Category Archives: Customer Value Creation

My Experiments with Customer Service ….. Part VI

From the Crucibles of JPS Customer Value Academy

                              Just Plain & Simple                               

                              ….. Helping Create Customer Value

The Indian Optician, November-December 2010 Issue

In the last issue I had written about how Right People and Right People Processes are The Key Success Factors for Indian Health Care. I received a lot of comments on the same; people expressing their agreement with the concept ….. selection, development, retention and growth of The Right People. While it is important for most organisations and industries, I strongly believe that it is The Single Most Important Success Factor for Indian Health Care and allied domains, with the stage of evolution that they are in at the end of the first decade of this millennium.

With the fifth part of ‘ My Experiments with Customer Service ’ in this publication, I had thought that I would conclude the series. However, as I dwelt more on the subject of selection, development, retention and growth of Right People, I experienced and observed issues all around, where the two pillars, that is ‘ Customer Service ’ and ‘Right People’ processes are directly correlated and have a direct impact on the success of organisations ….. assuming that, primarily ‘customer value creation’ is the raison d’etre and will cause the creation of wealth for the owners.

What is important, however, is that the following two types of concerns be adequately addressed and their solutions internalised before any meaningful outcome can be expected  :

– “Once I train my people, they will get picked up by someone else. My entire investment will go waste. Then why should I train them ?” 

– “Yes”, there is total agreement, “it is very important to have the Right People.” But probe a little deeper and one finds that an understanding of the characteristics of ‘Right People’ is missing.

While the latter, in itself is a full fledged subject of research and it may not be possible to touch on it here, what surprises me most is the former ….. When you pray for others, God listens to you and blesses them, and sometimes, when you are safe and happy, remember that someone has prayed for you. 

In any case, for whatever time that an untrained person (whether new or old, senior or junior) stays in an organisation, he underperforms and that itself is an opportunity cost which one does not realise. An untrained person will remain a sub-optimal contributor for a much longer period (assuming that he will learn on the job) than it would take to bring him up to speed through developmental inputs.

So, development and growth of employees yields returns in terms of both financial investment and effective time spent on the job; motivation, additional commitment, retention and subsequent efficiencies are icing on the cake !!

The other thing is the kind of impact that lack of well trained people can have on customer experience …..

We, as a family, enrolled as ‘privilege’ members (obviously at a fee) of a well known group of health care clinics. The ambience, equipment and doctors are really very good. Rates are high and the usual greed of excessive ‘tests’ is there as with any healthcare service provider these days. While it was our conscious decision to enroll with the clinic and I am not blaming anyone or complaining about this, one does expect a ‘little’ special treatment, or say, atleast an acknowledgement that they do have members in the ‘privilege’ group. However, far from ‘acknowledging’ one as ‘privilege’ members, most of the staff is not even aware of the existence of such membership, forget benefits associated with it.

On one occasion, when a staff member showed complete ignorance about benefits of the membership, I asked to be allowed to speak to the duty manager. The duty manager’s response was “Sir, he is new” ….. “So”, was my immediate response, “you don’t train/educate your new staff on all the processes ?” It is surprising that new staff was not made aware of the programme directed towards a supposedly loyal/high value group of privilege members. I am sure the formation of this group must have been a part of a core marketing strategy somewhere on the upper floors of their head office in Ivory Towers.

But this was not the only time such a thing happened. I continuously sensed lack of education and developmental inputs at the staff level. So while a lot of investment would have gone in in building the ultra modern clinics, staff interaction makes me keep longing for my neighbourhood doctor’s personal touch and at much lower costs ….. If only the high end clinic could ‘clone’ (not proposing propagation of the same in technical terms) the neighbourhood doctors’ personal behaviour or explain the relevance of the strategy behind introducing privilege membership to its staff, my frame of mind would have been so different today.

And then there was this young employee of an airline which promises to be on time always and also lives up to its promise !! This was a stray incident when, due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, the Hyderabad-Delhi flight was delayed by several hours. There were angry outbursts by aggressive Punjabi passengers, but the poor employee, obviously had no training at handling such situations. That one incident would have put some doubt (rightly or wrongly) in so many of the airline’s (well earned) passengers’ minds.

