Performance Perspectives

Category Archives: Enterprise Performance

Governing Cx through Line-of-Sight

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line of sight gearsAn end-to-end approach for managing customer experience strategy and delivering on its promises...

Over the past 24 months, Customer Experience Initiatives (Cx programs, as they have come to be called) have climbed to the top of the radar screens of most leadership teams. Organizations are abuzz with projects to identify “touchpoints,” map “customer journeys,” and strengthen their customer-facing business processes. Alongside these initiatives are even larger investments in acquiring the data and analytics required to feed and sustain these service improvement strategies. >>Next>>

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2014: The Year of Touchpoint Renewal

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CxTAM Industry View
Copyright 2013, onVector Consulting

At its core, Cx is about all the pursuit of delivering  an exceptional customer experience across every touchpoint, every time.

That’s a pretty ambitious goal, and one that I’ve begun to refer to with my clients as the “Cx Holy Grail”.

EVERY touchpoint, EVERY time? Think about it. Every time we buy a product, activate a product, use a product, get support, renew our service, suspend or terminate our contract…and the list goes on…, we must deliver an exceptional experience. Some would even say that our viewing of advertisements, interactions with social media, and even our passive conversations with others about our experiences qualify as a touch points that need to be “managed”.  And they wouldn’t be far off.

So where do we focus first? Which touch points? Which parts of those touch points ? What can wait? What can’t?

One way to simplify the madness is to have a common set of unifying standards that every part of the organization can identify with, routinely. While statements like “Exceptional Cx: Every Touchpoint, Every Time” make for good mantras and vision statements, our Cx program will be short lived unless those statements can be  translated into a clear set of observable, measurable and actionable factors. Without these, you’re literally flying blind with no way of knowing when something is broken, where improvement is needed, or how to fix it. That’s a core principle in managing any strategy, and one that is glaringly missing from most Cx programs today. Our Touchpoint Assessment Model (TAM), and the 12 attributes that comprise it, was essentially constructed to address that gap and and help our clients better focus and navigate their Cx improvements.

TAM in a Nutshell

While  the model is based on a quite a bit of research, client experiences, and some pretty creative crowdsourcing; its structure and architecture is quite simple: 3 key areas of focus comprised of 12 unique and discernible attributes.

The first four dimensions deal primarily with the product or content being served up in the transaction. The second four deal with the process through which the interaction occurs. And the final four relate to the style and delivery of the transaction. Each of the 12 attributes are worthy of separate discussion and exploration which I’ll cover in subsequent posts. But for now,  here are the highlights.
An Exceptional Customer Experience requires that the:
 Content or Product is:

  • Relevant to the specific transaction, persona and context at play
  • Useful in serving its intended purpose
  • Reliable and consistent in its delivery
  • Value accretive (we’ll explain this more later, but suffice it to say, it’s the “differentiable stuff” (smart value) that gets noticed)
Delivered through Processes and Mediums that are:
  • Crazy simple
  • Responsive to the required or desired outcome of the transaction
  • Efficient and free of waste (“my time” and “your’s”)
  • Transparent when they need to be
With an accompanying Style and Tone that is
  • Inviting and engaging 
  • Real and Authentic
  • Appropriate to the context and customer circumstance
  • Helpful and resourceful

Within each of these 12 attributes are corresponding definitions, metrics and practices that paint the full picture of what is required to achieve what we would call “best practice”. It’s a model that has been constructed over 36 months of research and client experiences, along with a healthy dose of reader input and perspective. Is it perfect? Of course not. But it does provide a good set of distinctions that help break down where our issues lie and what can be done to begin turning things around in the right direction. What’s profiled in the chart above is how our clients have graded themselves in a recent survey of current Cx program focus. Do we agree with all of these assessments? Probably not. But it does show that most believe there is considerable room for improvement. And after all, that’s the point of all of this.

