Using Your Values to Create Value

In the book “Good to Great”, Jim Collins shows how every great company has a fundamental set of core values. At 3M, their core set of values includes “Value and develop our employees’ diverse talents, initiative and leadership.”

When Dr. Spencer Silver first invented the unique, repositionable adhesive that made Post-It notes possible, there was no one at 3M who could figure out a commercial application for the adhesive. Nine years later along came Art Fry, a new product development engineer at 3M who had a problem. Art was a tenor in his church choir. His bookmarks kept falling out of his hymn book. Not wanting to lose his place, Art came up with the idea to use Dr. Silver’s adhesive to coat a piece of paper that could be positioned over and over to mark each week’s choir music.

What made Fry’s inspiration come to life was his passion for the idea, which was supported by the entrepreneurial spirit which is at the core of 3M’s culture that values their employees’ initiative and leadership. Fry was also helped by an official “bootlegging” policy that let him spend 15% of his time on a project of his own choosing (another policy that promotes 3M’s core values).

There are now 600 Post-It products being sold in more than 100 countries.

Coach Kevin’s Challenge:

Great companies have a defined set of core values that drives the culture and people of the organization to deliver value to their stakeholders. Focus energy on these areas of core values:

• Make sure that your core values are written down and visible to all employees
• Design your compensation and reward systems to align employee action with your core values
• Recognize those people who are outstanding at pursuing core values to deliver results (Art Fry was elected to the 3M Circle of Technical Excellence)

Are your people living by the core values of your company?

Are you having a customer experience today?

Jim Skinner, McDonalds Vice-Chairman and CEO, leads a company that has seen a dramatic increase in results in the last few years (quadrupled their dividend to $1.2B over the past four years and raised the stock price from $25 to a peak of $65). Jim started out as a McDonald’s restaurant manager trainee in 1971 in Carpentersville, Ill and worked his way to the top job. Jim stays connected to his company, employees, and customers by eating a McDonald’s lunch every day – that’s right every day.

Skinner says “The moment of truth is the moment we interact with our customer.” He’s proud of the fact that he’s the same guy that went into the job. Yet Skinner has been leading a lot of change at McDonald’s, engineering a major turnaround and proving to Wall Street and to Main Street that the secret to peddling more Big Macs, McGriddles and Happy Meals is as old as the business of sales itself: Give the customers what they want.

Coach Kevin’s Challenge:

Most business leaders lose touch with the customers they serve. Try these solutions for getting a first-hand customer experience for your business:

• In a retail environment, talk to people coming in and out of your business who bought or didn’t buy something (ask outside the hearing range of your employees)
• Phone ten customers who purchased from you in the last week
• Email the last ten customers and ask them about their experience
• Talk to people in your service department to get feedback about people in sales
• Talk to people in sales to get feedback about people in service (with the appropriate filters)
• Make sure that you are using your own products or services and if possible, be a customer of your best competitors

What have you done today to have a customer experience with your products and services?

Make Sure New People Fit and Bribe the Rest to Quit

Zappos takes fanatical customer service and a high energy culture to deliver more than shoes over the Internet. Zappos CEO Tony Hsich is committed to an organization that constantly amazes their customers. He understands that companies don’t engage emotionally with their customers – people do. The Zappos senior management team is transperent in their thinking allowing employees to be free to do whatever it takes to make a customer happy.

The Zappos corporate culture is bursting with personality. To continue creating the legendary stories about Zappos staff and their customers, Zappos management must hire people who fit their culture. They have introduced an innovative way to help weed out those that don’t fit early in the process – a small practice with big implications.

Every new Zappos employee must first take an intensive four week training program that immerses the new emplyee in the Zappos’ strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. A week after completing the training session and working at Zappos, new employees are called into a meeting and offerred a payment for the work they have done with a $1,000 bonus to leave. The new employees who do not fit the corporate culture take the money and run — about 10% of new call center employees take the bonus offer and leave.

The new employees left are the ones who work for the love of the customer and the experience of working with incredibly committed and high energy people. If you want to create a memorable company, you have to fill your company with memorable people.

Coach Kevin’s Challenge:
Knowing what you know now, who are the people on your team you would be happy if they told you they were leaving today. Why tolerate having those people on your team and what can you do about it?

Try bribing people to quit instead of bribing people to stay.

Article from Kevin Lawrence: How to Turn an Industry on Its Head: Become Masters at Delivering on Big Promises

Things are shifting…Now What?

Economies are changing and it’s time to get back to basics: creating lots of value for the customers we serve in our businesses.

Over the past 10-20 years there are many businesses that became quite successful without being that amazing at what they do or creating tremendous value for their customers…In some cases, businesses just rode the wave of growing economies.

Reality check time…are you creating real, tangible value for your customers in a way that is meaningful to them?

Here is a case study we just completed on a Vancouver, BC based business called Provident Security. I met the owner, Mike Jagger earlier this year and was impressed with how he has taken a basic business like security for businesses, homes and events and built it into a precision value-creation machine.

Read the article, “How to Turn an Industry on Its Head: Become Masters at Delivering on Big Promises” and then, using him as inspiration, ask yourself 3 questions:

1. What is the #1 thing that our customers value most about our product or service when compared to our competition?
2. How can we quantify and then increase that value to our existing and potential customers?
3. How can we articulate the tangible value we create in a way that will position us far ahead of our competition?

If you’d be interested in attending a conference call with Mike Jagger to learn more about how he made these changes in his business, let me know.

Make it a great day.

Kevin