Why Engagement Isn’t Enough: How Managers Drive Results

As leaders, we often miss critical indicators that can improve the likelihood of organizational and personal success. Consider the ubiquitous employee satisfaction survey, which is usually administered once a year and, as long as the scores are respectable, crossed off the corporate must-do list. Typically, these surveys measure employee engagement levels. But as Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton explain in the excerpt below, that’s not enough. They rightly contend that employee energy and enablement are as essential to high levels of performance as engagement.

As I think back on projects that I have been associated with, it is clear that every success and failure was due not only to the level of engagement among team members but also to their energy level and the degree to which they felt enabled (or empowered) to achieve their goals. At a time when leaders everywhere are spending an inordinate amount of time identifying “A” players and getting them on the bus, it is also clear that the three Es — engagement, energy, and enablement — are the key to realizing the full potential of employees.

— Ann Rhoades

 

An excerpt from Chapter 3 of All In: How the Best Managers Create a Culture of Belief and Drive Big Results

 

On a thundery morning in Fort Lauderdale, only a few miles from where U2 played a few nights before, a crowded indoor atrium begins to take on the feel of a rock concert. Businesspeople are hanging over six floors of balconies looking down at a collection of dancers on the main floor. Then, at the urging of the lead performer, just about everyone in the building suddenly starts moving to the pulsing strains of a recording by Lady Gaga, throwing their fists in the air and shouting, “Just dance!”

When the music ends the crowd roars. The lead dancer, a middle-aged woman in a business suit, waves up at the gathering. Hundreds of people are laughing and cheering another performance by Doria Camaraza and her leadership team.

Doria who?

This mild-mannered, bespectacled woman is the senior vice president and general manager of this American Express World Service Center, located in two nondescript buildings in an industrial park in southern Florida. This is a 3,000-person call center, and the work is not easy. Customers call when they need help with a lost card or want to make an address change. Others want to dispute charges or can’t find their bill. And some are upset; perhaps they don’t qualify for a credit increase. Yet despite the often demanding atmosphere, Camaraza and her fellow senior managers have found a way to get just about all of these people to believe in what they are trying to accomplish. In fact, we might argue that she and her team are the best bunch of leaders of believers you’ve never heard of — bad dancing and all.

Here’s some proof: Around the United States, employee turnover in call centers averages about 50 percent annually. That means if you answer phones for a living, about half your coworkers will leave before another year passes. Not here. Turnover is Fort Lauderdale is in the single digits annually. Let us pause for a moment to let that sink in: Turnover is less than one-fifth the national average.

But there’s more: Productivity measures are tops in the call center industry.

Six years ago, when Camaraza took over, the call center was good. Today it’s great — helping American Express earn an unprecedented five consecutive years of J.D. Power & Associates awards for highest customer satisfaction among credit card companies. Very impressive.

But boogying in front of your employees? This is, after all, American Express — one of the world’s most prestigious business brands, and you might argue one of the most serious. Not here, says Camaraza. She calls this American Express facility a “community of caring,” and the leadership team dances every month in the atrium to get attention before the real business of this meeting, called “Tribute” — spotlighting employees who’ve gone above and beyond and those who are celebrating long-tenure service awards. As soon as the music ends, Camaraza retires to what she calls her “Oprah chairs,” two beige loungers, where she interviews a series of employees who are being spotlighted publicly for living the American Express values. via strategy-business.com

________________________________________________________________________

Hire Jim Woods to Speak to or Advise Your Organization

Innovation, Growth, & Hypercompetition Consultant/Speaker/Business Coach

 Website: InnoThink Group

Request a consultation: Office: +1 719.649.4118 or complete our form.  

 

Innothink Group is a strategic management, innovation and business coaching consultancy. 

Our Guarantee. Where many consulting firms are reluctant to bear risks or tie their rewards to project outcomes, we decided to build a better model. We align our success with yours. We’re outcome obsessed, outcome paid, putting nearly two thirds of our fees at risk subject to hitting predetermined milestones. More than a guarantee we wanted from the outset to create true partnerships with shared responsibility. See a few of our clients.   

We provide broad ranging advice covering innovation, commoditization, competitive advantage, business policy and strategy, as well as global strategy and implementation. 

 

How should we innovate the cities of our dreams?

 

The gleeful sense of aspiration coursing through cities today is more than mere “urban renewal.” The very assumptions about what makes a city a city are being challenged. We’re in a period of spectacular innovation and a dizzying demographic shift that 50 years from now might make the great migration to the suburbs look minor by comparison. Time was, and not that long ago, crime was swallowing cities whole. Today you can sleep in Zuccotti Park without being mugged. (Hell, you’ll hardly smudge your pajamas.) But the protests against economic inequality that are rumbling through our cities right now are also a sign of the dissonance that hums just below the surface of this new urban era. They’re a reminder that if the young people occupying Wall Street are going to keep our cities evolving, then the old model — gentrification by fiat — will need to change, as well.  How do you create an “Apple-like” culture that drives consumer growth?

