Category Archives: Peripheral Vision

This is why every business should have a “Minister for Foreign Affairs”

Posted on January 2, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Flowchart on a chalk board

Recently I interviewed Annalisa Gigante, a Board member of ZIS (Zurich International School) and former Head of Innovation at LafargeHolcim. We were talking about customer-centric leadership and Annalisa suggested that companies could really benefit from a “Minister for Foreign Affairs”. She said today “we need to know what’s going on with the rest of the world.”

I thought about this and realized that the amount of disruption we are facing in our businesses and work lives suggests that we can gain better context on what’s happening, make better decisions, and have a better chance of benefitting from it if we do what she suggests.

In our research and work with companies wanting to become more customer-centric, we have called this factor: Peripheral Vision. That is, the externally focused “wide vision” activities carried out to understand the likely impact on the future business from changes in technology, society, economy, political and legal, and the natural environment.

Many companies seem to have a “Minister for Foreign Affairs”, but like we see in politics, often the learnings and potential impacts of these insights are not widely shared – and consequently not acted upon. In practice, peripheral vision should be built into future business strategies. But in our experience, it is frequently missing.

If you want to know how you can identify if your “Ministry of Foreign Affairs” is effective, find out about how our MRI (Market Responsiveness Index) can help you.

AND if you want to build this capability in your organization check out our MarketCulture Academy.

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Posted in Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Foresight, innovation, Peripheral Vision

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5 ways the insurance industry is being disrupted

Posted on March 20, 2016 by | 1 comment

Game_Changer_Disruption

The insurance industry is facing a shake-up. The traditional model using specialist agents who communicate with their customers around the time insurance premiums are to be renewed and offer generalist solutions is being disrupted.

  1. Consumer needs and demands are changing. Independent online research sources enable consumers to buy online, compare alternative offers and enhance self-service choices. Insurers will need to offer more personalized products that take account of individual circumstances and provide more transparency in their pricing.
  2. Sites such as Friendsurance enable friends to pool their premiums and is an example of how social networks are bypassing traditional insurance companies. As these grow they will impact incumbents.
  3. Car manufacturers are looking to add value to their offerings and through technology will have the ability to offer tailored insurance based on a driver’s history rather than industry wide statistics. Just as they bundle in car servicing they have the ability to bundle in insurance as an overall car package.
  4. As more car sharing takes place and the number of low frequency drivers increases premiums can be restructured to cover “pay as you use”.
  5. Many new competitors will be pure play online companies as we now see with specialized travel insurance companies like 1Cover. There will be many specialized market niches for them to attack.

Incumbent insurance companies will need to build a cultural capability around customer and competitor foresight – a capability that is attuned to future customer needs and future competitive threats. This will require a cultural agility that enables them to innovate and act before customer changes and new competitor models break the floodgates and seriously erode their businesses and their future.

Is your company being disrupted or a disruptor?

You can read more about what you must do to build customer and competitor foresight in The Customer Culture Imperative.

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Posted in Competitor Foresight, Competitor Insight, Disruption, innovation, Peripheral Vision

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Is your business model under threat and your survival at stake?

Posted on April 14, 2015 by | Leave a comment

Business Model Threat

In any large successful business today parts of the business are performing well while other parts are ailing. Multinationals like Ford Motor Company and Starbucks are performing well in some countries, but not in others. Samsung and Ikea have high market acceptance of some products, but not others. But, what’s important is to determine if your core business model is under threat. If it is, your very survival is at stake.

Consider what is happening to the traditional postal service corporations like the US Postal Service (USPS), Royal Mail (UK) and Australia Post. Virtually all national postal services originated from government owned and legislated monopolies when letters were the primary source of written communication. These organizations created thousands of bricks and mortar post offices and shops, a large transport infrastructure to deliver letters using thousands of postal staff. The digital revolution has changed all that – letter volumes are declining rapidly, with consequent ongoing and growing losses for incumbent mail services. The business models of traditional postal corporations are under attack from all sides.

