Are you running out of energy?

Do you want to be alert, dynamic and full of energy all day long? Do you want to be in a positive happy mood? Do you need to be productive, creative and capable of making good decisions in your work or personal life? Do you want to increase your life span and reduce your susceptibility to disease and viral infections? I guess for you and me the answers would be Yes, Yes and YES!
It's a paradox that whilst the country has never been wealthier, people are working more than ever and we try and pack ever more social and personal commitments with family and friends in the limited time that we have. As the world speeds up, it's ever more important for you to have peak physical energy and mental ability on tap. But sometimes quite frankly it can be a bit of a struggle.

Well according to James Mass (Professor of Psychology at Cornell University and author of "Power Sleep") the answer to help boost your peak performance may be eliminating the overdraft in your sleep "bank account". This overdraft could be sapping you of energy, creative thinking, good health and happiness. Now on the one hand people such as Margaret Thatcher are able to thrive with less than 4 hours per night sleep. On the other hand Einstein required 10 hours sleep per night. Interestingly, apparently our natural body clock oscillates on a cycle time of around 25 hours - without time cues experimental subjects went to sleep one hour later each night. Personally I feel exhausted if I don't get at least 8 hours sleep - and I have to use an alarm clock and two mobile phone alarms to drag me from my slumbers.

Sleep deprivation diagnosis
Perhaps you might wish to take a quick diagnosis by answering the following YES/ NO questions:

• Do you sometimes feel tired, irritable or stressed out during the week?


• Do you have problems concentrating and remembering?


• Do you feel slow with critical thinking, problem solving and being creative?


• Do you need an alarm clock to wake up at the appropriate time?


• Do you find it somewhat of a struggle for you to get out of bed in the morning?


• Do you hit the snooze button several times during weekday mornings?


• Do you feel drowsy whilst driving in the evenings?


• Do you use caffeine to stay away awake?

If you answered yes to 4 or more questions, then you could well be suffering from sleep deprivation.

The Golden Rules for "Power Sleep"
Dr. Maas has some very simple and powerful "golden rules" to help you get peak performance from life. So here goes:

Get an adequate amount of sleep each night
Work out your personal "sleep quotient" (see below) and then make sure you get that amount of sleep each night. For most people today that means getting 60 to 90 more minutes sleep each night than they are currently getting.

Establish a regular sleep schedule
Go to bed at the same time every night - even weekends! Once you are getting your natural sleep quotient each night, you shouldn't need an alarm clock. Don't try and catch up for lost sleep at the weekends (a bad habit I have I'm afraid). If you sleep late on a Sunday, it will be a struggle to get a great night's sleep on Sunday night. Sadly your brain doesn't have a different biological clock for the working work and the weekends.

Get continuous sleep
For sleep to be fully restorative, it should be taken in one single continuous block. 6 hours of solid sleep can be much better than 8 hours of broken sleep.

Make up for lost sleep
Think of your sleep like your bank balance. If you go overdrawn, it pays to get back into credit as soon as possible. Sleep loss is cumulative, if you lose several hours on a given night, you will become more and more sleepy in the ensuing days, even though you get your "normal" sleep. So pay back your sleep debt. To catch up, try going to bed earlier than usual or if that's difficult try a nap during the day can help you pay back your sleep debt.

So how much sleep do you need?
Here is Dr. Maas' technique for calculating your personal "SQ" (Sleep Quotient):
Start by selecting a bedtime when you are likely to be able to fall asleep easily. Settle on a time at least eight hours before you need to get up. Maintain that bedtime for the next week and keep track of the time you arise. You might wake up too early for a few days if you've been conditioned to a short sleep schedule, but if you're sleep-deprived, that maladaptive conditioning will soon give way to longer sleep.
If you haven't been sleeping enough, don't change your rising time. Instead, go to bed thirty minutes earlier than usual for the next week. Add fifteen to thirty more minutes each week until you wake without an alarm clock and feel alert all day.
When you establish your correct bedtime, you might try to cut fifteen minutes and see if that procedures feelings of drowsiness the next day. Then you'll know for sure if you've identified your individual sleep requirement.
[Source: www.powersleep.org]. Now if you are like me, you are probably wondering how you can get this amount of sound sleep. If you want to learn some great strategies for getting a better night's sleep see http://www.powersleep.org/strategies.htm .