Employee Development, then, for those who say “They will get picked up by someone else. Why should I develop them ?”, is nothing but creating your own ‘clones’ or explaining the relevance of your strategy to your employees, so that when a customer walks in, you can be assured that he/she will get the same treatment as you would have given, had you been able to be present at all locations, all the time, for all customers ….. Just Plain & Simple !!

J.P.Singh

Justplainandsimple Consulting Pvt. Ltd.

JPS Consulting

Just Plain & Simple                               

….. Helping Realise Potential

JPS Customer Value Academy

Just Plain & Simple                               

….. Helping Create Customer Value

Website : www.justplainandsimple.com

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Through The Productivity Prism

From the Crucibles of JPS Consulting
Just Plain & Simple
….. Helping Realise Potential

TRIM Update ….. A Showcase of Industrial India, December 2010

Every organisation is searching for ways to enhance productivity. With ever increasing competition, costs and complexities, survival of the fittest (slimmest !!) becomes the norm and hence, the demand for higher productivity from all resources – people, material, time, money …..

 

‘Cost cutting’ ends up becoming favoured buzz words (with the recent recession, probably rightly placed too) in almost all organisations ….. ‘Do more with less’ kind of slogans finding a prominent place in corporate presentations. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with these as guiding principles for operations, neither of them yield the best outcomes without an understanding of the organisational context. Hence, for example, while ‘frivolous’ expenses are definitely not desirable, cost cutting can add to productivity only to the extent that it cuts flab. Beyond a limit, you ‘ cannot cost cut your way to glory in productivity ’.

 

Economics is the science/art which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses – Lord Robbins.

 

This is probably the most useful and practical principle that can help in productivity increase, if understood well. The subtle meaning captured in this definition throws open the spectrum of possible ways in which organizational resources can create an impact. Alongwith the following statement by Archimedes, it provides a robust model for productivity increase.

 

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world – Archimedes.

 

Productivity, in its very simple mathematical/scientific form, is a ratio of output over input. Or in business context, Return on Investment. This can be depicted as a product of (A) Profit/Sales & (B) Sales/Investment. These ratios dance in a colourful spectrum when viewed through the prism of organisational context !! Robbins and Archimedes together provide the canvas and brushes respectively, with which to paint organisational success.

 

A statement like ‘Do more with less’, breaks up into multiple hues, when passed through The Productivity Prism of organisational context. These are :

 

1) Do less with much less

2) Do same with less

3) Do more with same

4) Do much more with more

 

On the spectrum from 1) to 4), are choices available to organisations operating in different situations ….. a shrinking/contracting scenario, holding ground, marginal growth or a high growth environment needing investments !! In situation 1) above, if input is reduced in a manner that output is not reduced to the same extent, the resulting ratio of productivity still ends up being better. The same ‘mathematical’ logic applies to the other three cases as well.

 

However, in the absence of human intervention, these are ‘passive’ mathematical ratios. In business, there is the option of ‘managerial’ discretion and ‘free will’, which can influence the way these ratios behave, rather than being handed over in a ‘fatalistic’ take it or leave it manner. Understanding and picking the Right ‘shade’ can make all the difference. The palette thus exposed by The Productivity Prism can be used suitably to come out with flying colours !!

 

Robbins helps when you understand the ‘Core Customer Deliverable’ and ‘What in the Value Chain adds most Value to The Customer’ ….. in the allocation of scarce means (with alternative uses; and mind you, organisations always have finite resources) for an optimal outcome. Archimedes helps by pointing out that unless the ‘leverage ratio’ is calibrated and fixed well, movement at the other end of the organisational ‘lever’ will be sub-optimal.

 

As a child, I used to play with fractions and found some really funnily (and enlightening) different ways in which ratios behaved depending on whether their values were >1 or <1. As a simple illustration, just try adding and subtracting the same number, to/from the numerator and denominator of two ratios, one >1 and the other <1 ….. The direction and quantum of swings in their values are really interesting !!

