10 IDEAS FROM THE WEBINAR

LEADING A HIGH-PERFORMING TEAM

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Motivating High Performance

1. Who cares? You need to motivate your team to want to be a high performing team.  We talked about how to create meaning for the work so people will be personally motivated to care, and want to step up.

2. What does the business value? You need to connect the dots between what the business values and what your team delivers.  It’s important that everyone on your team knows how the business makes money.  How will you increase your team’s impact on critical business outcomes?

Set Clear Expectations

3. Roles: Define roles in a way that builds higher performance right into the job description. The worksheets for this webinar have a great template for defining job requirements beyond the work and skills.  They help you articulate and define higher value performance factors.

4. Clear expectations: You need to be really clear up front to define your expectations of high performance. Only then will you have a concrete way of measuring if it happened, and assessing the gap if it didn’t. Clarity up front lets you make the poor performance discussion less personal and emotional, and more fact based.

5. Measures and Consequences: We talked about how to build trust and motivation by how you manage performance across the board. Differentiate. Deal with low performers, reward high performers, and motivate average performers to step up.  Nobody coasts.

Learning and Stepping Up

6. Learning: Each year you need to set a goal for something beyond the work that your  team should learn about.  Should it be about customers, financials, process, social media?  What should your team be learning? How will you make sure your team is better and smarter next year?

Visibility and Recognition

7. Team Brand: How do you build your team’s Brand to create new habits of high performance that will be recognized by others?  What does your team want to be known and recognized for? And what specific behaviors will you agree upon, and commit to, to support that?

8. Fun vs. Boring Work: How do you  handle motivation between teams that do the exciting, fun work and the teams that are stuck with the boring work?  How do you show business value for the work infrastructure teams do?

Innovation & Bonuses

9. Innovation: How does innovation fit in?  What does high performance look like for innovation? Does it need to tie to the business goals?  Who gets to participate?  What are the right measures to motivate innovation?

10. Do bonuses work? Do bonuses motivate higher performance?  Do they result in higher quality work?  Do they annoy others if not everyone has access?  What is the best way to use bonuses to motivate high performance?

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Adding Value

I am always talking about “adding more value” or “working at a higher level of value”.

How do you know if what you are working on is valuable?  Are some jobs more valuable than others?

What is valuable?

One of my favorite stories I read in a book long ago, was about a a CEO of a bank who walked in one day, and saw a young intern looking dejected in the bank lobby.

He asked the boy, what is it you do for us here?  The boy replied, I have a stupid job… I was told to make sure that the containers for the deposit slips are never empty, and that the pens always have ink in them.

The CEO said to the boy…

You have the most important job in the whole bank.  You are responsible for our clients’ very first experience with us when they walk in the door.

…A bank survives on its deposits. It is your job to make sure that our clients who come in to deposit money have confidence in our bank. How would they feel if the pens had no ink? Your job is to make sure their first impression is a great one, so that they keep doing business with us.

Connect the dots

What is so great about this story is that the CEO connected the dots for the intern.

It is not that any particular job is more valuable than another.

The trick is to understand what the business values and make sure your work is impacting that, no matter what job you are in.

Don’t treat your job description as a life sentence.  Change it. Do more and different than you are asked to do.  Understand what the business values and then tune your job to make sure you deliver on it.

How do you connect the dots between what you do and what the business cares about?

Sometimes people tell me that their job is too low level — it’s too far removed from the big business initiatives for them to see why it’s valuable.

Major red flag: If you can’t connect the dots, no one else will either.  You need to map it out.

Ask, So What?

For example:

A manager of a team of tech-writers: We produce documents that explain how to use our products.  So what?  Customers can be successful using our products. So what?  They don’t need to contact us as often.  So what?  Supporting our products costs less.  So what?  That impacts our profit. There you go!

Then think about how to add even more value.

You could interview the web and phone support people and understand what questions are most frequently asked.  That would give you ideas for what to include in the documentation to reduce the support load even more.  There you are adding more value.

