Tag: Change

Your change is unique

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

With the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream speech” this is a week in which we are reminded of the power of people’s dreams to change the world and the power of individuals to bring those dreams to life.

How do you want to change the world?  

Everyone does, at least in some small way. Everyone’s desired change is slightly different.

That is the work each of us need to do.  The diversity of our unique visions is also the reason why the changes are not going to happen on their own.

Here is an exercise to try:  Take the next five people you meet and ask them to describe specifically how they would like to change the world.  Don’t settle for “achieve world peace” or “end poverty” or “achieve gender equity”.  Ask them to explain how that world would look, work and feel in some specific detail.  

The answers are diverse even if the themes are consistent.  Ask yourself how you would describe similar changes. My experience is that each person’s method and inspirations for changing the world are driven by unique visions and their experiences.

This drives us to at least five insights for our personal actions to realise our changes in the world:

  • You can’t leave it to others: Nobody else wants exactly what you want.  Don’t you want your views to be considered and some part of your vision realised.  If you are not involved you don’t get to shape the changes and the decisions will be made by others.  As many people have discovered specifying requirements and sitting back generates a different quality of outcome to being a part of a change process.
  • You can’t do it alone: Any change to the world, as opposed to ourselves, by definition affects others.  You will need to take their goals, concerns and circumstances into account.  You will need their help or at least an end to resistance.  Plan for a collaborative and adaptive process to engage them in the change.  There is always enough work to do and ideas turn into better action through discussion and debate.
  • We need to use what is common: Finding common purpose, concerns and circumstances is how we engage others to move to new actions.  We need to align around each of these before we can move forward in an engaged way.   Differences are issues to be addresses.  What is common is our way forward together.
  • We need to embrace difference: Don’t sweep difference however small aside or under the carpet.  It will only come back later more dangerously and more vehemently.  Explore how the small differences in vision can be addressed or aligned in action.  Difference is the source of ideas, innovation and growth.
  • Use the ‘fierce urgency of now’: The best time to act is when you see the need for action. When you see a need for action, act then.  Others will see it to and the common view of a need to act is important to leverage.   Later, you will need to recreate the same level of energy and urgency or you and others will be endlessly debating when is the right time.
If you want to make your changes in the world, you will have to act, embracing the challenges that it brings.

Scaling enterprise sales

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Selling to enterprise clients is the new black. However, enterprise sales rarely comes easily.  The challenges highlight where businesses need to innovate to engage enterprise customers.  

With the successes of organisations like Workday, Amazon Web Services, Yammer, Salesforce.com and others in selling to enterprises, many entrepreneurs are looking to generate revenue for their start-up by selling to enterprises.  Over recent years I have spoken to many people, keen to sell services to large organisations.  Like all good entrepreneurs they are keen to move fast and scale their businesses.  However, few have invested time and effort in how they will scale their distribution to enterprises.

David Sacks CEO and co-founder of Yammer gave a recent talk to Khosla Ventures that highlighted the challenges of enterprise sales:

  • Enterprise sales aren’t viral.  You might be able to win enterprise users with a click, but money takes sales effort.
  • You need a sales team to get the sale and you can waste a lot of time and money with a poor performing sales team.
  • You need to know your buyer or you can waste a lot of time navigating organisations and dealing with many parties
  • You need to shape your buyer’s perceptions
  • The enterprise rarely has one mind and you may find conflicting agendas, decision rights, etc.  It is not uncommon to have technical, finance, legal and other gatekeepers who need to be satisified before a check is cut by the buyer.

Sacks called for start-ups to put as much effort into innovating distribution as they do their product. Any business to business sales business should do the same.

