Hazte la pregunta adecuada

El pasado septiembre tuve el privilegio de participar como ponente en la quinta edición de TEDxAlcarriaSt. Los organizadores me invitaron a compartir las claves que me permitieron descubrir hace años mis dos pasiones (correr y mi profesión) y que me siguen permitiendo disfrutar de ellas a día de hoy.

Después de reflexionar bastante tiempo llegué a varias conclusiones. La primera y más relevante fue darme cuenta de la importancia de hacerme las preguntas adecuadas. Tengo que confesar que tanto en mi vida profesional como deportiva nunca tuve claro qué quería hacer. En ambos casos llegué a encontrar mi camino haciéndome justo la pregunta contraria: ¿qué no quería ser?, ¿en qué no me quería convertir? Me llevó mucho tiempo encontrar mis pasiones. Mucha prueba y error. Y aquí llega el aprendizaje: tu pasión no siempre es obvia y para la mayoría de las personas encontrarla requiere bastante perseverancia. 

La segunda conclusión importante es que, una vez encontrada esa pasión, hay que cultivarla y hacerla crecer. Creo firmemente en que todos debemos encontrar aquello que nos hace felices pero al mismo tiempo es importante recordar que casi nada subsiste sin esfuerzo. Yo tengo una filosofía muy sencilla que comienza con una pregunta poderosa que me hago a mí mismo cada vez que me surge un nuevo reto: ¿quiero hacerlo?, ¿de verdad estoy comprometido a hacerlo? Si la respuesta es afirmativa y encuentro en mi mismo el nivel de compromiso necesario, el siguiente paso es eliminar las excusas. Ya anticipo que no es fácil pero no hay alternativa. A continuación me fijo un objetivo claro y me concentro en su ejecución. Y, por supuesto, hago todo lo posible por disfrutar del proceso.

Próximo reto: TEDxAlcarriaSt

El próximo 30 de septiembre tendrá lugar en Guadalajara una nueva edición de TEDxAlcarriaSt al que he sido invitado a participar como ponente. Un nuevo reto que asumo con mucha energía e ilusión.

Next September 30th will take place in Guadalajara, Spain, a new edition of TEDxAlcarriaSt to which I have been invited to participate as a speaker. A new challenge that I assume with great energy and enthusiasm.

What it takes to innovate without an innovation department

When it comes to innovation, we usually face two main challenges.

• Not everyone understands well the true value of innovation. So I like to say that innovation is the art of turning ideas into business (and money) in the mid and long term.

• The hardest part of innovation is not having an idea: the hardest thing is to carry it out. The good news is that although the innovative idea fails, we always have the opportunity to learn from failures.

But let’s start at the very beginning. The first decision to make is what kind of innovation we want to do. This point is very important because it will determine who should take the lead and how.

Different levels of innovation:

According to The Innovation Policy Platform “a radical or disruptive innovation is one that has a significant impact on a market and on the economic activity of firms in that market, while incremental innovation concerns an existing product, service, process, organization or method whose performance has been significantly enhanced or upgraded”.

Radical innovation implies risk and has to be driven from the top to bottom and to make it work you have to exclude from the daily team and give to a separate business unit.

Incremental innovation implies lower risk and has to be driven from the bottom to up. To get it done you need to create an internal culture in the organization.

When there’s no innovation department and we expect innovation to surface among employees of the organization (therefore incremental innovation) then some conditions must be met. Somehow there must be a culture of innovation with the following approach:

Jump and learn: learning by doing

Most of the innovative ideas are already in the organization, although for many reasons very few arise. Not everybody feels comfortable when taking risks or dealing with uncertainty. And definitely only a few are willing to devote extra time to these processes. Therefore, the most important thing is to find the right people with the right attitude.

From this point, we must devote the right time for planning and then move on to implementation rapidly. Only by applying the appropriate methodology, we will ensure that we learn from the failures and we incorporate our learnings in new innovation processes.

Ownership & rewards: people first

It is highly recommended that the team that will develop the new idea feel that owns the process. The best scenario is one in which the team developing the idea is also the team that starts and operates it. Betting on teamwork is a way to significantly increase the probability of success and collective learning.

Questioning

In my post “Questioning in business” I mentioned Yamashita’s considerations: “Company leaders are realizing that if they’re only asking the small questions, it’s not going to advance their agenda, their position or their brands. In order to innovate now, they have to ask more expansive questions”.

Devote time (quantity and quality)

If we are truly committed to innovation, it is essential to dedicate a specific time in our agendas. Senior management full alignment is also essential.

Training

As I said before if we want to ensure that the innovation process works (results and / or lessons for the future) is essential to use a rigorous methodology. And that cannot be improvised. It is essential to have adequate training provided by the company.


