What are your major Disruptors?

By Simon King

In the article "Disruptive Innovation Comes to Healthcare" Thomas Lee, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Business School, suddenly realizes that the emperor has no clothes.

"We instantly understood that our heads had been in the sand."

In seeing how other industries have been completely transformed by lower cost options for what look like simpler needs take hold and expand to command significant market share.

This has happened many times before. A good example is what happened to the US steel industry in the 70's when the innovation of minimills started to take hold.

"It was like World War I trench warfare, where a 1% shift in market share was a big deal. "

Initially the minimills targeted the lower quality segment of the market with a much lower cost product. Then they gradually improved the quality and volume of their product to serve the high quality and higher margin segments of the market. In time they totally changed what had been an industry controlled by large vertically integrated steel manufacturing.

"1% shifts in market ... trivial .. compared to possible 20% movement ... to lower cost disruptive innovations." 

With Salesforce and Amazon driving tremendous innovation, Cloud and SaaS are looking like the next major disruptors for the software industry. What are your plans to avoid unpleasant surprises and to be ready to take advantage of the opportunities they offer? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Podcast #1 Introduction to The Service Experience

By Simon King

Working at BMC I have the great delight to work with dozens of really smart people.

Today I finally managed to convince our own Anthony Orr (member of the CTO office, contributor to ITIL V3, a BMC book on Service Modeling and a recent book on Service Lifecycle) to sit down and have a conversation with me about Service Experience.

He and have have the fortune to meet a great many of BMCs customers, and we wanted to share with you some of the common observations we hear from them and some of the recommendations we provide in response.

In this first session we explore a number of different avenues as we consider why customers should really consider Service Management and what the key benefits are.

It's about a 30 min podcast - hopefully you have time to listen in
Podcast #1 Introduction to The Service Experience

Please let us hear your questions and feedback in the comments

A Burning Bush for Change

Interesting article by Forrester analysts, Ted Schadler and TJ Keitt, outlining 4 company's uses of Social technologies to transform interaction inside and outside the business.

http://bit.ly/TjCua4

Over the next few posts they plan to document in more detail what they found

A key observation was that the traditional model of technology deployment that relies on organizational change for adoption is likely to run into trouble for Social apps.

The four companies who succeeded had one thing in common - A Burning Platform for change.

Sound familiar to successful ITIL implementations, anyone?

Zappos - Driving employee engagement

Live. Love. Enjoy?

Todays knowledge worker is a prized employee. But keeping these smart employees engaged is a constant challenge.

To drive the Service Experience so often missing in Retail, Zappos fosters a culture that encourages employees to live and work according to their personal values.

Zappos hires based on 10 Core Values as well as fit for the culture. CEO Tony Hsieh is so serious about this approach that you can find this in their hiring FAQs:

Is it true that Zappos offers new-hires $2000 to quit?
Yes, we do offer new hires $2000 to quit. We really want everyone at Zappos to be here because they want to be and because they believe in the culture. If they know they don't quite mesh with our culture, we don't want them to feel stuck here, so we give them an option. Less than 2% of all prospective employees end up accepting the offer.

Yep - It's all about them!

Taking a page right out of Daniel Pink's inspiring book on motivation, Drive, Zappos provides employee autonomy with the 10 Core Values that aim to foster naturally engaged employees:

1. Deliver WOW Through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More With Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble

Purpose

The Zappos mission is clear and simple. 

• One day, 30% of all retail transactions in the US will be online.
• People will buy from the company with the best service and the best selection.
• Zappos.com will be that online store.

Does employee engagement matter?

You can read more about Zappos in CEO Tony Hsieh's book - Delivering Happiness. But how does your company culture stack up against Zappos and what actions are you taking to drive engagement in your team? Share your thoughts in the comments.


 

Focus groups not always that focused

Definition: focus group

According to Wikipedia " focus group is a form of qualitative research in which a group of people are asked about their perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes towards a product, service, concept, advertisement, idea, or packaging".

Not all focus groups are equal

Alan Cooper is widely recognised as the Father of Visual Basic. In his book "The inmates are running the asylum" he acknowledges that focus groups may be useful in some industries. However, he is emphatic that they should not be relied on for software user interface.

Take a chance

This leads the most innovative leaders to appear to us as the ultimate risk takers.

Steve Jobs openly admitted that the night before the launch of the iPad that he was petrified of market rejection. Yet, 100m iPads later, the risk taker looks like a genius.

Understand the real risk

So how can we learn to take more risks, but manage the downside? This is something that Google and others understand well in their 20% time model. Employees are encouraged - even required - to spend time innovating in areas that aren't on their ToDo list.

What are the key risks? Well it turns out that during market changes, the key risks are in fact the opposite of what we would expect. Examples that innovators often cite are

• Not going far enough
• Not going quickly enough
• Not trying enough options

All of which in fact translate into too much waste.

How can we Manage risk ...

Fail quickly - Attempt multiple options and evaluate for solution effectiveness

Fail cheap - Create Mockups and evaluate for efficiency at scale

And reward?

Plan the Total experience - Define the total experience from identification to selection, buying, deploying and upgrading.
Ritz-Carlton look for WOW moments to exceed customer expectations. When I went for a run and returned with an empty Gatorade - the next day I found a fresh one in my room.

Define the unstated need - Look under the cover to see what users are really trying to do and why they can't succeed with today's solution.
BMW understood the time and cost associated with owning a car - so they include maintenance for free.

Test. Test. Test. - One size doesn't fit all. Consider discrete market segments and distribution channels. Collect feedback and act on it.
You may only launch into a new market once. Unhappy customer may tell ten others. Define your target audience and stay focused on them to ensure success - and word of mouth references.

Separate innovation organizations - The main organization may consider the innovation a threat. They may take implicit or even explicit action to inhibit a new innovation. Create small focused teams.
IBM separated the PC development team from others at Boca Raton to ensure success.

Are you only listening to existing customers?

What mechanisms do you use to expand feedback beyond existing customer groups. Please share your ideas in the comments.

Communicating Innovation Simply

K.I.S.S.

Keep It Simple Stupid has long been a mantra for those that understand the power of Focus.

But I'm not sure how many of us realized that it should be applied to all our presentations.

Check your slides At-a-Glance

Nancy Duarte runs a presentation and design firm, in Mountain View. The firm has a long list of credits, but have a major claim to fame in their support of of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth".

In this recommended post <Do your slides pass the Glance Test> Duarte makes a great case for the Glance Test to verify whether you're on track.

Recommended checks include:

1. Slide elements
2. Flow on the page
3. Contrast
4. White space
5. Visual hierarchy
6. Unity

Marketing innovation

There is as much to be gained in the simplicity and clarity of a message as there is in the product or service itself.

After all, how are you going to explain to the masses what the capabilities and benefits of your offer are?

Having just watched the live blog of Apple's recent iPad mini launch, I couldn't help but see the similarities in approach on communication as those recommended by Duarte.

So whether you're preparing an update to an Executive or to your Business Service customer ... Yes - I am saying that in marketing as well as service, Subtraction is the new Black.

Was this useful?

If you found this post useful, please share your thoughts in the comments.

The power of Disruptive Innovation

Watching the live blog of Apple update today from Gizmodo

Some very impressive stats - highlighting the power of disruptive innovation

Over 200m devices updated to iOS6 already

700k iOS apps

35B app downloads

Over 125m documents in iCloud

Paid out over $6.5B to developers


Sold over 100m iPads now

iPads 91% of tablet web traffic

#1 US notebook

#1 US desktop

And a new iPad mini for Christmas