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Streamline Training & Documentation
Streamline Training & Documentation
Monday, March 08, 2010
A Vivid Preview of US Air Force Basic Training
You can find voluminous information about the US Air Force at www.af.mil, but if you want to check out the really cool stuff, the place to go is www.airforce.com.
Thanks to the March/April issue of Communications Arts magazine, I'm now aware of the immensely engaging and informative section of airforce.com devoted to detailing what happens during Air Force basic training. You can access this section here.
You'll find that the navigation is organized according to the eight full weeks recruits spend in basic training:
Week 1 — Fall In
Week 2 — Basic War Skills
Week 3 — Combat Lifesaving
Week 4 — Countering the Threat
Week 5 — Ready to Fight
Week 6 — The Beast (Basic Expeditionary Airman Skills Training — field exercises and combat scenarios)
Week 7 — Airmanship
Week 8 — Graduation
Each week's material includes a video overview, a short inspirational blurb (accessed by mousing over an image on the screen representing the week's focus), video comments from a Military Training Instructor, still photos, and a summary of the schedule for the week.
The site also provides guidance on how to prepare for basic training (e.g. what to study in advance, what to pack, and what not to pack).
On every screeen a visitor is one click away from launching an online chat with an "advisor" or launching a tool for finding the nearest Air Force recruiter.
Visitors can also:
click on "See What It's Like" to access video on such activities as combat search and rescue, serving on a bomb squad, and special ops.
try various interactive features, such as "Train a Military Working Dog," "Refuel a Plane," "Launch a Rocket into Space," and "Fly with the Thunderbirds."
play simulation games
The basic training section of airforce. com is the handiwork of GSD&M Idea City.
Alfred Sloan's Memoir IV: Introduction of the Pontiac
The post from day before yesterday quoted Alfred Sloan's explanation of how General Motors formalized its policy of producing "a line of cars in each price area, from the lowest price up to one for a strictly high-grade quantity-production car."
A "market segmentation price ladder" of General Motors models from 1925/26: a Cadillac sedan, a Chevrolet touring car, a first-year Pontiac coupe, a Buick touring car, and an Oldsmobile sedan. (www.cnet.com.au)
As Sloan goes on to explain in Chapter 9 of My Years with General Motors, the corporation's management recognized in 1924 that there was too big a price gap between their $510 Chevrolet touring car and their $750 Olds touring car. GM decided to introduce a new make, the Pontiac, to fill this gap. [The gap] was big enough to constitute a volume demand [from prospective auto buyers] and thereby to accommodate, on top of Chevrolet, a competitor against whom we then had no counter. It was therefore an important gap to fill both offensively and defensively; offensively because there was a market demand to be satisfied there, and defensively because competitive cars could come in there and come down on Chevrolet as we planned for Chevrolet to come down on Ford. On this reasoning, we made one of the most important decisions in the history of General Motors, namely to fill the gap above Chevrolet with a brand-new car with a new six-cylinder engine. We had come to believe from an engineering standpoint that the future favored sixes and eights. However, to make the strategy effective, it would be necessary to fill the gap with a car that also had some volume economies. Otherwise, because the new car would draw some volume away from Chevrolet, reducing its economies, a loss would result for both cars. We concluded, therefore, that the new car must be designed in physical co-ordination with Chevrolet so as to share Chevrolet's economies and vice versa.
[. . .]
... the Pontiac represented the first important advance in co-ordinating the physical product in manufacturing. Physical co-ordination in one form or another is, of course, the first principle of mass production, but at that time it was widely supposed, from the example of the Model T, that mass production on a grand scale required a uniform product. The Pontiac, co-ordinated in part with a car in another price class, was to demonstrate that mass production of automobiles could be reconciled with variety in product. This was again the opposite of the old Ford concept, which we persistently met and opposed at every turn. For General Motors, with its five basic price classes by car makes and several subclasses of models, the implication of the Pontiac idea was very great for the whole line. If the cars in the higher-price classes could benefit from the volume economies of the lower-price classes, the advantages of mass production could be extended to the whole car line.
[. . .]
The Pontiac went on the market on schedule for the model year 1926 with the coach priced at $825, that is, about halfway between the Chevrolet coach, priced at $645, and the Olds coach, priced at $950; and the gap in our car line was closed.