This new column will focus on how we forge our new urban future and how we create cities that reflect our values. We will cover this intersection of innovation and inequality, of urban design and the problem of poverty, and how one might help solve the other. Cities today are cleaner, healthier, safer and greener. They’re also more expensive. But wealthier, snazzier cities needn’t be gilded jewel boxes for the 1 percent. Better transit, smarter development and improved amenities can benefit those who need them most. And there’s reason to be optimistic that they will, because the generation that will retrofit our old cities with new ideas is the same one that’s currently developing an instinctual aversion to economic unfairness.

In hindsight, we could have seen this new urban groundswell coming. Two or three decades ago, cities were suffering from a toxic stew of debt, crime, poverty and drugs. Corruption at many levels was often the status quo, and “Murder Capital of America” became a dubious buzz phrase that was passed from city to city like a baton. But by the early ’90s, for an amalgam of reasons that have been debated ever since, things began to shift. The crack epidemic receded. Cities got safer. “Friends” debuted.

By the time Rachel quit her job at Central Perk, young people with money and college degrees were inundating cities like a flash-flood. Blight withdrew, and entire neighborhoods were remade overnight. Some longtime residents were forced out by rising rents, while others quickly became millionaires as their property values soared. Among the new arrivals themselves, there was a hasty hashing out of the rules: whether development should trump preservation, whether you should pay a brokers’ fee, whether babies could be brought to bars. Some worried that cities like New York were losing their edge. Tiny culture wars erupted (Hasids vs. hipsters! bicyclists vs. drivers!) as everyone tried to figure out the new pecking order, the new urban way of life. You may read this article in entirety at via salon.com.

Speaking 

 

As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth.  

 If you’re interested in having Jim speak at your next event, simply use this form to send us your details and speaking requirements, and we’ll be in touch shortly. Or you may call us at 719-649-4118.  

 

 

Schumpeter: To Be Innovative is To Be Good At Copying | The Economist

 

 

EVERY year Les Wexner, the owner of Victoria’s Secret, a lingerie retailer, takes a month off to travel the world looking for other companies’ ideas to adopt. Limited Brands, his clothing group, seeks lawful inspiration from firms ranging from airlines to consumer-goods manufacturers. Mr Wexner’s philosophy is that business should celebrate imitation.

That is almost a heresy. Politicians and countless awards ceremonies extol innovation’s role in economic growth. Businesses are told to innovate or die. Imitators are cast as the bad guys: “The corporation that is first…has an opportunity to manufacture with the highest frequency and in the most desirable markets,” proclaims the boss of Burkett & Randle in “Duplicity”, a 2009 corporate thriller starring Julia Roberts. The firm duly triumphs over the evil rival which tries to copy its supposed cure for baldness.

In the real world, companies copy and succeed. The iPod was not the first digital-music player; nor was the iPhone the first smartphone or the iPad the first tablet. Apple imitated others’ products but made them far more appealing. The pharmaceutical industry is split between inventors and imitators. Some innovators, such as Pfizer, have joined the copycats, starting generic-drugs businesses themselves. The multi-billion-dollar category of supermarket own-label products is based on copying well-known brands, sometimes down to details of the packaging. Fast-fashion firms have built empires copying innovations from the catwalk.

The pace and intensity of legal imitation has quickened in recent years, argues Oded Shenkar, a management professor at Ohio State University, in a provocative book, “Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge”. Among social-gaming firms copying, and accusations of copying, are rife. One boss is said to have told his employees: “I don’t fucking want innovation. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.” Germany’s Samwer brothers, Alexander, Oliver and Marc, have made a fortune replicating American internet models in other markets, sparking outrage in an industry which prides itself on invention. One of their recent efforts is Pinspire, an online pinboard with a similar layout, colour scheme and features to those of Pinterest, the latest craze in social media.

History shows that imitators often end up winners. Who now remembers Chux, the first disposable nappies, whose thunder was stolen by Pampers? Ray Kroc, who built McDonald’s, copied White Castle, inventor of the fast-food burger joint. Even Playboy magazine was just an imitator, noted Ted Levitt, one of the earliest management gurus to acknowledge the role of imitation. Copying is not only far commoner than innovation in business, wrote Levitt in the 1960s, but a surer route to growth and profits. According to “Copycats”, studies show that imitators do at least as well and often better from any new product than innovators do. Followers have lower research-and-development costs, and less risk of failure because the product has already been market-tested. A study by Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis, “Pioneer Advantage: Marketing Logic or Marketing Legend”, found that innovators captured only 7% of the market for their product over time.

Firms seldom admit to being copycats. First, it is bad for bosses’ egos. Second, it can be legally risky. Apple is suing Samsung for “slavishly” imitating its products with its Galaxy smartphones and tablets; and Samsung is suing Apple back. (According to Mr Shenkar, Samsung is also eagerly awaiting a Korean-language version of “Copycats” to distribute to its executives.) This week a jury found that Google had copied Oracle’s intellectual property related to bits of its Java infrastructure.

