Read this remarkable turnaround success story about how Todd Wille’s cooperative leadership and management brought back the customers to Unify Corporation and boosted the morale of the workforce during a very difficult time when the company was under investigation from fraud, they were almost bankrupt, and it seemed like all they could do was fail! I applaud Todd Wille, winner of the 2008 turnaround executive award!
I find it interesting to partner two analytical tools: business blindspots and executive personality profiling to predict where a company is going. In business blindspots, you seek to uncover the biases of your company, competitors or co-workers and recognize that you have them too. We all have blind spots based on our experience in life! When you combine this with executive personality profiling, you can come up with some insightful conclusions such as predicting company’s actions, including your competitors.
Asymmetric information models are passé and information interpretation is NOW: the ability to understand and anticipate! Many of the models and processes that we use to collect competitive intelligence and conduct our various forms of analysis–including voice of the customer and market research–do not lead to innovation. So often these processes concentrate on what customers “want” rather than what they “need,” and they don’t know what they need. Innovation is most easily defined as productivity. Yet innovation is a sloppy process. Employees innovate best within a culture of “learning and growing from mistakes” rather than being punished for making mistakes. Learn how to articulate the truth in ways that management will listen (cooperative leadership).
Just before SCIP09, we shared a list of 10 things we wanted to do while at the conference, so in the spirit of cooperative intelligence, I’ll share the talks in the Competitive Intelligence Track and some of my favorites at SLA2009, which takes place in the Washington, DC Convention Center June 14 – 17.
In most cases on LinkedIn, it’s a loose connection, and you’ll never hear from that person again unless they want to sell you something, fill jobs or find a job. Yet I do connect with many of my pals and meet new people who share my interests on Twitter and we do engage through tweets, albeit with the 140 character limitation. The pendulum is swinging back to more traditional marketing for me since I still get more business from word of mouth marketing and referrals from existing customers and friends.