Take a random CEO and ask him what he expects from his employees and you will very often hear that his employees should think outside-the-box, challenge the status quo and come up with radical new ideas and execute them to achieve extraordinary business results.

Even though top-management encourages employees to try something new and give them a “permission to fail”, many people do not go the extra mile but prefer to stay in a mode of “comfortable apathy”. It is too risky for many employees because if their endeavor fails, they risk their career, might lose their bonus, and in the worst case even their job. One can understand employees when they ask themselves “Why should I go the extra mile, when I can risk my bonus and career chances?”

Overcoming these challenges is difficult and there is definitely no silver bullet but with a different take on performance goals, it might be possible to stimulate the willingness to innovate and drive change while at the same time providing measure that limit the employee’s risks.

Strategic stretch goals to stimulate innovation

By reaching for what appears to be the impossible, we often actually do the impossible. And even when we do not quite make it, we inevitably wind up doing much better than we would have done.Jack Welch

The concept of stretch goals has been broadly applied at General Electric in order to limit the annual bargaining between managers and their employees on performance goals. Stretch goals should limit such negotiating and improve long-term view, stimulate breakthrough ideas and justify trade-offs in one year to harvest the benefits in the following years.

A definition of stretch goals

Strategic stretch goals are goals that cannot be achieved with what is known and how is worked today. They aim for something that is impossible today.

This definition is important because setting the wrong stretch goals will burnout your people. Such tactical stretch goals are goals that can be achieved with the current way of work and they usually result in employees doing more of the same - which ultimately means longer hours.

Strategic stretch goals really push the boundaries of what is assumed to be possible to strive for the impossible. Only when you aim for the impossible, something that cannot be achieved with existing practices, you have the “pressure” to come up with radical new ideas instead of increasing your workload.

An example

Let us assume that you have defined a 10% growth goal for your business segment in the coming year. Instead of defining a tactical stretch goal of 15% growth for next year, a strategic stretch goal would aim for a 50% growth. Confronted with such a growth target, managers would have to come up with different solutions than simply working harder and longer. Maybe new distribution channels, new partnerships or other strategies could be a solution but working longer hours will not even bring you close to the 50% growth.

The “pressure” to innovate

Defining strategic stretch goals gives employees that are willing to innovate an opportunity to realize their ideas. For those that do not see the need to innovate yet, stretch goals can create a “sense of urgency” that stimulates and forces them to work on ideas that help to achieve these goals. The point of “pressure” and “sense of urgency” is not to get people working harder. It is to get people to do things differently and raise the capability of the organization.

How can you define stretch goals in your organization?

If you have not defined stretch goals in your organization, it will be difficult to introduce the concept, define them and link them to the bonus system in your organization. Nevertheless, you could easily run a workshop where you define stretch goals and work together with other people in your organization to develop radical ideas that might bring you closer to the strategic stretch goal.

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Remarkable customer experiences are the result of delivering greater than expected value to your customers. Every kind of organization – from start-ups to multinationals – have to continuously create and deliver value propositions that not only exceed the customers’ expectations but which are also greater than that of the competition.

When designing for remarkable customer experiences designers are often confronted with countless innovative ideas that need to be synthesized and bundled into dedicated value propositions. While the concepts of customer value and value propositions are admittedly a bit abstract (see “A Framework for Creating Customer Value”), the NABC (Need, Approach, Benefit, Competition) framework can help to better understand and sharpen the value proposition of your product or service. The framework has been developed by Curtis Carlson and William Wilmot and has been summarized in their book “Innovation – The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want”.

To sharpen your value proposition they suggest to answer the following four questions:

1. What is the important customer and market Need?

2. What is the unique Approach for addressing this need?

3. What are the specific Benefits per costs that result from this approach?

4. How are the benefits per costs superior to the Competition’s and the alternatives?

Here is an example how to apply the framework to describe the value proposition of a video-on-demand system.

Need: Movie rentals represent a $5 billion business opportunity that you currently cannot access. The only parts of rentals that people really dislike are the obligation to return the tapes plus late fees. Customers find that it is inconvenient and wastes time.

Approach: We have developed a system that allows you to provide videos on demand to your customers using your cable system, with access to all the movies of Blockbuster. Our approach makes use of one of your currently unused channels, with no changes to your system. In addition, you do not need to invest any capital. Each movie costs your customers $6.99, the same cost as a rental at a video store.

Benefits per costs: You will receive $5 of new revenue per movie rented, with a margin of 20% after paying for the movie costs. Your customers will have all the pause and fast forward functions of a VCR when watching the movie, and they do not have to return the movie when done. Late fees are gone. We estimate you could capture a market share of 20%.

Competition: Our system is patented, and it is the only one to include all of these features. Online rentals represent new competition for both you and us, but they have a handling-cost disadvantage of 75 cents per tape. Sending videos back is inconvenient, plus they cannot provide spontaneous purchases.

To improve your own value proposition, use these sentences as a starter to describe it.

Need: My customer’s needs are …

Approach: My approach to satisfy that need is ….

Benefit: The Benefits per costs of my approach are …

Competition: My benefits per costs are superior to the competition and alternatives because …

More information about the discipline “Value Creation” and the other four disciplines “Important Needs”, “Innovation Champions”, “Innovation Teams” and “Organizational Alignment” can be found in the book “Innovation – The 5 Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want”.