 

While the canvass and brush are provided by Robbins and Archimedes and the palette is made available through The Productivity Prism, (I dabble in oil painting sometimes, with the output, as per my children, of the type from the dyslexic child in Taare Zameen Par !!) the only thing that one now needs is a thinner to dilute the paint to the right consistency, so as to be able to get the ‘Right Flow and Application’. Expertise in tools for proper prioritisation of issues at hand, understanding cause-effect relationships between various parameters and risk analysis can provide the right ‘consistency’ to enable ‘A Smooth & Graceful Flow’ in decision making with Optimal Innovative Solutions in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow ….. leading from complexity to simplicity ….. The Justplainandsimple Way !!

J.P.Singh

Justplainandsimple Consulting Pvt. Ltd.

JPS Consulting

Just Plain & Simple

….. Helping Realise Potential

JPS Customer Value Academy

Just Plain & Simple

….. Helping Create Customer Value

 

 

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Social Media ….. A User’s Perspective

From the Crucibles of JPS Customer Value Academy
Just Plain & Simple
….. Helping Create Customer Value

I am no expert in social media and also, not a very heavy user/time spender on social media sites. Yes, I do have a presence and do frequently ‘participate’ on quite a few of them. More so, as a practising manager, my interaction is more from the practical business perspective rather than living and breathing in the digital/internet world as does today’s digital generation !!

Having said that, when Geetanjali suggested that I do a short piece on social media, my obvious first response was to google ‘social media’ and try to learn more about it. So much for the strength and power of and dependence on the internet and social media today. Wikipedia gives a description of social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, which allows the creation and exchange of user-generated content.” Businesses also refer to social media as consumer-generated media (CGM). A common thread running through all definitions of social media is a blending of technology and social interaction for the co-creation of value.


There is abundance of data about the tremendously high prevalence, reach, usage etc. of social media and hence, let me not delve into those details and numbers. However, at a macro level it is man’s inherent nature and ‘interconnectedness’ that propel such developments. The story of human evolution is more about co-existence, co-evolution and collaboration than about destruction and fights. There is definitely a social set up and a ‘collegiality’ about the whole domain and it is this ‘motivator’ that acts as the power engine behind the huge success of social media. Promos of the movie ‘The Social Network’ (about the founders of Facebook, including Mark Zukerberg) say “You don’t get to 500 Million Friends without making a few enemies” !! The second part maybe debatable, but the relevant part here is the creation of a huge base of ‘friends’.


Some quotes from the film :


Mark Zuckerberg : People wanna go online and check out their friends, so why not build a website that offers that. I’m talking about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online.

Sean Parker : We lived in farms, then we lived in cities, and now we’re gonna live on the internet!


In my own personal life, as happens to most of us with nuclear families and work pressures, my contact with close cousins and friends from schools, college and early career, had dwindled drastically. But over the last few years, with Linked In, Facebook, Twitter and some other sites, I have been able to rediscover and reconnect with so many lost contacts and more importantly, have stayed connected due to ease of usability e.g. my cousin in Scotland with whom I touched base after 25 years and an old colleague now in Beijing, not to mention the business associate in Toronto with whom I am exploring opportunities.


The progression of society and social interaction through social media is blurring the boundaries of professional, social, personal and family space that used to be in so formally water tight compartments earlier. My own work timings are 24X7 with personal and professional time and space boundaries diffusing and the two spaces becoming more and more nebulous and closer in feel to the now commonly used term ….. ‘cloud’ ….. in a way reinforcing the quantum physics description of the true ‘wave’ nature of matter/existence. Non routine work formats, network like loosely bound collectives (teams), weak links (due to larger intermolecular distances in gaseous state) ….. all are becoming characteristics of the way we tend to feel and work and the direction towards which social media evolution is taking us. Organisational boundaries get blurred as well and networks and matrix like working environments emerge, each requiring very different skills.


There are certain other clear characteristics of this rather ‘nebulous’ state of affairs that is emerging. Let me use a few quotes from the same movie to demonstrate these.


