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Let Your People Go

I don't always agree with Tom Peters: That said, he is a business genius and a visionary guru that more of us should pay attention to. And I don't mean by reading his books and by nodding yes to his brilliant insights. I mean we need to do what he recommends when he calls for blowing up the current business model, which goes back to the Industrial Revolution. It is heavy with bureaucracy, leaden with middle managers and based on a structure that places barrier after barrier in place, blocking the best ideas of employees and destroying their motivation and passion for making a difference. Today's business model kills innovation. If that model were a human, it would get life in prison or the death penalty for murder.

I wrote Lead With Your Heart because I believe the current model is failed. I call for a new model but unlike Peters, I don't think we can blow up the current model but instead need to change it in steps. Why? Business Boards of Directors and Executives like the security of today's business and are rewarded for creating valuation today instead of building a company for tomorrow. I believe that philosophy will doom most of today's behemoths if they don't begin restructuring for tomorrow's customers, who today are represented by the generation we call the Millenniums, with Gen Y leading the way.

In order to survive the expectations of the new generations of consumers, we first must understand them. What are their wants and needs? Here is a slice of their expectations pie:

• They want more from business than a satisfactory product or service.
• They want and need to be blown away by our offerings.
• They want and need to be treated like VIPs, and deservedly so.
• They want to be catered to and they want all their expectations exceeded.
• And most important, they want technology that makes their lives better and more fun, and that makes the world better as well. They want businesses to put people ahead of profits, and do so in demonstrable ways.

Here are some of the steps that corporations and all established businesses need to take to survive the customer-centric era, which is upon us and here to stay for the foreseeable future.

• Corporate Hierarchy: Here I agree with Peters. Small steps take too much time. Blow it up. We need no managers at corporate headquarters, only leaders. In fact, I'm not sure we need corporate headquarters. These fortresses of conservatism and egotism usually produce nothing more than bureaucratic messes that inhibit and ultimately kill the best that people can produce. They are designed to be served, not to serve. They are antithetic and poisonous to innovation and customer-centric practices. They suck the blood out of every employee and leave them apathetic to results at best. They serve those who are self-serving and whose primary desire is to work their way up the corporate ladder by making as few mistakes as possible and by making their bosses happy. When instead they should serve customers first and foremost. If they are necessary, staffs should represent but a tiny percentage of the total workforce.
• As for titles, delete every title except President and CEO, COO, and CFO. Replace all other titles with the smartest leaders within your business. No more managers, directors, VPs, SVPs, EVPs, or functional-area presidents. Call the leaders what they are: Marketing Leader, Manufacturing Leader, etc. If you are retail, keep store managers but blow up all the other titles and flatten the organization. Don't promote your best R&D person to a leadership position. R&D, manufacturing, customer service, and all the functions that serve customers are too important to raid. Find leaders who lead best, don't promote doers.
• Pay Structures: Drop all automatic and across-the-board pay raises and reward people based on how they serve their customers, whether their customers or internal or external. Do they always meet or exceed expectations? Do they create happy customers who are always happily surprised by the products and services they receive? Here is the most important recommendation: Doers, those people I recommend need to stay in their areas of expertise, should make the most money in the company. Pay should be based on creating unbelievable products and services. You don't pay the GM of a baseball team more than your shortstop. Don't pay a leader in your business more than your best doers. It makes no sense.
• Innovation: By removing the hierarchy, you have created the first stage for an environment where people can feel their ideas matter and are supported. Now you must let your people go. Encourage them to take risks. Implore them to try things. Pat them on the back for their failures. And reward them for successes as measured by meeting or exceeding their customer's (not yours) wants and needs. Don't pull a Microsoft and improve a flawed system. Blow up products that don't make customers happy and create ones that do. Don't create products and services because you think there is or can be a market for them. Create products and services that blow people's minds because they not only meet or wants and needs but they exceed customers' expectations.
• Happiness: Measure all success not on profits but on the levels of happiness experienced by customers, internal and external. How? Ask them. And Listen to them! Are they happy? Are they happily surprised by how they you treat them? How your products and services exceed their wants and needs?
• Customer and Employee-Driven: Don't do anything that isn't customer- and/or employee-driven. Everything must have a cause and effect, and both the cause and the effect must put people first.

