To anyone and everyone that has taken the time to read my blog articles over the past few years - Thank You!

As we begin a new year I should like to take a moment to thank the 11,446 people that have taken time-out of their busy schedules to muse over my articles in recent years. Never did I imagine that anything I produced would get seen by 11,000 people. Wow!  You never did show up in my teens when I was playing my electric guitar. (But there you go.)

Thank you even more to those who have reached out to me to give encouragement or let me know how they've applied some of the learning lessons I've documented about organizational design, business and IT that I have myself found useful.

I hope you all have a special 2014.

I.

What Are Actionable Insights?

I was delighted when so many sites picked up this simple presentation I've put together to describe what Actionable Insights are.

I think there is a great deal of confusion at the moment around the entire technology space because people are hearing whispers of BIG DATA, CLOUD, PREDICTIVE AND SOCIAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE and the like...  and what they really want to know is what any or all of these technologies have to do with their business.

For Business Intelligence Software vendors, it's not always easy to answer the 'So What?' questions when it comes to applying their technology; particularly when the people making the introductions are enthusiasts of technology - and they generally are.  If you are passionate about technology like me, you just want to shout out to everyone in the world "Hey, give this a try!" but every business, and business user has a different perspective on 'what insights matter most to them'.  Failing to appreciate and land on the specific insights useful to buyers and instead making a general technology silver-bullet pitch is an all too familiar Lion Pit that Business Intelligence vendors fall into.

This presentation covers descriptions of types of Business Intelligence software and the key outcome areas that are driving demand for Actionable Insights.  I've covered a lot of the background and technology issues in this presentation that I think are most helpful in understanding the general topic area. What I haven't done is to even start to describe the road-blocks and organizational design issues that are probably going to make the biggest difference to the value of Actionable Insights to early adopters of the technologies designed to source them.

These are about:

• Changing attitudes and behaviors.
• Appreciating that IT systems have focused for years inwardly on processes that exist WITHIN AND ACROSS the enterprise but rarely beyond it.  That means to really get to grips with harvesting and assimilating actionable insights new technologies need to be introduced along with new thinking on security governance, data governance, scaling and analysis tooling.
• Accepting that some Actionable Insights that are most valuable to an enterprise aren't being captured today at all (such as 'soft-measures').
• Some Actionable Insights don't have any specific role in the enterprise responsible and accountable for making use of them. 

I.

Talent Leaders Can Learn From Customer Science - To Foster 'Loyalty Beyond Reason'

 

'Loyalty' by Sherry Ezhuthachan

Stepping across from the world of marketing and brands into talent management has helped me to appreciate there are more common areas than I'd previously realized.  To be high achievers in the talent industry, HR and talent leaders will need to learn the lessons of brand managers.

...

"Loyalty Beyond Reason? - That's a funny name for a blog.."

I often get funny looks when I tell people about my new blog title.

I came across Loyalty Beyond Reason when reading one of my favourite books for the second or possible third time and I was reminded how central it is to running business in the noughties.  The book,written by Kevin Roberts, then CEO Worldwide of Saatchi and Saatchi, is called Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands.  It's a slightly annoying book because it's better than the three books on business I've written myself.  Anyway, reading the book you realize Kevin is one of those guys that 'understands' how customers and markets work at an 'organic' rather than 'theoretical' level, a bit like Richard Branson.

The key argument introduced in the book is that industry and commerce has moved from a focus on products, to (but products have become very similar, companies need to protect their IP some how and therefore we have..) trademarks, to (but customers don't connect to trademarks so we have..) brands to (but now we even have too many brands to think about so we need to give customers reasons to grow 'loyalty beyond reason' so we're heading towards..) 'Lovemarks'.

It isn't difficult for me to buy into the idea that companies don't own their brands anymore and - if they want their brands to be successful - they need their customers to take them on, buy into them, promote them.  Just look at brands like Apple and the passion users have for their products.  This isn't just a cold, calculating buying decision at work here.  Nope. These boys and girls LOVE their brand.  No matter how many advertising dollars go into Microsoft I don't see the same thing happening with that brand.  Now I know some of the guys at Microsoft in the product marketing teams and I have to say they're an exceptional bunch of folk.  They know their stuff when it comes to Outcome Driven Innovation and all the latest thinking and approaches on Product Management and how to deliver world class products.  Recent launches show there's nothing wrong with their products.  Yet they don't engender the same passion and loyalty in their customers as Apple has managed to do.  They are failing to create Loyalty Without Reason.

Spending my time in the talent industry over the past few months I've learned that the need for Loyalty Beyond Reason is missing in many employer:employee relationships, let alone contractor:contracted relationships.  The relationship between a customer and and a supplier very often only becomes contractual when the customer chooses their brand.  Before that they can go anywhere.  Perhaps employers think that because they have an employment contract in place they can within reason 'do what they like' when it comes to their relationship with staff and contractors - but this is a pipe dream.  Even when there are contracts and agreements, these don't create great productivity and game-changing ideas.  Like any contract, it's only really there for when the relationship breaks down.  No, if talent leaders want high performing workforce and world class talent, they're going to have to forget about contracts and compliance, using performance appraisals as a way of formalizing how the carrot and stick are applied, they're going to have to find better ways of creating loyalty beyond reason.

The brand industry knows that you can't tell customers to buy your products,  you can't even ask them nicely.  You have to get customers to want to buy.  And the buying decision isn't all about facts, analysis and reason, the last 9-yards is pure emotion; how it makes you feel to own a product or use a service.  I fly Virgin Atlantic because they play T-Rex when you walk down that long isle on the plane past the nouveau riche to economy. Makes me feel good.

Talent leaders need to invest in their people 'in a certain way' - not the Microsoft way, the Apple way.  As with the Customer Science industry, the starting point is to invest time in understanding 'the individual' and applying actionable insights to draw out the things people care about emotionally, on the edge of reason.  Any business can do this - big or small, accountants or engineers.  You just have to start in the right place.

I.