Note that Sloan also briefly addresses the gap in 1924 between the $1295 Buick "6" touring car and the $2985 Cadillac touring car. This gap was filled by the Cadillac La Salle, which was introduced in 1927, its base model priced at $2685, or about $700 less than the Cadillac seven-person sedan.
In the spring of 1921, General Motors' Executive Committee created a special committee to study the company's de facto product policy and make any recommendations that might seem advisable for adjusting it. As Alfred Sloan explains in Chapter 4 of My Years with General Motors, The product policy we proposed is the one for which General Motors has now long been known. We said first that the corporation should produce a line of cars in each price area, from the lowest price up to one for a strictly high-grade quantity-production car, but we would not get into the fancy-price field with small production; second, that the price steps should not be such as to leave wide gaps in the line and yet ... great enough to keep their number within reason, so that the greatest advantage of quantity production could be secured
[. . .]
The core of the [GM] product policy lies in its concept of mass-producing a full line of cars graded upward in quality and price [with Chevrolet at the low end and Cadillac at the top]. This principle supplied the first element in differentiating the General Motors concept of the market from that of the old Ford Model T concept. Concretely, the General Motors concept provided the strategy for putting Chevrolet into competition with the Model T. Without this policy of ours, Mr. Ford would not have had any competition in his chosen field at that time.
In 1921 Ford had about 60 percent of the total car and truck market in units, and Chevrolet had about 4 per cent. With Ford in almost complete possession of the low-price field, it would have been suicidal to compete with him head on. No conceivable amount of capital short of the United States Treasury could have sustained the losses required to take volume away from him at his own game. The strategy we devised was to take a bite from the top of his position, conceived as a price class, and in this way build up Chevrolet volume on a profitable basis. In later years, as the consumer upgraded his [automobile] preference, the new General Motors policy was to become critically attuned to the course of American history.
On June 22, Morgan Daloisio published a straightforward article at brandchannel.com that extracts lessons for internal branding from the experiences of Virgin Media and Red Hat.
The basic goal is to have your employees effectively represent your brand to your customers. The three lessons Daloisio discusses (somewhat edited here) are:
Practice what you preach. "Employees only change their behavior when they see tangible evidence that the brand is infused into the way the business is run." Give priority to "areas of the business with the most power to influence employee behavior," namely, recruiting, training, performance management and incentives, and modeling of appropriate behavior by managers and executives.
Ensure brand managers and HR personnel are tight partners. For example, Red Hat formed "a permanent group called 'People + Brand,' which merged brand, design and HR under one executive ..."
Take care to create internal communications that engage employees with your brand. Specifically:
"View every communication with your employees as an opportunity — embed your brand values in everything employees read and hear."
"Find unique and different ways to deliver your brand message to employees."
"Be honest, straightforward and timely when communicating with employees. That’s the only way to build trust and belief in the brand and in the company as a whole."
For another perspective on how to handle internal branding, you can see this earlier post on how Loews Hotels Corp structured the training portion of a large-scale branding initiative.
Carrying on the theme of a recent post — preparing for job transitions — I'd mention another compilation of helpful advice, in this case recommendations for how best to use LinkedIn.
It is apparent from the reader comments that Swearingen's article attracted that I am not alone in finding it valuable. And some commenters add links to further tips, such as here.
M&A Activities of Companies Based in Developing Countries
The literature on economic development gives considerable attention to the means of technology transfer between developed and developing counries. There is an instructive case study of one such mechanism in the May issue of the Harvard Business Review.
Nirmalya Kumar, a professor of marketing at the London Business School, writes about how the India aluminum company Hindalco has used cross-border acquisitions to obtain competencies, technology, and knowledge it needs in order to carry out its strategy of becoming a strong global enterprise, manufacturing both basic and value-added products. This competency-driven rationale for acquisitions is a distinct contrast to the synergies-and-cost-reduction rationale that generally lies behind acquisitions made by companies based in developed countries.
