REIMAGINE YOUR ENTERPRISE – A HUMAN CENTERED APPROACH ( Part 1 )

Inspired by the work of Christopher A. H. Vollmer, Matt Egol and Naseem Sayani on a new article on business-stratetry website, I create this post to summarize the infomation that I found useful for any practitioner who want to improve the digital image of their enterprises. This is rather a long article but bear with me, you will be surprised at what you can find here. Here we go.

What does it mean to become a digital leader? Companies in every industry are looking for answers to this question. They are exploring new business models, developing new user experiences, and experimenting with new channels and platforms—all with the strategic goal of creating significant value in a digitally powered business environment. To get there, most of these companies are pursuing the same laundry list of initiatives.

For too many companies, these efforts have not translated into enough market impact and growth. They are stuck. Their results are too incremental; they merely move their brand recognition or increase sales a bit. But there is far more market-making, world-changing potential for them in digital businesses, products, and experiences, and more and more business leaders know it. Instead of reengineering their digital practices and processes, they need something bolder and more disruptive, but still very simple. They need reimagination. Reimagination means reshaping your entire business around the customer or user experience. The best-known term for this is human-centered design (HCD). When companies practice HCD, they put the user (the customer, the audience member, the person on the other end of the digital channel) at the center of every decision the company makes. This empathetic focus on user experience is an essential driver to creating simple yet disruptive solutions that are operationally feasible, economically viable, and, most important, desired by users.

Human-centered design represents a new way of life for business. It cannot be easily achieved with the embedded controls and constraints of a typical mature enterprise. In the digital world, time really is money. Companies no longer have the luxury of carefully developing new products and business models via a bureaucratic and waterfall-driven stage-gate process. Instead, successful companies evoke many of the attributes of a startup—creativity, speed, bias for action, flexibility with risk, and radical collaboration. People work fluidly across functions and business units and collaborate readily with outside vendors and business partners when specialized expertise is needed. These companies are less likely to force their talent, whether internal or external, to run the gauntlet of restrictive finance, IT, legal, and HR processes. Finally, the digital process is a viable contributor to the business, with significant revenue and profit growth rates.

To achieve this entrepreneurial vigor in your company, you may have to consciously break down long-established internal barriers. One way to do this is to put human-centered design at the center of what your company does. The details will vary from one company to the next. Every company has its own distinctive situation, there are five basic principles of digital reimagination that any company can follow: Embed human-centered design in everything you do, build brand value holistically, design for three years out (but build for today), stand up new structures and teams, and nurture your existing digital culture.

1. Embed human-centered design in everything you do – a case study. Focus first on designing and delivering great user experiences by learning and applying some basic practices of HCD. For example, in online surveys with an HCD orientation, you ask questions that develop robust behavioral insights by empathizing with users’ needs, habits, and pain points. You use the answers to fuel high-impact digital value creation. You look for ways to engage with customers, and you mobilize rapidly to meet the most attractive opportunities revealed through that engagement. You also develop an agile, iterative prototype and launch process, which allows you to release-test many new products and services, starting with the “minimum viable product,” or MVP. An MVP is a product with the minimum number of features required for a holistic user solution. Your goal is not technological excellence per se, or even rapid time-to-market with a new offering, but emotional connections with your customers. In short, leveraging HCD in a holistic way from strategy through execution enables you to tap into customers’ motivations while also providing greater utility and functional benefits.

These principles become even more powerful when connected to community. Building connections to your users is just a starting point. Your real digital value emerges when people engage, share, and build community with one another. This direct engagement—facilitated by your company—creates a venue for habitually capturing insights about what customers think of your products and services, what matters most to them, and what consistently irritates or enthralls them. These insights can then feed your innovation practices across customer service, marketing, advertising, and promotions.

The musical instrument manufacturer is a compelling example of how this plays out every day. The core mission of its leadership team (including the private equity managers who had invested in the company) was to transform the brand from being product-focused (“we make the best instruments”) to being lifestyle-focused (“we serve music enthusiasts”). Anyone who uses this company’s products today is seen as both an artist and an enthusiast—not just in the rock genre, but in almost all music categories. These musicians are actively engaged in forums and content about the features and maintenance of their instruments. They share music and new sounds with their peers, and they collect instruments representative of their music heroes.

But what about those who do not currently play music? Or those who are trying to learn? The company used some basic practices of human-centered design to uncover some attributes of these potential enthusiasts that would provide a connection to their aspirations. The company gathered insights about the way these people listened to music, and the pain points they had experienced in trying to learn to play.

The company found, for example, that music was not an independent experience for these enthusiasts; they were part of an ecosystem of content, composed of a vast range of music sources. These included online stores for music downloads; traditional sources like the car radio; music-oriented social media where people exchange recommendations; subscription-based Internet radio services; music video sites; and live music. Many of the enthusiasts were also curators, interacting with other enthusiasts and with artists in a variety of forums, and buying their music in a variety of ways.

The company invested in building a unique online presence that helped simplify the process of sorting through these options, and that put enthusiasts and musicians more closely in touch with one another. That, in turn, gave them more reason to interact with the instrument maker. Reimagination, via HCD, delivered a ripe base of insights to drive forward the “lifestyle agenda”—powered by a test-and-learn mind-set that is helping the organization learn from the results every step of the way.

end of part one

credit to Christopher A. H. Vollmer, Matt Egol and Naseem Sayani.