As you learn more from the support teams, you might even get an idea to share with the product development team about how a feature of the product is causing a lot of confusion.  If they implemented it differently it would require less support and less documentation!  Value again.

Don’t wait to be asked.  Find the value.  Add more.

Make your job more valuable

If there is a secret to succeeding at work it is to make sure your work is highly valued, and that you get recognized for it.

1. Understand the business strategy. What does the business need? And what does the business think is important to get done right now? That stuff = “the value”.  As a manager you need to always be learning this (because it changes), and sharing it with your team.

2. Change how you work. Make sure the work your team is doing is impacting those things.

3. Get recognized for it by connecting the dots for people. You have the responsibility to show how your work is impacting what the business cares about. You need to show how you are adding value.  Don’t wait for others to figure it out or to discover how valuable you are.

4. Impact Profit. One way to specifically add value, that is available to anyone in any role, is to make the business more efficient or productive.  That way you impact the bottom line. Profit is always something that is important to the business!

Not everything we work on adds value.

Sort through your workload and understand which things really make a difference.

I have always done my best to make sure that every single person in my organization understands how the business makes money, and what the drivers of revenue, cost and profit are.

If you can get everyone on your team focused on adding value, you can motivate and challenge them to step up, and it will be clear to everyone how you are impacting the business.

Your Job

Your job description is not a life sentence – you can change it.  You need to change it.

If you want to make more progress in your career, (and suffer less along the way), you need to rethink how you work.

I had an opportunity to speak about this at the Design Automation Conference in Anaheim this week, to the Women in Electronic Design Group.

My talk was on Managing your Career on Purpose.

Add value to the business

Something that has been on my mind lately is how important it is, for people at any level, to take control of re-defining their job so they can put themselves in a position to add more value to the business.

The only reliable way to advance your career is to understand what the business needs and make sure your work is impacting it.

Working hard is not enough

In fact, working too hard, trying to do everything that is asked of you, is what gets you stuck.  You need to understand what the business values, and then tune your  job to deliver more value, not just deliver more work.

You need to refuse to burn your time, energy, and career capital working too hard, the wrong way, on the wrong things.

What I find really interesting about this when I work with companies, is this gaping disconnect:

• The Employees: When I talk to the employees and mid-level managers, they tell me they feel like they are working themselves to death, and their work is not being appreciated or recognized.
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• The Executives: Then when I talk to the executive management, they tell me that they are frustrated that their people are stuck in the details and not stepping up to deliver at a higher level of value, and failing to drive the strategy forward.
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What this implies, is that improving your career is not just good for you. It’s good for your company.  They are waiting for you to step up.

The secret:

• Your management doesn’t just want you to do what they ask of you.
• They want you to do the job that needs to be done, not just the one they gave you.

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Think about it this way.  If your job as a manager was just to get your team to do everything that is asked of you, your manager wouldn’t need you.  They could just assign all the work directly to your team.

You need to change the game

You need to catch all the work, but not try to do it all as it comes across the table at you.  You need to step above it, analyze it, sift through it, prioritize it, and recommend a better way to do it.

Your management wants you to think strategically about the workload that is dumped on you.  It’s up to you to figure out how to change the game, figure out what the most important stuff is, and find the best way to do it.

Don’t wait to be asked

The people who figure this out and do it without being asked or instructed to do so are the ones whose careers advance.

They are not burned out, working tirelessly, without recognition, on everything.  They have figured out a way to be less busy, but add more value to the business.

Good for business

From the perspective of the business, having more people and managers who are personally motivated and capable to step up, the better the business strategy will be executed.

Execution stalls happen when managers and employees are so overwhelmed with activities and demands of their current jobs, that they don’t even have time to think about how to do things in a better way, or implement a new strategy.

Stepping Up

Make sure you know what it means to lead at the right level and manage talent and team performance, not just projects and work output.  Increase the reach and breadth and significance of your impact.

Communicate better.  Build a strong network of support.  Delegate better, and always raise the bar.  You need to step up and pull your people up. It is what your business is expecting of you.

Individuals:  If you’d like some help to step up, check out these resources.