Kumar lays out an eight-year timeline of what he calls the "M&A competency stairway" that Hindalco has gradually climbed in order to build the "industry-related skills and M&A techniques" it needed to pursue ever more challenging acquisition targets. The stairway has five steps so far:
Starting small, Hindalco acquired two Indian companies, Indal and Annapurna Foils, in 2000. Competencies gained:
How to bid for, negotiate with, and integrate companies in India
How to manage a large customer-focused, value-added products business
How to turn around a small Indian company (Annapurna) in receivership
In 2003, Hindalco acquired the Nifty and Mount Gordon mines in Australia. Competencies gained:
How to take over, turn around, and operate companies in a developed market
How to list companies on a stock exchange abroad and manage investor relations
In 2005, Hindalco acquired the St. Anne Nackawic Pulp Mill in Canada. Competencies gained:
How to manage a global supply chain as a a buyer and a seller
How to manage price fluctuations and foreign exchange risks across countries
In 2006, Hindalco acquired Minacs Worldwide in Canada. Competencies gained:
How to acquire assimilate, and delist a company in North America
How to manage a large, HR-intensive multinational operation
Finally, in 2007, Hindalco acquired Novelis North America, a company more than twice its size. Kumar acknowledges that the jury is out on how this latest acquisition will fare, both because it is so recent and because of the current depressed market conditions that Hindalco, along with everyone else in the aluminum industry, is coping with. In any case, it seems safe to say, as Kumar does, that Hindalco could not have tackled such a large acquisition without the competencies built through previous, smaller-scale acquisitions.
Kumar offers this summary of Hindalco's M&A strategy:
Making aluminum at competitive prices requires economics of scale, process skills, and cheap raw materials. Selling value-added aluminum products demands attention to quality, service, and brands; product development skills; and a knack for forging customer relationships — capabilities that Hindalco didn't possess [prior to 2000]. To learn them, it decided to acquire the leading downstream companies: Indal in India and Novelis overseas. The objective was to gain new competencies — not to get big fast or to reduce costs.
Note that, because the rationale is building competency, acquisition programs like that of Hindalco do not involve wholesale replacement of the management of acquired companies. Also, they have a long-term focus, as opposed to a focus on realizing profits quickly through cost-cutting.
The Cambridge-based advertising agency PJA has drawn up a scorecard (pdf) for its business development efforts that can serve as a model for other agencies and as a discussion-starter for companies in any industry that want to systematically improve their approach to bringing in new customers.
The scorecard has five sections:
The Plan
Positioning
The Pipeline
The Pitch
Perception/Reputation
Within each section are three or four items to be used in assessing the current quality of business development efforts. For example, the items in the Positioning section are:
We have a positioning statement
A majority of agency staffers can summarize agency positioning
Our positioning deliberately excludes market categories or capabilities that are not areas of strength
The assessment is on a scale of 1 to 5:
1 "Not on your life" 2 "We have some work to do" 3 "I'd give us a solid 'C' " 4 "Pretty damned sure" 5 "Absolutely"
Obviously, you can adopt your own labels for the rating scale if the cutesy agency lingo doesn't appeal.
I've been following Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, for some time (though I don't yet haunt anyone on Twitter, including Hsieh), most recently here.
I've now had the chance to watch the two-part YouTube video of the talk Hsieh gave on March 14 at the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin and it's another keeper. As one commenter at YouTube puts it,
"Culture drives the brand". "Chase the vision". What an excellent way to run a company! We can all learn a lot from the Zappos example.
Part I . . .
Part II . . .
Hsieh's slides are available here. An audio podcast is here.
On March 10, Advertising Age published a brief note (sub req) by John Quelch, a professor at Harvard Business School, that offers concrete advice concerning the issues on which a chief marketing officer (CMO) can most effectively contribute to his/her CEO's decision-making during the current recession.
Quelch identifies four key issues:
Adapting to shifting consumer behavior — "The CEO needs a CMO who understands the company's brands and consumers — and their comparative profitability — to recommend needed changes in customer targeting and brand messaging."
Optimizing pricing — "Marketers need to hit key retail price points [which are lower than in rosier economic times]; emphasize lower-cost, stripped-down or downsized versions of their products; and revamp their promotion calendars to maximize price competitiveness at the point of sale."
Stretching marketing dollars — "An experienced CMO will know how to take a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer to the marketing budget."
Embracing Internet-based media — It may be time "to experiment further and allocate more of [companies'] budgets to search advertising, banner advertising or motivating user-generated content through a branded website." The CMO has the expertise needed to make informed recommendations.
Quelch concludes by noting that CMOs need to be not only adept at brand differentiation, but also financially literate so that they can put together credible business cases for their marketing recommendations.
A couple of previousposts have discussed how Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, views exceptional customer service as the linchpin of his company's strategy for continuing success.