Throughout 2014, I’ll be posting periodically on different aspects of the model as well as case studies on how our clients are using the framework within their Cx programs and governance processes to drive sustainable change. And as I have in the past, I’ll “pepper” things a bit with my own personal experiences which, as many of you know, are viewed through a pretty critical Cx lens. Taken together,  I believe this input will provide our readers a with a useful perspective from which to measure and strengthen their Cx program.

To all of my clients and colleagues, thanks for a great 2013. I look forward to our continued collaboration in 2014 and the learning and sharing that goes with it.

For more information on the CxTAM, and how it can help accelerate and strengthen your touchpoint renewal efforts, visit our onVector Cx webpage, or contact us at Cx@onVectorConsulting.com

b

Bob Champagne is Managing Partner: Customer Experience Solutions at onVector Consulting Group.. Bob has over 25 years of  experience in Cx and Customer Operations, with emphasis on the global energy and utilities sector. Bob has consulted with hundreds of companies across numerous industries and geographies. Bob can be contacted at bob.champagne@onvectorconsulting.com or through LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/bobchampagne 

Hitting Your Numbers in 2013

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As we said goodbye to 2012 last Monday night, many of us were already thinking about the year ahead. For some, thinking about the future and setting goals for the year ahead is just a natural part of their “wiring”—an annual renewal process, if you will. But for many, it’s a way to declare a fresh start—basking in the glory of the things we achieved last year, saying good riddance to things we didn’t achieve, and making those proverbial “resolutions” on the things we want to improve and our forward looking goals and targets.

Doing the same thing…and expecting a different result

As we all know, no matter what our new year’s declaration of improvement may be, whether it’s breaking a bad habit, adopting a good one, or just improving on something that’s important to us, many would concede that their success rates are fairly modest, with only a scarce few of these resolutions ever making it past the first couple of weeks.

But despite the fact that most achieve far less than what they set out to, we, nonetheless, go mind-numbingly through the same process year after year after year. You could say that the end of the year, and the state of mind that accompanies it (induced or otherwise), makes us a bit Pollyannaish about the future, which, in turn, causes us to overreach somewhat.

Reasonable behavior for a typical human, granted, but is it as reasonable to expect the same apparently irrational behavior pattern from a corporation, whose goals are presumably established in a more thoughtful (and usually sober :) manner. Is it surprising that these goals often realize the same miserable success rates.?

Underachievement breeds underachievement

On a flight home last week I sat next to an individual who works as a planner/scheduler in a petrochemical plant in charge of maintenance practices. For him, one of the key measures of success is simply the percentage of PM’s and CM’s (preventive and corrective maintenance work orders) that are completed as scheduled. For most of us that don’t work in that industry, we would assume the goal to be fairly high, say north of 90%. But as it turns out, the industry average appears to be in the 80% range and at this particular facility, they were struggling to hit 40%!

I see this a lot with my clients, across multiple business processes. In fact, I’d say it’s more of an epidemic than a random set of occurrences. Call centers that plan for particular service levels, but end up in a huge “recovery” mode in the middle of the year based on changes to a handful of base assumptions. Sales targets that need to be dramatically adjusted based on lower than expected conversion rates. Employee churn that seemingly appears out of nowhere.  Not to mention runaway costs and budget overruns in capital projects and initiatives.

Yes, of course, these are business realities that will always occur. Many are unpredictable but can be reasonably well contained with good contingency planning and risk management practices, or by adjusting the portfolio to have an overperforming area compensate for an underperforming one. Either way, we have accepted the fact that there will always be some level of error or slippage in our planning. The key, of course, is to minimize it.