My Perspective on The Entrepreneurship

I went out another day and joined a meetup party with some entrepreneurial fellows there. I have had a few conversations about entrepreneurship and the worldview about it. That went surprisingly well, so well that some of the ideas intrigued me to change my perspective on the subject. I gave it some thoughts and here is the note.

There is only one world!? If someone ever says to you ” That would never work in the real world”, please don’t  believe them. That world may be real for them but hang on, it does not mean that you have to live in it.

Failure is a prerequisite for success, is it? WRONG! A Harvard Business School study have revealed that entrepreneurs whose companies failed the first time had almost the same follow rate as people starting a company for the first time: just 23 percent. So don’t take it hard when people advise “fail early and fail often” or that failure builds stepping stone, it is true just not that glamorous. There you have it, so then whenever you fail, it is not necessarily that you are one step closer to success, it is just that something have gone wrong and you better fix it.

Hiring and growing, the more the better? Not necessary, any business could be started from the garage and yours is too. I believe that you should not hire anyone until you feel hurt and have to. Hiring is to reduce the pain from the tasks not to increase the pleasure. While premature hiring is a serious mistake that have failed may promising start-ups, it is suggested to grow slow and see what feels right.

Work longer or smarter? some say smarter, I would say both. You could figure out a faster way to work but it doesn’t mean that you can leave the office at five. Workaholics are smart workers too and they are working longer than the others, now who would you hire and who would you be?

Why are you doing this? Profit alone is not strong enough and should not be used as a sole motivation (though a business without profit is just a hobby). You need more than that. Not only you are building your business, you have to breath your business and live your business. You need to feel that you are making a difference, that it is important that you keep doing what you are doing or if you stop, people will notice. Great business has a point of view, not just product or services. You need to believe in what you are doing, you need to have a backbone, also need to know that you are willing to make it happen, then show it to the world.

Good or perfect? In some cases, good should be enough. Since problems can often be solved with simple solutions, get the job done and move on is more important than showing off the skills or perform glamorous work. You wont be able to get some “wow”out of it but it is way better than wasting resources or doing nothing because you are not able to afford the complex solutions. So good is enough. If it is not so you can always make it great later.

Competitors, should we be friends? Grow together is not a bad idea but do you know that people choose side and they do it all the time? So picking a fight with your rival is not a bad idea itself. Whenever you think they suck, say so. When you do that you will find that people who share the same viewpoint will be siding with you. And talking a stand will always stand out, people get stoked by conflict. They take sides. Passions are ignited and that is how you get people to take notice.

That will be all for now, I will update this whenever something come across my mind.

A Way To Tip

I was browsing on the internet and hoping to find something good to read, then I came across Marriott blog. In case you do not know him,Bill Marriott is one of the most famous corporate bloggers in the world. The company chairman actually does his own posts, dictating them on a weekly basis. This personal involvement has won the site loyal fans since they know they are getting the word from a real executive — a powerful point of differentiation.

He talked about his rule to tip people, by his words “I try to tip everyone from the pizza deliveryman to the parking attendant to the waiter and bellman”. He also mentioned about a lesson from his mom on tipping, quote “When a service has been rendered that makes you feel like someone has really made an effort, it’s worth rewarding their attentiveness. He also pointed out that in some cases, there are people who provide you services but rarely appear in front of you. They are not on anybody’s radar, they do work and provide beautiful services but remain unseen. Think about the chef who cooks you foods, is it not that the one you tip most of the time is waiter/waitress? In his case, they are the housekeepers. And for the record, he did tip them whenever he stayed in a hotel.

Now, we all know that he runs a business (being Executive Chairman and Chairman of the Board Marriott International, Inc.). But from that point of view, he was thinking about tipping the housekeepers – a brilliant idea. It is true that their efforts are worth to be mentioned and rewarded but how many business owner or manager pay attention to that trivial fact? Marriott does, he even organized a campaign based on that idea.

“We’re partnering with Maria Shriver and A Woman’s Nation to launch “The Envelope Please.” As part of the campaign, we’ll be placing envelopes in over 160,000 guest rooms at participating hotels in the U.S. and Canada. This will make it easy for our guests to express their gratitude. “

Now I think about it, from business point of view, this should have a strong impact on both sides of the coin. Firstly, this will encourage his employees, in this case the housekeepers, give them more motivation to work and perform their job at high capacity. The message is clear, everyone will be named and rewarded for his or her true effort. Just imagine who would be unhappy within this working environment? Secondly, this hits directly into the emotional affection of the guests. So he was showing the world that business and profit are not always the priority but the human factor should also be regarded. And history shows that when you bring human factor into your business account, it is only the matter of time that success will arise. That is also why the human-centered approach is so popular nowadays.

So, if you have a business and you have employees, it does not matter what kind of business you are in, may it be providing physical goods or just services, it is crucially important that you pay attention on the people who are working for you. Unhappy employees can be a potential harm to the business, because when employees are not in a good mood to work, the products they are producing may result in poor quality or in some cases the services delivered to clients may be not as good as it was expected. Motivated and encouraged employees are sure beneficial adds to the business, so it is wise to keep it that way and the methodology to achieve it is simple, you just have to care.