Hsieh is convinced that the key to exceptional service is hiring people with the right attitude and a willingness to embrace the culture at Zappos, a culture that is encapsulated in ten core values:
Deliver WOW through service
Embrace and drive change
Create fun and a little weirdness
Be adventurous, creative, and open-minded
Pursue growth and learning
Build open and honest relationships with communication
Build a positive team and family spirit
Do more with less
Be passionate and determined
Be humble
Hsieh's commitment to these values comes through in a blog post he wrote back in January dealing with his happy experience as a Twitter user. Since I'm stillresisting spending time with Twitter, and worrying that I need to get on the bandwagon, naturally this post caught my eye.
As a company, Hsieh explains, Zappos "[uses] Twitter to build more personal connections with people." But that's not all, as far as he's concerned. He goes on to say that "Twitter has contributed to my own personal growth and made me a better person."
Hsieh mentions four aspects of this personal impact of Twitter:
"Transparency & Values: Twitter constantly reminds me of who I want to be, and what I want Zappos to stand for."
This is where Hsieh cites Zappos' core values as a constant guide not just for his company but also for his own life. He explains, "Whether I tweet about something personal or something related to Zappos, if I'm living my life through these 10 core values, it all goes towards building the Zappos brand while shaping me personally as well." He also mentions that "Because I knew that I was going to be tweeting regularly about whatever I was doing or thinking, I was more conscious of and made more of an effort to live up to our 10 core values."
"Reframing Reality: Twitter encourages me to search for ways to view reality in a funnier and/or more positive way."
Hsieh explains that "now anytime something that used to get me upset or frustrated happens, I try to find the humor in the situation and think about how the situation can be reframed. I've found that almost every 'bad' situation is actually an opportunity that can be entertaining to my followers on Twitter, which also forces myself to see things in a different light." You definitely want to read the example he cites of how he used Twitter when he managed to lock himself out on his hotel balcony while on a trip to Mexico.
"Helping Others: Twitter makes me think about how to make a positive impact on other people's lives."
Hsieh reports that nowadays most of his tweets "do at least one of the following: Cause my followers to smile with something funny. Inspire my followers (for example, with an inspirational quote). Enrich my followers' perspectives (such as with a link to an interesting article)." This certainly matches my own idea of what would interest me enough to become someone's follower on Twitter.
"Gratitude: Twitter helps me notice and appreciate the little things in life."
Hsieh says, "For me, because I try to tweet every day, I've found that I'm always looking for opportunities to have something to tweet about. So I end up noticing and appreciating things that I would normally not even give a second thought to." Again, the sample tweets he mentions are charming.
Since I'm already following Hsieh, in the sense that I always read anything I happen upon that quotes his thoughts about running a business, the day may just come when I add myself to his Twitter followers list.
Two recent interviews, one with the CEO of the Brazilian company Mundivox Communications published on December 18, and the other with the CEO of the online shoe seller Zappos published on December 22, share an important theme.
Alberto Duran launched Mundivox in 2000, and is currently overseeing growth that is steaming along at 100% per year. The company's 1000 employees build networks and provide voice and data services, mostly to small and medium-sized businesses. (About 10% of revenue comes from residential work.)
Before getting to the aforementioned theme, just for a general sense of how Duran thinks, here is part of what he has to say in response to a question about the current volatility in the world's financial markets:
The question for me would be: Why is the [stock] market driving all this? The managers of a company and the board of directors are in charge of the long-run situation, [but] the health of a corporation is measured mostly by the stock market. That was supposed to be for the long-run growth of the company and to align [it] with the shareholders and their interests. In reality, what I have seen is companies taking short-term decisions to create short-term mini-bubbles or to please the expectations of bankers who often do not understand exactly what they are doing. I have seen it in my industry. I see the major telecom companies acting like banks. I do not see them acting like telecom companies. I benefit greatly from that. I do not know about society, but personally I could not be more pleased because I actually compete with banks instead of competing with telecom companies.
So, you see that Duran is a vigorous strategic thinker and quite articulate.
Now on to the theme I was struck by. When asked about his top priorities for the next couple of years, Duran says:
The first priority, believe it or not, it is creating new management in the company. I find the biggest problem is to create middle management. They are extremely smart; they are extremely capable in their field technically. But their view of the world and their view of what is right and what is wrong may be sometimes different. Diversity to me is not in race, it is in the way you think. And that is where the biggest focus and the biggest challenge lie, because without those managers we cannot grow to have 10,000 peple. I need more managers to move into different areas, to lead more people and to influence those people like I would.