But there is usually plenty of scope to imitate safely. Jean-Paul Gaillard, a former chief of Nespresso, a coffee-making system which has made billions for Nestlé, a Swiss food giant, decided to take on his old firm. His new venture makes coffee capsules which exactly fit Nespresso machines, to compete with Nespresso pods. Nestlé has been unable to stop him. Copying may be safer still when the imitator is not grabbing the innovator’s customers: Southwest Airlines, an American discount carrier, made no objection when Ireland’s Ryanair cloned its business model.

Not invented here

Some businesspeople are willing to talk about the limitations of innovation. Kevin Rollins, a former chief executive of Dell, a computer-maker, asked, “If innovation is such a competitive weapon, why doesn’t it translate into profitability?” But most remain obsessed with their own inventions. Copying is taboo. Praise and promotion do not go to employees who borrow from other firms.

As a result, firms pay insufficient attention to the art of copying. Levitt examined a group of companies whose sales depended on regularly launching new products. None of them, he found, had either a formal or informal policy on how to respond to other firms’ innovations. So they were often far too slow to imitate rivals’ successes, and missed out on profits. Not much has changed since Levitt’s day. Though copying is fairly common, lots of companies fail to do it effectively. American firms in particular are too obsessed with innovation, argues Mr Shenkar. By contrast, Asian companies—such as Panasonic, whose former parent, Matsushita, was nicknamed maneshita denki, “electronics that have been copied”—have excelled at legal imitation.

Excessive copying, of course, could be bad for society as a whole. Joseph Schumpeter worried that if innovators could not get enough reward from new products because imitators were taking so much of the profit, they would spend less on developing them (hence the justification for granting inventors temporary monopolies in the form of patents). But that is not the immediate concern of corporations. Copying is here to stay; businesses may as well get good at it. Economist.com/blogs/schumpeter via economist.com

 

________________________________________________________________________

Hire Jim Woods to Speak or Advise to Your Organization 

Innovation, Growth, & Hypercompetition Consultant/Speaker/Business Coach 

 Website: InnoThink Group 

Request a consultation: Office: +1 719.649.4118 or complete our form.   

 

Innothink Group is a strategic management, innovation and business coaching consultancy. 

Our Guarantee. Where many consulting firms are reluctant to bear risks or tie their rewards to project outcomes, we decided to build a better model. We align our success with yours. We’re outcome obsessed, outcome paid, putting nearly two thirds of our fees at risk subject to hitting predetermined milestones. More than a guarantee we wanted from the outset to create true partnerships with shared responsibility. See a few of our clients.   

We provide broad ranging advice covering innovation, commoditization, competitive advantage, business policy and strategy, as well as global strategy and implementation. 

 

How should we innovate the cities of our dreams?

 

The gleeful sense of aspiration coursing through cities today is more than mere “urban renewal.” The very assumptions about what makes a city a city are being challenged. We’re in a period of spectacular innovation and a dizzying demographic shift that 50 years from now might make the great migration to the suburbs look minor by comparison. Time was, and not that long ago, crime was swallowing cities whole. Today you can sleep in Zuccotti Park without being mugged. (Hell, you’ll hardly smudge your pajamas.) But the protests against economic inequality that are rumbling through our cities right now are also a sign of the dissonance that hums just below the surface of this new urban era. They’re a reminder that if the young people occupying Wall Street are going to keep our cities evolving, then the old model — gentrification by fiat — will need to change, as well.

This new column will focus on how we forge our new urban future and how we create cities that reflect our values. We will cover this intersection of innovation and inequality, of urban design and the problem of poverty, and how one might help solve the other. Cities today are cleaner, healthier, safer and greener. They’re also more expensive. But wealthier, snazzier cities needn’t be gilded jewel boxes for the 1 percent. Better transit, smarter development and improved amenities can benefit those who need them most. And there’s reason to be optimistic that they will, because the generation that will retrofit our old cities with new ideas is the same one that’s currently developing an instinctual aversion to economic unfairness.

In hindsight, we could have seen this new urban groundswell coming. Two or three decades ago, cities were suffering from a toxic stew of debt, crime, poverty and drugs. Corruption at many levels was often the status quo, and “Murder Capital of America” became a dubious buzz phrase that was passed from city to city like a baton. But by the early ’90s, for an amalgam of reasons that have been debated ever since, things began to shift. The crack epidemic receded. Cities got safer. “Friends” debuted.

By the time Rachel quit her job at Central Perk, young people with money and college degrees were inundating cities like a flash-flood. Blight withdrew, and entire neighborhoods were remade overnight. Some longtime residents were forced out by rising rents, while others quickly became millionaires as their property values soared. Among the new arrivals themselves, there was a hasty hashing out of the rules: whether development should trump preservation, whether you should pay a brokers’ fee, whether babies could be brought to bars. Some worried that cities like New York were losing their edge. Tiny culture wars erupted (Hasids vs. hipsters! bicyclists vs. drivers!) as everyone tried to figure out the new pecking order, the new urban way of life. You may read this article in entirety at via salon.com.

Speaking 

As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth. 

 If you’re interested in having Jim speak at your next event, simply use this form to send us your details and speaking requirements, and we’ll be in touch shortly. Or you may call us at 719-649-4118.