Take Australia Post. Like many postal corporations it has developed a growing profitable parcel delivery service fuelled by online consumer purchasing. It is providing new services like its digital mailbox for business and consumers. But profits from these new lines of business are being eroded by losses in the traditional letter delivery business and from competition. Both Singapore Post and Japan Post have purchased courier companies to compete in the Australian parcels delivery market. Also Uber Rush is allowing people to order pickup and delivery of packages using the Uber app. Last year Volvo trialed a service called Roam Delivery that allows retailers to drop off merchandise inside your parked car. All of this adds up to intense competition for Australia Post. Much the same is happening to US Post and Royal Mail as well as other incumbent mail and postal services around the world.

How can organizations like Australia Post survive? They must develop and strengthen a customer-centric culture as the foundation of their organization and as a basis for long-term competitive advantage. This means that they must have strategic alignment with their markets and customers where an understanding of current and future customer needs and current and potential future competitors is factored into their strategies and supported by everyone in the business. This knowledge and mindset must become embedded in all of their businesses and throughout all functions in their organization to enable them to become more agile, competitive and innovative to create superior value for their customers. That in turn will help to drive ongoing growth and profitability.

The postal organizations around the world seem to be at different stages on the journey to customer centricity. New Zealand Post is probably one of the most competitive being one of the earliest to have its mail service deregulated in 1998. It is now two years into a 5-year transformation plan and is showing improvements in overall profitability. USPS lost US$5.5 billion in 2014 despite its growth in package services and has a lot of ground to make up. Australia post is profitable, but profits are declining from the impact of mail service losses and there is now a strong focus on developing a customer culture.

Is your business model under threat? You can measure where you are in terms of customer centricity and what stage of the journey you have reached by exploring the roadmap provided in the award winning book: The Customer Culture Imperative: A Leader’s Guide to Driving Superior performance.

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Posted in Case Study, Customer Centric Culture, innovation, market culture, Peripheral Vision

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Is this the end of in-store customer service and retailing as we know it?

Posted on February 19, 2013 by | 2 comments

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You would think traditional retailers when confronted with the undermining of their traditional in store purchasing business models would be reaching out for new ways to create value for their customers……

Although most retailers agree delivering a superior in-store experience will rescue the physical store from the fate of the last buggy whip company. I find it strange that they continue to offer customer service that borders on a slap in the face.

A recent survey released by Motorola has found that the number of shoppers who prefer to rely on their own mobile devices, rather than shop assistants, to guide their purchasing decisions has reached a level that for retailers can only be described as “a major wake up call”.

There are a couple of facts from the research that suggest retailers may have given up on providing better in store service.

Firstly about 50% of Millennials (Gen Ys) and more than a third of Gen X shoppers suggest it’s easier to find information on their mobile devices than from a store associate. Since the Millennials are gradually overtaking baby boomers as the biggest consuming group, retailers are saying to their future target customers –  there really isn’t much point in coming to the store after all.

The second interesting fact is that store managers agree – and are convinced in even greater numbers than their customers – that mobile devices provide better information. More than 60% of managers were of this view!

The Motorola research also revealed that the shopping experience improved when sales associates themselves used mobile technologies.

Digitally-enhanced service is clearly a direction being taken by many leading-edge retailers who are already shifting to mobile checkouts and other technologies that bypass or supplement humans to provide product information.

What is the future of store based retailing?

The shift in retailing appears to be heading in a smaller number of viable directions:

The first is technology-based self-service, with people being largely phased out of store operations. This is already starting to happen at super markets and other high volume retailers.

The second is real value-added  in-store customer experiences provided by passionate “brand ambassadors” – for example Lululemon and Apple in which store associates are so highly trained, informed and motivated that they can make customers feel good enough about the experience to make additional purchases.

The third will be specialty retailers in high traffic tourist areas that will continue to relie on holiday shoppers and serendipitous purchases. The local cannery row and fisherman’s wharf areas in Monterey California come to mind….

Consumers appear to be losing faith in the ability of retailers to deliver on the promise of people powered service.

What do you think? How will store based retailers survive in the future?

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Posted in Customer Experience, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Service, Customer Value, Peripheral Vision

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Your customers are being stolen by the new digital disruptors – Are you fit enough to compete?