More great strategies for a great night's sleep
If you want to learn more about great sleeping strategies, tips for exhausted parents of young children and minimising the impact of jet lag (and everything you ever wanted to know about getting a great night's sleep) then get hold of a copy of "Power Sleep" by Dr. James B. Maas from Amazon J Having just looked at them, I think I'm going to have to ditch my bad habit of watching episodes of 24 where Jack Bauer saves the world on the hour last thing at night ;-)

The key reasons why CIOs get fired and what to do about them

You're now CIO - welcome to the hot seat!
The CIO is probably the hottest seat on the "C" suite in terms of pressure and demands and that gets reflected in terms of a short tenure in the job. As individuals, they are typically bright, intelligent, hard-working and committed - and yet when you visit the offices of their colleagues frequently they are demanding that their CIO needs to go and go soon.

How long does a CIO last?
In the bad old days around the turn of the millenium - in the times of the dot-com crazy years of explosion growth and sudden collapse the accepted wisdom (or should I say urban myth) a typical CIO could expect to last 18-24 months in the job. These days, they get a while longer at the helm some say around 3-4 years (Forrester poll) and others 4-5 years (Gartner poll).

You've got to keep the lights on!
The most obvious requirement for any CIO is to keep the core IT systems and basic infrastructure working. If they stop and the organisation ceases to function properly, then they are not going to stay around long. I guess in over 25 years of business experience, I've only seen these catastrophic failures happen 2 or 3 times and the CIO incumbent pay the price of failure.
Business users and customers expect IT to work and by and large it does. I suspect expectations of reliability increase year-on-year and most CIOs are on top of this fundemental part of their game. Perhaps the big downside, is that the substantial time & efforts typical CIOs and their staffs spend "keeping the lights on" puts them under pressure in othe key strategic areas that can ultimately cost them their jobs.

So why do senior executive colleagues want to fire their CIOs so much?
I often reflect on a number of the CIOs I know well personally. I often struggle with the paradox that despite they are great people, dedicated to their jobs and achieve great things for their organisation with the frequent situation that many of their colleagues want to see them fired? How can such an uncomfortable situation arise?

Perhaps at the heart of it is the relentless increase in the demand for IT to help a modern large-scale organisation function successfully with the constraints of time, resources and most of all money to fulfill these expectations. We all know that the units costs of technology is falling year-on-year, the problem is that the demand is increasing even faster. This means that left unchecked, the costs for IT would explode year-on-year - and if this happens every CIO knows that they will be out-the-door before the kickoff budget planning round has even finished.

So every decent CIO attempts to control this ballooning budget overspend monster and it's here that is perhaps the root cause of the difficulties they experience. In the case of large organisations (particularly financial institutions) one endures a long drawn out and intensive budget setting process. At the end of which the overall budget for IT is determined and then the costs allocated (with different degrees of science depending on the organisation) to the individual business units and functions. The spending is based on a whole series of assumptions - which in practice turn out to be over optimistic. Business demand nearly always exceeds the assumptions in the budget (whether for infrastructure, desktop & communications or applications & projects - or all of them together) - the CIO is then sucked into a policing issue trying to enforce standardise solutions (to keep unit costs down), seek out and destroy skunkwork initiatives or suppress & defer and demand.

You can't keep the spending tide back
Despite your best efforts in putting in place control systems to control spending, many CIOs ultimately fail to keep the overall IT costs under control. You might be able to keep those costs you have direct control over, but user departments find a way to fund the spending you try to suppress regardless. Eventually the CIO and Finance catch you out when they get around to aggregating all of the IT related spend going on in the organisation, that can be 50% to 100% higher than you think it is. You may have not been responsible, but you are judged to be accountable for this overspend :-(

Business users hate the words NO & WAIT!
All to frequently, the CIO and their teams are involved in saying no or never to business demands for more IT (from Blackberries to new CRM systems). Much of the demand can be simply status driven (I must have a Blackberry too as all the other senior managers have one).
The CIO may try and put in prioritisation and approved processes in place - but to the business user these can seem to be bureaucratic roadblocks deliberately put in place to stop them getting what they want.