Strengthening your performance plan

It all starts with understanding how poor target setting occurs. Here are a few of the most common breakdowns:

  1. Failure to specify and declare accountability—Many mid- to upper-level managers have a tendency to set goals at only a high level, consistent with what they must accomplish for compensation metrics and bonus payouts. For example, we might set productivity and quality goals for a regional operating group, or a customer contact center, or a production facility, but not “cascade” the measures to the discrete parts of the operation. That causes two problems: 1) accountability remains with the senior manager/executive and never flows down to the level where it can be most directly affected, and 2) the goals themselves are often misinformed, or at least not crafted with the best insight available.  The result—all sorts of end-of-year juggling and balancing to make the sum of the parts hit the target number, which only works as long as there is enough slack to make up for one or more component shortfalls.  It also creates difficulty in terms of understanding and diagnosing downstream problems and trends.
  2. Weak basis/grounding for forecasts—One of the biggest frustrations I hear from executives is their organizations’ ability to produce valid and reliable forecasts. Without a good forecast, it is virtually impossible to set useful and achievable targets. Part of good forecasting is understanding the component parts of the forecast, which we already discussed above. But more important still is the ability to define and understand the drivers of what you are trying to forecast. For example, if we our goal is to forecast service responsiveness in the call center (say, % of calls within an acceptable hold time), we need to be able to understand call volume, staffing capacity, and assumptions about productivity (current levels, expected gains, etc.) at a minimum. Understanding those factors a level or two down the cause-and-effect chain (say at a call type level) would certainly increase the confidence in the forecast. But creating a really robust forecast requires that we go well beyond that and understand the “drivers” of the components themselves—what factors are correlated with the attributes we are trying to forecast and by how much? So what does this look like in practice? Instead of looking at total volume assumptions from the year prior, we actually create a zero-based (bottom-up) forecast based on predictive variables and leading indicators (e.g., change in the volume of local/regional building permits might be used to tweak our assumptions about the volume of new connection call types).
  3. Alignment gaps –-Even with the best planning assumptions and accountabilities in place, there must be strong alignment across the various stakeholders who make up the forecast. That may sound like “motherhood and apple pie” for some of you, but I’ve seen too many cases where Department A makes a change to a business process to affect a certain operating metric without a clue of how that metric might be relied upon in other downstream forecasts. A good example of this is the impact that operational or product changes have on customer service and support requirements. Sure, if we do well in defining the forecast attributes, and cascading accountability, we should be able to minimize some of this risk. But unless we take the time to help our cross-functional managers and peers understand the interrelationships and dependencies between operating metrics and forecasts, there will always exist significant room for surprises.
  4. Weakness in measurement and reporting—Last but not least, is the importance of good measurement and reporting practices that will help identify issues before they become problems that affect the performance of the portfolio or the business as a whole. We should measure not only the operating results, but also the performance against each variable that contributes materially to that outcome, as well as how effectively we predicted and forecasted the nature and impact that each has on our business performance.

At the end of the year, or any reporting period for that matter, we all want to be in a position to declare success on our initial goals for the year. And where we haven’t been successful, we want to at least have had ample opportunity to course-correct to get back on track, or deliberately declare a different target. What we don’t want is to miss the numbers and not know why. Again, sounds like a no brainer, but those kind of questions and blank stares still plague many business and operating executives when it comes to missed performance goals.

Looking at how we performed as an enterprise, business unit, or function is an essential part of managing. But it is equally important to study the effectiveness and consistency with which we set our goals, targets, and forecasts throughout the business, as this will lead to more sustainable performance over the long run.

Let’s make that a goal for 2013.

-b

 

Sure, I’ll Jump Right on That!

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Inspiring Action- An Art or a Science? 

I’ll jump right on that!! Five simple words that can either convey the attitude of a person eager and motivated to get something done, or a sarcastic way of declining a request based on it being either an uninspiring or unrewarding experience (or perhaps both).

Much of what we know about performance management comes from the behavioral sciences and the work of legendary psychologist B. F. Skinner. In case you missed that day in your Psych 101 class, basic behaviorism is built on the simple concept of providing a tangible reward–a piece of food in the case of experimental animals–in response to the correct achievement of some basic task (or, conversely, the withholding of a reward–or administration of a penalty of some sort–for failure to complete the task).

Pigeons, Teenagers, and Everything In Between

When we talk about the field of performance management–be it measurement, goals and targets, tracking and reporting, performance communications, back-end rewards, or the myriad of other “moving parts”  within the performance management process–we are really talking about elements that are at the core of managing human behavior.

