Practical Strategies for Our Challenging Economic Times
While we continue to watch our global economies “rock and roll,” a frequent topic of conversation in my consulting circles is whether organizations are still seeking help with their technical, business, marketing, and personnel needs.
The answer is yes! The smartest enterprises realize that the most strategic investments during challenging economic times revolve around shoring up infrastructures, designing valuable new offerings, streamlining operations, and strengthening talent bases.
For businesses rich in ideas about increasing their value, this represents an ideal incubation period!
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A Prescription for Pumping Up Productivity
In my last newsletter issue, I introduced several of the tools and scenarios I’ve designed to help organizations diagnose the frustrating obstacles they face, which can compromise employee and customer success.
While consulting with organizations over the years to eliminate “burning hassles,” I have developed a suite of best practices that make this process smooth and worry-free. That’s what today’s issue is all about.
These best practices have evolved into a step-by-step process that your group can use to permanently cure the headaches that afflict them. If followed diligently, it will help ensure that those headaches won’t return.
Imagine how these benefits could apply to you…
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Follow This Compass to Organizational Prosperity
People often ask me what I do in my consulting work with small businesses, large corporations, and the public sector.
I describe how I help people start up, tune up, or make over their businesses, organizations, systems, and processes; do strategic planning; and navigate through and help solve underlying issues that cause mysterious leaks and cracks in morale, productivity, and customer satisfaction.
To this end, I developed the tools and scenarios described in this newsletter to enable people to diagnose their own enterprise needs. What often stands out more powerfully than anything else is an intense desire to remove certain aggravating obstacles to employee and customer success.
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It’s Time to Think Beyond Usability
Today’s newsletter explores a range of issues related to how people interact with the Web sites they visit.
Once upon a time, measuring people’s success with using Web sites (and other systems) primarily focused on usability testing, the discipline that systematically observes and measures of ease of use.
Today, however, testing has evolved beyond usability — from determining whether visitors can easily perform a task on a site — to assessing whether visitors actually will take one or more specific actions on the site because they feel persuaded, engaged, and compelled.
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Today’s issue is all about uncovering and removing the subtle and not-so-subtle constraints that keep us from accomplishing all that is possible in our business and professional lives.
Have you ever wondered whether any drag you’ve been experiencing occurs from insufficient knowledge, smarts, energy, talent, commitment, or resolve? These arenas represent aspects of our potential, but aren’t necessarily what is holding us back.
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How Does Your Organization Learn from Experience?
Have you ever used or heard the expression, “In 20:20 hindsight, knowing what we know today, we surely would have done things differently”?
It’s usually a good indicator that unanticipated events or circumstances had come back to bite, haunt, or baffle the participants of a particular process, project, or endeavor. Everyone I know, including me, has dealt periodically with unpleasant surprises that did not match initial predictions!
Although any unplanned outcome might seem problematic while it’s occurring, the good news is that astute observers can retrospectively gather invaluable gems of wisdom from those experiences. They can then use that wisdom to the organization’s greatest advantage going forward.
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What’s Your ROI (Return on Imagination)?
At this time of year, I often experience a nostalgic sensation of going back — to school, to new projects or challenges, or to some as yet undefined, but mysteriously important destiny.
All summer long, I’ve been buried working on several creative endeavors, allowing a plethora of new ideas to percolate in my brain. Since I have been exercising my imagination even more than usual, I’ve planted several new seeds; mulched, watered, and cultivated my mental garden; and harvested some interesting results.
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I’m continuing the theme from my two most recent newsletters on consumer behavior and a slew of new research on persuasion. I feel compelled to provide a review of a fabulous, highly readable compendium of the latest findings from the “masters of persuasion,” Dr. Robert Cialdini and his colleagues.
Released in 2008, “Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive,” is destined to turn into a classic just as Cialdini’s prior work, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” has become a foundational resource for practically every aspect of business and marketing.
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I received such positive feedback from savvy subscribers on my recent newsletter on consumer behavior that I thought I would give this topic an encore performance! Today’s issue delves into a sequel, as recapped below…
Of all the newer releases in my stacks of fascinating summer reading, Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions” still tops my list of the most compelling bodies of research to be published in 2008.
Ariely, an MIT professor, has studied the seemingly “irrational” idiosyncrasies and impulses that subconsciously guide our social and consumer-based actions, regardless of the industries, markets, or “niches” in which we find ourselves. I summarized some of this research in my last newsletter, and am covering another set of his findings today.
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Ideas for Probing Your Prospects’ Psyches
Today’s issue focuses on the psychology of our audiences, including their buying behaviors. When thinking about your clients, customers, constituents, or prospects:
Do you have a general, one-size-fits-all idea of what makes them tick, or a much deeper insight into what goes through their minds when they’re dealing with a problem or challenge?
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