Nobody loves you anymore :-(
If you are not careful, as CIO you end up with a personal reputation as obstructive (insisting on standards), a conehead (asking colleagues to invest in major infrastructure investments they don't understand), ineffective (as new projects never get delivered fast enough) and pretty isolated. Setting aside the business & technology challenges, long tenured CIOs make a big effort to build their personal relationships with key colleagues outside of Technology.

The service sucks
Sometimes the service just sucks. The root cause can be over aggressive negotiation and bidding of an outsourcing contract that forces the other party into dysfunctional behaviour in order to try and recoup their losses on the contract they signed with you. Sometimes it's down to an offshoring exercise (internal or external party) that doesn't work out to well. The cost savings turn out to be less than expected - but worst of all the delivered service is appalling. If poor service screws up the revenue numbers and increases customer churn for a key division of the company - then you are toast.

The silver bullet doesn't work
Many organisations end up signing up for a huge "Transformation Programme" and these of course can take years (3-5 years to see through). You may of course have signed up a very convincing multi-billion partner organisation to help you through this journey. At the outset, you can enjoy a lot of support from your CEO and the whole IT organisation (and much of the business community too) can become heavily involved. The seasons come & go and slowly but surely the doubts begin to grow whether the Transformation programme will ever be completed - or that the benefits so confidently predicted will ever be realised. I guess you should start to worry if you get to see the leaves falling from the trees a couple of times and the Transformation programme is still running. The CFO and their team start to show ever closer interest in your budget spend and forecast - your outside partner tells you to have courage and keep going.
The business senior executives start to jump ship and stop attending the key governance meetings, you know when your sponsor tells you that they feel someone else is better suited to take the helm that your time is up!

So what do long tenured CIOs do differently to be successful?

Keep the lights on with a strong team combined with a disciplined approach
One should begin with the obvious of keeping the lights on. This is glaringly obvious and few CIOs ever get caught out here. The difference comes in managing the amount of time and attention that you end up spending in this area at the detriment of all the other areas. The simplest and in my experience the most effective approach here is to get a really solid deputy here who excels at delivering reliable IT operations and put a strong service delivery framework in place (ITIL is now proving popular) to guide you in implementing the right systems & processes for IT service delivery.

Implement the principle of "User Pays" for as much IT spend as possible
IT spending is a simply an arithmetic function of usage x unit cost. Responsibility & accountability for the usage part of the equation most properly belongs to you business users.
Smart organisations (and their smarter CIOs) such as AMP in Australia have thought through how they can put in place strong financial systems & processes to put in place "user pays" systems for as much IT related spend as possible.

In a "User Pays" environment, the business users are in complete control and responsible for determining their spend and how much IT service to consume. If they want 10 new Blackberries for next month, they can have them. However this is only made possible by being able to give them an accurate bill each month (which has the true fully loaded cost) and ideally supported by a smart "pooling arrangement" where unused assets can go back into a pool to be reused. The CIO can then influence demand by pricing assets that are standard (your bog standard low spec PC) at a significant discount to those special super duper "one-of-a-kind" special orders. If you combine the pool pricing concept with the idea that you pay for an asset for its lifetime untiol someone else picks it upo - you give your business users a tremendous incentive to go with the low-cost standard rather than trying to enforce a mandatory regime that no-one buys into.
Once demand for IT is being managed directly by the users - they can decide to buy as much or as little as they want. This makes your users a lot happier - in fact they will love you. Even better for your CFO, once the true costs become transparent your users will drive down the costs with a passion and vigour that will astonish you. That just leaves you to work on the unit costs of IT - and you'll find with this focus thay you (with your colleagues in Finance & Procurement can achieve astounding cost reduction opportunities that you've not had the time & energy to uncover and pursue in the past.

[I know the principle of "User Pays" sounds difficult to implement, however it's a lot easier in practice especially if you start off in an areas such as Desktop and Projects - these are two of the most straightforward areas to start with and major cost drivers in your overall budget. When this goes successfully you can move onto more complex areas such as Infrastructure & Networks - the principles are the same - you just need more sophisticated finance systems to help you make it work.