Duran recounts how he asked Craig Barrett, currently chairman of the board at Intel, how Intel had grown successfully to the point of having thousands of employees. Barrett pointed to the importance of culture. Duran says:
That is when I started going back to my books and my management theories. ... I started paying more attention to the soft issues and to psychology, than the tools that I had learned to use at the beginning of my career.
Which brings us to Tony Hsieh of Zappos (discussed in a previous post). Asked why culture is so important for him and his company, Hsieh says:
Our whole belief is in today's world companies are becoming more transparent whether they like it or not. One disgruntled or happy employee can write something on a blog and have that read by millions. It's the same thing with a customer. Our belief is a company's culture and brand are two sides of the same coin. The brand may lack the culture but eventually it will catch up. You can't control evey touch point like you could 50 years ago. The only way to do it is instead of trying to "control the touch points" is to get the right people with the right attitude, build the right culture and the rest will take care of itself.
In part, Hsieh's view comes from trial-and-error. Asked about his biggest mistake, he responds:
With my first company it was not paying attention to the culture. We hired the right people with the right experience and skills sets, but we didn't know to look for a culture fit. By the time it was 100 people, I didn't want to go into the office anymore. That was a weird feeling. That's why we ended up selling the company.
Finally, in response to a question about how Zappos maintains its culture while rapidly adding employees, Hsieh says:
It comes down to whether employees view it as part of their job description. If they don't that's not going to scale. The only way it can is if every employee feels it's part of their responsibility. We make it a part of the hiring process and we actually fire people if they're not living up to the Zappos core values even if they're doing their job function. It's 50 percent of every performance review. That's the only way I think it can scale.
Any organization would be well-advised to examine their own degree of success in building a cohesive, productive culture and in recruiting new employees who are motivated to fit in and contribute to meeting shared goals.
With good reason, much classroom training nowadays is led by facilitators rather than by teachers per se. The idea is that adult learners should generally direct their own learning as far as possible, and they should spend their training time as far as possible working on real issues and problems with a team of colleagues. The facilitator's role is to help with sharing of expertise, keeping discussions on track, and posing questions that get people to think more deeply.
Facilitators do, in fact, generally include periods of teaching in the flow of training, often to present concepts, to provide memorable examples of how to handle various situations, and to demonstrate techniques the training participants need to learn.
There is a type of more traditional teaching that organizations should provide on a regular basis. This is teaching done by the organization's leaders that is designed to pass along expertise and to reinforce internal messaging and branding.
In the November 2008 issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine, Michael Chavez and Gil McWilliam of Duke Corporate Education, and Sushanth Tharappan of the Infosys Leadership Institute, offer advice on how to optimize leaders' teaching. The article isn't as clearly written as it should be, but it's still worth perusing because it captures instructive details of several years' worth of experience with Unisys' "Leaders as Teachers" initiative.
The authors point to three reasons teaching by leaders is valuable:
It's a way of passing tacit knowledge along from senior experts to the rising generation of leaders.
What leaders have to say tends to get attention — "... bringing leaders to the forefront of the process of developing other leaders ... sends a powerful signal to the organization about the value of specific insights and the importance of the development process itself."
The Leaders as Teachers approach forges a productive alliance between the organization's learning and development professionals and top management.
Based on their experience with leaders teaching at Infosys, the authors offer five caveats:
Make sure that what the leaders teach is content making a specific contribution to achieving explicit learning goals.
Content likely to fit the bill includes material that helps employees understand why and how to change their focus or priorities, that helps institutionalize use of new tools or knowledge that the leader doing the teaching has had a direct hand in producing, or that affords the leader an opportunity to solidify his or her own command of concepts, frameworks, and practices by explaining them to learners.
In the latter case, the leader is also, in effect, acting as a champion of specific changes the organization is making in order to develop capabilities needed for executing its strategy.
Make sure the teacher uses techniques, such as posing stimulating questions, that involve the learners "in the creation of new meanings, in finding applications and examples and in stretching" everyone's imaginations.
Make sure a leader being considered for a teaching role is able to invest the necessary time "to work closely with internal learning and development professionals — and often outside consultants and educators — to build learning outcomes and design the content, refine the materials and design, and rehearse the delivery."
