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Creating Shared Value Article Series

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

Creating Shared Value (CSV) is not about your corporate responsibility, it is about the opportunity to create profits with purpose that simultaneously drive sustainability, economic growth and social progress.  Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategies typically come at a cost, using corporate economic profits to aid with social progress, but what we are talking about here is integrating social progress into your business strategies as a means of creating long term, sustainable profitability that benefits all stakeholders; employees, customers, stockholders, partners and the communities in which your company operates. To many business leaders and philanthropists, this all sounds too good to be true but the fact is this is a proven methodology.

In my article series with Motivated Online we are exploring a structured framework that serves as a guide for you to embark upon your journey to start Creating Shared Value.

In my 1st article, we distill the concepts of Creating Shared Value.

In my 2nd article, we examine the key preliminary questions essential to shaping your Shared Value strategy.

In my 3rd article, we introduce a dialog that educates and motivates others to support this movement.

And most recently, we delve into how to attain sponsorship to seed your Shared Value journey.

In my next article we will begin to rethink your products and services through the lens of Creating Shared Value.  Stay tuned!

I would love to hear from you, what are your thoughts on this transformative strategy?

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My Best Customer Experience Ever Via Porter

Monday, May 9th, 2011

I received a package last week from Porter Airlines.  I suspected my favourite airline was sending some kind of nice gesture to show appreciation for my being a regular customer… Why? Because that’s just the way they operate.  Well, I had to read the letter inside more than once as I was in such disbelief of their generosity!  It came as a letter from the CEO, Robert Deluce and it read…

“Dear Dawna,

As one of our most regular customers on the Toronto-Montreal route, I’d like to thank you for flying with Porter.  We’re grateful for every one of the many miles you’ve flown with us.

As well as a free roundtrip and discount code for 40% off anywhere Porter flies, inside this box you will find a beauiful, handcrafted passport holder made by Want Les Essentials de la Vie; a small, Canadian business with admirable attention to detail, much like Porter.  It’s my sincere hope that you’ll enjoy using it on your travels for many years to come.

…

Sincerely,

Robert Deluce”

Wow, one free trip and another at 40% off, that is amazing.  The letter was written like a piece of “Customer Experience” art!  This letter and gift even further strengthened my admiration and loyalty to Porter.  Kudos to Deluce and his team, this is smart business.  Companies often spend large amounts on big broad marketing campaigns with varying results, if more companies focused on maintaining valuable customers in powerful ways like this they would be surprised by the magnitude of the impact that would have with their customers.  In essence they are crowd sourcing their marketing and it works, this blog post case in point.

Porter rocks!

Posted in Blog Homepage Featured, Favourite Links | 3 Comments »

What CEM, CSV and EPM Can Learn From the NFL

Friday, May 6th, 2011

If this HBR IdeaCast with author of Fixing the Game, Roger Martin does not drive home the need for us to change our measures than what will?  Martin, shares a powerful metaphor to illustrate how misguided our corporate performance measures have become.  He brilliantly drives home just how normalized we have become to ignore such radically irrational behaviours.  His NFL analogy is both clever and simple,  I loved it!

This awareness presents us with a great opportunity to rethink our corporate key performance indicators.  We need to start measuring what matters.  What matters is the Shared Value we create and the consequences of the Customer Experience we create.  We also need to change our emphasis of measure, while setting goals is essential, what matters most is not whether or not we fully meet our goals but rather our improvement factor.  The example Martin provides with Google is tragic, how can we not celebrate and reward a growth of 27% for a $30 billion company with a 21% return on equity and 17% increase in earnings?

Bottom line, we need to rethink what we measure and how we measure it in context of what matters today, in terms of impact and sustainability.

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Visualizing CXPA’s Full Potential

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

Many of us supported ClienteerHub’s mission to create a social learning community for Customer Experience and like many start ups with a great idea, unfortunately it was unable to sustain it’s initial vision.  Yet we, the community, all knew the value of a community focused on creating greater awareness and improvement in the Customer Experience discipline.  So I am thrilled to welcome and be a member of the recently launched CXPA (Customer Experience Professionals Association).  CXPA is founded by Customer Experience pioneers Bruce Temkin and Jeanne Bliss with a shared mission:

“The Customer Experience Professionals Association is a global, non-profit organization that supports the professional development of its members by enhancing networking, providing research and education, establishing standards, promoting the industry, and creating a better understanding of the discipline of customer experience.”

