Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

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Culture. The intangible competitive advantage

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Great article in Fast Company

Although cultivating a great culture demands a lot of emotional investment, leadership wisdom, and a genuine care for people, it is a financially low-cost investment with a high economic return. This is why great leaders pay attention to it. An authentic culture, at the very soul of a business, is something competitors cannot imitate. Like soul, culture is intangible. Yet given a little inspiration, this intangible commodity can be converted into untold wealth. Incredibly, the next big wave of growth will come from businesses whose leaders know how to convert low-cost intangibles like culture into high bottom-line value.

Dogs Dinner Strategy – is that you?

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Richard Rumelt is the author of Good Strategy/Bad Strategy–The Difference and Why It Matters

It is a real gem of a book

In the book, Rumelt identifies two kinds of objectives: ‘dog’s dinner objectives’; and ‘blue sky objectives’.

Dog’s dinner objectives

“A long list of “things to do”, often mislabeled as “strategies” or “objectives”, is not a strategy. It is just a list of things to do. Such lists usually grow out of planning meetings in which a wide variety of stakeholders make suggestions as to things they would like to see done. Rather than focus on a few important items, the group sweeps the whole day’s collection into a “strategic plan”. Then, in recognition that it is a dog’s dinner, the label “long term” is added so that none of them need be done today.“

Blue sky objectives

“The second form of bad strategic objectives is one that is “blue sky”. A good strategy defines the critical challenge. What is more, it builds a bridge between that challenge and action, between desire and immediate objectives that lie within grasp. Thus, the objectives a good strategy sets should stand a good chance of being accomplished, given existing resources and competence.…… By contrast, a blue-sky objective is usually a simple restatement of the desired state of affairs or of the challenge. It skips over the annoying fact that no one has a clue as to how to get there.

The purpose of a good strategy is to offer a potentially achievable way of surmounting a key challenge. If the leader’s strategic objectives are just as difficult to accomplish as the original challenge, there has been little value added by the strategy.”

So how does your strategy match up with either of these two kinds of ‘Bad Strategy”

So what is good strategy?

“A strategy is a way through a difficulty, an approach to overcoming an obstacle, a response to a challenge. If the challenge is not defined, it is difficult or impossible to assess the quality of the strategy. And if you cannot assess a strategy’s quality, you cannot reject a bad strategy or improve a good one.”

Simple hey !

Gamestorming service design

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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

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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

There are great teams and not so great teams

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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

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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.