,( venues, room, seating,speaking formats, tools, etc) those that do will survive those that don’t will join the buggy whip business as interesting business cases for future students to smile at.