I feel like I’ve been a blog free zone this last month – travelling and conferences taking up the slack between work and play. So here are some highlights, in chronological order, that you might find useful from the last 3 weeks… Tell me which you’d like more on and I’ll write more.
1) LimeBridge’s 12th global gathering in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We missed the tornado a few miles south in Texas, but managed a European shopping competition since everything is so cheap. As Frederic said at the car hire desk (adopt cheesy french accent here…) “Surely we should take a driver with ze car at this price!” Given how cheap things are we did start a serious discussion about offshoring to America – it’s maybe not as daft as it sounds, at least in US brands or B2B.
We spent lots of talking about the book “The Best Service Is No Service” whch has now sold out in Australia and judging by the orders of 100+ at a time, will soon be in its second print run. Not bad after a month and a half.
But what shall we focus on in “book 2”? Suggestions on a postcard please. We’re thinking about “The complete systems model of how the customer experience and contact points drive economics in a business model” – maybe with a shorter title!
2) GOC – the Global Operating Council, alias the US CCO Forum, but focused on outsourcing and offshoring since that’s the biggest part of the US model. This was also the 12th meeting they’d had and ably hosted at the Avis centre in Tulsa. We giggled at the sign on the door saying “No fireams or dangerous weapons allowed on these premises” but apparently people sometimes forget and bring them in…… We had an excellent visit to Direct TV (think the US version of Sky) as well. The big take aways?
• The Philippines are already as saturated as India for voice. Some very interesting insights shared on which outsourcers are performing or not.
• Performance management, environment, coaching , work force management and lifestyle are still underutilized weapons of mass employment in the US. These were good companies but you’d be sacked in the UK for the lowest of the attrition levels being achieved
3) From the US it was straight into the Professional Planning Forum Annual Conference in Manchester. Apart from the best way to run a packed conference of 350 people in many streams and have a party too, there were fabulous shared case studies from all the Award finalists. The final Innovation award went to EDF for their work on contact elimination. We launched the 2008 F+S Research, which was carried out in conjunction with PPF. You can download the paper from our library. Another blog is called for on this striking work!
4) Madrid was the next stop for an in-house conference, a format that many of our clients use. Whilst we have designed and facilitated some, this one was just the key note speaker role again. With countries from all over Europe represented, it is noticeable how similar the issues are and how enormous are the opportunities to avoid reinventing wheels by learning from each other.
5) Finally to this week’s ECMW conference in London with about 500 in the audience and Richard Branson headlining. In fact the interview with him was rather tame, yet intriguing. Chairing so many conferences, one starts to feel like there are no new things out there. And at the same time so many things to learn.
The highlight for me was Daniel Pink, an author and former speech writer for Al Gore. Before his “green” film that would have not have been something you’d talk about. Anyway, he got my best speaker rating, and I loved his use of “levity, brevity and repetition” to get his messages across. What was the message? That Abundance, Asia and Automation are taking over. And in that environment its really important to develop right brain creative skills to compete.
Given he followed one of the most painful speakers I’ve seen in a long while – and I see a few – arguing for lots of maths and analysis, he was on a winner from the start. His technique was “scream, preach and shout” – and nope it didn’t work.
Other highlights? Fred Reicheld was masterful in his arguments for how he developed the Netpromoter scoring system after listening to very simple work at Enterprise (car hire not space ships) and Ritz Carlton and others. They had all talked about the Golden Rule – do to others what you’d like to have done to you – and from this came the referral question. Personally I still think saying you intend to recommend when asked is verydifferent from having recommended but lots not lose sight of the bigger prize – getting the board to balance finance and customer issues.
Willie Walsh of BA getting the best airline results but not taking his fat bonus in light of the debacle at Terminal 5 is a good case of recognising when the balance isn’t right.
Let me know your thoughts and what you want more on at peter.massey@budd.uk.com