Use other training resources (i.e., not a leader) for the more basic portions of a training effort. Have the leader step in to teach how concepts already presented apply to company-specific situations.
Organize a cadre of teachers large enough to handle the number of sessions being scheduled. No one senior leader is going to have time to meet with more than a few groups. Note that it will probably be necessary to allocate time to train-the-trainer preparation.
In a sidebar to their article, the authors note that the actual content of the programs Infosys offers is selected
based on input from multiple listening mechanisms: a survey of high-potential leaders and their consolidated personal development plans; senior management performance reviews; and the opinions of business-enabling functions such as HR, corporate planning and quality.
To actually produce the content, Infosys uses a process that helps leaders "deconstruct their learning into teachable points of view," and then incorporates those POVs into an engaging training design.
To ensure the relevance of the content, Infosys:
Aligns the content to the company's leadership competency framework. Each session provides a "platform for illustrating or narrating examples of how leadership competencies actually play out at work."
Places great emphasis on debriefing — i.e., drawing lessons from the tales the leader tells about problems and dilemmas he/she has had to handle.
Encourages learners to approach their jobs with confidence. Unisys places strong focus on helping learners believe that, with diligent application of their enhanced skills and knowledge, they can achieve results comparable to those achieved by the leader doing the teaching.
You can read more about the Infosys approach to leadership development, including measurement of its impact, in a April 2008 interview with Girish G Vaidya, head of Infosys Leadership Institute.
Right on cue, the Wall Street Journal published an article in today's edition that offers reinforcement for points covered in a recent post on the potential for nurturing joint dependence to improve performance of both a manufacturer and a partner company, such as a supplier.
The WSJ article, by Eric Johnson, a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, and Robert Batt, a PhD candidate at Wharton, looks at the relationship between manufacturers and dealers. The recommendations Johnson and Batt offer track closely with those that grow out of the research by Maxim Sytch and Ranjay Gulati discussed in the earlier post.
Based on three years of interviews and field research, Johnson and Batt recommend a strategy of building long-term sales and profits by strengthening manufacturer-dealer relationships. This approach has three elements:
Strengthening the best dealers — This can mean culling weaker dealerships in order to provide scope for the stronger dealerships to grow. Providing dealer training can be a big help in positioning the remaining dealers for solid success.
Supporting dealer profitability — This means developing products that can be sold at good margins and that crowd out competitors.
Incorporating dealers in company culture — Manufacturers should take positive steps to enlist their dealers in achieving the company's mission in a way that aligns with the company's culture. This generally involves such contributions as training, merchandising support, and promotions. Other relationship-building activities, such as sales conferences and joint sales planning, are also productive.
Johnson and Batt illustrate their ideas with examples drawn from practices at piano manufacturer Steinway & Sons and power tool manufacturer Stihl Inc.
Knowledge@Wharton published an article today that, among other things, serves as a reminder of the importance of including training in efforts directed at raising employee productivity.
The article looks at the recent adoption of RedPrairie's workforce management software by Ann Taylor Stores Corp. This software enables Ann Taylor to make sales assistants' assignments in a way that has the most productive people — in terms of average sales per hour (most important), units sold, and dollars per transaction — on the floor during the times of heaviest traffic.
As described by RedPrairie, their software can take not only sales productivity and store traffic patterns into account, but also employee preferences and skill levels. Appariently, Ann Taylor has not given the latter variables much weight.
Stephen Hoch, a marketing professor at Wharton, argues that the software — as implemented at Ann Taylor — "potentially creates a hostile working environment." Hoch
acknowledges that technology-based information can be valuable to managers, but only if the value is clearly understood throughout the company. Without consistent buy-in, technology-driven management tools will result in adversarial relationships across all staff levels.
Information technology is not a way to overcome weak management, he suggests, noting that human capital management systems must be sold to workers as a valuable tool for all employees and should be accompanied by training sessions. "It should motivate everybody, not just the best sellers. It would be nice to couple it with training to bootstrap people who are not as effective as the top performers."
It is important to note that RedPrairie assumes that at least some of its clients will want to integrate workforce management software with training because the company offers learning management applications.