The above are the strategies that need implementing if businesses are to survive and flourish in the era of customer-centricity. The details need to be worked out for each business. One size does not fit all, and innovation and creativity count. There is no easy way to do this. However, your customers (all people you touch--employees, external customers, communities in which you do business, everyone your business affects in even the smallest of ways) want and expect more from business than ever before. And their wants and needs are going to grow exponentially in the future. Are you ready to serve them? Or will you continue to serve yourselves and set up barriers and internal structures that sacrifice the wants and needs of the many for the benefit of the few at the top?

It's A New Day

Author's Note: Yesterday, a luncheon with two brilliant, kind and spiritual men, Vincent Wright and Tom Clifford, blessed me with a personal Epiphany. Beginning today, my authentic self and my passion for leading with your heart will be present in this blog--it will be the "plus" in bizsolutionsplus. Thank you Vincent and Tom, and to other's such as CK, Ryan, Cam, Drew and Gavin who inspire me with their hearts and their minds.

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It's A New Day for bizsolutionsplus

Bizsolutionsplus was launched about 18 months ago as a blog designed to present ideas about  marketing, PR and advertising. To date, it has walked that line, only occasionally veering left or right into politics or music, with deserved devotions to those who serve. Today, this blog jumps the tracks. It will continue to be called bizsolutionsplus but it will focus on the plus, not the biz. It will discuss the ways things could be, using the way they are only as a reference, a starting point for change

A bit of personal history to help you understand where we are going and why we are going there. In 1996, I entered the graduate school of Pastoral Studies at Seattle University. For several years prior to that giant leap, I felt an intense gnawing at my insides. Something was wrong in my universe. The love seemed to have left the atmosphere. Humankind had forgotten the lessons of the Renaissance and the vision of those few thinkers not stoned in the beat, beatnik and hippie generations:

What they believed and questioned centered on what human means. They believed, in essence, that humans are relational; that we live in tension between the mind and the soul (what I call the heart). We are meant to live in relationship, not in self-absorption, denial and isolationism. Every part of my being resonated with those ideas. But what I saw around me was that most of us seemed trapped within our intellects, creating a lack of balance in our lives. For me, that imbalance created a disturbance bordering on insanity. Now kindly jump ahead 9 years to 2005.

Through a long and still-continuing process of centering myself and looking for a personal balance between my mind and my heart, the dangers of a world bent on self-absorption and power led me to write "Lead With Your Heart."

During those nine soul-searching years--some spent working in social justice non-profits, some in the corporate world--I  looked around for institutions that could lead us to achieve peace and prosperity. I worked for Christian-centered groups and non-profits as a grassroots organizer and lobbyist and I worked in the corporate world as a manager. To my surprise, I grew more and more convinced that our only hope lay in commerce. To be more specific, in the leaders and people who worked within the businesses that engage in commerce. I came to believe that the real power in the world lay in the hands of the workers, from those who were on every rung of the business ladder, from the bottom to the top. In other words, most people on our planet work for a business or an institution. In sheer numbers and incredible wealth the business world represents incredible potential to use that power for good. And, whether or not we like it, power is a requirement for change, good or bad.

Out of my conclusion that business represents a great place to institute changes came my book, which calls for a new business model that strives to make the world a better, safer and happier place to live, grow, marry (or not), raise children (or not), work and pursue peace and happiness. The premise of my belief is that if we encourage hard work, personal responsibility, giving, kindness and happiness, and grow a business based on those values and measure success based on the amount of good that we do, instead of the amount of money we make, we will add to instead of subtract from our humanity. We will respect all living things in such a way that we cannot abide harm to any living form, and our profits will not decline but will increase because people want to form relationships with good, not bad or evil, no matter the form in which they appear. In one sentence: When business focuses on people, their wants, needs and desires, business is at its best.

That brings me to this announcement: In the future, most of my posts will be forward-looking in that we will discuss ways to make lives better and happier. Whether the topic is marketing, a business analysis, music or politics, I will be looking to share my beliefs that we can and should do more. I will strive to focus on the positive, on the spirit of humankind and on the businesses and institutions that are trying to be the best they can be, not the largest, the richest or the most powerful. Some, such as P&G or HP, will be wealthy and powerful; some will not. In summary, this blog is committing to showing people and institutions at their best, not their worst.

It goes without saying, that some of you will stop reading this blog and may even believe me to be delusional or a kin of Don Quixote. That's okay and I wish you well. Other's will be attracted to the approach, where good news will be the topic of the day. None of the ideas to be discussed are original to me. I am many things but delusional is not among them. Instead, I will share the writings and the thinking of others and my own experiences based on what I have seen, read, and heard over six decades.

The train has left the station, jumped the track and now carving a new path in the wilderness.