Deliver great service and make sure you can objectively track it
One of the simplest mechanisms I've seen in place is based on Friedrich Reichheld's "Net Promoter Index" concept used by companies such as Enterprise-Rent-A-Car. Basically, you track customer reaction after every service experience and increase the proportion who loved it and work to eliminate those who consider the experience sucked! Reichheld has written some great HBR articles and the best seller "The Loyalty Effect" which explains how it all works in more detail ;-) I've seen it work brilliantly when used with customers and by IT departments to track their own performance with their "internal customers". If you ever want to see and determine the added value of internal functions vs outsourced functions it's a really great approach for gauging the true "value add" in service delivery against cost differences.
[I've even seen it used as a great cost reduction tool by a technology company who worked to eliminate the key root causes that were the ultimate root cause of why they were upsetting their customers - they were able to eliminate nearly 30% of their costs in a rapid implementation project in their call centre operations and have happier customers!].

Avoid "silver bullet" projects!
Silver bullets are only useful for killing werewolves and they don't exist ;-) If some one mentions the "T" word - Transformation - be on your guard. The simplest advice would be:
- If you are looking for productivity uplifts, then don't start with IT. The simplest and most powerful approach (and the most overlooked in my experience) is implementing the management disciplines of "Lean" (sorry to use a buzzword) - you can get productivity lifts of 1% per week (delivering 15% to 40% over 90 to 180 days). Michael George's book on deploying "Lean Six Sigma" in service businesses covers a number of great tools & approaches you can put in place in 30 days.
- Load the Dice in Your Favour. If you read "The Hard Side of Change Management" by Harold L. Sirkin, Perry Keenan, and Alan Jackson (HBR: October 20005) - their argument can be sumed up in their introductory section "At one extreme, a short project led by a skilled, motivated, and cohesive team, championed by top management and implemented in a department that is receptive to the change and has to put in very little additional effort, is bound to succeed. At the other extreme, a long, drawn-out project executed by an inexpert, unenthusiastic, and disjointed team, without any top-level sponsors and targeted at a function that dislikes the change and has to do a lot of extra work, will fail". They have a simple but powerful tool in this article where you can determine your project's likelihood of success within 5 to 10 minutes analysis based on appraising just 4 key factors (based on their extensive database of project results around the world in different industries).
- Watch out for snake oil! If your consultants are using words not found in a standard school dictionary - then you can suspect them of being flim flam artists.
- Think twice about outsourcing and offshoring. You can always get someone to offer you a ridiculously low bid - you just then have to live with the consequences. If you implement some of the Lean Productivity & Service Experience concepts mentioned above - you may find you've eliminated much of the business case for sending work offshore or being outsourced.
[For my friends & colleagues in India and great outsourcing firms - I know you do a great job. It's just I would recommend clients in a difficult situation to sort out their service & cost issues first before calling you in as a last resort.

Why can't we be friends?
If you've implemented all of the best practices above, then you are truely one of the great CIOs destined to enjoy a long & fruitful tenure with the respect and admiration of your colleagues. With all the time & energy freed up from removing your biggest problems, you can look forward to helping your colleagues in the organisation solve their difficult issues - perhaps over a round of drinks on the 19th hole of your favourite golf club ;-)

Best wishes for your future success & happiness and remember "being CIO is the greatest job in the world"

John

Building Great Customer Experiences - Or beware consultants with no clothes!

It must be one my personal business nightmares, if you can imagine having just flown to New York to meet a new client and the airline has lost all your clothes! So what can one learn from such events about delivering great customer service experiences?

The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry
To give you the background, I’d just been to California and had arranged to meet the COO of a potential great new client in New York on my way back home to England. I’d visited them a few weeks before and I’d felt as though I’d wandered onto the set of “The Devil Wears Prada” (or should that be “Ugly Betty”?). So not wanting to be left too far behind the “New York Chic look” of my hosts, I’d gone out and purchased the very best of shirts & ties that London has to offer (OK anyone from Milan is allowed a note of scepticism at this point) combined with my new Italian suit & cuff links, I knew I’d look the part ;-)

My plane was several hours late into New York due to “unexpected delays” – I was little nervous as I’d arranged to go out to dinner that evening. Still with my Platinum Frequent Flyer card my suitcase had qualified for a special “Priority Handling” label so I was looking forward to getting my suitcase quickly and rushing off ahead of the pack to the taxi rank. Sadly, after all of the luggage had disappeared off the carousel there was no sign of my case, so I made my way to the airline’s baggage handling office. I was joined by another passenger who had experienced a similar fate. The Airline staff assured me that my suitcase had landed and recommended I went back to check the carousel again. This experience was repeated another 3 times. From my interactions with the airline staff, I managed to get the impression that losing one’s baggage was not a completely unusual experience. My heart sank as I looked at the back wall of the hall which was filled floor to ceiling with damaged suitcases in glass cases awaiting collection from their owners