CXPA has corporate sponsorship (and membership) from the likes of Adobe, RightNow, and SapientNitro just to name a few.  It is not a free membership model, but it is a not for profit organization.  When I checked earlier today, there were 86 individual members and 21 founding corporate members since their launch last Wednesday.  So far the content is all authored by Temkin and Bliss and while I hold their insights in very high regard I am hoping they will add the wealth of other rich insights from our community. <nudge nudge wink wink>

I am excited to see that they have created committees inviting members within the community to help shape the education, marketing, membership, networking and professional development strategies.  There is no question CXPA has the potential to boost the momentum and maturity for the Customer Experience movement and I have great confidence in the founders and our collaborative community to make this a success.

Key to the success of this association is motivating meaningful discussions and a rich customer experience, essentially drinking our own champagne.  As of yet the conversation has not started, but it is still early, and it is up to us to make it happen… that said I wanted to share my vision of an CXPA that would inspire our community and maximize our potential to co-create value for the Customer Experience movement.  Just imagine…

Have any other ideas?  Bruce, Jeanne, I am happy to help!

Posted in Blog Homepage Featured, Favourite Links | 2 Comments »

What Makes a Wise Leader?

Monday, May 2nd, 2011

I loved HBR’s Big Idea feature this month, The Wise Leader by professors Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi.   Nonaka and Takeuchi have brilliantly identified six abilities of wise leaders:

#1 Wise leaders make decisions only after they figure out what is good for the organization and society.

#2 They can quickly grasp the essence of any situation or problem and intuitively fathom the nature and meaning of people, things, and events.

#3 They constantly create informal as well as formal shared contexts for senior executives and employees to construct new meaning through their interactions.

#4 They know how to use metaphors and stories to convert the essence of their actual experiences into tacit knowledge for individuals and groups.

#5 They exercise political power to bring together people with conflicting goals and spur them to action.

#6 They encourage the development of practical wisdom in others, especially employees on the front lines, through apprenticeship and mentoring.

The authors explore the abundance of drivers that have led us to rethink the essential capabilities of today’s leaders.  In essence we have been “Hit by fraud, deceit, and greed, people are angry about the visible lack of values and ethics in business.”  Arguably we have already begun to mend this hardship and I am over the moon by the growing momentum.  In order to truly harness the Shared Value movement and begin to make profits with purpose we need to cultivate wise leaders and foster wise employees.

I would like to add a 7th essential aptitude for today’s wise leaders:

#7 They are cognizant of irrational behaviours and biases, particularly of employees and customers, and mindful of the predictable patterns that are at the source of them.  They know how to shape employee and customer responses through motivational constructs.  In other words, they do not design incentives that presume logical responses; what may seem logical in theory is frequently highly illogical in practice.

I believe this is at the core of what defies our ease in creating the employee and customers experiences we intend.

What other talents are vital for today’s wise leaders?

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The Customer Experience Show – Making Profit With Purpose

Monday, April 11th, 2011

Listen to internet radio with Customer Experience on Blog Talk Radio

Posted in Blog Homepage Featured, Homepage Featured | 1 Comment »

Getting Started with Shared Value

Saturday, April 9th, 2011

As a follow up to my debut article on Motivated Online, Pairing Passion with Purpose by Creating Shared Value,  we start to explore Enabling Shared Value. First we zoom out to the birds-eye view, illustrating our roadmap at a very high level.  Within each step are numerous powerful methods and frameworks to support your journey and effectively enable your Shared Value strategies.  Then we zoom in and take a worms-eye view to ‘ASK’ the key preliminary questions essential to shaping a Shared Value strategy.

The goal is to put your Shared Value journey into the context of your corporate environment.  In my next article we will focus on the essential “DIALOG” needed to get your Shared Value journey in motion.

Big thanks to the audacious and highly creative folks at Motivated!

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Passion Profile Featuring Michelle Romanica – Part 2

Friday, April 8th, 2011

For the month of April I am thrilled to be featuring Michelle Romanica for my Passion Profile.  Last week we learned why Michelle is so passionate about the “human connection”.  This week we will learn about what traits best describe Michelle and which traits she most admires in others.

