We All Need A Fool

The most common root cause of failure in business is:

The failure to act on alarms and indications of problems because they come wrapped in opposition to "The accepted wisdom".

The Accepted Wisdom
This is the company position on something. Usually defined and planned to a degree of accuracy only possible when the White Board is nearly full or there are only 2 sheets of paper left on the flip-chart.

You Need a Fool
In 1995, British Airways appointed Paul Birch as the official BA 'corporate jester'. An entertaining and thought provoking speaker, Birch tells the story of approaching his director of corporate strategy with the idea. His justification was that an official jester might play a useful role in the company, just as medieval name-sakes had done in royal courts. The logic was that the modern board of directors is a bit like a medieval court, where no one questions the king or senior courtiers, because "they have become far too important for anybody to challenge ... as long as they can't possibly be wrong, they can continue doing the wrong things all the time and never know it".

Who Do You Use
If you are really lucky (or a great Leader) as an MD, your team will automatically perform this role for you. You have created a board environment where people feel able to challenge the consensus. People in your team will take it in turns to call for a sanity check - to make sure that your leadership team is not in danger of becoming a stampeding herd heading for the next corporate disaster.

Most organisations will have to work at this. Some will need an external input. In the form of a Board Mentor or Non-Executive Director (NED).

External Catalyst
Use the right external help, with a balanced perspective. And the ability to work alongside your team and to ask the awkward questions. Then your team will make business decisions based on facts and data more often. Relying a lot less on intuition and herd instinct.

Viral Brand Damage Limitation

Businesses and organisations who care about their brands take a number of steps to develop their brands and their reputation. They usually spend a lot of time, money and energy on design, registrations and promotion. Many go on to survey their audience to ensure that their brands are recognised and are associated with the intended image.

In this world of social media, just as it is feasible for ingenious brand owners to promote their brand using the power of the internet and the social media, so it is now entirely feasible for your reputation to be damaged by the same social media. This why Tweets about certain brands will solicit a fast reaction and a correction. A recent set of Tweets on Asda’s on-line store shows that they not only monitor Twitter for their brand, but take pro-active steps to contact people and to ensure satisfaction. NHS-Direct also monitor Twitter for negative comments and make an attempt to fix things – although a simple Twitter reply with a link to a generic comment web-page is not in the same league as Asda’s recent reaction. Similarly, other brand owners seem to be totally oblivious to the power of the web, including forums and Twitter.

If you type “Land-Rover Discovery 3” into Google and then go to the second site in the natural listings (www.disco3.co.uk/forum/) you will find a forum which, on 4th January 2010, included 1077 posts on faults and fixes for the Discovery 3 model and 398 posts in the same category on the recently launched Discovery 4 model. It may be that not all of these represent manufacturing faults, but would you buy an expensive car after reading this lot?

My point is simple. It is now a lot more important for brand-owners to be sensitive to customer opinions. They may conduct surveys; they may take the feedback from those surveys seriously. But, how many brand owners actively seek out dissatisfied customers? These are the dissatisfied customers who find it so easy to publish faults and foibles to the global internet audience.
People usually vote with their feet – and change to an alternative brand if they are unhappy. Unfortunately, some of our purchases fall in to the “too expensive to dump it and move on” category – especially in a recession. So we are forced to stick with brands we are unhappy with and to tell the world – damaging brands in the process.

Suggestions

• Make it your business to actively seek out unhappy customer comments in the social media world. Speak to your customers.
• Show them you care.
• Put things right – over and above the warranty if required.
  - Do this before they build a huge following who are just waiting for the next public notice of some issue or problem.
• Consider developing KPI’s on your brands appearances in social media with positive, neutral and negative comments.
• For something more structured - take a look at a post on Creating Customer Delight
• Or, read: Richard C. Whiteley, The Customer Driven Company, Perseus Books, ISBN 0-201-60813-8