While most of  us regard performance management techniques as a way to motivate our organizations and employees to achieve “peak performance” levels, the same techniques can be used in an infinite number of other areas, across both the work and personal spectrum. Remember, while Skinner’s subjects were originally pigeons, his techniques have been applied effectively in everything from corporate performance to the most basic of personal transactions with our children… and everything in-between.

…and Yes, Customers Too!

Recently, I’ve been giving a good deal of thought to how we can use these same principles in our relationships with customers. There are many things we do to encourage customers to behave in certain ways. Whether it’s  buying more of a product, maintaining allegiance to our brand, or other more subtle changes we seek in customer behavior (shifting to less costly billing and payment channels, moving consumption to more optimal places in our delivery system, increasing utilization of our automated inquiry channels (website, IVR, etc.), participating in recycling campaigns, etc.), the age old “behavior modification” techniques used by the early behaviorists, still present in most of our performance management organizations, are just as, if not more, important to our relationships and interactions with customers. It’s all about creating a line of sight between a desired outcome and the behaviors required to drive it, keeping that line of sight visible, and ensuring that all requisite parts of the process are in place to motivate and reinforce staying on that path and consistently hitting the desired target.

A few days ago, a close friend of mine who enjoys spending an occasional weekend in Las Vegas (something I know very little about, or at least wouldn’t  admit to if I did!), received, during one of these periodic jaunts, a loyalty card from a casino offering him certain amenities whenever he visited their property–usually free (or at least that’s the spin they put on it) dinners, valet parking, etc. Personally, I find it hard to see these loyalty programs as being of any great value, since I’m sure the rewards pale in comparison to how much casinos “fleece” their patrons. But regardless of how I view that industry and their programs, my friend seems to enjoy them. And, well, who am I to judge?

After visiting the casino a few times in 2011, he received a letter letting him know that he had reached a new loyalty level (again, one has to wonder about achieving a new loyalty level at a casino whose primary mission it is to take your money. But let’s not digress again). After quickly congratulating him on achieving this “new loyalty tier”, the program manager went on to describe how close my friend was to reaching the next level beyond his newly attained one.

I may not have all of my numbers exactly right, but it went something like this: “Congratulations on achieving our Silver level by earning 15,000 points! You’re now only a few steps away from hitting the Gold level. By earning an additional 900,000 points, you’ll enjoy all the benefits of Silver PLUS all the many new benefits reserved exclusively for our Gold members!” etc, etc, etc…

Sometimes there is not enough oxygen on the planet to describe how many things are wrong with a particular business practice. This was one of those times. But the letter alone did most of the damage. Whatever the expenditures required to get to the “silver level” (and I really didn’t want to know the details), simple math told him that he’d need to spend many, many, many multiples of that to even approximate the next level. After a good laugh, his response was: “Sure, I’ll get right on that!”

Motivating Loyalty-

The good, the bad and the ugly…

Loyalty programs all include features of this sort: tiers of benefits that reward buying behavior, incentives for climbing to the next tier, quantifiable measures and tracking schemes that let you know how you are doing on your progress, and all the communication required to motivate you up and over the “next hurdle.” It doesn’t matter whether the program is for frequent fliers, hotel visitors, or even banking savers (an alternative I would encourage my friend to consider). There is no doubt that such programs work.

What differentiates the good ones is not simply the presence of elements like measures, goals, and rewards but, rather, the range of “moving parts” within the PM process I alluded to earlier. For example, let’s look inside my friend’s experience. It wasn’t the lack of a measurable outcome or awareness of what he had to do to get to the next tier that created the breakdown, but rather the enormous gap between the tiers (where the target was set), its level of achievability, and the manner in which progress was communicated.

