Three Clever Questions: Don't Ignore Anymore

Often in our quest for continued business excellence and chasing new businesses, we tend to ignore asking uncomfortable questions that may spring surprises, we can better do without. With growing complexity, enhanced innovation focus and accellerated pace of change, these questions have gained lot more significance and need serious and systematic management attention, like never before.

1 Is the problem we are solving still a high priority problem for the client? Business depends upon its ability to help clients solve problems in an efficient and cost effective manner. What if the problem itself is no more a problem? Consultants banking on providing information access services to clients in earlier days have lost appeal as information access is no more a problem that clients face today. Video conferences solve the problem of managing face-2-face interaction without the need to travel. Hence business travel service agents banking on better travel services may be focused on solving problem, which may loose its own priority over time. What if the mileage efficiency of petrol engines double itself or oil prices become one-third of its present value? Alternate fuels based vehicles banking primarily on solving travel cost related problems may loose significance.

2 What is the potential appeal of the Opposite Extreme? For every loyal customer set there is a disengaged set, which is located at the other extreme of the continuum on specific service/product characteristics. If you have positioned your products with high acquisition cost and low consumable costs, there will indeed be a consumer set that prefer low acquisition cost and acceptable high running costs. If you have bunched all services and provided single price, some customers may be looking for separate prices for each service consumed. If your soft-drink is black, there are some consumers that prefer their soft-drink to be colorless. Often competition emerges from other extreme and goes unnoticed, till it starts gnawing your market share. Idea is not to advocate serving all set of customers, but to be conscious of the potential customer set that prefers the opposite of “what you offer”. You may choose to ignore them, but then that will be a strategic choice.

3 Are we depending too much on Rationality as a basis of appeal to potential customers? So much has been written about the limitation of humans to make rational decisions and how subconscious choices, operating environment and social context have disproportionately high influence on our decision making. In fact, Dan Ariely (predictably irrational), Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics), Michael J. Mauboussin (Think Twice) and other authors have not only provided examples of decisions taken by people like us that can not be labeled as rational, but also provide ideas on how to capitalize on this peculiarities associated with “how we buy?”. Marketeers know this through experience, but make sure the R&D folks, design engineers and operational excellence experts also keep this in mind and accommodate “irrationality” in their solution perspective.

Reflect! Share your views and perspectives, as always.

Leaders : Reboot your approach

Hi,

Thanks for reflecting your views on the previous post. Here are some of my reflections. 

I think, the difference lies in the approach towards some of the key leadership functions.

Lets take some examples:

1. Approach to “being accepted”: Leaders can no longer rely on Hierarchy to get acceptability. It is leader’s personal expertise and recognized excellence in an area of business value, which followers believe deserve respect and worthy of providing platform to lead. 
2. Approach to “being heard”: Directive style memos don’t work anymore beyond minimal compliance. Two way dialogue, that is authentic, persuasive, consistent across channels while being open to questioning with leader as facilitator and final integrator of views seems to work. 
3. Approach to “getting things done”: It is no more about detailed instructions about “how” it is to be done, but greater focus on telling “what needs to be done’ and “why it is important?” 
4. Approach to “getting best out of those led”: Traditional means of Motivating them to do what they are not convinced about, wont work. Connect work to their passion and then work relentlessly to avoid organization bureaucracy, and politics act as de-motivating distractions. 
5. Approach to “handling failures”: Instead of being criticized for being careless and unprofessional, leaders are expected to emphasize upon lessons learnt and may celebrate the well intentioned experimentations.

What other approaches need to change?

Lets Reflect!

What enable leaders to sustain relevance in the new world?

Leaders sustain their relevance till the time they continue to sustain dependency of the followers on them. This is achieved by leaders providing something followers’ value and are seen as the most preferred source. Seen this way, leaders’ sustained relevance depends upon their ability to continually understand their followers and provide Value they seek.