These lesson reflect what any business to business organisation has known for years.  Enterprise sales is a demanding body contact sport where the rules and the opposing players keep changing.  So how do you do it better than the average depends on how your design your innovative sales model to leverage these insights:

  • Be ready to be right first time.  Enterprise buyers are time poor. If you don’t have your questions or your pitch clear, then don’t expect them to wait for you to sort it out.  These are first impression sales so you want to create and maintain a positive momentum from the get-go.  Plenty of great ideas died at the doorstep because the sales person wasn’t ready to sell.  Make sure your team is capable of delivering the message.  Spray and pray can do more damage to your reputation.  In many cases, there are few buyers of your solution and unlike consumers they rarely forgive.  In a social era, enterprise buyers increasingly know each other and collaborate on insights into vendors.
  • Collaboration is better than going alone.  Leverage internal change agents and partners who can help you understand the organisation, the agendas and find the buyer. Invest time in research before you act. There is enormous power in having someone inside the organisation who can work the system for you and supply you with the right information to go forward. Too many perfect fits fail because meetings don’t get followed up.  Just like internal change agents, partners who have already done the leg work on that or similar organisations are ways to accelerate your efforts.
  • Understand the buyer’s needs.  What your product does is irrelevant.  How much the users love it is irrelevant.  Your feature differences to competitors are irrelevant.  Your analyst ratings are irrelevant.  Don’t confuse the tool with the result.  What matters most to corporate customers is the problem that they are trying to solve today. Make sure your pitch is meeting their strategic needs.
  • Help the organisation understand value by solving their need exceptionally well.  The decision criteria in organisations can be as bewildering as the choice of solutions that the organisation faces.  One thing is clear to every company the amount of money that they are being asked to put out the door.  The better job you do demonstrating real value is a multiple of that specific cost, the easier your sales job is.  We are not talking promises or soft benefits.  We are talking demonstration of real hard value.  If it can’t be demonstrated by a pilot or experiment in the organisation then you will need to invest in case studies with role model global organisations that everyone else wants to copy.
  • Manage a pipeline of sales opportunities:  Enterprise sales take time.  Providing continuity of management over time is important to maximise your chances and minimise waste.  Managing a pipeline enables you to assess continuously where each deal is at, assess prospects of success, kill bad deals quickly and shepherd customers through from suspect to prospect to opportunity to purchase decision to order and then through to implementation.  
  • Plan for and design for servicing of the account to realise value. Winning a licence fee or a service fee is well and good. However, unlike consumers you can rarely leave a enterprise client to its own devices to make the value from your product.  The multiple agendas mean that there will be changes, new questions and always new agendas. If you want to retain and grow their business given all you invested in a sale, treat sales and service as a continuum.  You will need to plan to support your customers to grow the use of your product and leverage that to grow your revenues.

As Sacks argues, you need to innovate in your distribution model. Enterprise sales don’t just happen. If you want to scale, enterprise sales you will need some new magic. My advice is to focus your distribution model innovation on the key issues because a better solution to these issues combining service design and sales will deliver big advantages down the track.

The few & the many

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Leadership

Large corporations are challenged sustaining & retaining change agents.  A handful of change agents can make an enormous difference to any organisation.  Change agents are at the heart of the ability to innovate, to adapt and to remain externally focused.  Change agents are often the gateway for new partners, explore the edges and conduit for new ideas into organisations because of their willingness to consider the new, to experiment and to get stuff done.

The ideal model is that leaders everywhere have the capability and the authority to drive change.  Like many ideal models, this oft stated ambition is harder to find in practice.  This difficulty is no excuse for not trying.  However, many corporates deliberately, or unwittingly, adopt a 21st century demarcation between traditional managers who keep the wheels of business as usual turning and their contingent of change agents who transform the business.

The best outcome for corporates is to have a spread of change agents across their business.  That way each function and division can be exposed to change.  For major initiatives, change agents from different silos can collaborate to bring the business together in key initiatives.  Sadly, this model is often the most dangerous for the change agents.  Change agents must operate in the midst of large groups of more traditionally oriented managers, dependent on a tolerance for diversity and ongoing support for their efforts and occasional failures. As one change agent put it to me, this model means that they have to deliver 110% of the contribution of a traditional manager in the organisation & then deliver change just to make their position safe.  The slightest slip creates an opportunity for backlash.

Commonly change agents will exist in clusters drawn to other similar individuals who are interested in new ideas and making change happen.  Some change agents explicitly recruit and develop teams who support their change agenda.  While this model can provide a safe haven to nurture change and change leaders, it creates a risk that the entire cluster can be lost at once with a change of leadership or a mass defection. Increasing fragility is not a sustainable solution.