After an hour and a half of going back & forth from the luggage carousel to the airline desk, the airline staff finally conceded that perhaps my bag was lost after all and I was given a claim form to fill in. I was given an 0800 number to contact and a tracking reference number and that was it. I had a sense of disappointment and unfinished business but I had to move on and let other passengers register their lost baggage too.

There’s no such thing as a “free breakfast”
I headed off to my hotel (minus any luggage) and checked in. The receptionist noted down my comment that my luggage had been lost and hopefully it might arrive in the next 24 hours. The receptionist realised I was a Gold member of their hotel loyalty system, so she kindly gave me vouchers for free breakfasts for my stay in Manhattan. Sadly, by this time it was too late for the dinner out I’d planned, so I went off to bed to dream the night away with visions of lost clothes, deodorants and shavers! I guess I wasn’t too worried that I could replace my lost items in the morning, after all America is the land of retail plenty. And as I was staying just off 5th Avenue, which is lined with clothes stores, it wasn’t going to be too difficult to get replacements in the morning.

In the morning, fortified by my free breakfast, though looking a little rough, unshaven (or should I say with designer stubble) and with crumpled clothes, I headed off to the shops and quickly purchased everything I needed. I guess as they were happy to process my credit card without phone verification I can’t have looked too bad. So at this point, it was an opportunity for me to think through the series of events as an interesting example of managing “the customer experience”. My airline goes to the trouble of writing hand written thank you notes each time I fly with them, and yet when it looses all my belongings – all they give me is a piece of paper and that’s it

It’s great that it’s free – but is it useful?
The hotel gave me a nice free breakfast but I would have preferred a shaver & some deodorant! If I think about a number of the budget hotel chains in the UK where they are happy to give you free shaver, foam, combs, deodorant etc. if you’ve forgotten them, there’s much their my American hotel & airline could learn from them.
A great technique for managing these unfortunate experiences was pioneered by Jan Carlson (former CEO of SAS Scandinavian Airlines) who coined the expression “moments of truth”. A “moment of truth” occurred whenever an employee interacted with a customer; Carlson said that these moments left an impression – good bad or exceptional.

Carlson applied 4 guiding principles for managing these “moments of truth” positively:
· Everyone needs to know and feel they are needed
· Everyone wants to be treated as an individual
· Giving someone the freedom to take responsibility releases resources that would otherwise remain concealed
· An individual without information can not take responsibility whereas an individual given responsibility can not help but take responsibility

The technique is fairly straightforward to implement. I guess a start is to get your service operations team together and ask them to map out the service experience from the customer perspective. Whenever you come across a “moment of truth”, you can then work out with your team just how best you can handle that sticky situation. I like to use the high-tech toolset of 2 sets of Post-It notes in different colours for such work – available from all good stationers ;-) Use one pack of Post-Its to map out the service experience from a customer perspective, and then use the other pack to define the main alternative events that can occur at each “moment of truth” and the best options for your own staff in how to deal with these. [For a more extensive and sophisticated approach try the “moment mapping” technique described in “Building Great Customer Experiences” by Colin Shaw & John Ivens]. I guess an even simpler approach is the Nordstrom approach; their employees are given the freedom to decide for themselves and have the single rule “do whatever you think is right for the customer”.

Don’t let disappointing service lose you your most valuable customers
And the end to this tale. Well my suitcase was located during the morning and arrived over at my hotel. I was able to locate my special shirt, tie & cuff links. [On a fashion point here – I’m convinced English mens’ shirts are more stylish than American shirts]. It made my day when the client’s PA complimented me on my cufflinks (OK – it’s a small pleasure but still a delight). On the business front though, one of the key lessons is that a poor service experience is one of the key drivers for customers switching suppliers. The disappointing experience causes customers to shop around other suppliers and they may well find a better value option losing you a very valuable customer. Best to make sure that your “moments of truth” are well managed.

