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Healthcare Sprints to Transform – Helpful Hints

Healthcare organizations are moving at light speed to transform the way they function.  Expanding government oversight, shrinking resources, technology demands, and increased complexity of services have all put incredible pressure on providers to change their business and care models. It’s quite a challenge.

Putting the core principles of managing change in a highly complex environment like healthcare is what my colleagues and I have been focused on.  If you’re in the middle of the industry the obstacles seem both large,and in some cases, invisible until you stumble on them. 

With so much change happening simultaneously in healthcare settings today it’s critically important to focus on basics of transformational process.

  • Clearly describe what the future looks like, feels like and responds like
  • Align the organziation around the true mission and values that make healthcare the noblest of services
  • Put patients first in all decisions
  • Embrace and inform every stakeholder of what the future holds and their value in the transformation process

December 5, 2012 Posted by | Uncategorized | | Leave a comment

Giving Thanks…Easy and Effective

Thank you!  Gracias!  Mahalo!  Grazzii, Dankë, M goi….

In whatever language we speak the words reflect the sentiment of appreciation for something recieved.  Improving the experience for those that serve and for those being served in life is often as simple as saying Thanks. 

Each year at this time there’s always a few moments to reflect on those that add value to our lives.  Appreciation for that value often goes unexpressed.  In a world where we seem to moving faster than the speed of light from one activity to the other the simplist, kindest gesture of appreciation can go a very long way.  As a crazed business traveler I’m touched by dozens of people along the shortest of journeys.  Each of those folks from the TSA agent at the airport to the assistant at my client who lets me in the door all add value to my experience.  Appreciating what they do gives them a lift and may lighten a challenging day.

Appreciative customers spawn outstanding service experiences.

November 20, 2012 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Innovation, Change and the Power of Trust

Shuttle Atlantis slipped the bonds of gravity for the last time today.  NASA has showcased the power of technological innovation for decades in the coolest way possible by catapulting humans from the blue planet to places millions of miles away into the unknown.  Amazing innovations have resulted from the space adventure and are in our homes today.  I spent nearly 20 years of my career in the aerospace business, no business is any more challenging, frustrating or rewarding.  As a key member of Rockwell’s Aerospace (now Boeing) program development team in the 80’s every day was an exercise in thinking so far off the table the your head hurt.  It was a huge deal when we stuffed 64K of memory into a box that actually fit into a fighter aircraft, no kidding, that was highly classified stuff back then.  The speed of technology innovation since then is clear. 

As the industry limped into the 90’s the innovative spirit and techniques that built the Space Shuttle, deliver the B-1 ahead of schedule and under budget moved into organizational innovation.  How do we continue to compete in new markets?  How do we survive a negative economic trend?  How do we continue to innovate while downsizing the workforce by thousands every month?  The challenges we struggled with then are challenges senior executives face TODAY!  PwC’s 14th Annual Global CEO Survey released earlier this year calls out innovation and technology as a key challenge.

Every client I work with has innovation on their strategic hit list, as they should.  Innovation is the growth engine of every enterprise.  Fostering an environment where both disruptive and incremental innovation exist comes in one word – Trust.  Trust between the organization and its talent is crucial to building a culture of innovation.  Some common benchmarks for innovative organizations are Apple, e-Bay, Amazon and P&G, . In each case the underlying culture of the enterprise respects the value of change and accepts the occasional failure.  I was fortunate enough to have Apple as a client during the development of the Apple Store as they were struggling for relevance in the consumer electronics space.  During that time a few significant failures found there way to the market.  Anyone remember “the cube”?  Steve Jobs kept trusting his talent and pushing the vision.  Steve would often grab lunch in the Cupertino cafeteria and randomly sit at a table.  His presence, confidence and trust buoyed the organization.

This post is too short to discuss all the components required to build the trust required to innovate successfully. Yet I can relate that a command and control structure that beats talent into neatly stacked silos is not recommended.   Open internal networks with the freedom to communicate across boundaries, re-purpose ideas shamelessly and the ability to explore and trial are the core of innovative cultures.

During my time as a leader at PwC on the West Coast our business selected a minimum of 10 business trends each year to explore for development of new service offerings.  We determined the trends collaboratively, built groups of consultants that felt a passion for the issue and let the party begin.  No budgets, no timelines just a set of ideas that may or may not be useful to our clients.  Routinely at least 3 of the trends we spotted and explored resulted in new service offerings that were relevant to clients and resulted in revenue growth.  The open nature of the culture allowed for free exchange of ideas, data and talent.  No boundaries were in place, only basic rules of engagement for experimentation.

In building for the 2020 business enterprise an open culture that fosters innovation is crucial.  Let the exploration begin!

July 9, 2011 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Making It Right…From the Start

Every week on HGTV Mike Holmes a burly, candid Canadian construction contractor brings to life the perils of hiring the wrong renovation contractors.  He’s a skilled craftsman that prides himself on “making it right” by inspecting renovated homes and providing the homeowner with fixes to shoddy prior work.  Every show ends with hugs and tears from the homeowners when the work is “done right.”

I love this show because it constantly reminds me of how important it is to give customers the best product/service available to meet their needs.  This isn’t always easy.  Customers look for value.  Value is primarily reflected in lowest price.  Lowest price may not be the “right” solution.  Mike never uses low grade products, he uses the best product for the job at hand, he ensures that all work exceeds published building codes.  Mike and his team of tradesmen take great pride in delivering a quality result. 