The Wharton article cites an article in the September 10 edition of the Wall Street Journal that reports employees at Ann Taylor "say the system has resulted in sharp cutbacks in hours for some employees and has diminished morale." I will have an eye out for follow-up reports indicating whether Ann Taylor persists with its current rather employee- and customer-unfriendly implementation of its workforce management system, or, alternatively, moves in the direction of beefing up training and having managers apply the software with a degree of flexibility that promotes high employee performance over the long run.
Like any typical consumer, among my most frequent encounters with successful training are conversations with adept, helpful customer service representatives (CSRs). (Of course, I've also had my share of disappointing and frustrating encounters with poorly trained and/or poorly guided CSRs.)
Well-trained CSRs are the name of the game at zappos.com, an Internet retailer specializing in shoes, but also offering clothing, handbags and luggage of all types, and accessories.
One recent account of Zappos' approach to building customer loyalty — a key to long-term financial success in Internet retailing — is provided by a May 2008 blog post at the website of Harvard Business Publishing. Bill Taylor cites Zappos as a standout for original thinking, steadfast execution of its business strategy, which centers on customer service excellence,1 and transparent thinking.
The specific focus of Taylor's post is Zappos' successful use of its employees as, in effect, brand ambassadors. Based both on reports of others and on his own direct observation at the Zappos call center in Henderson NV, Taylor explains that Zappos' "smart and entertaining call-center employees are free to do whatever it takes to make you happy. There are no scripts [for the CSRs to read from], no robotic behavior, and plenty of legendary stories about Zappos and its customers." (You can read one such story here.)
The superior performance of Zappos employees in building customer loyalty is largely due to careful selection for cultural fit, and to training "that immerses them in the company's strategy, culture, and obsession with customers."2 The training extends over four weeks, three of them in the classroom, followed for CSRs by a week of guided call-handling at the call-center.
After the first week of training — during which trainees receive an entry-level salary — they are offered $1,000 to walk away from the job. The thinking is that the company needs to weed out people who aren't really drawn to the CSR job as defined in the Zappos culture (what I would call people who lack the requisite critical caring). About 10% of new CSRs accept the offer.
You can learn more about Zappos' approach to its business by reading CEO Tony Hsieh's "Top 10 eCommerce Lessons" and by watching the video below, which presents an interview with Hsieh.
__________ 1 For example, in a departure from the practice of many Internet retailers, Zappos publishes its 800-number on every one of its webpages.
2 A basic component of Zappos' culture is its set of ten core values, which you can read here.
I'd like to to follow up on an earlier post about the concerted effort Absa Bank made in 1998, following amalgamation of four South African bank brands into one Absa brand, to ensure that its employees would deliver on the brand promise of quality service to customers.
Julia Scheffer completed a master's thesis (pdf) in 2005, which, though generally heavy going, does provide further detail concerning the specific steps Absa took internally as part of its overall effort to achieve its branding aims. As summarized in a chart on pp. 196-197, the goals of the bank's plan for communications to employees concerning the new Absa brand were to:
Undo confusion.
Share information.
Obtain employee buy-in.
Change customers' perceptions of the bank.
Provide in-depth knowledge of where Absa was heading and why.
Explain the financial implications of the amalgamation.
Explain the long-term financial benefit.
Gain market share.
Ensure optimum solutions for customers.
Retain customers.
Suit customer convenience.
Support simplified systems.
In their content, the communications to employees covered:
The fact that Absa was a single commercial bank.
The time frame for the changeover from multiple banks to a single bank.
The benefits and implications for employees.
The benefits and implications for customers.
The benefits and implications for other stakeholders.
The cost implications for Absa Group.
Product implications.
The fact that Absa was readying itself for the future.
How divisions were being consolidated.
The importance of the steps being taken for the bank's survival in a changing environment.
Leadership's emphasis on ethical operations and being forward-looking.
The prospect of gains for everyone from the consolidation.
The nature of the infrastructure changes being introduced.
Management expectations of employees.
The fact that consolidation would enable Absa to be more true to its mission.
An array of communication actions and channels were used:
Electronic channels — The launch was done live on the ABSA Channel, an in-house TV channel, and the message also went out via email.
Print media — Communication via ABACUS, an internal publication; information packs sent to all managers; personalized letters to employees; tent cards for tables.
Group dialogue and discussions held via Absa communication representatives and "action line" employees.
Private discussions with Branch Managers.
Absa Communication Centre (a call center for answering employees' questions).