Posted on January 25, 2013 by | Leave a comment

digital_disruption

FitNow, launched in 2008, produces Lose It!, the top application in the iPhone’s health and fitness category. FitNow is based on the premise that your phone is always with you and is the perfect platform for tracking your calories. It now has more than 10 million customers.

This business with less than 10 employees is extremely focused on assessing digital customer feedback, revising the app regularly and adding new benefits like social connections among users. It is continually looking at ways to add benefits without increasing costs.

How should Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig respond?

There are a growing band of companies like this – digital disruptors using platforms like iPhone and iPad apps and Facebook to reach millions of people. These new companies have just a few people and move almost at lightning speed. They ignore competition and traditional channels to market and go directly to end customers. Their costs are low, so their margin per customer is high enough to generate profit through volume.

We are all now in a faster moving, more competitive digital environment, no matter what we make and sell. Gear up everyone in your business to understand it and get “fitter” to compete.

So, consider this. If there are no barriers to entry in your business and competitors are easily able to compete with you off a low cost base and from all directions, what would you need to do differently?

Probably a lot of things. Disruption of this type usually needs a transformative change to the way you do things. A good start is to quickly review those things that drive competitiveness, growth and profitability in your business.

You will find that there will be a need to change peoples’ habits around speed of innovation and new products/services to market.

There will be a need to gain greater insight into customers and how their needs are changing. You will need to look for some benchmarks from these disruptive digital competitors. But most of all, you will need to embark on a journey to strengthen your customer-focused culture.

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Posted in Game Changers, innovation, Peripheral Vision

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Does Intel have the right culture for the future?

Posted on January 22, 2013 by | Leave a comment

intel's_customer_culture

In a question asking him to summarize the Intel culture, outgoing CEO (in May  2013), Paul Otellini said:

“Egalitarian. Merit based. That came from Noyce. Anyone can speak in a meeting, but you must speak with data. That came from Moore. Take risks. Embrace innovation, but do it with discipline. That’s Grove. World-class manufacturing came from Barrett. I’ve added a marketing component.

The other thing unique to Intel, at least in Silicon Valley, is the mix of older and newer employees. Intel has more 20-year-plus veterans than any Silicon Valley company. I’ve been here 36 years. Yet the average age of our global workforce is 25. Tradition and innovation. We like both.”

Intel’s culture seems to do everything to drive facts and reasons ahead of position and formal authority. One of Intel’s values is something like “constructive confrontation”.

Among large technology companies, only Intel has mastered CEO succession multiple times. Founded in 1968, Intel has gone from founders Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore, who both served as CEOs, to Andy Grove, Craig Barrett and now Paul Otellini without losing its status as the world’s preeminent chip manufacturer. It has had some major tests of its culture.

In the mid-1980s Intel’s memory chip cash cow was being wiped out by Asian competitors and its future star, the microprocessor, was still building. Intel faced scandal in 1994 when it mishandled news about flaws in its Pentium chip. In 2006, the newest CEO, Otellini, had to lay off 10% of workers in what now can be seen as a prelude to the Great Recession.

In 2006, when Ortellini took the helm, he tossed out the old business model. Instead of remaining focused on PCs, he pushed Intel to play a key technological role in new  fields, including consumer electronics, wireless communications, and health care. And rather than just microprocessors, he wanted Intel to create all kinds of chips, as well as software, and then meld them together into what he called “platforms.” He went about reinventing Intel as PC growth began to slow.

In addition top to bottom reorganization, he made big changes in the way products are developed. While previously engineers worked on ever-faster chips and then let marketers try to sell them, there are now teams of people with a cross-section of skills. Chip engineers, software developers, marketers, and market specialists all work together to come up with compelling products. Otellini is convinced such collaboration leads to breakthrough innovations.

Otellini has strengthened Intel’s financial performance and maintained dominance of its industry. The challenge facing the new CEO will be to keep pace with the changing mobile, tablet and social media environment. Intel’s culture took a battering with the major staff cuts in 2006 and again substantial cuts in 2011.