Executives:  If you’d like to discuss how to give your managers tools and support to step up, contact me:

In a struggling economy, companies are asking employees to go without raises and bonuses.

Why humans work

Do your employees get angry and check out? Or do they keep working hard with little to no cash incentive to do so?

The good news is that humans work for more reasons than money — and money is not even at the top of the list.

What is at or near the top of the list for people is to feel like their work matters, that it counts for something.

The companies who create meaning for the work keep their employees engaged and productive through the business downturns.

Companies that do not go the extra mile to create meaning, have a workforce doing as little as possible.  I see this often.  It is a shame for everyone involved, including the shareholders.

People want their work to matter

I was preparing to write this blog about how to make work more meaningful for people, when I heard a piece of an interview with Dan Ariely about his new book, The Upside of Irrationality.

I didn’t hear the whole interview, but he talked about a test he did to measure how important meaning was in one’s work. The test was to complete a task repeatedly, until you wanted to stop.

The task was to build a Lego robot.

When you completed it, you got asked if you would like to build another robot.

In one case the robot you built was placed to the side so you could admire it while you built the next one.

In the other case if you said you’d like to build another, they dis-assembled the one you just built right in front of you,  gave you back the pieces and said, OK build another one.

How to drain all meaning out of someone’s work

I’m sure I am doing a dis-service to Dan Ariely’s work by taking this out of context, but that is one of the best metaphors I have heard for taking the meaning out of someone’s work!

It got me to thinking, what are all the ways we drain meaning from our employees work, dis-assemble their robots right before their eyes, mabye even without recognizing we are doing it?  And how can we build up the meaning instead?

1. Changing your mind all the time

Someone completes something you said was really important, but you changed your mind since you first assigned the task.  Now instead of accepting the work and thanking them, you gloss over it and ask them to do something else instead.   Then later you change your mind again, maybe even back to the first thing.

Robot parts are flying at this point!

Let people finish things.  Don’t keep switching the task before people can complete things.  Consider the full cost of changing your mind.  If you really have to change your mind, don’t skip the closure.

Thank people for the work, and communicate a reason why THEIR work still counts,  even though YOU have changed your mind.

2. Not accepting something different than you do it

Be careful here, just because it isn’t like you would do it, doesn’t mean that it’s not good enough, or maybe even better.

Build the robot again, but this time use the blue legos for the feet and the red ones for the arms because that is how I do it.

You are far more likely to create meaning if you accept good work, than if you tweak it to death just to make it exactly like you would do it.

3. Skipping the closure

The urgent customer issue or demand has disappeared because you either won the deal or lost the deal. The team has been working frantically to produce or defend something.

When you no longer feel the urgency, you either forget to call off the team, so they keep working round the clock — oops!   Or you just never go back to collect the work, because it no longer matters to you.

Just because it no longer has meaning for you and you have moved on to other things, doesn’t mean you should take the meaning away from the people that did the work.

Save the robot as a resource

If the work is no longer necessary, close out the project, thank them, and have a quick brainstorming about how we can use this important work for another customer or to solve a general issue.

It’s so much easier to just move on to your next urgent thing, but you are sacrificing your team’s motivation an ongoing performance and support if you skip this step.

4. Not being clear about the strategy

This is probably the biggest and most common hazard I have seen.

Companies are fuzzy about what their strategy is.  But they demand lots of hard work from people, and it is utterly impossible to understand if the work matters to the strategy or not.

Unclear strategy causes lots of wasted time and energy working on the wrong things, or waiting for decisions to be made, but it is really de-motivating for people to deliver work into a strategic black hole.

That is like throwing their robots directly into the trash can.

Make the strategy clear.  It’s what creates meaning for the work.
See also: Uncertainty is Expensive

5. Not connecting the dots for people

Even if the strategy is clear to you, don’t expect your staff to automatically see how their work fits into supporting the big picture.

You need to spell it out and show them why their work matters. If you never connect the dots about how their work specifically supports the over-all strategy, there is no meaning in it for them.

Otherwise, they are just putting their robots on a conveyor belt to be used for unknown purposes.