Sometimes the issue is as simple as managing distinctions between tiers and levels. For a person like me who travels extensively, upgrades, for example, are certainly important. But as airlines continue to consolidate, customers who might have grown used to being consistently upgraded now find that while they were once big fish in a small pond, they have now become average-sized fish in a much larger lake. Anyone caught in the consolidation of the United and Continental loyalty programs knows this first-hand. In fact, there are now more “elite” than “non-elite” fliers (usually by a factor of two) competing for that “special boarding” privilege (essential for getting dibs on very scarce and valuable carry-on luggage space). So for me, the boarding privileges have become more valuable than the upgrade itself. Simply differentiating between platinum, gold, and silver elite fliers in the boarding process would improve the experience of those with the highest travel frequency. Further distinctions (within the higher tier) would also help to create more perceived equity within the ever growing mass of frequent travelers when it comes to upgrades.

More often than not, the differences lie in more subtle application of the “moving parts” within the process. There is a principle most of us may remember from that Psych 101 course that deals with the specifics of reinforcement “schedules” (variable/fixed intervals, for example). While it’s nice to get “upgraded” every single time we exhibit the expected behavior, true behaviorists would tell you that is a clear path to complacency (besides which, the experimenter–or in our case, the program manager–ends up spending a great deal more than necessary in rewards in order to achieve a desired result). Whether they are right or wrong in this assertion is not the issue; market research can answer that. The real issue is that nuances such as this remain very much in play and should not be simply ignored or overlooked in a program’s design. Most of us can recall a time as a customer when receiving an unexpected extra (what we in the south call lagniappe ) did, in fact, generate good will and motivate improved buy behavior. A colleague of mine talks about this quite extensively on his blog “Marketing Lagniappe,” and, although he does not purport to be a true southerner, he understands the concept and its application better than most that actually hail from the “Big Easy”.

Incorporating Performance Management into your CEM strategies…

Like any good chef, there are many ingredients that need to be mixed in the correct sequence, at the right temperature, and  presented in the right way to create that high-quality, positive experience. Same goes for designing our customer experiences:

  • Are the incentives you’re offering ones customers even care about? How much time and energy are you wasting on deploying innovative tools that have more impact for you that they do for customers?
  • Are your incentives easy for customers to redeem? .Small “point of sale” rebates are often have far more “relevant impact” than larger ones that require more customer effort to redeem (after adjusting for lower redemption levels)
  • Do you rely on hidden tricks to manage program costs (e.g., points that expire, rewards that require supplemental cash payments, etc.) that can actually produce more negative that positive impact on customer experience?
  • Are the measures you’re using easy and simple for customers to understand and use in tracking their progress to that next reward or level?
  • Have you considered the effect of different reinforcement schedules? (Fixed versus variable intervals? Different types and quantity of rewards?
  • Have you given enough thought to where program “targets” (rewards and tiers) are set?
  • Are the targets achievable in reasonable amounts of time?
  • Is your messaging and communication sufficiently compelling?

Clearly these techniques apply any time we are trying to convince someone to “jump right on it.” But in the world of customer experience, where competitive forces are always at play and differentiation is becoming more and more critical, it may just be the most important consideration in your product and program design.

-b

Bob Champagne is Managing Partner of onVector Consulting Group, a privately held international management consulting organization specializing in the design and deployment of Performance Management tools, systems, and solutions. Bob has over 25 years of Performance Management experience with primary emphasis on Customer Operations in the global energy and utilities sector. Bob has consulted with hundreds of companies across numerous industries and geographies. Bob can be contacted at bob.champagne@onvectorconsulting.com

2011- Year of the Squirrel

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What 2011 taught us about strategic distractions, and their impact on business value…

A few months back, I remember having a good chuckle while watching a Jon Stewart parody on the Republican candidate field.  The monologue poked fun at the media’s tendency, during its seemingly relentless coverage of the leading candidate on that day, to completely shift direction the moment a new contender entered the picture.In this case, Bachman was the leader du jour, the media was the dog in the Pixar movie “Up”, and the part of the squirrel was played by none other than Rick Perry, who these days appears to be succeeding only at distracting himself.

“Squirrel moments” happen all around us, and with greater frequency than we’d care to admit. As flawed human beings, it’s easy for us to get sidetracked from what we should be doing, by some urgent new distraction that seems terribly critical in the moment. Yet most of us eventually manage to refocus, once we become aware (through our own cognitive skills or because a friend or colleague points it out to us) of how badly the squirrel moment has driven us off-course. Typically it is the speed with which we are able to re-calibrate ourselves that ultimately determines the degree of damage, if any, that is caused by the distraction.

