Ever run or cycled into a headwind? You have to work a lot harder to make the same progress that normally comes a lot more easily. Conversely, running or riding with the wind at your back is a glorious feeling.
On a recent ride, I had plenty of opportunity to consider how headwinds and tailwinds apply to business as I tried to distract myself from all the huffing and puffing I was doing just to maintain a decent speed. (more…)
Sheryl Adkins Green, Global Vice President of Brand Development for the iconic cosmetics brand Mary Kay Inc., is my guest for today’s interview.
She has some important insights to share about how to build a brand across many different countries and cultures. She speaks not only about understanding the differences and commonalities among women around the world, but also aligning the organization around that understanding.
And she should know! Sheryl leads the company’s global product strategy including product positioning, packaging, product education and pricing. Prior to joining Mary Kay, Sheryl was the Vice President and General Manager of the Pro-Line International Division of Alberto-Culver.
I met Sheryl a couple of years ago and have really benefited from her wise counsel and support ever since. I think you’ll really enjoy hearing from her. Have a listen!
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Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s publication of its “The Popularity Issue: America’s most popular products and how they got that way” makes some fascinating statements about today’s business culture — but not because of the items it named (although those do make for an interesting read.)
The fact that a business publication would devote an issue to things which are “popular” and that it plans to do this every year (as this issue was named its “1st Annual”) suggests that popularity is a concept businesspeople care about – which is an interesting, and not necessarily good, development. Further, the methods by which BusinessWeek measures so-called popularity reveal the vagary in any undertaking to understand popularity – which leads to some important implications about business success. (more…)
Over coffee the other day a colleague asked me a question I actually get asked a lot: Do you find that people “get it?” By “it” he was referring to operationalizing the brand, the approach I teach and help my clients implement. He asked because he’s found, as have I, that although many company leaders claim to understand the difference between expressing and operationalizing a brand, the fact is, most don’t put their brand in the driver’s seat of their organization.
Our talk prompted me to think about why this is the case. Most business leaders are eager to leverage the full potential of their brands, but they’re not following through. (more…)
Today I interview Omar Green, the Director of Strategic Mobile Initiatives at Intuit.
I met Omar when I moderated a panel on “Mobile: New Business Models, New Markets” at the Red Herring North America conference last month. I was so intrigued by the work Omar and his team are doing, I wanted him to share some of it with you.
Omar has been at the center of several of Intuit’s recent mobile application launches including GoPayment, which is a mobile credit card acceptance service in conjunction with Sprint/Nextel. Prior to Intuit, he was director of personalization technologies at SaveJe Technologies where he created one of the first user context-sensitive mobile operating systems.
Although Omar’s resume sounds pretty tech-y, I found his comments really insightful and Intuit’s approach to solving customers’ problems quite enlightened. Give a listen:
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Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum 2010: Creating Breakthrough Customer Experiences featured a fantastic line-up of speakers — including company leaders from client organizations as diverse as H&R Block, FedEx, and Sprint, as well as thought leaders from Forrester and other service providers.
From all of the presentations, it was clear that “creating breakthrough customer experiences” (defined on Wikipedia as “the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier“) requires systematic, cultural, and organizational changes within a company. (more…)
Now that summer is officially here, I wanted to take a look back at the past 6 months and see what kinds of conversations had been sparked by brand as business bites. 
The following are the top posts from each month in terms of number of re-tweets, comments, or emails they generated – I’ve also included some of the commentary. I’d definitely like to hear more, so please take a look and then add your voice to the conversation by clicking on the “comments” link below. (more…)
I was fascinated by the story told in a recent strategy+business piece about Herman Miller, Inc., the “office-furniture maker.” 
That descriptor belongs in quotation marks because it seems the company is as adept at building breakthrough business practices as it is its cool Aeron chairs. The article offers a peak into the great company behind the great brand. I’ve culled from the piece insights about what Herman Miller is designing in its business lab:
1. change as a strategic advantage – Most companies may tolerate change and the best ones anticipate it, but Herman Miller has embraced it in a way that would cause companies half its age to marvel.
The company has successfully undertaken fundamental changes to its business model and its culture throughout its long history (the company was founded over one hundred years ago, in 1905) — change from investing in the current product stream to funding a skunkworks operation; from adversarial relationships with its suppliers to a consultative ones; from batch manufacturing to lean manufacturing; from static furniture to programmable environments.
It’s not been easy – the strategy+business piece calls the prospect of change “mind-bending” as it relates the story of the company’s search for a manufacturing solution to address encroachment from lower-priced competitors. But the company’s willingness to change, combined with its capacity to execute it, is remarkable.
2. 360 degree collaboration – The company’s skillful practice of positive, productive collaboration originates in its tradition of hiring outside designers. In its early years, it engaged Charles and Ray Eames to produce groundbreaking designs including the iconic Eames Lounge Chair.