Speed, Recency and Accessability :

Marylin Delpy : The site got twenty-two hundred hits within two hours?
Mark Zuckerberg : Thousand.
Marylin Delpy : I’m sorry?
Mark Zuckerberg : Twenty-two *thousand*.
Marylin Delpy : [to herself] Wow.

Permanence :

Erica Albright: The internet’s not written in pencil, Mark. It’s written in ink

Reach, Scalability and Usability :

Marylin Delpy : What are you doing?
Mark Zuckerberg : Checking in to see how it’s going in Bosnia.
Marylin Delpy : Bosnia. They don’t have roads, but they have Facebook.


There was a similar feeling when electronic media went through a revolutionary phase in India in the early ‘90s. Overnight, speed and recency of CNN led to the print medium and other channels look archaic and becoming insecure.


At a more micro level, in terms of usage for marketing, it does provide a strong tool. In conventional direct marketing that I used quite a lot, the key factors were direct, focussed and two way communication. Social media allows great efficiencies and effectiveness to practitioners of this.


However, conventional marketing wisdom of Brand Positioning, Style, Tonality are still valid and cannot be overlooked. A marketer can use divergence to reach out and target specific potential customers (mass customised contact base and communication, respecting the tremendous diversity of tastes and interests that can also be captured very well) and inward convergence to get customers/stakeholders to reach back to the organisation, but the greatest benefit lies in the possibility of developing ‘stickiness’ of relationships if ‘trust’ & ‘confidence’ is built in the source as an authority/expert.


Needless to say, there has to be caution in certain areas too e.g. in handling complaints and negative comments that can also shoot out and spread with the same speed and reach. Says a recent newspaper report ‘within 48 hours of its launch, the facebook account of Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) got 1278 hits and over 400 comments, mostly complaints. Only that MCD didn’t want to know about the civic mess in such gory details’. Life sciences and pharma players have to be very cautious in sharing information with lay consumers, lest wrong/half information create problems.


Specific tools, techniques and knowhow for this medium are also evolving as learning builds up, like for any new profession. There are already short term (one/two month) courses on social media that are coming up, to build and share a base of ‘knowledge’ related to this field.


Hope the skills and mass of knowledge in this area develop and this is one technology application which is truly used in growing love and not hatred in humanity, staying true to its inherent characteristic of ‘hyperconnectedness’ !!

J.P.Singh

Justplainandsimple Consulting Pvt. Ltd.

JPS Consulting

Just Plain & Simple

….. Helping Realise Potential

Website : www.justplainandsimple.com

 

(An edited version of this article was published in Empowering Times, December 2010 Issue

 

 

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The Indian Health Care Growth Story ….. A Perspective

From the Crucibles of JPS Customer Value Academy

                                           Just Plain & Simple                               

                                            ….. Helping Create Customer Value

The Indian Optician, September-October, 2010 Issue

Health care in India is clearly poised to grow. The last decade has seen the growth curve take a definite upward swing.

With the growth opportunity in an industry, needless to say, also comes entry of new players. So also has been the case in India. The industry has seen an increase in players in the direct domains of health care service delivery, as also related stakeholders in insurance, funding agencies, manufacturers, consultants, manpower outsourcing etc..

Each stakeholder brings a background and knowhow and definitely adds valuable contribution to the growth story. Each also has its own perspective and its own strategy on how to ‘create value’.

One is reminded of the story of five blind men (or men in a dark night situation) and the elephant, from school days. This needs to be taken in the right context of the meaning and the lesson it offers please.

There were five blind men who came upon an elephant.

“What is this?” asked the first one, who had touched its side. “It’s an Elephant.” said the elephant’s owner. The man ran his hands up and down the elephant’s side and said “It is like a huge wall”.

The second man, touching the elephant’s leg, said, “This is like a pillar”.

“An elephant is just like a snake. It’s wrapping around my arm” said the third man, stroking the elephant’s trunk.

Said the fourth man pulling the elephant’s tail, “This is not a snake, it’s more like a rope.”