Will it be resilient and adaptive enough with a new CEO to strengthen the future focused, customer oriented culture that was a focus of Otellini’s reign? Has it retained its innovative capabilities? Only time will tell.

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Posted in C-Level Quotes on MarketCulture, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Values, Customer Culture and Profit Link, Customer Foresight, Customer-Centricity, Game Changers, innovation, Market Culture in Action, Outside In, Peripheral Vision, Trust

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4 ways Electronic Arts navigated major Tectonic Shifts impacting their Customers

Posted on January 21, 2013 by | 3 comments

tectonic_shifts_in_technology_and_customer_impacts

Many industries today are experiencing market and technology shifts in their marketplaces that are somewhat like the clashing of tectonic plates that cause earthquakes and tsunamis. Industries including publishing and printing, education, telecommunications, media, advertising, health and retail are all facing massive change. How does an organization navigate a techtonic shift?

Electronic Arts Labels (EA), the world’s leading developer and publisher of interactive entertainment  faced a techtonic shift in 2007 with the rapid change occurring from retail packaged goods products to new digital delivery platforms. The new CEO at that time, John Riccitello, presented his vision as a burning platform – you are in the middle of the ocean on an oil platform that is on fire. You either hold on and ride it down or you jump off and face the unknowns of a swirling ocean.

In his article titled “Getting into your customers’ heads”, Krish Krishnakanthan finds out what EA had to do to navigate this techtonic shift. To transform from a retail products business to a digital supplier using new platforms such as social networks, mobile phones and tablets.

The key success factors:

1)   Measuring and tracking customer usage of games, external gaming-publication reviews (critical review success is linked with sales performance). For that part of the business with direct sales to consumers, they use technology to measure customer interactions and the lifetime value of each customer.

2)   Changes in the competitive landscape with low entry barriers and the emergence of small game developers has required  EA to restructure its business to give decentralized profit and loss control to product line/brand managers to enable them to compete with specific identified competitors.

3)   Enhanced communication and collaboration between development teams and marketing teams to co-ordinate go-to-market strategies.

4)   Scanning the external environment through consumer blogs and social media to identify new shifts in consumer opinion, competitive plays, new technology impacts on customers and economic forces affecting the market. This has required a culture change by EA. One which centers their whole business around the customer. An adaptive, future focused customer culture has enabled EA to cross the chasm created by the techtonic shift they faced.

Staying on the “oil platform’ would have meant riding the business to the bottom – out of business. Is your industry facing a techtonic shift? If so, check where you stand on “customer culture”. Is it strong enough to be adaptive and resilient to the storm ahead?

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Posted in C-Level Quotes on MarketCulture, Customer Foresight, Customer-Centricity, Digital Marketing, innovation, Market Culture in Action, Market Responsiveness Index, Outside In, Peripheral Vision, Social Media Marketing, Voice of the Customer

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Is 3M still an innovator? – 3 traits it must have to mobilize growth in 2013

Posted on January 15, 2013 by | 2 comments

customer innovation culture

3M is one of the most consistent companies on wall street, paying out a dividend for nearly a century. It has a diverse stable of 55,000 products from electronics to health care to renewable energy. 3M has long been recognized as one of the most innovative companies in the world.

It grows and expands its business with organic growth and acquisitions. Organic growth is driven by R&D spending, which has developed products like Scotch Tape, Post-It Notes, and Multi-layer Optical Film. It has a long history of invention and innovation and this has been at the core of 3M’s growth since its inception.

But in the past decade the company has focused more money on acquisitions. Recently, the company has purchased security company Cogent and ceramics maker Ceradyne. These acquisitions, along with dozens of “bolt-ons”, have accounted for a large percentage of the company’s growth since 2000.

But the strategy is shifting to more organic growth, which has been stuck at 3% for the past decade, by increasing R&D spending to 6% of sales by 2017 from 5.3% in 2011.

Dan Caplinger, a writer for The Motley Fool, says 3M’s slowing growth has caused some to question whether the company is still innovative. With a new chief executive onboard, Fool contributor Travis Hoium recently suggested that new CEO, Inge Thulin, could be the one to get 3M’s research and development engines firing again.