Ensuring that all your employees understand how the business works, and how their work helps move it forward, motivates and enables them make better decisions and add more value.

With our without financial rewards your employees will do better work, faster, if they can personally see why it matters.

10 IDEAS FROM THE WEBINAR

PACKAGING & POSITIONING YOURSELF

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Have the Right Strategy

1. You, the Product. You will come across as much more powerful and compelling if you develop your approach to present yourself.

You need to think of yourself as a product to be marketed, and create a communication strategy for each audience you need to influence.

You have a lot of control over how you are perceived, and can stack the deck in your favor, if you do the right things on purpose.

Create the Right Materials

2. Your Marketing Materials. We talked about creating an inventory of marketing materials way beyond a resume.

3. The worksheets for this Webinar are loaded with checklists, examples, and templates for creating a compelling marketing package for your job search or stronger positioning within your company. (download)

Define Your Unique Offer

4. Your Offer: You need to talk about what you offer in a specific way that opens doors and gets people making introductions for you.

5. Thought Leadership. If you want a big job, people will Google you. Make sure they find something impressive! We covered how to create presence and thought leadership internal and external to your company.

6. The Right Stories. Having the right stories prepared ahead of time is critical to making the right impression.  How to package your key accomplishments and proudest moments, and use them to gain a real advantage in how others perceive you.

7. Story Telling: Don’t be boring! How to wrap the right, different titles and
punch lines around key stories for each specific audience, and your desired outcome with them.

Take the Right Actions

8. How to get on “the List”: There is always ” A List”.  Learn how to get on it.  Make connections and get the support of people who are in a position to help you.

9. Make the Connection: We talked about how to map what you offer to what companies are looking for, so they will recognize that you are what they are looking for.

10. How I did it: I walked through an example of how I used all of these techniques at a time in my career when I was going for a big job.

The feedback on this session was amazing, thank you!

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3 Months FREE Membership Offer

Based on the great response to the Membership program and this particular webinar,
I have decided to extend the 3 free months offer to June 9th.

If you become a member by June 9th, you’ll get this podcast and the worksheets,  as well access to all the other resources in the Member Library until September 2011.

Become a member now and get 3 months free.

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Hidden Expense…

Uncertainty is a huge hidden expense in your business.

There’s the obvious expense of work not getting done — as uncertainty causes people waiting for decisions instead of working.

But the more damaging and expensive side of uncertainty is the work that gets done the wrong way.

The wrong work

Unresolved strategic issues, don’t just stay in the board room until you finally get them answered.

Every unanswered strategic question leaves legions of people in your organization, less productive and more expensive than they would be with clear direction.

It’s the inconsistent work that comes from everyone taking their best guess while waiting for the strategy from above, that is expensive.

As a leader one of your biggest responsibilities is to remove uncertainty.

Strategic Chaos

What are the unresolved strategic issues in your company?  What are the decisions that are never seem to get closed?

Are we a product or service company? Should we do an exclusive agreement?  Should we be selling through different partners?  Should we upgrade our architecture, or build on the one we have?  Should we change our pricing for global customers or optimize regionally?

The cost of indecision…

It’s not that strategic unanswered questions go answered that causes the problem. It’s that they get answered every day, differently, by front line employees who are making the best choices they can in the moment for how to implement their work.

A tale of 2 business units

An interesting example of this is a company I worked with that had two business units.  At the executive level, it was a political war.

They could not commit to a decision if one or the other business unit was the primary mission of the company, or if both businesses should get equal attention and investment.

So what happened…

Hundreds of front line, individual contributors had to wonder, debate and make up their own answer to the most strategic decision in the company: What business are we in?

Customer-facing, unsupported strategy…

A specific, downstream effect of this was that every trade show event manager had signs for both businesses in their inventory.  So they each had to decide on their own, Do we hang one sign or both?  Do we make one bigger? Put one on top? Or give them equal treatment?

They all did their best, but of course they all made different decisions.  And different local politics ensured that the company was never represented the same way twice!

Because the executives left this uncertainty, the most fundamental positioning of the company was executed differently at every event.

