What’s your one thing? The one thing you could do this year that would bring you the most success? The one thing simply by concentrating all your resources on you could impact your business to the greatest degree? In our Rockefeller Habits 2 Day Workshop we ask our participating clients to discover their one thing. The one thing that they need to focus on in the next 3 – 12 months that would make a significant difference in their business.
Strategic Discipline Blog
Douglas A Wick
Recent Posts
Growth Summit cont Fred Reichheld The ultimate Question – Customer Advocacy
Posted by Douglas A Wick on Fri, Feb 1, 2008
How do you measure customer loyalty? How important is customer loyalty? Fred Reichheld suggests that most companies are doing customer loyalty all wrong, and yet it is the one thing that when done right secures real growth for your business. In Fred’s presentation he discussed his books, The Ultimate Question, Loyalty Rules and The Loyalty Effect, mostly highlighting recent information in the latest offering, The Ultimate Question.
Topics: Net Promoter Score, Growth Summit, NPS, Fred Reichheld
Growth Summit cont Paul Orfalea Transform Obstacles Into Opportunities
Posted by Douglas A Wick on Sat, Jan 19, 2008
Paul Orfalea is that man who created Kinko’s. He’s written a book, "Copy This!" about his taking a small copy shop and turning it into a $2 billion a year company. FedEx Kinko’s, as it is now known, is the world’s leading business services chain with over 1500 locations worldwide. He is also the self proclaimed “poster boy for Attention Deficit Disorder and dyslexia who just happened to have failed two grades.
Topics: Growth Summit
Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinko’s has an interesting story with lots of anecdotes. However I'd like to provide you with a question and book for you to considering picking up that really speaks to the heart of why you are or aren't achieving what you want.
The book [I'm listening to it on CD] is the Power of Story, by Jim Loehr, the gentleman that co-authored the Power of Full Engagement, another one of my favorite books. Having only read a portion of it I can only give you the flavor of it. Like most books I enjoy I plan to get the hard copy now that I've found the audio portion is so engaging.
The book offers a very good perspective that most of us are caught in a web of deception and limitation due to the stories we continually tell ourselves.
Two stories that stood out was of a tennis player they worked with that they helped determine her mission. When they originally asked her what her mission was, she announced it was to win lots of money and become a top ten tennis player. She realized very quickly that wasn't very fulfilling, and discovered the emptiness of this when she achieved what she wanted and still felt unfulfilled.
Through a number of questions similar to our Primary Aim and what most people would recognize as a discovery process for your mission statement this female tennis player had an epiphany. She announced one morning that your mission was, "I want to be sunny!"
She wanted to be a beacon of happiness, which eliminated the stress and anxiety she had been feeling about her striving to achieve. Uninhibited by her previous constraints and only concerned with living her mission, she promptly went out and played her best tennis ever upsetting one of her previous nemesis in her first grand slam event.
Story #2 is about a business owner who while performing extraordinarily well after taking over his father's business never felt happy or satisfied. He realized that his obsession to build the business was more about making his father feel he was good enough rather than any desire of his own.
Unfortunately many if not most of us face the same situation as the latter story. We have never really figured out what makes us happy. In fact we are busy constructing stories, most of them compelling lies about how we are not good enough or what we can't do rather than positive life affirming messages of the person we are truly capable of becoming.
I plan to write one of my newsletters on this, once I have gotten through more of the book. The idea the Power of Story, by Jim Loehr offers is that we can change our lives by simply changing our story. Perhaps simply isn't the best word to use here, but let me ask you, what's your story? Where have you been deceiving yourself into believing you are less than you are capable of?
Finally I leave you with a quote from Marianne Williamson [Also sometimes attributed to Nelson Mendala] that I have built my business purpose around, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous." Actually, who are you NOT to be? Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that others won't feel insecure around you. We are born to manifest the glory that is within us. It is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
Reading the Power of Story, makes me appreciate the power that Paul Orfalea created in achieving his success with Kinkos. What your story, and how much do you wish to achieve? I'll talk about Kinkos in my next blog.