Other posts on innovation:
The challenge of innovation
Innovation prowess
The role of the leader in the innovation process

4 business lessons from running a marathon

A little more than two years ago, when I had just beaten my personal record in the Madrid Marathon, I wrote a post in which I explained some of the key factors which had allowed me to run a distance measuring more than one stretch around the planet.

From then on, and although 16 years have gone by since I started to run, I haven’t stopped learning. Each race is unique and therefore a chance to keep on learning and know yourself a little better. In this last two marathons, for example, I have learnt four major lessons which can be applied really easily to the professional environment:

Confidence in oneself is vital but it should not fall on attempting to underestimate your external conditions or overvalue your own abilities. Because of this, flexibility and adaptability are two fundamental ingredients when it comes to tackling unexpected challenges (from a small lesson when preparing for our race to a sudden change in the commercial strategy of our main competitor).

Planning and preparing are keys to success. There are no possible shortcuts: in order to achieve our objective and finish the race in the desired time we need a combination of perseverance, resilience and a lot of will power. And, like in the business world, it is really important to be impeccable in the execution and follow-up of measurements which make up our desired performance.

Having a planned strategy for the whole course is indispensible- we cannot just focus on the short term. It is important to always remember what the final objective is and to ration our energy levels for the whole of the race (or the whole of the tax year). This will help us to overcome the well-known “wall” effect which comes up half way through a race, or to deal with any half-year profits which aren’t particularly brilliant.

Honesty with oneself. Dreaming and thinking big are not big challenges but they can become dangerous if we do not act with the right criteria. Whenever I have managed to meet my sporting objectives there has been a strategy designed beforehand: starting with a look at my abilities when it comes to preparation and being honest with myself in terms of my potential to develop in the time remaining, I have come up with some aims which, although ambitious, were sensible, along with realistic training plans. I insist on honesty with myself because we cannot expect miracles to happen. If something happens, it will surely impact negatively on the expected performance: never the other way around.

And a final lesson on travel companions. Counting on the support of your family and friends when it comes to marathons and your colleagues in the professional world is, without a doubt, the greatest incentive to keep going until you reach your goal. Without them, it’s mission impossible. As an African proverb says “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go accompanied”. And I like to add “accompanied with the best people”.

Versión en español de este post

4 lecciones para los negocios que he aprendido corriendo un maratón

Hace algo más de dos años, coincidiendo con la que ha sido hasta ahora mi mejor marca en el Maratón de Madrid, escribí un post en el  que explicaba algunas de las claves que me han permitido correr la distancia equivalente a más de una vuelta al mundo.

Desde entonces, y aunque han pasado ya 16 años desde que empecé a correr, no he dejado de aprender. Cada carrera es única y, por tanto, una oportunidad para seguir aprendiendo y para conocerte un poco mejor. En los dos últimos maratones, por ejemplo, he aprendido cuatro grandes lecciones que pueden aplicarse muy bien al entorno profesional:

La confianza en uno mismo es fundamental pero no  se debe caer en la tentación de subestimar las condiciones externas ni sobrevalorar tus propias capacidades. Por ello, flexibilidad y adaptabilidad son dos ingredientes fundamentales para abordar retos inesperados (desde una pequeña lesión en el caso de la preparación de nuestra carrera hasta un cambio repentino en la estrategia comercial de nuestro principal competidor).

La planificación y la preparación son la clave del éxito. No hay atajos posibles: para conseguir cumplir nuestro objetivo y terminar la carrera en el tiempo objetivo es necesaria una combinación de perseverancia, resiliencia y mucha fuerza de voluntad. Y, como en el mundo de los negocios, es realmente importante ser impecables en la ejecución y en el seguimiento de las métricas que objetivan nuestro rendimiento.

Es imprescindible tener una estrategia meditada para todo el recorrido y no concentrarnos sólo en el corto plazo. Es importante recordar en todo momento cuál es el objetivo final y dosificar las fuerzas para toda la carrera (o todo el año fiscal). Esto nos ayudará a superar el famoso efecto del “muro” a mitad de carrera o a enfrentar unos resultados de mitad de año no especialmente brillantes.

Sinceridad con uno mismo. Soñar y pensar en grande es muy estimulante pero puede volverse peligroso si no lo hacemos con suficiente criterio. En todas las ocasiones en las que he conseguido cumplir mis objetivos deportivos ha habido una estrategia previa diseñada para ello: partiendo de un diagnóstico de mis propias capacidades en el momento de comenzar la preparación y siendo honesto conmigo mismo respecto al potencial a desarrollar en el tiempo restante, me he planteado unos objetivos ambiciosos pero sensatos y un plan de entrenamiento realista. Insisto en la honestidad con uno mismo porque no se pueden esperar milagros. Si algo pasa, seguramente será para impactar negativamente en el rendimiento esperado: casi nunca al revés.

