Are we too focused on ‘Leadership’ – and not enough about ‘Followership*
What does it take to develop followership – check out this video
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Gamestorming service design
30 years ago we called this moments of truth – Dave Gray calls them touch points but the idea is the same. None the the less this is a great way to map out your customers journey through your service experience. It is also a wonderful way to make the whole team understand what the critical touch points (bottlenecks) are in the customer experience:
Se his blog here
The future of learning
I just love this whole concept:
A MOOC is not for credit, it’s for (networked) learning. You participate in a MOOC because you want to learn about a particular topic or subject. A MOOC is an alternative (attractive?) mode of learning in a flat, technologically interconnected world and supports life-long networked learning.
See the article and further links here
Pinoners of a great service culture
South West Airlines introduced the concept of the Service Profit Chain long before the original book was written.
Here is a great post from Micah Solomon https://www.micahsolomon.com/ to remind us on how important a strong culture is in a service organization.
You will find the post What you can learn from Southwest Airlines’ culture here
There are great teams and not so great teams
Here is a great blog post from Brandon Curry
There are great teams and not so great teams. The best companies are networks of great teams. When you look at organizations, there is a huge range in performance team by team by team. There are differences within high performing teams compared with underperforming teams. These differences impact not only business outcomes, but lead measures like the ability to attract and retain talent that create the valued product or service that customers trade money for.
This is just so much up my alley…
Read the rest on Brandons blog it is well worth your time
Unique and personal works wonders for RevPar
Here is a great post from Xhotels on what it mean to be a disruptive hotel :
Hotels need to be more Disruptive.
It once again reminded me of the classic marketing model that so clearly shows what this is all about that oh’ so tricky move from new to perennial with out falling into the trap of becoming stereotype.
As long as you can maintain uniqueness – you can also hold your price – but if you slip up and fall in to the trap of becoming stereotype – then you have taken the first step in entering what the Americans call ‘the race to the bottom’. And we all now what that does to our bottom line.
Read the 3 great examples of uniqueness on the Xhotels blog here
This is also a theme that I have developed extensively in my book: Best! – no need to be cheap if... The overall idea his is to use the frame work of the Service Profit Chain to understand build that uniqueness over time.
I would be more than happy to offer you a copy if you are interested – just drop me a line and i will send you a download link.
Vision and Focus
This is a great video clip of a young Steve Jobs in Action. Notic how he keep the team focused on what is truly important
Where to Play and How to Win…
Do you have a clear strategy ?
I have lost count of how many hotels and conference centers I’ve encountered over the years who define their strategy as ”delivering great customer experiences” or being ”among the top 5 in their category or region”.
But that’s not a strategy. At best it’s a vision and and worst-case it’s just wishful thinking
Strategy is distinctly different from visions missions and goals. Strategy crystallizes the very hard choices that we all need to make. Strategy defines how we create value. Value emerges when we have the skills to produce something that costs us less to produce than somebody else is willing to pay for it. Period.
Value = ( Sales Price – Cots to produce/deliver)
At first, that sounds simple – but it quickly gets trickier, what I may be happy to pay € 100 for is probably quite different from what you are happy to pay €100 for. Value is deeply subjective, each of us computes it in our own way depending on the circumstances and the situation.
It therefore makes no sense to talk about creating value without at the same time answering the question value for whom?
Because if I try to be everything to everybody I risk ending up being nothing to anybody and there’s not much value in that.
Where to Play
Developing an effective strategy therefore boils down to defining target market segments and clearly understanding what it is they need. (But but when targeting certain segments we also need to understand that that means there are other segments that we are willing to forgo)
How to Win
The better we understand the specifics of a segment the better we can tailor our service delivery in such a way that we produce value for exactly that segment.
So the 3 hard questions we need to ask our selves are:
1. Who is the target customer?
2. What is the value proposition to that customer?
3. What are the essential capabilities needed to deliver that value proposition?
Obviously, if we are running a hospitality business that is open 365 days a year we will need to identify several target segments ( time of year, day of the week – day part etc). Remembering, that what differentiates segments is not the demographics but the situation.
I have very different needs when I’m traveling in connection with a weekend break, compared to when I am traveling to conduct a workshop – same fellow very different needs ( and price points).
So we need to break down our value propositions into situations.
In my book Best! . No need to be cheap if you are … I have a chapter on how to work on you value proposition using the value equation.
Also here is a great article from S+B on the same subject – and finally the best tool to visualize and brainstorm some more on this is the Business Model Canvas as explained in the video here.