Image courtesy of mandolux

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Empathic behavior and empathic employees are one of the essential success factors for extraordinary customer service. Knowing this, the big question is: How can your employees be more empathic? Are your employees empathic?

Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist at Northwestern University, reported about an exercise (see article "Your Boss Really is Clueless")that one could perform to find out the degree of empathy. Just ask somebody to draw a letter on his or her forehead. In which direction does it face? Is it written so that you can read it? Or is it written so that others can read it?

More than a decade of experiments have shown that people who write the E in a way that is legible to themselves but backwards to others have not thought or cared about how others might perceive the letter. On the other hand, people who draw the E backward to them but legible to others have considered another’s point of view.

Still, this is a nice exercise, how do you make empathic employee behavior real? How can empathy contribute for a remarkable customer experience?

Xavier from Notebooks.com provides a great example of a concrete manifestation of empathic employees providing extraordinary customer service. He shares his story of a broken Apple MacBook Pro and how he was treated in the Apple Store.

I was greeted by a very friendly Swiss Apple employee who was on his last day of training in the U.S. before returning to Zurich to help open a new Apple store. […] Obviously my MacBook Pro has already had its fair share of downtime and I don’t think it’s reasonable for a notebook to be subject to three major repairs within the first four months of purchase. He said he completely understood my frustration and asked one of the Genius Bar managers to assist.

The Genius Bar manager then asked me something that I’ve NEVER heard before from any computer customer service person. “What would be a satisfactory solution for you?,” he asked.

That might seem like a simple question, but it’s something that more companies should ask to resolve customers’ issues. It shows that they’re actually trying to solve your problem rather than just run you through their standard operating procedures.

I told him that all I wanted was to walk out of the store with a machine that I could count on and not have bring back for yet another repair. […]

This single question is such a powerful statement and shows that employees care about the customer and that he is taken serious. They are interested in the customer’s opinion and the desired outcome that he imagines.

But wait? What if I cannot deliver the customer’s desired solution?

Well there is always the risk that you might not be able to deliver your customer’s desired solution and meet his expectations, explain why you are not able to deliver the solution. If you have valid arguments, your customers will understand. However, without asking him directly, you always have to guess what the solution might be and the process towards a solution is much more complicated.

What are the implications for your organization?

There are probably extensive handbooks and trainings for “front-line” employees in your organization. They might include guidelines about replacement policies, dress code, and how employees should talk with customer, just to name a few. If these handbooks include the guideline to ask the question “What would be a satisfactory solution for you?” you are already on the right path, if they don’t include it then it is time to update your handbooks and training manuals.

 

Read  the full article My Apple Curse Strikes Again, but Apple Store Saves the Day

Read the full article Your Boss Really is Clueless or the complete research paper "Power and Perspectives Not Taken".

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Following Tom Kelley’s quote that "Innovation is not just a program, it’s a way of life" I have recently taken a closer look at the characteristics of an "innovation lifestyle", especially in organizations.

During this research I found an article titled "Fostering an innovation mindset" which defines an innovative mindset as a pervasive spirit that stimulates individuals and teams to create newness in all areas of an organization.

Here is an excerpt of the introduction:

You know a company with an innovation mindset when you see the way employees interact with one another. They treat one another with respect, admiration, and cooperation. They smile. They laugh. They express consideration and thoughtfulness. They listen. They focus on the benefits desired by consumers rather than on their own personal gain. They come to work with an optimistic enthusiasm, because they believe that what they do each day really does count. They focus on the future rather than on the past. They exude self-confidence, possess a healthy self-esteem, and believe in their own capabilities and strengths. They have faith in innovation and in one another.

Found in: "Fostering an innovation mindset" by Thomas D. Kuczmarski, based on his book "Innovation: Leadership Strategies for the Competitive Edge".

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In user-centered design processes different research methods can be applied in different stages of the process of developing new products or services. User research in the early stages should aim to gather insights about consumer and their behavior as well as to get inspiration for design concepts. In the later stages, user research is very often used to evaluate and understand the implications and acceptance of certain design prototypes.

These different objectives require different user research methods and selecting the right method is very often a complicated task (i.e. should you do an ethnographic field study or a focus group to get inspiration for new product features?).

Christian Rohrer has written an article in Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox with the title "When to Use Which User Experience Methods" which helps in selecting the right user experience research method.

Modern day user experience research methods can now answer a wide range of questions. Knowing when to use each method can be understood by mapping them in 3 key dimensions and across typical product development phases. […] These three dimensions are Attitudinal vs. Behavioral, Qualitative vs. Quantitative and Context of Website or Product Use.

Especially interesting is the chart that illustrates where several popular user research methods appear along these dimensions:

Additionally the proposed guidelines differentiate between the different phases of product development suggesting typical methods for the strategize, optimize and assess phases in product development.

If you are looking for more information about user research methods you can find more information in the article "The 13 Most Popular Methods for User-Centered Design" as well as in "An Overview of Market Research Methods for Innovation Development".

Read the complete article.

 

Photo courtesy of Roebot

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