The fifth man had touched the elephant’s ear and declared, “This is like a husking basket”

And they moved on along the road, arguing as they went ahead.

One way this story is used is to illustrate the principle of living in harmony with people who have different belief systems and that truth can be stated in different ways. This is the theory of Manifold Predictions.

Rumi, the Sufi poet, uses this story as an example of the limits of individual perception.

Each stakeholder has his/her view and rightly so. Each will try to use his/her own strategies and decisions to maximise his/her value creation.

With multiplicity of players in health care, there will be increased competition and that should be, for sure, good for the customer. Hence, Customer Value Offering will necessarily become extremely critical.

Survival of the fittest will therefore be linked to whoever is able to master ‘what the customer really wants’ & ‘what adds most value to the customer’.

Latest technology will be a key element, but may not be the only factor in winning this game. India needs ‘appropriate’ technology as well, to cater to the huge mass of population. And for that matter, there is money to be made at all levels of the income hierarchy and geographic spread. But how does this get unlocked ?

Strategically, a key differentiator that will emerge is operational efficiency. This is also a key element in customer satisfaction, be it for service providers, health insurance companies (portability/cashless debates included), suppliers, medical tourism or outsourcing agencies. Operational Efficiency includes cost, process efficiency, service cycle times, continuous improvement etc..

However, one point which is probably not getting enough attention in this whole excitement over growth, is the importance of Right People and Right People Processes. It is people, across all stakeholders and across all domains, functions and levels, who fundamentally drive all the strategies, decisions and operations. Ability to select, develop, retain and grow The Right People will probably emerge as the single most important Success Factor.

Any of the players in this industry, definitely spends a large percentage of its revenue in people cost (and it will be comparatively higher in pure service led businesses). This is the biggest expense after cost of goods ….. and just consider how much attention goes behind purchase (and annual maintenance contracts) of inanimate goods compared to selection, development, retention and growth of The Right People !!

Development of skills and talent, specific to health care itself, maybe an investment worth making in the business. There are organisations doing it, but very often it is seen as a social sector activity. However, this one activity could be the biggest value and profit enhancer, from the top end paying customer to a no frills primary centre in rural areas, where also, as they say, there is a lot of fortune lying !!

It is people at all levels who will become critical to success.

Leadership Challenge is to build bridges into the future.

For those who think operational efficiency may not be as important, it may be appropriate to share here that “Fielding historically has been seen as a Service Function in cricket for too long, till Jonty Rhodes changed the game and showed that a Fielder can win matches !!”

J.P.Singh

Justplainandsimple Consulting Pvt. Ltd.

JPS Consulting

Just Plain & Simple                               

….. Helping Realise Potential

JPS Customer Value Academy

Just Plain & Simple                               

….. Helping Create Customer Value

Website : www.justplainandsimple.com

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Decoding Innovation

 

From the Crucibles of JPS Consulting                                       

                                Just Plain & Simple
                                ….. Helping Realise Potential
 
TRIM Quarterly ….. A Showcase of Industrial India, September 2010
 

We are ourselves creation of God and by being creative, we further continue the process set forth by Him. Not only is it in our nature to be creative, but by doing so, we give back to The Creator, in our own specific ways, His gift of creativity to us. Creation, in its very basic meaning, is a process of ‘causing to exist’. Life has, inherent in its nature, an element of creating ‘newness’ and ‘novelty’. The continuous cycle of Creation, Preservation and Destruction is The Cosmic Cycle of Brahma, Vishnu & Shiva. When we are creative, we harness the universality around us and make it flow through us. Hence, creativity is life; it is opening oneself to GOD (Good Orderly Direction). When we refuse to be creative, it maybe self will, but contrary to our true nature, leading to things becoming static/still/dead.

