Engaging customers - how do you know who you really want to work with? Love your customers, and your customers will love you back I like to work with customers who are willing to do the personal and professional transformation to become innovative and agile. If I look at my customer set, they're usually between [...]
From Why to What to How - what’s your purpose? One of the enduring factors in creating an agile and innovative business is purpose. Purpose answers the question: why do we do what we do? It gives a sense of determination to your ambition and direction. It gives a different flavour to your work then [...]
Mine the business innovation gaps: Seasonal sharing for scalability I’ve been working with an agriculture machinery company over the years. This family run business designs and manufactures huge innovative machines that solve the current problems farmers face. Their industry is subject to the seasons, which means all farmers want new machines just before the harvest, [...]
Explore, engage and extrapolate to discover the pains, gains and jobs to be done of your customer Response-ability is all about your ability to intuitively anticipate the future and to know what your customer wants before your customer knows it. Intuitive anticipation is the main differentiator for successful, innovative companies. Looping, one dimension of response-ability, [...]
Cooperation for Innovation One of my Polish agricultural machinery clients was having a hard time. His budget for marketing had been halved, even though his sales targets were maintained at growth rate. I had a lengthy conversation with him about options in cooperation. The trick is to find another party that is complementary in product, [...]
Creating cooperation & belonging: Are you living up to your promise? As I travel the world helping businesses to create communities of cooperation and innovation I sometimes wonder why we have not been able to solve the world’s Big Hairy Audacious problems together. We potentially have the knowledge, the resources and the technology to do [...]
Should you rely on intuition? One of the games I play with my colleagues is : “Guess the relationship”. The rules of the game are simple. When we are in restaurants each of us makes a hypothesis about the relationship between people sitting at another table. We discuss our intuitive sense of their relationship. If [...]
Can you teach intuition? When I walked into the boardroom I knew something was seriously off key here. The new CEO was sitting with his back to his team. Some leaders were juggling with their phones, others were answering emails. This was supposed to be a breakthrough meeting about the strategy for the coming two [...]
Intuition is essential for innovation In 1996 I conducted a large research program on leadership development. I had been a director in multinationals for a long time, and was frustrated by the lack of behavioural results the leadership curriculum was generating. So I set out to find out what actually helped business leaders to learn. [...]
Uncover your customer’s dreams I had been offering coach training for 25 years before I finally decided to ask my alumni why they came to me. I was facing a decision to invest in certification and wanted to know if it would make a difference. I found that my customers could easily get traditional training [...]
