Business Results Revolution

I have spent much of my career helping business leaders and entrepreneurs leverage leading-edge business strategy and organizational management practices. They’ve done so in an effort to build the solid business foundations that are necessary to achieve the level of customer and financial performance for which all companies strive.

My experiences have given me a window into the typical and most critical problems that act as barriers to business success. When companies don’t know how to clearly define, state, and communicate a key marketplace differentiator or customer value proposition, for example, they can fall behind. Others fail to define financial business performance objectives and goals with time-limited targets and find themselves flailing as a result.

Sometimes subtler problems – such as misalignment between the business model used and the desired customer value proposition, or failing to use performance measurement as a learning and improvement feedback loop – are just as crippling, preventing companies from translating their strategic and operational efforts into the desired customer and business performance results.

What impact do these business missteps have on company performance?

For start-ups, they manifest themselves as difficulties in making the transition from a small company to a mature, successful business with the heart and agility of an entrepreneurial endeavor. For larger, more established businesses, it means an inability to seamlessly make the leap to the high-growth profile required to secure long-term sustainable success and market leadership status.

All of these organizations can benefit from an effective and easy-to-use roadmap that addresses and eliminates these common barriers to business success. Most contemporary books dedicated to business results improvement fall short, though, since they only focus on one of the typical problems I see. It’s rare, in my experience, to find a book that offers a complete approach to attacking all of these critical business performance barriers. Yet business leaders don’t have time to waste piecing together fragmented approaches that may or may not translate into lasting results – they need a comprehensive solution-oriented approach that will help them survive and thrive.

That is where this book comes in.

The three-question model for business success that Sandy Richardson outlines is deceptively simple. In my opinion, however, it cuts through the distractions and noise in business and effectively addresses the critical elements all companies must tackle to overcome the classic problems that stand in the way of success. And with its emphasis on conversation as a tool for enabling strategic alignment, measuring business results and impact, and evaluating and improving performance, this book provides business leaders with a powerful, easy-to-implement way of taking their company’s customer and business performance to the next level.

You’ve likely picked up this book because you know that you need to do something different – you are searching for a strategy to transform the way your company works to produce customer and business performance results. I’m here to tell you you’re in the right place. This book provides a practical approach and roadmap for success from someone who has been in the trenches, knows what really works, and communicates it effectively.

To get the most out of Business Results Revolution, I’d encourage you and your team to work together as an organization to answer the book’s three central questions.

Be sure to take a continuous, dynamic approach. Continue to ask yourself the questions over the long-term to build and refine your skills at answering them and to stay on top of important changes both inside and outside your company – changes that could have an impact on your customer and business strategy and success. Finally, identify and implement the improvements and strategic changes that surface as you explore your answers to these three questions.

As you do, be sure to strive to build the culture and skills required to cultivate and leverage conversational leadership across your organization.

What will you get for your efforts? A solid foundation for exceptional business performance and the consistent and sustainable customer and financial outcomes and results, as well as the business growth and market leadership you and your employees are working so hard to achieve.

Howard Armitage, Ph.D, FCMA

Gordon H. Cowperthwaite Professor of Accounting

Founding Director, Conrad Business, Entrepreneurship, and Technology Center

University of Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

INTRODUCTION

There’s no doubt – running a successful company, business unit or division can be a real challenge these days. I know because I hear it from the business leaders I work with almost every day.

No matter the sector they work in, they all tell me the same thing: they’re faced with new challenges on multiple fronts like never before. While the pace of that change is relentless, the global economy continues to be volatile and unpredictable, adding to the pressures they feel. And that’s just the start: performance expectations from their markets and shareholders are constantly on the rise, and customers’ needs are evolving too, with expectations for a quality service experience expanding with every interaction they have.

In addition, years of cutting operating costs to the bone means there’s nowhere easy left to go in the drive for further cost efficiencies. And both the company/employee relationship and the workforce are changing, becoming more complex and time-consuming to manage and mobilize.

What’s more, in the midst of that the competitive landscape is flooded not just with local competitors, but national and global ones as well – all going after the same customer.

Faced with all of this, and more, it’s amazing that any business succeeds today. However, miraculously, many do!

While lesser mortals would fold under these pressures and challenges, most business leaders I know rise to meet them, seeking new approaches and ways to deliver customer value, improve organizational performance, and achieve targeted financial performance results.

