I am a digital nomad and entrepreneur specializing in the curation of online information focused on the fields of business and travel. I run numerous websites, including MBA Depot, MBA Boost, Management Ideas, Dado Que and Lengthy Travel. I received my MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.
Surprise your best customers when they least expect it. A guerrilla marketer mails lottery tickets to her best customer every time the jackpot hits $5 million. This unusual gesture generates a lot of goodwill and keeps customers talking about her.
Author: Kimberly Stansell | Source: Inspire People to Talk about You | Original Publication: Inc. Magazine | Subjects: Customer-Related, Marketing / Sales
Kill the Company is about having an out-of-company experience. It’s about examining your weaknesses so that you can make them your strengths. In most businesses each year, we do a SWOT analysis [to examine] our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Most people use it as a political construct to say where they are strong and [to say that] they are not really weak — … [ Read more ]
Author: Lisa Bodell | Source: ‘Kill the Company’: Identify Your Weaknesses Before Your Competitors Do | Original Publication: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Competitive Intelligence, Management, Strategy
Set up an Innovation Slush Fund to provide seed money to champions and skunk works. Couple it with allowing your key operations people 10-15 percent of their time to work on projects that they feel have some high innovation potential. The only condition of getting the money or time is a periodic report (preferably voice mail, E-mail, video, or group presentation rather than a bureaucratic … [ Read more ]
Author: Jim Clemmer | Source: Innovation and Organizational Learning Pathways and Pitfalls (Part 2) | Subject: Innovation
HCL delivers detailed financial performance data broken out by business unit regularly to employees’ desktops. This has stimulated employees to ask more questions, volunteer more ideas, and challenge their managers more often. In turn, everyone is making better decisions — the kind of decisions that directly affect the customer’s experience. Similarly, in a bold twist on the 360-degree employee appraisal tool, all appraisals are posted … [ Read more ]
Author: Vineet Nayar | Source: The Thought Leader Interview: Vineet Nayar | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior
Executives at Norwegian oil and gas company Statoil were looking for ways to make it more nimble and more realistic about its goals. So they adopted a new approach to year-end budgeting, which breaks it out into three different sets of numbers. These included targets (“what we want to happen”), forecasting (“what we think will happen, whether we like what we see or not”), and … [ Read more ]
Source: Listening to employees: The ‘Beyond Bureaucracy’ M-Prize winners | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Finance, Management
Have every new employee do customer support for two weeks. The first week is a typical “first week at a new company” which includes a formal day of orientation on the first day. The next four days are structured around on-boarding the person and getting them involved in their role and their team, but not too deeply. This allows there to be a “break in … [ Read more ]
Author: Brad Feld | Source: Have Every New Employee Do Customer Support for Two Weeks | Subjects: Customer-Related, Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior
Managers of a product team at Microsoft offered employees the chance to pick their next assignment, rather than having the leaders hand down those decisions. In this case, to retain top talent in a competitive market and to boost employee satisfaction, team leaders pitched their projects to employees, allowing them to evaluate the opportunities and chart their own course. Some managers worried that participants would … [ Read more ]
Source: Listening to employees: The ‘Beyond Bureaucracy’ M-Prize winners | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior
Consider adding a frequency opt-out option to the standard “fine print” at the bottom of every electronic mailing. Instead of just seeing an unsubscribe link, recipients can take their choice between that and an option to reduce frequency, which reads: “If you would like us to decrease the frequency of the emails sent to you, click here. This will reduce the number of mailings by … [ Read more ]
Source: How to Reduce Email Unsubscribes by 35% & Boost Holiday Sales | Original Publication: MarketingSherpa | Subjects: Customer-Related, Marketing / Sales
Instead of asking, “Are we all on the same page?” or, “What am I missing?” and accepting predictable responses, one should conclude a meeting by going around the room and asking each person to say aloud what she is committing to do and by what date. If you establish a pattern of asking people at the end of a meeting to explicitly state everything to … [ Read more ]
Author: Jeff Grimshaw | Source: There Must Be Some Misunderstanding | Original Publication: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior
Simple resource allocation decision rules can help minimize political infighting because they change the burden of proof from the typical default allocation (“what we did last year”) to one that makes it impossible to maintain the status quo. For example, a simple harvesting rule might involve putting a certain percentage of an organization’s portfolio up for sale each year to maintain vibrancy and to cull … [ Read more ]
Author: Dan P. Lovallo | Source: How to Put Your Money Where Your Strategy Is | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Finance
When you do [customer satisfaction] surveys, it usually screams out that you know nothing about that customer or their purchase history, and you’re giving them a mixed message on whether you listen to them. Although you’re asking them to take time to fill out the survey, they never hear back from you about what you’re going to do in response to the results. So in … [ Read more ]
Author: Frederick F. Reichheld | Source: Loyalty: It’s Worth More Than You Think | Original Publication: LOMA | Subject: Customer-Related
The CEO of Insituform made raising the productivity of his work force a key goal of his three-year turnaround plan. So he and his executive team decided to set up a national competition. The work crew with the best productivity improvement in the first quarter would get a week off, and be replaced by the executive team, which would work however many hours were necessary … [ Read more ]
Source: CEO in the Ditch | Original Publication: Chief Executive | Subject: Management
A technique for avoiding decision bias is to request that managers show more of their cards: some companies, for instance, demand that investment recommendations include alternatives, or “next-best” ideas. This approach is useful not only to calibrate the level of a manager’s risk aversion but also to spot opportunities that a manager might otherwise consider insufficiently safe to present to senior management.
