If you want to dramatically improve the results of your company or organization, you need to focus on both your culture and people. Chris Edmonds’ has been showing people exactly how to do this for over twenty years. He has now taken this knowledge and beautifully presented it to us in his latest book The Culture Engine.
Twenty years ago, Starbucks started expanding north into Canada and Vancouver was one of the first cities to see a proliferation of Starbucks stores. At the time, I was looking for a coffee store where there was skim milk (non fat milk for my non-Canadian friends) on the counter. I was tired of coffee shops where I had to constantly ask for cold skim milk for my coffee. Fortunately, Starbucks included skim milk on the counter in every single one of their stores. For me, this was the key differentiator that made me a Starbucks customer for the last 20 years.
The last two weeks, skim milk has been disappearing from Vancouver Starbucks stores. Every time I get a Starbucks coffee, which is usually more than once every day, I have to ask for skim milk so that I can add it to my coffee. When I do, a four litre jug is retrieved from the back and put on top of the counter for me to open and pour into my coffee. Not only has Starbucks taken away the key differentiator that made me become a customer in the first place, they make the experience of getting what I want unpleasant.
The last ten years has seen a seismic change in the way that prospects find and purchase products and services. Social media, Google, SEM, blogs, white papers, peer reviews, and more have forever changed the way sales people are viewed. For example, in my work with Webtech Wireless, prospects “Googled the snot out of telematics solutions”, believing that they know more than the sales people who are selling to them. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In 2011, I committed to writing about Collaboration, Communication, and Business. That was during the first week of January and since then I have written two blog postings a week. My hope is that you have found the writing useful to your own career, organization, and business.
Changes in technology, people, demographics, and markets provide challenges and opportunities. For example, a friend reminded me of what it was like to go skiing when ski hills had incredibly slow two person chair lifts. Then along came four person detachable high speed chair lifts. Ski hills that embraced the new technology could not only take many more people up the hill every hour, they had a strong competitive market advantage over those that stuck with the old chair lift technology.