Jacob Andersson, a writer with Seeking Alpha, notes in his post “3M is poised to go nowhere fast” that it has experienced slowing revenue growth and in fact has had a decline in revenues over the past three quarters when compared to one year ago. From taking a look at its past few income statements he believes that 3M is headed for a continued slowdown over the next one to two years.

But what will drive 3M into the future is the ability to reinvent itself by creating new products and innovating current products. The biggest question now is whether invention and innovation are still alive and well at 3M and does it have the 3 cultural traits needed to drive successful innovation and revenue growth.

There is only one way to know if 3M businesses have the relevant culture traits across its diverse product and service categories needed to mobilize organic growth.

Measure and benchmark those market-connected cultural traits that drive successful product innovation.

Based on our research there are three future-oriented traits that really count.

1. Customer Foresight: Does the company gather information on potential customers? Does it target them based on its opportunity for competitive advantage? Does it understand and invest in meeting future needs of prospective customers? Does it understand and act on unarticulated needs?

Link to Strategy: Strength in this behavioral trait is particularly relevant to a strategy designed to obtain new customers in order to increase the customer base and grow the size of the business.

Driver of Business Performance: This trait measures a business’s ability to acquire new customers and meet future customer needs and specifically impacts innovation, revenue growth and new product and service success.

2. Competitor Foresight: Does the company consider potential competitors when making decisions? Does it identify market shifts in order to identify potential competitors? Does staff feed in competitive intelligence relating to potential new competitors and how they might affect future customer needs?

Link to Strategy: Strength in this trait is particularly relevant to two types of competitive strategies:

a)    a strategy designed to defend competitive position against new competitors in the medium to longer term in industries experiencing market shifts or

b)   a strategy to increase market share by creating a new competitive advantage in an new emerging market.

Driver of Business Performance: This measures a business’s ability to account for future competitors and their strategies and create relevant new products and value propositions. This behavioral trait impacts innovation and new product success.

3. Peripheral Vision: Does the company monitor, understand, and respond to the political, economic, social, and technological trends emerging on the periphery which could affect its customers and its business? Is all staff encouraged to scan their respective fields of expertise for new ideas relevant to the changing external environment? Does the company act on this flow of new ideas?

Link to Strategy: Strength in this trait is particularly relevant to an innovation strategy reflected in two types of strategies

c)    a strategy based on new products and services as the means for growth and profitability

d)   a strategy requiring a new business model to cope with disruptive technological changes

Driver of Business Performance: This measures a business’s ability to scan, sense and act on threats and opportunities emerging in its external environment and impacts innovation. Those companies that have it show capabilities of effective innovation that drive sales and profit growth from new market opportunities.

Where should 3M start? It should measure and benchmark these 3 traits in those businesses that really require innovation for substantial revenue growth. It can then act to strengthen those traits needed to fuel successful product innovation.

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Posted in Customer Foresight, Customer-Centricity, innovation, Peripheral Vision

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Where is the innovation in American retail banking?

Posted on January 9, 2013 by | Leave a comment

customer_innovation_in_banking

More than 150 nominations representing over 30 countries were received for the 2012 BAI-Finacle Global Banking Innovation Awards for breakthrough innovations that positively impact banks and their customers. Of these, 27 were from banks operating in the US and 4 from Canada.

The awards are designed to recognize banking organizations for game changing products, services and practices in retail banking. The award winners were selected by an independent international group composed of prominent industry thought-leaders, academics and retail banking professionals. The winners were announced on October 12, 2012.

The award for the Most Innovative Bank of the Year went to First National Bank in South Africa.  The Product and Service Innovation winner was the OCBC Bank, Singapore, the Channel Innovation award went to DenizBank, Turkey and the Disruptive Innovation in Banking award was won by Alior Bank in Poland.

Here’s how the judges described the First National Bank, a Division of FirstRand Limited:

“First National Bank was named as winner for its culture of innovation and advancement of retail banking. As part of their innovative culture, the bank holds an internal competition, called “Innovators,” that formally encourages and supports the process of innovation and related competencies. Business units within FNB are empowered to innovate through leadership buy-in and advocacy. As a retail banking institution, FNB takes a top down approach to innovation to embed it into the culture. It shows visible support of innovation through internal programs designed to develop new-to-the-world products and services that provide access to retail banking for all who want it. FNB’s commitment to innovation can best be seen through their annual contest – “Innovators”.