As I mentioned last week, Michelle is first a foremost a master of the “human connection”.  As a Business Outcomes Facilitator with the KeyChange Institute she supports business leaders in achieving their desired business outcomes with a process that engages the science behind learning. It aligns thought processing and behaviour choices with specific desired business outcomes.  Michelle is also a Producer for the Customer Experience Show; an internet talk radio show on a quest to raise the awareness of Customer Experience practices and principles and why customer centricity is a must for long term sustainability.

Dawna: “What are 5 traits those that know you best would use to describe you?”

Michelle:

“Passionate: The daily fuel that keep me moving forward.

Introspective: Constant questioning and learning.

Open-minded: So much can be learned from others and synergistic efforts produce the richest results.

Tenacious: When I am passionate about something, I don’t let “can’t be done” or “difficult to do” steer me off course.

Optimistic:  We are not doomed. We are evolving. And every person is worth the collective effort to better our world as we know it.”

Dawna:  “What qualities do you most admire in others?”

Michelle:

“Humility: People who have put ego aside for the greater good of the people he/she serves.

Intuitiveness: Being guided by intuition and not solely reliant on logic and rationalization, which can be manipulated by others.

Clarity: Being razor sharp about their vision and what they need from others to make it happen.

Transparency: Speaking the truth at all times and understanding that people can handle the truth and will be more committed for it.

Trust-worthy: Someone who does what they say they will do, when they are going to do it.”

Stay tuned for more of Michelle’s answers next Friday!

Curious about my previous Passion Profiles?  Cheers to Dan Rockwell, Eric Jacques, Ted Coine, Tim Sanchez, Dean van Leeuwen, S. Max Brown, David McQueen, “Write”, Linda Ireland and Ron Dimon.

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The Health Care and Gaming Connection

Monday, April 4th, 2011

Not only is cross-fertilizing brilliant ideas a clever innovative approach to solving complex problems, it can also steer you towards strategic growth opportunities.   It was not surprising to me to read about “The Pharma-Gaming Connection” in Locating Your Next Strategic Opportunity via this month’s issue of HBR.  The Health Care industry was well represented at the Gamification Summit in San Fransisco earlier this year and gaming was a hot topic at the recent HiMSS in Orlando.  The article shares examples of ventures seizing this opportunity such as Foldit; an online social game for science geeks based on the challenge of finding the most efficient way to fold proteins in hopes that they can help solve real protein-folding challenges for biopharma companies.  What struck me about the examples the article provided was that none of them were focused on solving the pervasive barriers that stunt growth and innovation in Health Care broadly; issues such as patient adherence, patient privacy, access, and patient experience.  My point is not to diminish the significance of the examples given, in fact these companies are helping pioneer the pathway for us to tackle the more systemic issues.  In essence I want to stress the need for us to target these issues.

I get super excited thinking about leveraging mass collaboration to bring Health Care into the 21st century by cross pollinating principles of Motivational Design, data visualization, and shared value.  As Hans Rosling has said “I am not an optimist, I am a possiblist”.   This is all very doable, in fact it is being done as we speak, smart biopharma companies and Health Care broadly can either chose to help shape this movement or scramble later to catch up.

Do you know of any examples of ventures connecting Health Care and gaming?  Please share if you do…

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Buzz-Off!!

Saturday, April 2nd, 2011

I am perplexed by the ever present sensitivity and negativity to “buzzwords”. I think it is cowardly to dismiss or discount something new or something that represents change without reason.  On the other hand, I acknowledge that new words are often misused or abused for impact or simply to be catchy.  “Buzzwords” remind me of what we call “one hit wonders” in the music world.  Only we don’t know if it is a “one hit wonder” until we give it time, we don’t call every new musician with a new song a “one hit wonder”.   Many are, but many are not.  Why don’t we give the same respect to new words?  If they don’t sustain into something meaningful, then label them “buzzwords”.  Not all new words are bad, many sustain to become respected business terms.  I remember when “cloud computing” and “social media” were followed by a dismissive snarl amongst the skeptics.  All I am suggesting here is that we not be quick to judge every new term or word simply because it is gaining airtime but is unproven.  In parallel, we all need to be mindful of over-using new words which can render them annoying.  No different than a catchy new song that you overplay until you are annoyed by the very song you initially loved.

So buzz-off all you new word haters and buzz-down all you new word junkies!  We all lean a little in one direction or the other and I am guilty of the latter, I do love discovering new words!  Which way do you lean?

If you had a crystal ball, which of current new words are certain to be buzz-kill and which ones have sustainability?

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