So what can be done to foster the growth of change agents across an organisation?  Here are 6 actions to help.

  • Know who they are, what they are working on and show interest.  Who are your ‘go to’ people if it is new, difficult or demanding?  A simple cup of coffee or a phone call can do wonders in retaining and encouraging people to push for change.  Clearly, if you run talent processes you can be more deliberate in investing in their development and careers.
  • Value project work as much as line management.  Change agents will be drawn to projects, but if it is a ghetto you will lose their impact in the rest of the business.
  • Encourage diversity of individuals, allow diverse management styles and make openness to the new & different a key value in your organisation.  Remember not all change agents are charismatic leaders and many will be far from traditional homes in edgy technology, creative or strategic business opportunities.  The effective styles are as diverse as human nature.  Some of the most effective individuals may be working in surprising parts of the organisation.
  • Network your change agents so that they do not feel isolated, can share lessons, can collaborate and even use their collective power.  Encourage change agents to share their skills and develop teams of others who can drive change. An enterprise social network will help if your culture allows it.  Also encourage your change agents to network externally and to learn from others.  
  • Ensure your performance management systems reward people for driving change and do not fatally punish a single setback.  Peer measurement and forced rank systems can exaggerate the impact of setbacks & can be vulnerable to politics if not well managed.  If you only value delivery of business as usual results in performance and find comparisons to change agents hard, your change agents will get the message quickly.
  • Foster a culture of working aloud & sharing of ideas.  Working aloud provides protection for change agents. More importantly, it enables the change agents to role model their behaviours to inspire others across the organisation to embrace & lead change.

A little investment in change agents goes a long way.  Too many organisations have missed their opportunity.  They are the ones left wondering why change is suddenly so hard.

Be prepared for social change

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Our mental models of how things work are often a barrier to our adaptation to new capabilities.  Digital disruption will stretch our thinking in many new ways.

When railroads were first invented they were designed to be a powered form of wagon for bulk goods.  Only later did people develop the potential for railway travel, changes in communications and accelerate the distribution of fresh foods and other consumer goods. The introduction of railway travel created significant social change, demands for new resources and infrastructure, and ultimately innovation in business & society. After a start as a powered wagon, innovators changed the mental model of a railway developing its potential and its impact on society as a whole.

We are in the midst of digital mobile and social revolution that is so new and widereaching we can face the same challenges in adapting our mental models. Yesterday I attended the New Economy Conference in Melbourne. The audience and speakers who had chosen to attend the event were very aware of the digital & social transformations beginning to be realised.  

A key theme of the day was the impact of digital, mobile and social processes in creating dramatic improvements in connection and speed of information sharing.  This has major ramifications for markets and for corporations as they see their offerings atomised to services, boundaries becoming porous and competition expanding in speed and global reach.  Even consumers are getting into the act of being producers through collaborative consumption. These ideas resonated strongly because they connect directly with the short-term transactional focus of our industrial age mental models of production, markets and competition.  They involve the exploration of relatively simple changes to current models (who, where, what, volume or speed).

Harder for everyone to grasp are the changes to social systems which come with these new technologies and the need for new physical, legal and social infrastructure.  To run their cross-continental networks, railroads needed and inspired new social infrastructure.  An example was that railroads required society to adopt a precise concepts of time to manage their schedules.  Railroads determined the implementation of the continental United States four time zones and largely became the arbiter of time in the communities that they connected. 

There is already evidence that these broader social changes are being created. Work is shifting rapidly towards creative knowledge work in many parts of the world with new demands for leadership and organisation. The acceleration of social activism was discussed on the day and the consequences of eBay, the many task allocation and collaborative consumption organisations in changing natures of trust & work.  We also discussed the social infrastructure required to measure value creation and waste in a broader more human way than just dollars (and the odd bit of avoided carbon).  We need to innovate as hard in this social infrastructure as in that to support the transactions.