Y una última lección sobre los compañeros de viaje. Contar con el apoyo de tu familia y de tus amigos en el caso del maratón y de tus colegas en el mundo profesional es, sin duda, el mayor aliciente para seguir adelante hasta cumplir el objetivo. Sin ellos, es misión imposible. Como dice un proverbio africano, “si quieres ir rápido camina solo, si quieres llegar lejos ve acompañado”. Y yo añado “acompañado de los mejores”.

English version of this post

Questioning in business

Today, in a world where market conditions and challenges have become even more complex, uncertain and subject to radical disruption across all economic sectors, some authors like Clayton Christensen feel that most of the corporate leaders are not still asking the right questions. To explain this it is necessary to come back to the “efficiency era” (early nineties) when it was all about asking “how can we save a little bit of money, make it a little more efficient, where can we cut costs?”. Keith Yamashita calls it the era of small-minded questions.

This explains how market leading companies in the tech sector and other industries are getting blindsided by newcomers offering products or services that may not have been as good, but are simpler, more convenient and more affordable.  Consider, for example, the big telecommunication companies and businesses like WhatsApp, Skype, etc. These new players are innovating at the low end of the market where the real potential for breakthrough innovation is. And why most of the big companies doesn’t pursue disruptive innovation this way too? Simply because they should have to move away from all they had worked so hard to build.

Fortunately Yamashita thinks that this era is ending: “Company leaders are realizing that if they’re only asking the small questions, it’s not going to advance their agenda, their position or their brands. In order to innovate now, they have to ask more expansive questions”.

The old model doesn’t lend itself particularly well to a market that favours speed, flexibility and collaborative inquiry. Changing to the new model where ambitious and open-ended questions like “Why? What if? or How?” are fully present requires difficult shifts in ingrained policies and approaches. Eric Ries, the pioneer of the Lean Startup movement, says, “the industrial economy was all about knowing the answer and expressing confidence. If you did your homework, you were supposed to know. If you had unanswered questions, that meant you did a bad job and wouldn’t get rewarded”. On the other hand, “the pressure on short-term results tends to give questioning out of the equation” (Tony Wagner, Harvard).

Warren Berger admits in his book “A more beautiful question” that even for those inclined to question, the most difficult thing is knowing what to ask... For this reason he suggests to ask questions at the most fundamental level -questions of purpose like:

•       Why are we in business? (And by the way- what business are we really in?)
•       What if our company didn’t exist?
•       What if we could become a cause and not just a company?
•       How can we make a better experiment?
•       If we brainstorm in questions, will lightning strike?
•       Will anyone follow a leader who embraces uncertainty?
•       Should mission statements be mission questions?
•       How might we create a culture of inquiry?

At this point, the big question is: are you prepared to ask the right questions in your business?

Facing the new challenges of marketing

HBR spotlights in its last issue the new challenges of Marketing in the digital age. They address this subject from three different perspectives:

The latest (and the best) in marketing

In other words: what strategies, structures and capabilities should marketers adopt to excel? The Marketing2020 Study surveyed more than 10.000 marketing executives about their organizations’ data analytics capabilities, brand strategy, cross-functional and global interactions, employee engagement, and other factors. High performers excelled in their ability to leverage customer insight, communicate a societal purpose and deliver a rich customer experience. They also demonstrated superior cross-functional collaboration, strategic focus, organizational agility and training through fluid organizational structures where Marketing is a core facilitator.

Here’s how the best meet the challenges of the digital age:

• they use data and analytics to improve marketing effectiveness
• they are clearly connected to the corporate strategy
• their employees are fully engaged with the brand purpose
• they focus on the right metrics
• their training programs are tailored to the specific needs of their business

Marketing collaboration

Marketing organizations must collaborate with other functions more than ever before but structural constraints and communication glitches often isolate them from the information and resources they need. The marketing pioneers are revamping the decision processes at the boundaries between functions, focusing on planning and strategy, execution and operations and infrastructure. It is at the seams between Marketing and the other functions that communication most often breaks down and processes stall. Just to put an example: in many occasions marketers and product developers believe that they have the final say on which features to include in a new product.

Some companies like Nordstrom have improved collaboration between marketing and other functions with simple tools that streamline decision making by establishing clear roles, explicit decision criteria and well-defined processes.

For that reason it is imperative to decide how to decide, assigning roles for key decisions.

Aditya Joshi and Eduardo Giménez suggest that as marketing works jointly with other functions at its boundaries, it must answer questions like:

• Business strategy: Where should we double down on marketing spend? Where should we pull back?