Failure to build value, and wasted time and money…

The company shot them selves in the foot at every event, failing to build their credibility and recognition consistently in the market.

Your job is to eliminate uncertainty, so that everyone can invest in executing in an aligned way, to build value, market confidence and brand.

This is true for every function and every team in the organization. And this has a huge ROI.  Failure has a huge expense.

How much uncertainty is in your organization?

This is at the heart of the work I do with my corporate clients.  Create clarity, concrete actions and motivation both at the executive level AND with all of the employees.

If you want to talk about the execution challenges across your organization,
contact me.  I’d be interested to hear what you are facing, and would be happy to share some ideas with you.

I have been writing a lot recently about the work I do in helping companies identify and deal with execution risks.

Wait it out…

One of the biggest issues companies are facing today is that people are simply not in the game.

They are keeping their heads down, waiting for the rest of the shoes to drop, and for the dust to clear.

So people are not engaging. Execution stalls.

What is more risky?

The interesting part about this, is that employees do this not because they are lazy, but because they think it is a safer, job-preserving tactic, than engaging with a new, risky initiative.

With so much change happening, they are afraid if they jump on board, visibly, they will become a target, when the next change happens.  It’s safer to just lay low, and stay off the radar.

Frustrated leaders always ask me:

• How do I get them to engage?
• How can I get them to start working in the new way?
• How can I get them leading, being a positive example for others?
• How can I get them communicating more?
• How can I get them to share their opinions?

First, a stable environment

As leaders, what we need to do is to help people understand that it is actually more risky to be invisible than it is to be engaged.

But first, you owe it to your team to create a stable environment.  You need to remove uncertainty about what people should be working on.  You need to not change your mind all the time, and not change the strategy every month.  It’s not fair to expect them to engage in chaos.

As long as you do this you can encourage your people to step up.

DEBATE or GO?

Debate

One of the best ways I have done this is to make it clear that for every initiatve, there is DEBATE Time and there is GO time.  During debate time, I make it clear that I want to hear people’s opinions.  I want to hear the arguments.  I want everyone to fight for  their point of view.

Decision

After debate time is over, I make it clear who owns the decision, and the decision gets made.

GO Time

Then I make it clear that we are in GO time.  This is the time to engage in the work, not in the debate.

By setting this structure, you can make it clear that expected behavior is to not be invisible during debate time, and to not be invisible during go time.  You want to hear opinions, and then you want to see active engagement on the decided course of action.

Invisible is not acceptable

Make it clear that being invisible in not acceptable in either phase,  and is actually a riskier behavior than jumping in.  You need to imply, if not outright communicate, if there were a need to do layoffs, it would be the invisible people who are not engaged who would be at most risk.

Make it feel real

People are more likely to participate in the GO phase if they have participated in the DEBATE phase.  It’s not just that they have more ownership, which also helps.  It’s that they have participated in the socialization of the idea.

It’s not just some fringe idea that is going to go by the wayside, so it’s not worth getting involved in – better to wait it out.

They get the feeling that this is a real thing, that everyone is involved with. SO it will be OK for me to.  I don’t want to get left out.

The source of execution risk

A big part of your job as a leader is to understand and deal with the execution risks within your own organization.

There are lots of drivers of business risk that have to do with external forces…

But execution risk in your organization comes from your people not working the way the business needs them to be working — which you can impact.

The Value of People

This is why I never understand when some business leaders see their people more as an expense to manage down, than an asset to build up…Or when they think people-oriented initiatives do not have a hard ROI.

Successful, growing people, build successful growing businesses.

I never saw the investment in people as a nice to have or a soft business driver.

I believe growing your people is as powerful a driver of profitable business growth as any other lever in your strategy.

Recession oriented thinking…

Someone recently said to me, “In a recession, companies don’t have to care about their employees.”  Indeed, I am seeing this.

Because employees are feeling quite beaten down these days, with increasing workloads and worries, and less care and feeding from above, some explicit focus on employees can have a dramatic impact on your bottom line right now.