As for me, I’m now minded to try out Silverjet Airways (see http://www.flysilverjet.com/) the new low-cost all business class airline – they offer fantastic service (flat beds, 30 minute check-in and even fly Carbon neutral) with much lower prices.

I’ll update you on the experience hopefully after my next trip to New York :-)

Best wishes John

Helping high-value service businesses increase revenues and margins

John Corr (Managing Partner)
Tel: +44 20 7748 2225
Email: johncorr@closequarter.co.uk

Don't get lost at sea with Blue Ocean Strategy!

Are you struggling to hit your revenue & profitability targets?
Are you struggling to think out a way for your company to break out of vicious price competition that is killing your margins and revenues - no doubt there will be blood in the water (hopefully not yours) as the competition gets tougher. You are probably looking around for a way to break out of your situation and perhaps you've come across the soaraway business best seller "Blue Ocean Strategy" by Prof. Chan Kim (Professor of Strategy and International Management at INSEAD, France).

Hands up who would like to be rich?
"Blue Ocean strategy" on the face of it appears to be a very attractive proposition - as it offers to make your competition irrelevant and create high profit growth? I'd like to be offered the lead in the next James Bond movie too ;-)

Hands up who would have liked to have come up with Google or "Cirque du Soleil" - you would be sipping champagne by the pool in your own Caribbean island by now no doubt! But how many of these unique truely ground breaking innovations come up in life - maybe 1 or 2 per decade across the globe. I'm sure I would have a better chance of winning the lottery.

A Fax Machine that is also a Toaster - Where can I buy one?
Now I could come up with an innovation that no-one else has though of - a fax machine that is also a toaster & coffee maker. (Actually I would think of buying such a great device if it had wireless Internet routing capabilities built in too - I'm surprised I haven't seen any on sale).
No doubt Prof. Chan Kim would say this is a ridiculous offer - as not many customers want this particular set of attributes. What they want is an offer that is the best on a limited number of highly relevant attributes (to that group of customers) that offers fantastic value for money.
I guess if this is true - then we have arrived at the thinking of Prof. Patrick Barwise & Sean Meehan of London Business School set out in their book "Simply Better".

Forget "Differentiate or Die" - You just really want something Better
To quote Simply Better" - "At the heart of the “simply better” approach is a new and controversial view of why customers buy what they do. Barwise and Meehan argue that customers rarely choose a product or service because it offers something unique. Instead, customers usually choose the brand which they think will most reliably deliver the basics – the generic category benefits which all the reputable brands provide but which some provide better or more reliably than others."

If you are in the UK, think Tesco and "every little helps" - Tesco set out to be that bit better than their main competitors (Sainsbury, WalMart Asda).

How do I come up with an (Even Better) Proposition?
Now I do think Prof. Chan Kim has come up with a great model and set of tools for coming up with your better proposition. His "strategy canvas" method of describing propositions is brilliant - and doesn't take too much time. [I have worked with clients who reworked their propositions to come up with 2 great new offers in less than an hour - though it did take them a good deal longer to get them to arket].
Chan Kim's "Value Innovation method" then has a great way of helping you rsehape the proposition - taking cost & complexity over part of your offer - to reinverst in making you a winner elsewhere. I'd suggest at this point - you either go over to www.hbr.org and download one of his HBR articles for about $6 - or purchase his "Blue Ocean Strategy" book from Amazon.
[You can even download a presentation describing it from http://blueoceanstrategy.org/wbos.html

What should I do next?
My suggestion for 3 steps to creating our own fantastic proposition:

i) Better beats Different
I would suggest you get a hold of "Simply Better" first, read it through to get your ead around the idea that customers just want better products and services (at a great price). [I know anyone outside of a leading global business school will think this idea to be galringly obvious].

ii) Get your head around the Strategy Canvas toolset
Get a hold of any of Prof. Chan Kim's books or HBR articles and teach yourself the technique for creating your own compelling "Value Curves" in under an hour :-)

iii) Create Your Own Better Proposition
Use Prof. Chan Kim's method (the "Strategy Canvas") for describing your propsition - then start to use his 4 approaches for making your value curve more compelling Try the idea out with a few key customers - and see if they find it much more compelling and attractive than your current proposition.

Good luck - and see you in the Caribbean on your new yacht soon :-)

John