Employees also attended a series of branding orientation sessions which introduced them "to the core values of the new brand by setting up the Brand Wall, which was a series of posters and web pages dedicated to various facets of the new brand." And, as noted in my earlier post, employees attended specially designed "I Am the Absa Brand" training workshops that taught them what to do in specific situations in order to achieve solid customer satisfaction.
In sum, Absa Bank's comprehensive communications program both for motivating employees to embody the single bank brand, and to equip them to do so effectively, is an instructive model for other companies attempting similar brand building.
The April 28 issue of Business Week has an interview with Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, that is worth reading in its entirety. A passage that especially caught my eye was Bezos' answer to the question, "Every company claims to be customer-focused. Why do you think so few are able to pull it off?" Bezos says:
Companies get skills-focused, instead of customer-needs focused. When [companies] think about extending their business into some new area, the first question is "why should we do that — we don't have any skills in that area." That approach puts a finite lifetime on a company, because the world changes, and what used to be cutting-edge skills have turned into something your customers may not need anymore. A much more stable strategy is to start with "what do my customers need?" Then do an inventory of the gaps in your skills. Kindle is a great example. If we set our strategy by what our skills happen to be rather than by what our customers need, we never would have done it. We had to go out and hire people who know how to build hardware devices and create a whole new competency for the company. [hyperlink added]
If you subscribe to Bezos' view, the implications for your company's approach to skills training are straightforward, namely, a big part of strategic planning is deciding how best to build needed new skills.
The latest edition of the newsletter our mayor sends out periodically was in my email today. After detailing Northampton's budget woes, the newsletter mentioned a visit to the mayor on Valentine's Day by Cecilia Appianim (pdf), a cocoa farmer from the village of Asentem in central Ghana.
Appianim was accompanied by Niki Lagos, sales and marketing associate of Divine Chocolate, a farmer-owned fair trade chocolate company. A major portion of the ownership of Divine Chocolate is held by the Kuapa Kokoo Society, a cooperative of 45,000 Ghanaian cocoa farmers, including Appianim, founded in 1993.
Appianim is Kuapa Kokoo's recorder in her village, which means she is responsible for collecting farmers' dried cocoa beans, checking that the beans meet quality standards, weighing them, arranging transport to storage and market points, and receiving and disbursing the farmers' payment for their beans. You can read more about Kuapa Kokoo here.
Note that the benefits of membership in the Kuapa Kokoo cooperative include training for farmers and, as one result of enhanced income, higher school attendance rates for farmers' children.
If you're trying to come up with concrete ways of helping your employees home in on true points of differentiation between what your company has to offer and what is available from competitors, the list of questions supplied in a recent post at brandingstrategyinsider.com can help.
The thesis of the post is that "[o]ften, exploring different competitive frames of reference will help you choose the most powerful brand benefit." All the suggested questions are certainly worth pondering, but for the specific purpose of articulating your point(s) of differentiation, think particularly about these (slightly edited):
Could another brand within our category credibly insert its name into our brand’s positioning statement?
What are the most likely substitutes for our product/service?
What could neutralize our point of difference?
What could make our point of difference obsolete?
What could kill our category?
Note that you don't need to reflect on and discuss a long list of questions to accomplish the goal of identifying and articulating true points of differentiation. Rather, your team should tackle intensively a select group of questions that stimulate creative thinking and iterative refinement of your position statements and value proposition.
I continue to follow news of what tacks American auto companies are trying as they attempt restore their competitive strength. Most recently, I came upon a report of an announcement from Chrysler that it is altering how it designs and engineers new vehicles.
A major aspect of the new set-up is organizing product teams by brand:
The Jeep team will focus on the SUV brand; the truck team is responsible for advancing the Dodge truck brand; and the car and minivan team develops Chrysler's full-size cars, the current midsize lineup and minivan products.
In addition, the future midsize product team focuses on future midsize vehicles for worldwide markets; and SRT [Street and Racing Technology] continues Chrysler's performance branding.
This is in contrast to the 2004 product team set-up, which involved production teams that were platform-based. (For example, there were teams for body-on-frame vehicles, such as trucks, and for front-drive vehicles. See this report in Marketing Daily.)
Now, if things go according to plan, everyone on the production teams, regardless of whether they have a direct marketing function, will be attuned to the importance of giving brand values high priority in discussions of the myriad issues that come up during the process of designing a vehicle and bringing it into production.