Author: Dan P. Lovallo | Source: Distortions and deceptions in strategic decisions | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Finance, Management
Formerly, when operational people in the business units at Devon Energy did a search for a new employee, HR would hand them a list of candidates. It would be their job to decide which candidates to see and to sell the candidates on Devon.
Now, we in HR sit down with the business leader and talk about the need, and the strategy to fill the need. … [ Read more ]
Source: Talent Is a Strategic Asset: A Virtual Roundtable | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Best Practices, Human Resources
Rio Tinto institutes checks and balances to manage internal lobbying. We have something called the Investment Committee, which approves sizable investments of any kind and consists of the CEO, CFO, the head of technology and innovation, and the head of business services. In other words, it does not contain any of the divisional heads. The plan is that this committee has enough data to have … [ Read more ]
Author: Guy Elliott | Source: Breaking Strategic Inertia: Tips from Two Leaders | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Finance, Management, Strategy
I would have a policy like Hewlett-Packard had when I worked there, before starting Apple. They encouraged you to work on little inventions of your own, and you would get some financial support from the company to build them. The company benefits in two ways. You’re becoming better at designing things for the company because you’ll force yourself to learn ways to solve your own … [ Read more ]
Author: Steve Wozniak | Source: Creating Great Products with Apple’s Steve Wozniak, Inventor of the Personal Computer | Original Publication: Babson Insight | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior
Borealis (the Danish based international plastics business) split their management requirements into four distinct agendas. They had a need to forecast, set direction, manage costs and control capital expenditure. They then set up four distinct systems to deliver each of these requirements. Forecasting was done centrally using a financial model that collected basic data from key points within and outside the company. As a result … [ Read more ]
Author: Mike Bourne | Source: Six Steps to Improving your Planning and Budgeting System | Original Publication: Think: Cranfield | Subject: Management
Retailers need to find ways to get customers to share complaints with management, not friends and family. One way is for retailers to ask customers to check a box on their credit card slip indicating they had a problem at the store. Retailers could then attempt to follow up, or give the customer a phone number or web address to make their complaints directly. If … [ Read more ]
Source: Beware of Dissatisfied Consumers: They Like to Blab | Original Publication: Knowledge@Wharton | Subject: Customer-Related
At one well-known energy company, the five executives of a top team were asked to list the company’s 10 highest priorities. Alarmingly, they listed a total of 23 priorities; only 2 appeared on every executive’s list and only 7 on the lists of more than three members; indeed 13 of the 23 priorities appeared on only one list. In other cases, the team doesn’t agree … [ Read more ]
Author: Erika Herb | Source: Teamwork at the Top | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior
That’s how firefighters in the town of Toluma got a badly-needed but expensive piece of equipment, a deluge gun, without asking their cash-strapped city council for a single dime.
Here’s how. Business was slow all over their town. The firefighters were getting nowhere when they asked for donations from business owners experiencing a weak economy.
Yet when they approached the manager of a Pizza Hut he said … [ Read more ]
Author: Kare Anderson | Source: Attract and Delight More Customers While Spending Less – by Forging Smart Partnerships | Original Publication: The CEO Refresher | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Social Responsibility