Its collaboration with designers continues today, with its recent hiring of experts to inform the development of its Creative Office. The outside team has created a “stream of innovations” from which the Herman Miller executives choose a subset for development.
This open-ness to partnering with outsiders shapes practically every aspect of the business. It works with its suppliers to implement the lean manufacturing principles honed in its own plants, providing its own experts to work on suppliers’ shop floors to introduce the changes.
The company also is using collaborative partnerships to gain new capabilities, calling on a building manufacturer to teach it how to build infrastructure. In return it is teaching its dealers how to be as “healthy and successful as possible – and to help them best represent Herman Miller’s strengths.” Its engineers regularly visit dealer sites to observe installations, identify waste to cut, and to reduce delivery time by improving logistics.
3. market- not product- or materials- oriented design – When given the bold aspiration of doubling the size of the company’s business playing field in 3-5 years, the researcher in charge, Gary Miller, began by asking, “What are the unsolved problems out there?”
He didn’t limit his investigation to conventional fixtures (using LEDs only as substitutes for standard incandescent light fixtures, for example) – nor a conventional approach to design. As his team examined trends and studied current products, they discovered, “Incumbent companies plied the waters of many established, but separate, oceans of commerce – but none were exploring the unchartered waters in between them.” So that’s where they focused.
With this market-oriented approach, the company “has moved itself from selling furniture to providing the entire building enveloped with intelligent infrastructure.” And in doing so, it has identified adjacent markets which will provide new streams of revenue at a time when its core business is flattening.
4. business school for all employees – Participative management has been a key operating approach at Herman Miller. Max De Pree, CEO of the company in the early 1980’s, explained the philosophy: “Each of us, no matter what our rank in the hierarchy may be, has the same rights: to be needed, to be involved, to have a covenantal relationship, to understand the corporation, to affect our destiny, to be accountable, to appeal, to make a commitment.” (emphasis mine)
This meant that when markets contracted in the 1990’s, the company instituted EVA (Economic Value Added) training for all employees in order to restore the firm to solid profitability. “It didn’t matter if [employees] were involved in buying, selling, building, designing, billing, paying, or financing…they were expected to embed EVA into their thinking.”
More recently, the current downturn has once again put the company under serious financial pressure and it has furloughed its employees every other Friday. But also once again it is teaching its employee base how to employ a broad business mindset to keep the business sustainable. Using a wage recovery plan which pays people back for lost wages if the company reaches its goals, CEO Brian Walker believes employees learn “to make progress through the management practices that had sustained the company for so long…”
5. new ways of thinking – A common thread runs through the company’s history – challenging the norms. A few examples:
Boundaries not briefs – As noted previously noted, Gary Miller, the leader of the LED project didn’t want the usual ideas so he engaged an unusual team. Prohibiting the hiring of furniture designers, he instead got a special effects designer, a computer designer, and an architect to form the team. And instead of a product brief, he simply gave them boundaries. This structured freedom approached yielded a host of innovations which “reinvent many aspects of office interiors” and “redefine how people would think about personal space, office geometry, privacy, and illumination.”
Advocacy not approval – Miller also took a norm-busting approach to managing up. He offset the “not-invented-here syndrome” and “the tyranny of the urgent” by asking the CEO, CFO, and two other leaders to sit on his internal board of directors. “The objective was to have top decision-makers invest themselves in the work…’The idea,’ he says, ‘was to change the dynamic from traditional review-and-approve to advocacy.’”
Balance not blow-off constraints – Charles Eames, taught the organization that “the first task of a designer was to recognize ‘constraints,’ including factors like price, size, production, time, strength, and support, and that the best design was the one that best balanced them.” Instead of pursuing the artistic purity of “good design,” the company has sought to answer the “real questions: Does it solve a problem? It is serviceable? How is it going to look in ten years?”
I hope you are as inspired as I was by this peak behind the curtain at Herman Miller. What other companies are operating their own business labs? Please let me know.
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I have a great interview to share with you!
Les McKeown spoke with me about the stages companies work through on the way to success, which is the subject of his new book, Predictable Success: Getting Your Organization On the Growth Track–and Keeping It There
Les is a serial entrepreneur — he’s launched over 40 businesses from a Pizza Hut master license to a graphic design agency, from a tool and die manufacturing company to one of Ireland’s leading contemporary art galleries. Today he works with senior leaders at organizations like Harvard University, Pella, T-Mobile, and American Express to help them lead their teams forward into the next stage of growth. Learn more about Les and contact him through his website, Predictable Success.
In our talk, Les shares some really insightful comments about the challenges business leaders face, including developing and maintaining their brand strength. I hope you get as much out of the interview as I did — and follow Les on Twitter (I do!)
P.S. I apologize for the bit of static and jumpy-ness of the audio file — it diminishes as the interview progresses and the content is well worth listening through it.
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