 

Nature continuously plays out and demonstrates its tendency to create novelty. The process of evolution is one of the ways in which nature expresses it’s creativity. Evolution generally refers to the gradual process of development that we see in nature. This process has been going on for billions of years, from the time the first simple single cells were formed, through all the stages as life evolved into forms with higher complexity and order. The key routes to evolution were random mutation (once in millions of cells), trading of genetic pools (bacteria had access to a vast pool of genes, through which they passed traits in a powerful and efficient global exchange) and symbiogenesis (this is the key route of evolution for all higher organisms, in which there is creation of new forms of life through permanent symbiotic arrangements). The latter two are demonstrations of the powerful effects of collaboration, co-creation and co-evolution that exist in nature and these were then fine tuned and honed by natural selection. It seems that there is a grand design where collective memories and energies (without any regard to size, caste, colour and hierarchies) are at play to create ‘innovative evolution’ in an interconnected Dance of Life !!

 

Innovation stands for a new way, technique or method to do things. By definition, then, it is a creative process. Evolutionary history of life is full of examples of ‘innovative evolution’. Breathing and photosynthesis are excellent examples of this. When bacteria expanded, their energy needs led to shortage of hydrogen. Photosynthesis was an innovation to break water molecules using sunlight, to release hydrogen and oxygen. While hydrogen was used to build sugar and carbohydrates, oxygen was emitted into the atmosphere, leading to an oxygen crisis. Free oxygen is toxic as it produces free radicals and also causes combustion and corrosion. Breathing was the next innovation !!

 

Whether there have been challenges of the kind where an oxygen crisis was looming large, or whether the processes of mutation, gene trading and symbiosis were in any case running continuously, followed by natural selection, what is important in all these is that nature has its own ways of creativity. We can call it ‘Evolutionary Innovation’ or ‘innovative Evolution’, but this concept of ‘Creative Evolutionary innovation’ has elements of sharing knowledge, competition and collaboration, co-existing, adapting and growing. But ‘who collaborates with whom ?’ and ‘who adapts to what ?’ The species have an interplay with each other and also with the environment and the ecosystem, shaping and adapting to each other and the environment itself, thus Creating an Innovative Co-Evolutionary Dance ….. Nature’s creativity is boundless !!

 

Organizations can learn a lot from this process . Each organization itself is an ecosystem or an organism and has inter-relationships within and outside. Every function/department/location within an organization is also an ecosystem or an organism with such inter-relationships within themselves, with other functions/departments/locations, with the overall organization and with the external world. Such similarities with the way ecosystems and organisms are organized and behave in nature, cause organizations also to mimic the patterns and behaviour of species and ecosystems. Especially useful is the observation and learning attained through the processes of ‘Creative Evolutionary Innovation’ in Nature, no matter what the size of the organization ….. as is the case in nature, where size of the organisms is immaterial for this process to propagate; the smallest single cell organism or an amoeba or bacteria all played this game with equal adeptness, provided they followed the rules well !!

 

I understand that in organizations, or more so in the corporate world, innovation has to play a more practical and commercial role. It cannot be just a ‘nice to have initiative’ without any observable impact. Organisations exist to 1) add value for the customer and 2) create ROI for the investors. Both these can happen, ONLY IF ALL THE STAKEHOLDERS IN THE VALUE CHAIN, COLLECTIVELY STRIVE TO ACHIEVE them, by creating a Differential and/or Cost Advantage in a WIN-WIN situation for all. If this basic premise is accepted and understood, the parallel drawn till now can make sense. Otherwise the organization and this discussion both can become extinct.

 

Creativity can be a lone/solo process and we have heard about many creative people who operate alone and do end up creating masterpieces. However, there are also the creative masters like Edison, who actually had the benefit of learnings of a whole team with him. There definitely are stories of creative geniuses who worked alone, but we are talking here of common people and minds, working in day to day operations in closer to ground organizations. How do they bring alive creativity in their work ? A streak of genius happens once in a million, like random mutations in nature. Rest of the story of evolution is about the other two avenues of gene trading and symbiosis, honed by natural selection.