No Kumbaya Required

I’m not talking about over hiring or over paying…I’m not talking about touchy-feely team building that is not connected to the business…And I’m not talking about weak, overly consensus-driven, everyone-gets-a-say-about-everything-all-the-time management practices.

I’m talking about paying market value for talent, but treating people above market – in ways that matter to them as humans, AND that drive the business forward.

The Hard ROI on People

I have led several business turn-arounds, where by definition, we were not awash in funds.  But in each case, I was able to get the people who remained with the business to personally care about what we were doing, and to personally invest in the success of the new plan.

A big part of the success came how we treated the employees.

We delivered growing revenue, and growing profits each time.

We did this because the whole team got on board, they were highly aligned to what needed to be done and why, and were motivated to contribute above and beyond their job description.

Remind me again, why is that not a hard ROI?

Why do business leaders think that they can do better for the bottom line by treating their employees like crap and/or interchangeable cogs?

How to reduce execution risk

This is at the core of the work I do with executive teams — identifying and fixing obstacles to execution, by helping get more of their people doing what the business needs them to do, in a more productive way.

Below I have outlined several ideas of things we implemented — things you can do to get your whole organization successfully executing difficult change.

In the coming weeks, I am going to write an article on each one of these, but just to give you a place to start, I’ll list them here today…

Motivation plus hard ROI…

Note all of these increase motivation, (and decrease employee’s anger and resentment), but it you think motivation is a soft or not-critical measure, I have noted a hard ROI for each one as well.

1. Uncertainty is expensive!

Uncertainty causes people to wait for decisions instead of working.

People don’t know exactly what to work on, so they don’t do as much work…Or they work on the wrong things. It is your job as a leader to remove uncertainty.

ROI: More of the right work gets done. You build value. You go faster. More deals close. Less time is wasted.

2. Resolve persistent strategic questions and disagreements

This is a specific version of #1, but just know that the longer you don’t provide answers, the more people either are not working at all, or are working in ways that conflict one another…

You are sending mixed messages to the market.

If these decisions are hard for you as the leader, why are you expecting every front line individual employee to answer them on their own every day?

ROI: More powerful, clear, consistent messages to customers, partners and sales (more sales), Less internal conflict and competition, Less sales stalls and losses (more horsepower on selling, weakened competition)

3.  Create Meaning

People want to feel like their work matters.

Make the big picture clear.

Don’t expect your staff to automatically see how their work fits into supporting the big picture.  You need to spell it out and show them why their work matters.

The more employees who understand and care about the big picture, the more employees who can make decisions and innovate in ways that contribute value or reduce costs.

ROI:  More higher quality work, more innovation on revenue and cost, less time in needless clarification.

4. Maximize Potential

Career development often falls first to HR and is then cut from the budget entirely.

The core of career development is to help each employee at every level understand their strengths and get them in a job that is a good fit where they can thrive and step up.

It’s a huge expense to have people in the wrong jobs.

They are not thriving, so they are not productive, and they are taking up a spot for someone who could be thriving in that role.

ROI: More productive individuals, more higher value work done, more bench strength.

5. Recognition

The issue is not typically that executives meanly refuse or withhold Thank You’s, it’s that they don’t have a system to recognize when something exceptional has been done, that someone deserves to be thanked for.

Set up a recognition process and culture, and involve the whole leadership team.

ROI: OK.  So this one is about Motivation, but I can tell you for sure, that if one employee thinks, “Wow, the company really values me”, it makes them and everyone around them more productive.

6. Communication

Most organizations fail to communicate enough.   Once you do 1-5 above, communicate about it every day, every chance you get.

You should be tired of discussing your Ruthless Priorities and your core messages.

Not until everyone is sick of hearing about it, and you almost can’t bear to say it again, is it beginning to stick with the organization at large.

ROI:  Huge decrease in wasted time for endless clarifications, email debates, and re-visiting decisions over and over again.  (Stick to your plan. Go faster.)

Hard ROI *IS* Personal

The trick is that since you are asking a personal investment of your employees to step up, they require a personal investment on your part.

As a leader, you can’t delegate this stuff.  You need to engage personally.
It’s worth it.