Some “squirrel moments” have far reaching impacts…

But for organizations, the challenge of refocusing after a significant distraction is far greater. Unlike individual distractions, those in organizations often require refocusing entire workgroups, business units, and processes that may have strayed far from the core focus and strategies of the business. It’s a bit like comparing a fighter jet to a large commercial airliner. While both are capable of course correction, larger aircraft don’t react “on a dime” and require a lot more time and space to maneuver.  The magnitude of the corporate distraction, the breadth of areas it touches, and the duration of the distraction, are just a few of the variables that determine the organization’s ability to react and readjust quickly.

2011 offered numerous examples of companies adversely affected by a loss of focus.

  • The enormous value that Netflix had created, based on a simple and straightforward product offer embraced by scores of customers, was severely jeopardized by the company’s ill-advised decision to migrate to a more complex, two-tiered pricing model driven largely by a short-term desire to justify an overinflated stock price. The outcome was both predictable and horrific, as customers departed in droves, destroying an enormous amount of company value in very short order.
  • Bank of America, arguably one of the better banks in terms of customer satisfaction and experience, watched much of that brand value evaporate following announcement of a pricing move (its now infamous $5 charge for debit card use) that evoked a similar customer outrage. While perhaps necessitated by financial realities (debatable), its positioning, execution, and ultimate response were painful to watch play out.
  • Research in Motion, maker of the Blackberry, whose loyal business following was predicated on its operational and reliability advantages, suffered a huge blow to its value on the heels of a long and poorly managed  network outage—a network on which it had based much of its service differentiation.
  • Berkshire Hathaway, a company whose entire business is based on the prudent, sober, and wise investing of its founder, ended up the subject of one of 2011’s stories of financial impropriety–an insider trading scandal the likes of which we’ve come to expect from the industry, just not from these guys.
  • HP announced another redirection of its product portfolio, and yet another shift in its leadership team–a true “squirrel moment” with a healthy dose of “been there, done that.”

S*** Happens! You just have to manage it…

Sure, one might argue, “bad things happen to good companies”, and in these and a myriad of other examples from 2011 there is certainly some truth to that. Sometimes, these blunders cannot always be attributed to bad strategies or failure to stick with a good one. Sometimes, it’s the tactical decisions that are “far removed” from the C-suite and its strategic decision making. Sometimes these decisions, as we saw above, are undertaken because of a financial necessity that in the short term might trump a marketing strategy.

But, by the same token, those seemingly small disconnects may, in fact, be symptomatic of the problem itself. While management may not be able to control ALL of the drivers that lead to negative consequences, effective development and MANAGEMENT of strategy can not only limit the damage caused by veering off course, but can play a very important role in course correction after the fact. For many companies the words “MANAGEMENT” and “STRATEGY” connote different, and often conflicting, disciplines. But for those successful at avoiding and responding to distractions, these are highly related and often inseparable competencies.

 Great strategy management is about the WHAT and the HOW…

So, how can you ensure that corporate distractions are kept to a minimum, and effectively refocus and re-center the business when they invariably do occur?