 

What then, could organizations do ? Draw on learnings from nature and life. The simplest life forms could have Creative Evolutionary Innovation. Organisations will not achieve it only by the chance stroke of a brilliant idea that occurs to an employee in romantic environs on a Sunday afternoon, relaxing on a hammock in the sun, glass of beer in one hand and cigarette in the other ….. He can probably keep waiting for that once in a million random mutation to strike. Or can organizations actually engineer the creative process proactively ….. by drawing on the know how encoded in the gene pool of the system and using symbiotic relationships to collaborate and co-evolve innovative solutions, taking the organization to the next level of growth and existence.

 

The fact is that every organization has tremendous information encoded in its DNA and the irony is that managers think that they know everything and do not need help. Even if I know that I do not know something, how can I be seen as admitting it in public ?? It was this ego that the primitive species did not have and hence continued to collaborate and evolve ….. and mind you, this was not only collaborating with other members of the same species, but at times with species competing for the same resources, to create a dynamic balance with win win for all. While bacteria are associated with disease, they are also vital for our survival ….. The story of evolution of life on our planet is one of cohabitation and co-evolution, rather than of combat and rivalry !!

 

Creativity, evolution, growth, learning and innovation are the lifeblood of any dynamic organization. Continuous learning and improvement are the hallmark of an adaptive organization. These organizations keep trying various things/doing things differently, some work some don’t ….. very much like natural selection ….. but the key element is their continuous effort to stimulate progress. They keep evolving and growing. 

 

What I suggest here is a process and mindset, which further reinforces and structures the same. This not only supports evolutionary growth, but also, in the way we look at innovation in more practical terms in our day to parlance ….. breakthrough growth as well.  The process involves bringing together all the knowledge bearers (genes) together, to place their understanding on a common plate (symbiosis), look at the same from different perspectives and evolve combinations and solutions that are innovative. This is not just a brainstorming exercise, but can involve techniques and expertise that make this seemingly simple process very effective. Selection of the right people to contribute their learnings, framing the right objectives, asking the right questions are some critical skills which can be facilitated if organizations are willing to take this journey. The expertise lies in making the complex looking process simple and structured ….. to engineer innovation rather than hoping that it will happen one day ….. and my experience says that it can be engineered !!

 

I have tried this in various situations and groups over a period of time. At a critical phase in the lifecycle of one business, profitability and hence survival was a big issue.  A team comprising people from manufacturing, materials, marketing, finance and maintenance, including shopfloor workers who are closest to action, worked together. Within six months they came up with actual, permanent, annualised cost savings to the tune of 4% of revenue. Engineered innovation achieved through facilitation with the right people, posing the right questions and using the right approach made all the difference for this organization ….. between extinction and thriving growth towards industry leadership !!

 

In another situation, a business was faced with the challenge of a competitive launch within one week. Competition had guarded the news very well and hence there was no time for preparing defence. A team of key people were brought together. Facilitation through a structured innovation process brought out a creative plan within one hour. The result was that the competitive launch was totally blunted and inspite of all the preparation, they could never gather the confidence and put their act together again to gain any respectable market share.

 

There was yet another organization with issues related to ROCE. Gene pool trading and symbiotic facilitation process led to a restructuring of P&L lines and asset turns to yield an increase of 7%. Examples abound, of the ways we have been able to utilize this mechanism in strategy, manufacturing, sales, problem solving, decision making, business processes, marketing etc. with equal success.

 

The process starts with divergence of thoughts (gene trading and symbiosis) followed by convergence (natural selection), which includes perspectives, analysis, combinations, risk analysis and action planning ….. all in a structured process. The attempt is not to just leave innovation to chance, but to be able to engineer and determine our destinies to the extent we possibly can.  Loss of information in black holes reduces our ability to predict the future ….. but atleast we should not end up creating organizational black holes ourselves, to be sucked up under the pull of organizational gravity itself ….. The idea is to have an organizational dance to release positive energy for Thriving Growth and Prosperity !!

 

J.P.Singh

Justplainandsimple Consulting Pvt. Ltd.

 

JPS Consulting                                       

Just Plain & Simple                               

….. Helping Realise Potential

 

JPS Customer Value Academy

Just Plain & Simple                               

….. Helping Create Customer Value

 

 

 

  

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