• Sales: How should we align performance metrics to ensure that marketing and sales focus on the same opportunities?

• IT: Should we build, buy or outsource the marketing technologies we need?

• Analytics: What criteria should we use to allocate scarce analytical resources to marketing rather than other functions?

• Pricing: How should we determine the optimal price incentive to prompt desired customer behaviour?

• Finance: How should we set financial expectations for tried-and-true marketing investments versus unproven but promising ones?

Truly understand your consumers

Many companies don’t really understand how many different kinds of relationships customers can have with brands, nor do they know how to reinforce or change those connections. These companies need to get better at capturing data that tell which relationship types their customers are looking for. They must shift customers toward relationships that advance the firm’s strategic goals. That requires understanding the unspoken rules of each type of connection and in many occasions means reorganizing marketing around relationships.

The authors of “Unlock the mysteries of your customer relationships” explain that each type of customer relationship is governed by its own rules. For example:

Basic exchange. The customer enters the relationship to obtain a good product at a fair price and doesn’t want to have to think or do too much.

Business partner. The customer wants to work with the company as a valued and reliable partner to solve problems over the long term.

Fling. The customer wants to experiment with a new identity. He expects the company to provide excitement and not encourage reflection or rational thinking about purchases.

Best friends. The customer is looking for intimacy and emotional support with a two way flow of honest communication and expects that the company won’t disclose personal information or take advantage of his vulnerability.

Buddies. The customer is looking for sustained interaction but doesn’t want a close relationship. He expects that the brand will not make demands or limit his freedom to associate with others.

Master-slave. The customer enters this relationship to intensify feelings of self-worth. He demands that the brand listen, anticipate his every need, satisfy every demand and not ask any question.

An excellent example of understanding this is Harley-Davidson. A team of employees spent time on the road with customers to develop the kind of intimacy that could cement Harley’s status as a best friend.

Related posts:

The Marketing Plan: the unresolved matter for SMEs

Social Media Marketing for B2B SMEs

The big challenges of B2B SMEs

What do high-performing companies do to improve their global competitiveness?

According to the Deloitte's Global Competitiveness in Manufacturing Initiative there are up to 43 different competitive capabilities that can make the difference and can be clasified in 4 groups: qualifiers, game changers, creating advantage and being challenged. 

"Qualifiers" are capabilities for which high performers and the other companies do not significantly differ. 

“Game changers” are capabilities in which high-performers stand apart from the pack and in which they likely will continue to lead. Brand image, leadership and management, business strategy, R&D capabilities, delivery speed, overall manufacturing processes, supplier network strength, and balance sheet strength were some of the game changers that high performers possessed. They are the elements of the genetic code that truly set high performers a cut above the rest.

“Creating advantage” capabilities are those in which high performers currently hold no significant advantage over other companies in current performance, but which are viewed as much more important by high performers than by other companies with regard to future competitiveness. Innovation capabilities, quality of human resources, global marketing, and procurement capabilities dominate the creating advantage group of capabilities for high performers.

“Being challenged” capabilities are those in which high performers currently hold a strong lead, but where they may lose ground as other manufacturers catch up and close the gap.

Obviously not all the competitive capabilities affect in the same way to all the sectors. As an example the industrial products sector has its own insights:

1. Reputation, product quality, and customer perceptions are at a premium: These areas are game changers for this traditionally B2B sector, whereas they are qualifiers for most other manufacturing sectors. High performers in this sector are significantly ahead of other manufacturers in developing a stellar reputation and fostering a strong perception of value and quality in their customers’ eyes, giving them a valuable competitive advantage.

2. Slow to reach global customers and markets: Global sales and marketing capabilities have relatively low values for current competitiveness and future importance and show little differentiation from other industrial products companies even for high performers in this sector. There is room to create significant differentiation in this sector through effective global sales and marketing.

3. Lagging on research and innovation: R&D capabilities, innovative product designs, and the overall quality of human resources are areas where even high-performing manufacturers in this sector rated their capabilities as generally mediocre. These are either game changers or creating advantage capabilities in other manufacturing sectors.

Finally there are some key findings on the future competitive advantages that the Deloitte's study shows:

1. High performers are getting serious about innovation.

2. Talent wars are just beginning. Innovation requires talent, so it is not surprising that high performers are placing considerable emphasis on talent acquisition and human capital development at all levels.

3. Manufacturing is globalizing again. 

4. Supply chain networks are leveraging collaboration for innovation and talent.

In summary this research suggests that high-performing manufacturers are now getting truly focused on the capabilities that drive growth: disruptive innovation, superior talent development and acquisition, finding new global customers, and creating new global markets.