Topics: Business Growth, priorities, performance, Power of Story
Growth Summit - Emergence At Work Steven Berlin Johnson
Posted by Douglas A Wick on Mon, Dec 31, 2007
Wikipedia and Mozilla Fire Fox are two examples of the collective intelligence that has made these two very successful. Google’s success has come through recognizing this bottom up thinking and they have organized their search rankings by counting every link on the web as a vote and thus allowing everyone to vote to attain page rankings. It must be working since Google continues to gain in popularity as the number one search engine.
In meaning cases the bottom up pattern works better than top down, however he offered several case studies where without leadership, this eventually leads to a downfall in an organization.
Lego is an example where the business involved their customers to develop new products and ideas. That is perhaps the most important practical piece of information I received out of this presentation. By involving your customers and your staff you can stimulate innovations. Yet customers and staff have to feel they are contributing and that these contributions are making a difference. IF they don’t the likelihood of their continuing to contribute diminishes. The challenge with this practice is getting involvement since the examples of Wikipedia and Mozilla show that in a group contribution 1% do most of the work, 10% participate, edit and offer contributions, yet fully 89% don’t do anything. In order to gain more participation Steve suggested rewarding schemes, rating comments and perhaps simply put a competitive environment in place where people compete for higher scores. Even in situations where there is nothing but a scoring system that is largely meaningless, people contribute more to raise their score.
Sites like Amazon and E-Bay have gotten great contributions for ratings and comments from their customers which has greatly enhanced their offerings and provided additional value to new and existing customers. If you’ve been to Amazon you’ve probably seen the comments from readers about a book and their rating system. Have you found it helpful? I have, and often times I will read the most negative rating just to make sure what they are saying warns me of what I should be concerned about before making my purchase.
Topics: Growth Summit
Which do you feel is more important, for you to be liked or for you to like the person you are trying to sell? You may disagree with this next statement, but if you think about it I believe you will discover it is true. Praise is the only information accepted and valued as much as when it is true as when it is false. What’s the point of this? The point is that it’s not important for the other person to like you. What’s important is for you to like them. Whether I like you or not will not determine whether I make a purchase, but rather if you like me I will be more inclined to purchase.
Topics: Growth Summit, persaussion principles, Power of Persausion
Growth Summit cont. – Persuasion Principle #5 Consensus – Social Proof
Posted by Douglas A Wick on Sat, Dec 1, 2007
If you’ve stayed over night at a hotel recently most likely you’ve seen the signs that ask you to reuse towels. If you wonder how effective it is to provide proof that others are following what you are requesting you’ll find Dr. Cialdini’s recent work at hotels in the Phoenix area interesting.
Topics: Growth Summit, persausion principles, Power of Persausion
Growth Summit cont. – Persuasion Principle #4 Consistency
Posted by Douglas A Wick on Sat, Nov 24, 2007
Is your business reliant on the commitment that customers and prospects make to you? Do your customers and prospects make appointments and/or reservations and then too often fail to live up to their end of the agreement?
Topics: Growth Summit, persaussion principles, Power of Persausion
Growth Summit cont. – Persuasion Principle #2 Scarcity
Posted by Douglas A Wick on Sat, Nov 24, 2007
That’s exactly what BOSE discovered when they introduced a new wave sound system. So they approached Dr. Robert Cialdini to review their ad and give them advice. He agreed that the ad contained everything that a customer would want to know, but he suggested one change, the headline. Instead of announcing new, he suggested, “Hear what you’ve been missing.” The result? A 45% increase in leads generated.
Curious why that works? I am. He indicated it drew on Principle #2 of his persuasion principles, scarcity, or "if I can’t have it I want it. "
Topics: Growth Summit, persaussion principles, Power of Persausion
Growth Summit cont. – Persuasion Principle #3 Authority
Posted by Douglas A Wick on Sat, Nov 17, 2007
How do you establish credibility in a short period of time? To be seen as an expert you must show knowledge and be trustworthy. To build these takes time however. For Principle #3 Robert Cialdini suggests we learn from the experts – mass advertisers. They have 15 to 60 seconds to gain credibility when advertising, so how do they do it?
Topics: Growth Summit, persausion principles, Power of Persausion