But in their search for that fail-proof approach that will deliver all of these results, executives often find themselves overwhelmed. Every new business book, theory, and idea from the newest business guru promises exceptional customer and business outcomes. Some business leaders I meet feel so overwhelmed by the options that they simply choose to stay the course and stick with what they know – it just feels too risky when times are so tough to make a change in their approach to strategy and business management.

Doing nothing isn’t the answer, though. And applying yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems just doesn’t work either. In my experience, staying the course is the riskiest decision a business leader can make today.

Most executives I know are bold. They’re people who take action, and their natural response to a tough situation is to find something that will move their company’s customer and business results forward. They pay attention to the latest and greatest management approaches and will often select the one that sounds the most promising, implementing what they can as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, as a business performance excellence specialist I often get called in after an executive has tried out their business model of choice and has become disappointed by the results. From the executive’s perspective, the business model has failed to deliver the promised results.

Based on my experience, traditional business models fail executives for at least one of three reasons:

1. Comprehensive business management models are hard to find

There are very few, if any, truly complete business models available that provide a real end-to-end approach to maximizing customer and business outcome success. Most models tend to focus on just a portion of this continuum. For example, many models for strategy creation don’t integrate into the strategy execution process, contributing to the high strategy execution failure rate we see in most businesses today. Customer relationship management approaches and tools often have no obvious alignment with a company’s customer value proposition, leading organizations to waste time and money on activities that don’t add value in the eyes of the customer. Business intelligence activities and software investments are often missing linkages to an organization’s customer and business strategy, resulting in data collection, analysis, and reporting efforts that do little to really move the business forward.

While these approaches and business models may individually offer a robust solution for a segment of the continuum, implementing them alone almost never translates into transformative customer and business outcomes, simply because they aren’t offering a comprehensive, integrated end-to-end solution.

If you want to truly maximize your company’s business success, you need to be prepared to sample from a range of these stand-alone solutions, and from a variety of disciplines (e.g. business, psychology, organizational development, etc.), cobbling together your own model based on best practices, in an effort to create that end-to-end approach to maximizing customer and business outcome success. However, doing the work to research models and knit them together to develop something new takes time, resources, and deep knowledge – all things most business leaders don’t have ready access to today.

Instead, those leaders want a proven approach and roadmap for success that will efficiently take them from point A to point B on the end-to-end continuum – with results that last. That roadmap, though, has been hard to come by until now.

2. No one needs more complexity in their lives

Another critical problem I see in the currently available business models is a high level of complexity. Detailed and confusing theories and principles, unclear linkages between concepts and action, and convoluted execution steps and roadmaps, mean that translating many of these business models into action requires heavy consultant involvement, a centralized army of internal personnel for implementation and support (a commitment that often lasts years), and a disruptive change management effort that distracts the organization from its core business for an extended period of time. To top it all off, real results often take years to emerge.

If you’re like many of the executives I talk with, your tolerance for complex solutions has hit the wall. What you want (and need) are simple solutions that solve real problems while actually delivering consistent and transformative customer and business results – solutions that are the real deal and not just hype.

For those business leaders who do try to implement these complex solutions, most find that they can’t continue to invest at the level they need to over the long haul. As a result, they end up pulling the plug on the convoluted business model before it has a chance to deliver maximum results.

To tell you the truth, I can’t blame them. Why would we ever think that the best way of dealing with a world full of complex business challenges would be to apply even more complex business models and solutions? In my experience, it just isn’t.

3. They’re focusing on implementing the what without the how

Almost every traditional business model has its own set of tools and techniques that contribute to successful model implementation and results achievement. Regardless of the approach, these tools must be deployed fully if the model is going to be effective. Something that I’ve noticed over time is that in many cases not enough emphasis is placed on the management structures and approaches, processes, resources, and infrastructure required to support the success of the model. A new performance measurement system, for example, just won’t succeed if managers aren’t given the training and support they need to use this information to manage and make business decisions in a new way. Even less attention is placed on developing the organizational culture required to reach the full potential promised by the business model. I call all of this focusing on the what and forgetting about the how.

Why have models become less robust over time? I think it’s because tools and techniques have a certain cool factor. Creating the necessary resources, infrastructure, and culture, though, is plain old hard work. Also, often these days when we design new business models, we tend to assume that technology deployment and use will somehow take care of the people side of the equation. I don’t know why we fall into this trap of faulty thinking, since we’ve all seen system implementation failures where communication, user buy-in, employee engagement with management, and behavior change were ignored or left out of the picture. The same thing happens with some business models.

