Need better execution? | Issue #143
10 Surefire Ways To Improve Execution In Your Business
You’re an ambitious CEO with your eyes firmly set on the horizon. You know your tech business has considerable potential. And you’re aware of opportunities opening up, right now, for companies that are first out of the blocks. To prosper and grow, you need to get execution right. Yet, so few companies do.
That’s because getting people to change is the real challenge of execution. You can come up with the most persuasive, jaw-dropping strategy in the world. But without total buy-in from your staff, it’s likely to wither and die.
This matters, and it needs action. Last week, I talked about the ‘Great Resignation’ that’s about to hit. If your company doesn’t hum like a well-oiled machine, you’re in danger of losing your good people – your ‘A-Players’. They’re driven and want to be on a mission. They like achieving and keeping score. And they want to work with like-minded people.
It’s the perfect flywheel. Smooth execution attracts A-Players who then drive even smoother execution. I know because we achieved this when I was MD of Peer 1. I’d interview great candidates and ask them why they wanted to join us. They’d been working for years for our competitors, why move now? They told us that ours was the first job they’d felt excited about. And that’s because they’d heard great things about the way we worked.
So how do you improve execution in your business? What are the main things to focus on?
How To Improve Customer Relationships By Creating A Connected Strategy with Nicolaj Siggelkow
Nicolaj Siggelkow is a lifelong academic, currently the David M. Knott Professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He is a Co-Director of the Mack Institute for Innovation Management and the former Department Chair of Wharton’s Management Department.
Nicolaj loves the intersection of teaching and research and getting to focus on the things he’s excited about. And so he’s written a fantastic book called Connected Strategy: Building Continuous Customer Relationships for Competitive Advantage.
In today’s episode, Nicolaj discusses how organisations can sell one off interactions they have with customers, he uses healthcare as his example, for a set amount of money. How do they persuade customers of the lifetime value of that asset so that they part with their cash up front for something they may not need for a long time?
We talk about pricing, subscription, technology and how these things are coming together to change the way organisations compete, in a connected strategy. How can we take a transactional relationship with a customer and turn it into a lifetime revenue generating relationship?
This is an absolutely fantastic conversation with Nicolaj, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
Recommended Podcasts
Business Owners of every kind will want to hear from some of the leading marketing, sales, growth and management experts in the world right here on Your First Thousand Clients! The show that gets you to YOUR first thousand clients and beyond!
Recommended Articles
Why You Should Ask Your People About Returning After They’ve Returned to the Office
There’s been a lot of tough talk about returning to the office lately. For example, Morgan Stanley’s Chief Executive James Gorman told his New York based employees, “If you can go into a restaurant in New York City, you can come into the office and we want you in the office.”
Anxious About Hybrid Work? Ask Yourself These 4 Questions.
I love my job. I also love working from home. You may feel the same, especially after over a year of fewer commutes and the ability to get serious tasks done in your own environment. But you may also be feeling pressure or anxiety about jumping right back into full-time office work.
How to Lead Your Team Through the Transition Back to the Office
If you’re anxious about how your team is going to navigate the transition to whatever form of in-person work your company is planning, you aren’t alone. By now, you’re likely aware that most employees don’t want to return to whatever normal looked like pre-pandemic. A recent survey from Harvard Business School of 1,500 employees revealed that 81% of them either don’t want to come back at all or would prefer a hybrid model of work.
Recommended Reads
Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R Sunstein
Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients — or that two judges in the same courthouse give different sentences to people who have committed the same crime. Suppose that different food inspectors give different ratings to indistinguishable restaurants — or that when a company is handling customer complaints, the resolution depends on who happens to be handling the particular complaint. Now imagine that the same doctor, the same judge, the same inspector, or the same company official makes different decisions, depending on whether it is morning or afternoon, or Monday rather than Wednesday. These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical.
In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Cass R. Sunstein, and Olivier Sibony show how noise contributes significantly to errors in all fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, police behavior, food safety, bail, security checks at airports, strategy, and personnel selection. And although noise can be found wherever people make judgments and decisions, individuals and organizations alike are commonly oblivious to the role of chance in their judgments and in their actions.
Award-winning Wharton Professor Katy Milkman has devoted her career to the study of behaviour change. An engineer by training, she approaches all challenges as problems to be solved and, with this mindset, has drilled into the roadblocks that prevent us from achieving our goals and breaking unwanted behaviours. The key to lasting change, she argues, is not to set ever more audacious goals or to foster good habits but to get your strategy right. In How to Change Milkman identifies seven human impulses, or ‘problems’, that commonly sabotage our attempts to make positive personal and professional change. Then, crucially, instead of getting you to do battle with these impulses she shows you how to harness them and use these as driving forces to help instil new, positive behaviours – better, faster and more efficiently than you could imagine. Drawing her own original research, countless engaging case studies and practical tools throughout to help you put her ideas into action, Milkman reveals a proven, inspiring path that can take you – once and for all – from where you are today to where you want to be.
Scaling Up Business Growth Workshop
6th July – New Forest
The journey to grow a business can feel lonely and full of disruptions for many leaders. In times of crisis like this, it’s easy to lose sight of where you are and how to get where you want to be. With clarity on your core values, purpose and vision you can streamline your success to scale faster.
Come and meet Scaling Up Coaches Dominic Monkhouse and his colleague, Philip Rose, and they’ll walk you through the Scaling Up programme that has already helped 2,700 firms worldwide get clarity on their business model.
MEANINGFUL ACTION FOR MONDAY
Review your flexible working policies
More women than men don’t want to come back to the office. The reason? Childcare. So look at your flexible working policy. Our recommendation is to form a team of staff with kids and give them the autonomy to come up with some proposals. What do they need to come back to the office? How could the company help with this? Maybe you need to adopt core hours of 10am – 4pm. That way, one parent can drop off and the other pick-up. Or rather than losing holiday when their child’s off school, could they take a sick day? Research shows that they’re much more likely to come on board if they’ve been involved in the process. And they’ll probably pick a higher goal than you expect.
Upcoming Events
LIVE FIRESIDE CHAT WITH HUBERT JOLY, CEO OF BEST BUY – 23rd JUNE – 1.30-2.30PM ET
Join us to hear the remarkable story of how Hubert Joly orchestrated Best Buy’s spectacular turnaround. Having joined as CEO in 2012, he spent 8 years transforming the company into one of the nation’s favourite employers, a sustainability leader, and an innovator, vastly increasing customer satisfaction, and dramatically growing its stock price. In this fireside chat, Joly will share how he did it and unveil his personal philosophy to achieving extraordinary outcomes for all stakeholders by putting purpose and people first.Autonomy Mastery Purpose – Plus an increase in productivity of 500%! What if the most significant obstacle to your success is your organizational approach? The world around us has changed. We are in the information age; individuals are networked together in ways that we could never have imagined. Rather than re-design our organizations to integrate the benefits from these technologies, most have simply taken their existing organization and woven these technologies around it. Join Andrew and Julian from Matt Black Systems to learn how they re-designed their organization, achieving a remarkable transformation.
Quote of the week
“Without execution, ‘vision’ is just another word for ‘hallucination’”
Mark V Hurd
Dominic Monkhouse
Dominic offers business coaching and management development, strategy planning and organisational change, using tried and tested methods to launch your organisation onto an unparalleled growth trajectory. His programme is a function of his broad experience, his deep expertise and a proven process used by over 2,700 firms worldwide.