The limits of strategy consulting

The limits of strategy consulting.

Strategy consultants are a species of their own. They tend to come and go, but not always for the right reasons.

The thing is, as with most things, you should use strategy consultants as a cure for some diseases, not for all. Basically, they are probably a good choice when you need ‘exising knowledge’. Their business model is around best practices, so if you want to move into an industry, a new country,… they will help you in not making the mistakes others made.
They are also a good choice when you are the CEO of a major corporate and need to initiate a change. If they can back up your choice, it will not only be much easier to sell to your board of directors and shareholders, it will also make it easier afterwards when things get ugly.

But strategy consultants have their limitations. Putting your hope on them to do something truly innovating (if it’s best practices it is by definition done multiple times before you know…) or work on ‘small innovation’ by combining new ways of working, new tools,… with your day to day work, they are probably not a good choice (neither will they want to work on the day to day work since it seems to ‘small’).

That’s where intrapreneurs come in.

That’s where JOINED! can come in!

The marginal cost of an extra customer.

The marginal cost of one extra customer if you can produce at a marginal cost of almost zero is… well… almost zero. So economical theory suggest you should go for that extra customer with all of your heart. Even without economics, people tend in a natural way to aim for an extra customer.
But is the total cost of that extra customer as low as you think? Should you not incorporate a cost of a lower availability, a lower service level, a less personal service,… for all of your existing customers? Knowing when that extra customer will start hurting your current customer base is as important as knowing how to get her in the first place.

Innovation is not a business unit, it is a mindset.

A lot of companies set up a dedicated innovation department, expect the world of it and then… get disappointed by the results.

The reason is simple: typically these departments are organised to work on business changing and money generation projects which tend to be… well large.

To make it very clear: they should be there and they should be filled with some of your best people, but innovation is more than only this. It is also about your team member having an idea on how to get your insights faster to the sales team, on how to save 1000 Euro by doing something different, on just testing out that new product tweak with a real customer (yes, he might be surprised, but he will not kill you for it), on trying to use a new tool to get organised better, on sharing that one thing you learned from that book/blog you read.

Innovation is about going out their, alone or with your team and challenge the status-quo of your day to day operations.

The end of the waterfall model in Strategy.

The waterfall model is well know in IT and general project management. Basically it’s model where you first let all business people work on requirements. When these are all clear, you let some outside ‘designers’ translate this ‘business language’ in project or IT language, then you hire an army of programmers to build the stuff. When they are ready, you invite the business guys back in and show them what you build.

It has taken a lot of time and money for companies to realize that this model is not always good: You have to invest a lot of money in order to actually get a shippable product, markets are changing faster than you can develop the ‘perfect’ product, projects take so long that you are forced to pull the plug out of them before there has anything been sold, people get demotivated because what they asked is not being delivered (business to IT) or because nobody seems to have an idea on what is exactly the requirement (IT to business).

Since once image says more than thousands words: it’s quite clear here: http://www.projectcartoon.com
The alternative that now is being used a lot is the scrum methodology, where you have iterations of short cycles where you create a shippable prototype, learn from that and continue to build further. In a world were market conditions change constantly, this is also the only way to make sure that you do not spend 2 years building to realize that is no longer what your customers want.

The strange thing is that with strategy, people still tend to use a waterfall model:

The CEO knows he needs a vision and strategy.
He hires a bunch of highly paid strategy consultants.
Those people mobilize the complete management to work on plans, create business cases,…
A committee is set up to decide upon and steer the actual projects that will be done.
Lot’s of interdisciplinary project teams are defined to do the work.
After one year, half of the projects are dead, the other ones have an outcome that is not what we expected.
The CEO is replaced or other strategy consultants are hired to determine why the organization was not able to deliver.

I dare to argue that in today’s world, strategy should also use a scrum kind of approach. Small teams of the most skilled people in your company should be able to challenge and convince the leadership that should give them the feedback and resources in order to try to set up small but strategic changes.

Imagine the typical timeline:

Hire a strategy consultant : 1 month
Let them take the the time of all your top people to come up with slideshows : 3 months
Decide on the priorities of the plans : 1 month
Let your people redo half of the business cases to ‘fine tune’ them: 1 month
Re-priorities: 1 month
Assemble project teams for your top 15 priorities: 1 week
Set up governance structure: 1 month
Do projects: 1 year
See results and ask yourself why the bottom line is not better even with the numerous projects: 3 sleepless weeks

And then it all starts over…

…or you can go for the following scenario:

Start with a strategy 1.0 workshop tomorrow: 1-2 day(s)
Empower your best people to try a first solution, develop a first beta version, test an approach: 1 month.
Let them come back after 1 month to see what it delivered. With their feedback, go into strategy 1.1 workshop: 1 day
Give them extra power to bring the next iteration quicker: 1 day
Let them do the next iteration: 29 days.

Ps: Don’t make it about problems, make it about solutions.