Focusing on the what without the how makes it difficult to achieve true results through your chosen business model. Yet some business leaders don’t even realize that the how is a critical factor for success – they’re content to focus on the what. Others know that the how is important but I see them struggling to implement it or they avoid it altogether because it’s just too hard.

Regardless, the outcome is the same. Time and resources get spent. Disappointing results are achieved. Employees become more disengaged. Business leaders end up frustrated. And little headway is made in achieving the desired customer and business outcomes.

Another business model bites the dust.

What you need is a fresh, easy-to-use approach that delivers exceptional results

Here’s something you need to know about me: I passionately believe that every business deserves to be the best it can be. I believe this so strongly that I’ve dedicated myself to eliminating these three critical business model problems and providing business leaders and employees with a practical and simple-to-use end-to-end roadmap that is guaranteed to enable exceptional customer and business results sustainably over the short, medium, and long terms. This roadmap has been tested and refined in the lab of real life until it has proven its ability to actually deliver on this promise.

To achieve this objective, I have – since the very beginning of my career – given myself a two-part challenge.

The first part of that challenge was to create a more comprehensive business model – one that integrates critical what and how elements into a hybrid roadmap for doing what needs to be done to achieve true customer and business success. To do this, I’ve sampled existing models and knowledge (after all, why recreate the wheel when parts of it may work?) and knitted together important points, ideas, and practices for success from a variety of sources and disciplines. To those, I’ve added my own original insights and ideas, developed from my experience and deep understanding of the discipline of strategy and business performance management.

From there, the second part of the challenge I set for myself was to create something that didn’t only work, but was as simple as possible. To me, keeping it simple meant that business leaders would actually be able to use my ideas and see them to fruition. With that goal in mind I asked, Are there two or three things every company must focus on to get the customer and business performance results they want? To answer that question, I called on my experiences with clients and numerous conversations with colleagues and other experts, as well as my reading on, research into and study of the practices of high-growth, market-leading companies. And based on all of that, I came to the conclusion that yes – there is a very short list of success secrets that hold up across most industries and business sectors.

What are those success secrets? It’s simple:

1. Offer a clear differentiator that customers/ purchasers see and value.

2. Align everyone and everything in your organization around delivering your differentiator without fail.

3. Validate and realign your differentiator and/or organizational capabilities as required.

4. Engage and involve everyone in your organization in a process of two-way dialogue at a personal level, inspiring commitment and emotional investment in defining, delivering, and refining your differentiator and serving your customer.

If you look at any business model out there, regardless of their bells and whistles, most boil down to at least one of these four success secrets.

Being the practical type, I’ve taken every opportunity I can to test out the premise of these four essentials in practice. Here’s just one story. A while ago I was working with a company that had one business unit that just couldn’t seem to raise their level of customer and business performance as expected. It wasn’t that the leader and her employees weren’t trying – in fact they were working very hard and the group was dedicated to achieving the highest levels of customer and business success. Motivation was not the problem here – so what was getting in their way? We searched high and low to uncover the root-cause problems, but it wasn’t until we asked a simple question – Who is your primary customer (and what do you do for them)? –that we realized we had a problem. It turned out the people in this business unit didn’t have the same perspective as the rest of the organization on who the customer was. Once we discovered this stumbling block we got everyone together talking it out, so that eventually everyone across the company was on the same page. It was truly amazing how results in that business unit improved once clarity and consensus was achieved. Who would have thought that by asking and answering one simple (but critical) question, so many performance problems could be cleared up?

However, it wasn’t until I had a conversation with one of my colleagues, Joe Clark, CEO of PranaBusiness, that the simplest of roadmaps for customer and business success became clear to me. Discussing the essentials for success, Joe shared with me his perspective. All businesses and executives, he said, must be able to answer two key questions if they are going to have a successful and sustainable business: Why do our customers do business with us? and What do our employees say when we ask them why our customers do business with us? Joe and his company have even taken it a step further and developed a web-based application that can help organizations dig into these two questions quickly and efficiently. This allows them to discover the answers with certainty and helps them pinpoint any areas of misalignment that are getting in the way of business success.

That was how the three-question formula that forms the foundation of this book came about. Joe’s two questions were absolutely brilliant because they get at the first two of the four universal success secrets (offering a clear differentiator that customers/purchasers can see and value, and aligning everyone and everything in your