As much as we create new ways of transacting, we also need to create new forms of community to supply the social infrastructure to support the transactions.  We need to support the short term interaction with a social fabric that can supply a longer human relationship.  Just as the railroads need a precise sense of time, our new economy demands new precision in ideas like collaboration, work, trust, community and value. 

When we think of the future of digital disruption, we need to allow both for how it will change the mental models we use every day but also how it may demand of us entirely new models, such as new concepts of organisations, jobs, reputation, social relationships and new measures of success.   Success in the new digital era will take both adaptation to a new transactional environment but also adaptation of a new infrastructure of community, trust and long term relationships.  New models of leadership and new social innovations will be required to achieve both.

Don’t

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

One word of advice you hear far too often trying to drive change is “don’t…” Both friends and foes are full of advice on what not to do.

Everyone wants to set boundaries on the actions of change agents. Your opponents will want to set a boundary that is short of your goal or fundamentally frustrates your path forward. Your allies will set boundaries to shape your actions to their needs, to constrain the threat of change and make change seem safer.

A prohibition like “don’t” sounds like a solid boundary. It may not be. When you hear “don’t”, ask yourself these questions:

  • Ask why? Are you being told “You cannot”, “You should not” or “Your action is inconvenient”? Getting to the point of the speaker will enable you to shape your next step.
  • If “Don’t” means “You cannot”, what would happen if you try anyway? Many barriers have been overcome by an open mind, persistence and experimentation.
  • If “Don’t” means “You should not”, seek to understand who is affected and what values are at stake. Too often the speaker is unclear. If so, clarify the issues with those affected. It may well be that others don’t share the speaker’s view or would be willing to compromise to see other values & outcomes achieved
  • If “Don’t” means “Your action is inconvenient”, acknowledge the inconvenience, mitigate where you can, but push on. Change inevitably includes some risk and inconvenience.
  • Most important of all, turn from the negative to the positive. Ask for advice on what you can and should do instead or in addition. Be open to new options, new ideas and include them in you consideration of new steps.

Helpful and unhelpful advice is everywhere for those driving change. Any advice including “don’t” needs careful scrutiny. It may not be either the advice or the obstacle that it purports to be.

We are all dead

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

“If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.” – Jack Welch

We are all dead.

The rate of change external to each of our organisations is now so great that no organisation can ensure it is changing faster than the external system. Global interconnectedness, the rapid speed of ideas in a digital economy & new means of working and collaborating means that change will only continue to accelerate.

So if we are all dead what do we do? Change the game.

Jack Welch’s quote assumed that the organisation needed to generate enough change internally to beat the system. If you are a massive diversified conglomerate like GE, then that is a real challenge

Don’t beat the system. Become the system instead. Organisations need to design their structure, boundaries and processes to integrate with opportunities going on around them in that external change. Instead of hunkering down to fight off the change, organisations need to rethink their defenses. The best defense may just be a welcome:

Have an outward facing culture: If your organisation is looking inwards for your ideas and opportunities, you are dead. If your organisation, only worries about its competitors, then don’t worry they are dead too. Open your organisation up to look globally (that really means globally including Asia, Middle East, Latin America and Africa)
– Focus on opportunities to create an ecosystem: Allowing the system to shape your products, services and customers will accelerate your change. This can be achieved in many ways such as partnership agreements, an API or a customer collaboration community. Once you start to see and think about the system in which you operate, new opportunities to change and innovate will present themselves.
– Create agile & open edges in their organisation with the freedom to interact with external changes: hackathons, experiments, partnership agreements and a handful of strategic investments can generate a lot of exposure to change externally that will help the organisation adapt. Make sure your permission and performance processes actually give your people the opportunity to interact. They need to be able to move at the speed of the system and that means trust.
– Speed the sharing of information and execution in your organisation: Copy the system where you can. Use enterprise social. Use agile. Use design. Use minimum viable products. Hack, experiment and test away.
– Kill yourself first: What business model do you most fear losing? What product are you too dependent on? What customer can’t you lose? Tackle these challenges now. Engineer a way to change them or innovate like crazy in these spaces before others realise your vulnerability.