Apart from seeking reward, recognition or objective resource allocation (which falls more in Managers’ domain now), followers used to look towards leaders for problem solving. For this, leaders required sufficient technical finesse to design appropriate solution and guts to execute the same. Demonstrable outcomes reinforced their credibility and thus help sustain their leadership. No less demanding task, but a lot simpler as long as problem had knowable dimensions and followers relatively aligned expectations.

Given the complex operating context and growing influence of multiple stakeholders in decision making, these days followers look towards Leaders for Sense Making of the prevailing "chaos with dynamically shifting patterns". Leaders challenge is to define the context, and communicate the relative importance of various trends at play and define action program, in a language that is simple but sufficiently sophisticated (to convey complex set of interdependencies) and boundary-spanning to connect with diverse followers set.

While in earlier world, followers leaders' confidence in proposed action and surety behind the proposal, now they look towards leaders ability to accept tentativeness and risks but still convince that the proposed action is the most suitable and appropriate option. While earlier having contingency plan was a good management practice, now leaders need to convey ability to adapt and allow for mid-course modifications as essential part of their confidence winning proposals.

What additional other traits do you see leaders of the new world need to learn?

Do you see anything yesterdays’ leaders need to UNLEARN to sustain their leadership in the New world?

 Lets reflect!!!

How do you measure your Relevance?

Relevance is defined in terms of pertinent to matter at hand, appropriateness to the users needs and capable of making a difference in decision making. Staying relevant is indeed best assurance for guaranteeing survival. Need for sustaining relevance and threats to relevance are obvious, especially when pointed out. But still we see irrelevance eating out organizations, brands, technologies, products and experts all around. And in most of the cases, although the movement to irrelevance has been gradual, its realization has been sudden and often too late.


Measuring relevance of regular basis and picking signals early may help. So how do you measure relevance rightly, even if not necessarily quantitatively accurately? Financial Performance, present customer satisfaction index or order pipeline may not be right meausres. 

Here are some initial thoughts around measuring relevance as a Consultant:

Type of Engagements: Advance booking of your time beyond present engagement is not sufficient to construe sustained relevance but business. Are you getting engagements with enhanced complexity, seeking greater innovation and creativity and by more demanding customers? Or order book is full by customers seeking similar advice and efficient reliable solution in their quest to catch-up fast.

Type of Competition: Consultant is known by the “Competition” he is is compared with. Often the early indication of loss or shift in uniqueness of position comes from change in the type and number of competitors one has.

Type of Praise: Who is praising you and for what? Most sought after praise comes from competition (in disguised form), and at the same time praise that is easiest to come by but with least business benefit (however most endearing) is from your own team.

What are other measures of Relevance that you believe help?

Welcome to Sustaining Relevance

Today, in this world of globalization and interconnectivity, the business environment has become extremely dynamic and the long held business paradigms have been questioned.

Signs suggest that the economic scenario is turning around but in reality, the uncertainity and complexity is increasing for the organizations.This has resulted in many new challenges for the organizations with the need for "Agility" and "Redefination" becoming more relevant than ever before.

The challenge of "Sustaining Relevance" is ubiquitous and is spread across all key dimensions of business including brand, competition organizations, technology, institutions, laws, employer and employee. in this dynamic world has become a top priority for businesses.

This challenge is even more pronounced in the Consulting sphere.Inspite of being exteremly pogressive in nature, consulting advices are  more ephemeral than other aspects of business like brands and get obsolete much faster.

Welcome to Sustaining Relevance. Through this blog, I am looking forward to interact with you for sharing thoughts and ideas about the relevance of advice, counter trends and the dimensions that can question the relevance of organizations in the future.

Some of the other thoughts that I plan to cover in my upcoming posts include :

1. Lessons learnt from my past experiences
2. My personal views on the emerging trends in today's environment
3. Discuss about some explored fronts in management consulting. Talk about my favorite books and thought leadership papers
4. Change Management - Its evolution, importance, benefits and future

Please provide suggestions (as comments) on any other topics that I can cover in my blog.

Thanks for Visiting.