JOINED! can help you in challenging the strategy work you need to deliver this month, not in the years to come!

Resolutions for 2013.

What will your priorities be for 2013?

A new year, time for resolutions (or objectives if you prefer a more direct approach). Talking about resolutions is talking about priorities. It is about defining what will be important for you, your job, your team,… in the coming months. It can be about what you want to achieve, but also in how you want to get there (or with whom)?

I dare to argue that in the world we live in, where change is a daily given, thinking about the who, the whom and the why is even more important than the exact what. It still is important to know what you want to achieve in 6 months from now, but it might be even more important to know how you will monitor whether your course of action is still the right one, how to make decisions in case of storm, how to adapt quickly and keep your team innovative and alert.

Taking time to really think about it is not wasted time, it is a sound investment in being effective and successful in 2013.

Let me wish you a successful 2013, full of new challenges, great people to meet and lot’s of customers to please!

Opportunity Indigestion

Packard’s Law states: “A great company is more likely to die of indigestion from too much opportunity than starvation from too little“.

In today’s 3.0 world, the ability for companies (as an institution or as a network of employees) to attract the ‘right’ people becomes crucial. Just hiring people based on job descriptions is becoming kind of strange (to be polite) in an environment where both customers, markets, products, CEO’s,… change at the speed of light. The only true skills that remain relevant are ability to change (and thus eagerness to learn & open-mindness), creativity (in connecting with people, ideas,…) and willingness to succeed (the old getting things done, be solution oriented, be able to act fast and learn).

For these employees to actually deliver, your company needs a clear vision, purpose and core-values. Without it, you will either limit the creativity (and in the end loose those employees) or they will not be able to work in the same direction.

The last part of the cocktail is for employees to have personal values to be in line with your company values, as this is the only way to guarantee long-term sustainability of the continuous improvement of both your employees as your company.

Today’s world is full of opportunities, don’t get a indigestion!

Ps: One fourth cocktail element: have fun!

There is no such thing as a 90% happy customer.

Touring, a car assistance company is now doing a radio campaign to boost their membership level: “9 times out of 10 you are back on route within 30 minutes”. This strikes me as kind of an irrelevant shout. Especially in rather one off customer events (The number of car breakdowns in one’s live should be very limited) that are also negative by their nature (It’s always a bad time to have a car breakdown), there is no in between: You either succeed to get people back on the road withing 30 minutes or you don’t. You cannot even out between car breakdowns, because typically there will be no next interaction in the near future.

The real question is, why should this be different in other industries: For each individual customer you either succeed in making him happy or you don’t. Overall percentages may be a way for management to give them a good feeling, but you better make sure every individual on your payroll, every process, every product is going all the way in every customer interaction.

Customers don’t stay because they are 99% happy, they leave because they are more than 1% unhappy…

The strategy paradox.

Let’s say you have a strategic plan (and so do your competitors) for 5 years into the future: What is it worth?

With an average CEO lifetime span of 2-3 years (according to this article), employee turnovers easily reaching 5-15% in some sectors, trendwatchers issuing new trend briefings more than there are changes in the weather (even in Belgium) and customers that seem to switch products and brands daily, what is the use of having a slide deck that describes your sales figure on the third Wednesday of August 2015?

Real value for a company lies in being adapted to react swiftly to change, in daring to question it’s ‘strategy’ on a daily basis (note: questioning does not always means changing). There has been written and said a lot about ‘culture of change’, but how many organisations are actually ready?

Having a strategy makes it harder to change your behavior, because you tend to have to work harder to find evidence if you want to change it. Most people don’t want to do the extra effort (or confront their bosses with it).

We are humans: we like change if we choose it ourself. So let’s start choosing to change (yes: it can be fun!).

Everybody wants to be the marketeer.

The glossyness of your product leaflets, the color of a button on your website, the typeface of your logo,… it seems that everybody (from sales over IT up until your CEO) has an ‘expert’ opinion on it. Let’s make it clear to all ‘marketeers’: When we say that ‘everybody is a marketeer’, we mean that you all should think about customer experience in your part of the value chain, that you too should be aware that you communicate with the customer (not only when you pick up the phone in a call centre, but also in the way you present your offer to the customer and in the way your invoice is structured).

So yes: marketing communications is a profession, customer obsession is (next to a passion) a company asset for sustainable development.

Now you all be ‘marketeers’ in your part of the value chain!

(and some cool music to go along with that @

The second worst mistake

The worst mistake a marketeer can make is to transpose his own beliefs to the rest of the market. Assuming that all your prospects and customers like the same things as you do, that they will react in the same way you do is a embarking on a safe trip to disappointment and failure.

The second worst mistake a marketeer can make is by not letting his own emotions, beliefs, preferences, reactions,… come into play. If you are not taking the time to experience your product, service,… with your own eyes, if you do not feel how you like to be treated as a customer, if you do not let your passion for the story behind the product carry you away, you will end up without a true compelling story, product, service, … & life.