  1. Define and clarify your business strategy — This sounds like motherhood and apple pie. It always does. But it remains the preeminent cause of breakdowns during times of distraction, because the strategy is either too complex to begin with, or it lacks sufficient clarity to engender the necessary alignment and commitment to continue keeping the firm focused in times of distraction. Your strategy is more than simply a restatement of a vision or broad ambition. It is a specific answer to a specific question: What do we need to do to ensure success within your existing business environment? One of Apple’s most effective demonstrations of strategic clarity was Steve Jobs’ insistence on collapsing their previously expansive product portfolio into four clear product families that would redefine its future. Clear, compelling, with an easily-understood line of sight to renewing the value of the business.
  2. Do more than just communicate it — Management 101 preaches “communicate your strategy.” But communication alone is insufficient to create the alignment necessary to avoid distractions. One of the most rewarding aspects of this job is watching clients challenge ideas and recommendations (even from yours truly) based on an automatic and often deeply-felt narrative of how the suggested change(s) might conflict with their core strategy. For them, it’s more than just “talking points.” It’s a compelling narrative they have embodied through words and examples. Sure, these too can be misinterpreted occasionally, but just like a pilot who is expected to react with some degree of muscle memory, we must develop and nurture that level of alignment as a first line of defense against corporate distraction. Vision, values, and strategies. They all need to be seamlessly integrated within a crisp, clear, and compelling narrative.
  3. Build and use the right navigation systems — When NASA launches a probe to Mars, it must travel undistracted for about nine months in order to hit a fast-moving and very small target (the red planet). Even the slightest and briefest of external forces can cause the probe to miss the planet by millions of miles. Having the right navigation systems and a network of alerts and course-correction mechanisms is crucial to a mission like this, and it is just as critical to a business like yours. In business, such technologies and processes comprise your integrated performance management system, and they should include the KPI’s of the business, the network of leading and lagging business metrics we must monitor, and a clear understanding of the relationships between them.
  4. Scenario and contingency planning — Made popular by companies like Shell years ago, the discipline to do this, and do it well, has fallen out of vogue. Not sure why, other than what I heard from a client a few years back…that it “forced us to admit that we might have the wrong strategy”, or that it “would distract us from adhering to that strategy”. That’s as much hogwash today as it was when I first heard it, and failure to implement a rigorous scenario planning process is, as ever, tantamount to sticking your head in the sand. If subjecting your strategic plans to that level of scrutiny adversely affects your ability to execute the strategy as designed, while being agile enough to react and learn from mistakes, then you either have the wrong strategy, the wrong leadership, or both.
  5. The ability and agility to recover from distractions — Unlike the dogs in “UP”, we don’t have masters to yank our collars or order us back into focus. (unless we work in a purely autocratic environment). What we do have is the ability to learn and react. It helps if we have a contingency plan with automatic responses. But we must also have the ability to recognize when something is not working, and the agility to put that learning in motion quickly and effectively.

 History doesn’t have to repeat itself…

2011 wasn’t the first time we’ve seen these types of blunders. And it most certainly won’t be the last.

We all remember the Tylenol scare of many years ago. Drug companies like J&J, who exist largely at the mercy of safety protocols and regulations, can easily be crushed by such events. But J&J’s ability to identify and react to the crisis with agility prevented what could have been an historic business failure. Their “distraction,” which arguably could have been anticipated, was kept fairly well contained.

Others weren’t so fortunate. The Exxon-Valdez and BP-Macondo debacles are two great examples of this. Safety, which should be a core strategic underpinning for any company, but particularly those in this industry, in large measure fell victim to distraction. But, in both cases, it was the lack of a coherent, actionable response strategy that kept business value flowing out of the pipeline/tanker as fast as the oil.

If we have the right blueprint for managing strategy, we can limit the number of distractions, identify and react appropriately when they do occur, and respond with agility and effectiveness to keep adverse consequences to a minimum.

-b/b

Bob Champagne is Managing Partner of onVector Consulting Group, a privately held international management consulting organization specializing in the design and deployment of Performance Management tools, systems, and solutions. Bob has over 25 years of Performance Management experience with primary emphasis on Customer Operations in the global energy and utilities sector. Bob has consulted with hundreds of companies across numerous industries and geographies. Bob can be contacted at bob.champagne@onvectorconsulting.com

Brian Kenneth Swain is a Principal with onVector Consulting Group.  Brian has over 25 years of experience in Marketing, Product Management, and Customer Operations. He has managed organizations in highly competitive product environments,  and has consulted for numerous companies across the globe. Brian is an alumnus of McKinsey & Company, Bell Laboratories, and Reliant Energy, and is a graduate of Columbia University and the Wharton Business School. He can be contacted at brian.swain@onvectorconsulting.com.