“Innovators” is a companywide initiative that supports and enables innovation with leadership buy-in and advocacy from the CEO and his direct reports. Winners of “Innovators” win real money (up to $120,000 USD) for innovations that meet the test, such as e-wallets and mobile phone offerings, which FNB is known for.

FNB encourages innovation at the lower levels of the organization, too, with its “Minivation” program, which rewards back office employees with “e-bucks” that they can redeem at FNB clients for suggesting more day-to-day, incremental improvements. A minivation is anything that takes less than three months to implement that provides some business benefit.

From an organizational strategy design perspective, there is a bias towards innovation in the FNB overall strategy in that it is both a strategic pillar and organizational value. FNB’s decentralized structure gives discretionary decision rights to business units who are enabled and encouraged to innovate. This top-down leadership and support evidenced through the sheer volume of innovations in all categories at FNB makes them The Most Innovative Bank of the Year. “

Of course, this is not the final word on innovation in American retail banking, but there was only one US bank finalist amongst the 12 finalists in the four categories suggesting that innovative practices can be learned from banks operating in other countries.

But what does successful innovation require?

Sustainable innovation, well described in the First National Bank case above, requires an embedded culture led from the top and supported and recognized at every level and in every group in the organization. To be successful, this innovative culture must incorporate behaviors that focus in 5 areas:

1)   Customer needs, especially foresight of future customer needs

2)  Competitive advantage, especially foresight of future competition

3)  Broader external changes, especially changes around the periphery of the industry

4)  Collaboration, especially internal  across functions and with external partners

5)   Alignment, especially innovation aligned with the company strategy

How innovative is your culture compared with your peers? Do you see strong behaviors noted above that are requirements for successful innovation in your business?

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Posted in Competitor Insight, Customer Foresight, Customer Insight, Customer-Centricity, innovation, Peripheral Vision

5 traits companies must have to play in free-for-all energy industry

Posted on January 8, 2013 by | Leave a comment

customer centricity in the energy_industry

Traditional electric utilities are on the verge of facing massive competition. The barriers to entry have fallen and a large number of new and old companies have entered the power generation business.

Numerous and diverse competitors – non-utilities – have already entered the electricity business. Wind farms are expanding. More than a hundred Silicon Valley startups are developing new power technologies. Many of these have venture capital funding. Several like the Bloom Box fuel cell, have the potential to transform the industry by bringing power generation to the home.

Real estate companies and builders are supplying rooftop solar on new homes. Schools, government buildings, and businesses are deploying their own solar panels. Chevron Energy Solutions, a Chevron subsidiary, is one of the nation’s largest installers of solar energy systems for education institutions

Tie this to consumer and business resistance to higher energy prices and an increasing drive to seek out lower cost alternatives and we will soon see the competitive floodgates open putting the traditional players with big traditional infrastructure investments at risk.

It is not clear where all of this is going to go.  Everything is in the mix – technology, the economy, politics, globalization and societal trends towards “green and clean”. The government plays a big part with its energy policy along with regulation, subsidies and incentives for varies parts of the industry.

The one factor that is common to the longer-term success of each player in this industry is the adaptability of its corporate culture. In this environment it must have a culture characterized by 5 traits:

  • Customer understanding and insight
  • Competitor awareness and foresight
  • Peripheral vision of industry changes and impacts
  • Strategic alignment around value for all stakeholders
  • Collaborative and empowered workforce

Those players that have these 5 cultural traits embedded in their DNA will be able to adapt to the rapidly changing conditions and challenges in this disruptive industry. Those that don’t will disappear or be acquired.

Could your business survive in a competitive free-for-all like this? Does it have the 5 traits required for success in any industry undergoing major market and technology shifts?

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Posted in Collaboration, Competitor Insight, customer focus, Customer Insight, Peripheral Vision, Strategic Alignment

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