12 habits of highly effective businesses
The pandemic has affected most industries and the way we run business. Further it has emphasised the urgency for more profound transformation, to secure business today and long term growth in new ways.
In this post I’m refreshing a structure that I had put together before the pandemic, and that supports some of my training sessions and articles, on how to plan for growth in digital uncertain times. It’s pretty generic, systemic, I link to specific tools and deep dive into details as consultant, trainer, or project leader.
4 business habits
Explore new boundaries. Play a better game.
REDEFINITION
REINVENTION
CUSTOMER VALUE
EXPERIENCE (CX)
▌Stretch, reinvent market boundaries, own unique territories
- What business are you actually in ?
- Reinventing industry boundaries
- Defining business around customers
- Targeting highly profitable niches
▌Shift to more powerful business models, experiment
- Moving to the next business model
- From pipelines to platform business models
- Data-fuelled business models
- Models with augmented purpose
▌Stretch your value, make it more specific, truly unique
- Augmented value (utility, emotional, digital..)
- Customer pain focus
- Augmented purpose
- Augmented storytelling
▌Organise all your activities around customers’ context
- Customer journey based activities
- Contextual dynamic unique experiences
- Contextual utility or entertainment value
- Closing the physical-digital gap
4 organisational habits
Design efficient systems.
ORGANISATION
SYSTEM, CX FOCUS
AS A SYSTEM
BUSINESS ASSETS
▌Redesign your organisation into a
customer-centric ecosystem
- Customer-centric liquid organisation
- Fast testing and learning organisation
- From HIPPOs to agile experimentalists
- Operating like a tech platform
▌Connect all your touch points, content and activities into a progressive system around customers journeys
- From selling to ‘non-selling’ system
- Contextual dynamic customer experience focus
- Closing sales and marketing teams into a virtuous loop
- Always-on experimentations & testing mechanisms
▌Connect all your contributors, ideation and testing processes, into an innovation ecosystem
- Ideation process & platforms
- Culture and management
- Inside-outside ecosystems
- Cross-industry innovation
▌Connect and turn all your business data into new business value
- Connect all you data first
- Turn into shared dashboards
- Use for your own business first
- Next as part of your business model
4 cultural habits
Activate an agile culture of continuous exploration, design, and testing.
& VISUAL DESIGN
PASTE HABIT
▌Approach business like an
architect and designer
- Put mental structures first, then fill in
- Modularise, iterate progressively
- A lot less is a lot more, work visually
- Solve issues like a designer would do
▌Embrace collective habits of
business experimentalists
- Formalise experimentations
- Run ongoing testing mechanisms
- Share learnings, iterate or stop fast
- Celebrate fails as much as wins
▌Someone, somewhere else, has a better
answer to what you’re trying to do
- Get inspiration from other industries, spaces
- Adapt & paste to your own business
- Combine and create into new stuff
- Read read read, build your efficient info system
▌Leverage cloud platforms to
work and innovate better
- Best-of-breed collaborative tools
- Think your collective work as platforms
- Keep in same place, iterate upon continuously
- Constantly improve your collaborative system
