Design and implement the ideal customer experience

Wouldn’t it be great to know what your customers need before they do? This is especially true in the era of social media, where customers voice their opinions on your company and products in ways that can hurt or help your company directly.

Bill Thomas, co-author of Anticipate, claims to have the methods to make this happen. In his own words Thomas promises “proven guidance on how to design and implement a customer-focused journey that moves beyond the transaction and satisfied customers, to a relationship and culture that creates and leverages loyalty – and the profitability that comes with it.”

Thomas’ 10-point framework was created to guide companies in charting a customer-focused journey that matures, anticipates and delivers increasing levels of loyalty and profitability with their customers, and across their broader value chain.

As one example he sketches out the typical strategic planning process, versus one focused on the customer. The plans speak for themselves:

Fiscal Budget –> Existing Capabilities –> Strategic Goals –> Customer Actions

Customer Needs –> Strategic Goals –> Needed Capabilities –> Fiscal Budget

If you’re looking for a more thorough customer strategy, then you’ll want to join us on June 19th for a conversation with Bill Thomas at our Soundview Live webinar, Knowing What Customers Need Before They Do. Bring your questions for Bill as well, which he’ll answer during the event.

Survival Instinct Gone Wrong

Survival instinct – it can save our lives, but it can also make us sick.

That is the conclusion of Dr. Marc Schoen in his book Your Survival Instinct is Killing You. Dr. Schoen explains how the Survival Instinct is the culprit that triggers a person to overeat, prevents the insomniac from sleeping, causes the executive to unravel under pressure, leads travelers to avoid planes or freeways, inflames pain, and closes down an individual to love. 
  
Provocative, eye-opening, and surprisingly practical with his strategies and ideas, Dr. Schoen shows how to build up your “instinctual muscles” for successfully managing discomfort while taming your overly reactive Survival Instinct.

Are you experiencing symptoms of an overactive survival instinct? Then please join us on June 12th to hear Dr. Schoen discuss his discoveries over the past 30 years and how they can impact your ability to function in this complex world. You will learn that the management of discomfort is the single most important skill for the twenty-first century.

Our Soundview Live webinar, How to Retrain the Brain may provide answers to some of the maladies that have been wearing you down.  Is it worth an hour of your time to find out?

Lessons in Leadership

Whether you’re already in a leadership role or are moving up the management ranks, it’s always helpful to hear the perspective of those who have mature leadership skills and are now helping others to develop their own.

Next week we will be hosting two excellent leadership webinars, one for managers who are working their way up and taking on more leadership responsibilities, and the other for leaders who are involved in change. Check out the descriptions below to see how the experts can help you.

How Managers Can Become Leaders with Alan Berson

Often the very same skills and traits that enable rising stars to achieve success become liabilities when promoted into a leadership track. While managers’ conversations are generally transactional, leaders must focus on people, asking great questions and aligning them with the vision for the future.

In this Soundview Live webinar, How Managers Can Become Great Leaders, Alan Berson will demonstrate that leadership mindsets and skills can be developed, and the Leadership Conversations Model provides practical guidance for connecting with others in ways that transform each interaction into an opportunity for organizational and personal growth.

Alan S. Berson is an executive coach, leadership consultant, speaker, and professor. Since getting his MBA from Wharton, he has held leadership, strategic planning and marketing roles at Fortune-500 firms including Gillette, Bausch & Lomb, and Marriott. He was also the CEO of a VC funded training company with Fortune 500 clients.

Answers to the Biggest Questions of Change Leaders with Phil Buckley

In this Soundview Live webinar, Answers to the Biggest Questions of Change Leaders, Phil Buckley will provide complete, actionable answers to the fifty burning questions change leaders routinely ask about how to manage change successfully.

He has detected a pattern to what leaders typically don’t know about managing change in their organizations, and distilled that pattern down to the top fifty questions that keep change managers up nights, giving you prescriptive answers that will build the confidence required to successfully tackle any change project.

Phil Buckley is a senior change management professional with over twenty years of global experience developing and executing change strategies. His experience includes managing twenty-seven large-scale change projects, directly working with teams in twenty countries. His assignments include mergers, de-mergers, organization restructurings, efficiency drives, culture initiatives, strategy creation and deployments, and capability developments.

Please join us for one or both of these webinars. Just click on the title to learn more and to register. Both events promise to give you the tools you need to meet the challenging demands of a leadership role. You’ll have the opportunity to ask your questions of these experts during the events.

How to Build a Culture for Market Dominance

The Sony Walkman was a great innovation, and it allowed Sony to dominate the portable music market for several years. But then along came the Apple iPod. Apple quickly took over the market from Sony even though Sony had developed an MP3 player before Apple. What happened?

Gerard Tellis, author of Unrelenting Innovation, says that Sony’s innovation was stifled by what he calls the “incumbent’s curse.” The three traits of an incumbent that can slow down innovation are:

  1. Fear to cannibalize current products.
  2. An aversion to risk.
  3. A focus on the present.

Sony was concerned about their music royalties so their MP3 player included anti-piracy software that stifled its adoption by consumers, and Apple took over the market. Tellis believes that unrelenting innovation requires that a company must work at overcoming this incumbent’s curse by reversing the traits:

  1. Be prepared to cannibalize current products.
  2. Embrace risk.
  3. Focus on the future.

Tellis developed a list of practices by which any company can become unrelentingly innovative and continue to dominate their respective markets. If you would like to hear about these practices, join us on May 29th for our Soundview Live webinar with Gerard Tellis called How to Build a Culture for Market Dominance.

Invite your colleagues and fill a conference room for just $49 for this exciting opportunity. And if you subscribe to our Online Edition of Soundview Executive Book Summaries, all webinars are free – $99 for our book summaries plus weekly webinars – not a bad deal.

Balance and Innovation

We have another two-webinar week coming to Soundview. Next week we will be hosting James Cusumano, author of Balance, and Stephen Shapiro, author of Best Practices Are Stupid. While these two topics are not related to one another, they are both important to every executive.

Balance: The Business-Life Connection by James Cusumano

In this Soundview Live webinar, Balance: Eight Steps for Success in Any Business, James Cusumano will provide a proven template for creating a successful business, and simultaneously, long-term balance and fulfillment in your personal life. Drawing from his just-released book Balance: The Business-Life Connection, the author brings three decades of diverse experience in technology and entertainment, which include Rock Star, Corporate Executive, Entrepreneur, Filmmaker, and Holistic Hotelier. He will show how to identify and unleash the power of life purpose and passion leading to long-term personal and professional fulfillment.

Best Practices Are Stupid by Stephen Shapiro

In This Soundview Live webinar, Why Best Practices Are Stupid, Stephen Shapiro will offer forty counterintuitive yet proven strategies for boosting innovation and making it a repeatable, sustainable, and profitable process at the heart of your company’s culture. Shapiro will show that nonstop innovation is attainable and vital to building a high-performing team, improving the bottom line, and staying ahead of the pack.

You’re invited to attend one or both of these important events. Each webinar will be entertaining in its own way, as Cusumano explains his unusual career path and Shapiro debunks business’s sacred best practices.

If you’re not a current Soundview subscriber, now is the time to join. Both events are free for subscribers, and it only takes three events to cover the full cost of a subscription. Check out the options and join us.