Things you can do right now:

1. Stay tuned in the next weeks for articles with more ideas on each of these topics.

2. If this was a forward, you can subscribe to get your own copy of this blog each week.

3. To discuss how I work with business leaders on implementing these practices contact me.

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10 Ideas from the Webinar:

BUILD  ENDURING VALUE

An Interview with Bob Evans:

Don’t miss this one!

Bob was highly entertaining and shared really important ideas about what companies get right and wrong in creating real value for their customers and business.

DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST now to learn more about:

What companies get wrong

1. False Gods: Bob talked about how companies are driven by things that seem important, but really create no value for customers.

Shareholder Value is an example – sure you need it, but how many companies have unhappy customers and high shareholder value?

2. Convenient and Familiar: Companies often disregard what customers really want because it is too hard to change the way they work. Bob talked about how to get un-stuck.

3. The wrong metrics: Does what you measure get you closer to your customers or put up barriers to meaningful interaction?  Do your measures represent the past or the future?

The Core of Customer Value

4. Satisfied or Excited? Merely satisfied customers don’t need to talk to you.  You need your customers to be excited about engaging with you.   Bob talked about how to actively engage your customers.

5. Customers have more choice and power than ever. How do you make your customers want and need to do business with you?

6. Human Engagement: The best companies respect and engage their customers as humans.  They challenge themselves to live up to their customers’ intelligence, expectations and needs.

Building Value In

7. Knowledge. Bob talked about how to make sure you appreciate the difference between:  What do I Know? vs. What do I think I know? and how companies get this wrong.  We would all be better off asking ourselves this question each morning!

8. Partnerships. Bob gave several examples of how using Strategic Partnerships to engage customers in co-design of products, services and experiences creates genuine, enduring value.

9. Experience. The best companies focus on their customers’ experience with the products and services vs. the products and services themselves.

10. Packaging. Bob talked about the great untapped value of how companies Package, Present and Deliver their products to reach a much wider and highly motivated market.

DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST now to learn more about Building Enduring Value

About Bob Evans

Bob Evans is the SVP and Director of InformationWeeks’s Global CIO business unit.
You can check out more of Bob’s writing on Information Week’s Global CIO website:

Here are a couple of Bob’s articles:

• Global CIO: Are Oracle, HP, Cisco, and IBM too big to innovate?
• Global CIO: UPS CIO Barnes Shatters Dangerous IT Stereotypes

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Hi Everyone,

Well who would have thought that a volcano in Iceland would prevent me from speaking at two events in New York City next week. 

Flights are delayed at least 4 days. I am stuck in Europe.

More precisely I am stuck in Florence with my sister, which admittedly, is not major suffering as far as travel disasters go. 

But the bad news is that I will miss the opportunity to connect in person with two great groups of people.

1. CIO Magazine’s CIO Perspectives

I was going to talk about how CIO’s can increase their relevance and political power, by making changes to the way they engage their business counterparts.

IT can make great strides winning over the CFO and CEO by how they translate IT vocabulary, front-end their help desk and website, present their budget in terms the business wants them to spend money on, and how they get their team executing on the things that are most important to the business.

2. The CMO Club Summit

I was going to talk to CMO’s about how to avoid constantly explaining and defending marketing, and go on the offense to prove how marketing is driving key business agendas. 

Marketing can step up strategically by getting their own organization more aligned and executing better, and by communicating about what marketing does in a way that is immediately relevant and valuable to the business stakeholders.  Don’t educate about marketing, talk about what THEY want, and get the green light on your plan.

Apologies

So my apologies go out to both audiences and conference organizers.  I enjoy these events most for the chance to learn from everyone else that is there.

I hope to participate next time!

And for everyone on the blog.  I’ll be back next week with a real post when I can get better internet service that does not cost per minute!

Ciaò

Patty

PS.  The photo is grainy because it was dusk (and taken with my phone), not because of volcanic ash!  I loved this view of the Duomo lit up at dusk .  (Viewed from the rooftop patio of the Grand Hotel Baglioni, while drinking  champagne!)