In the world of large scale business transformations that I’ll proxy as IT projects the “get it right” percentage varies depending on the source.  Standish Group’s most recently published Chaos Report found 32 percent of projects were considered a success. Criteria for success include: having been completed on time, on budget and with the required features and functions. Nearly one-in-four (24 percent) IT projects were considered failures, having been cancelled before they were completed, or having been delivered but never used. The rest (44 percent) were considered challenged: They were finished late, over budget, or with fewer than the required features and functions.

The July 2010 IT State of the Union survey reported traditional projects based on team size  are 47% successful, 36% challenged, and 17% fail.

So basically less that half of all major IT projects are considered successful.

Mike Holmes would be apoplectic.  C-Suites are disappointed. Users are frustrated and apathetic.

What seems to be the problem?  In my view the primary issue is value seeking.  In pursuit of getting more for less business leaders tend to go for the lowest, or near lowest logical cost for implementing major change.  “Doing it right” comes into the equation in early planning and in the “lessons learned” conversations following the project.  Yet during the course of the actual work of transformation the final objectives of the transformation get lost in the budget challenges.

The real cost of a failed or challenged transformation is the loss of trust in leadership.  Organizational enthusiasm for the vision presented early is tainted by shortcuts taken during the process and a mediocre result.

Successful organizational change whether technical, cultural or process focused demands the investment to “doing it right” the first time.  The cost and burden of  “making it right” eventually becomes the responsibility of employees in the trenches that view leadership as budget conscious bumblers eroding the commitment to the next change effort to support customers, business strategy and shareholder value.

Take it from Mike Holmes just “do it right”, take pride in the outcome, get hugs all around.

May 27, 2011 Posted by | Thinking About Change | Leave a comment

Secret of Effectively Managing CHANGE

Statistically, nearly 80% of  major transformation programs, either technical or strategic, fail to generate the desired benefit, reportedly, due to  failure to manage the change.  This is both myth and fact.

Myth: The implementation team failed to manage the desired change effectively thereby the entire ERP, CRM, Merger, etc. failed to meet its intended goals.

Fact: In most cases the project team failed to manage their own health and internal processes, causing unintended consequences to ensue.

Transformations fail to achieve their goals because the implementation team falls prey to themselves. 

Typical stumble points include:

  1. Ignoring how the change initiative or new strategy is honestly perceived by stakeholders
  2. Communicating not only the “new way”  to get work done but also “what to stop doing” the old way
  3. Establishing clear metrics to guide the change forward

A key responsibility of the change leader in any major transformation effort is to care for the project team by listening, observing and intervening when destructive conflicts, miscommunications, poor decision making, breakdowns in accountability, weak leadership and overall fatigue within the team surfaces. 

Effective change depends on effective change agents.  A change practitioner’s goal is  to keep the team in their forward view and be aware of challenges to meeting the ultimate goal.  If the change agent’s are dysfunctional, the change will fail. 

Keeping the team together is more than organizing a few fun events.  This select group of highly talented folks are the core of your change agent force. 

Maintain team health by:

  1. Consistently reinforcing the future state vision and goals – when the goals are clear, the road to success will also be clear.
  2. Ensuring the project team remains integrated with business stakeholders – isolation will breed stakeholder resistance.
  3. Quickly intervening when signs of dysfunction appear; confront issues head-on within the team – negative perceptions within the team will leech into the stakeholder group and stiffen resistance to change.

Effective change leaders work with both internal team dynamics and business stakeholders equally. SSHH….This is the dirty little secret!

April 27, 2011 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

2011 Voice of the Customer (VOC) Trends

 

Collecting, analyzing, acting on and integrating customer feedback into the strategic decision making process of many companies has reached fever pitch.  Over the past few years gathering and analyzing customer feedback has become increasingly important and cost effective as user friendly technologies with built-in analytics are introduced. 

Assisting my clients in growing their proficiency in taking the gigabytes of customer feedback data from survey result to strategic action is a significant part of my practice.  Trends in Voice of the Customer (VOC) proficiency improvement are moving from learning to keep score to the next levels of proficiency around connecting the results to business outcomes for strategic decision making.

What’s HOT in 2011

In preparation to support out clients my colleagues and I reviewed and evaluated a variety of sources that forecast VOC trends as well as canvassing our clients about what key trends they see emerging.

Our work revealed one key theme, the community must “Move from rear-view mirror scorecards to forward looking dashboards.”  The challenge in the marketplace continues to be integrating VOC analysis into the strategic decision making process.

Specifically we found 5 Trends that are white hot in 2011:

  1. Crash Data Silos – In order to make VOC analytics relevant throughout the business it’s crucial that this data be “mashed up” with operational data.  Business intelligence must integrate VOC data in the mix.
  2. Closed Loop-Processes – Follow the bouncing ball…until it stops.  Development of closed-loop processes that take VOC information from it’s initial collection through actions taken and into business outcomes resulting.
  3. Employee Engagement – Employees are back.  Over the last few years business leaders have taken a see-no-evil approach to what employees were feeling.  Conventional wisdom has been that employees were not doing well. 2011 has seen a rebirth of interest in measuring the Voice of the Employee (VOE).  The key trend for the VOC community is to relate VOC and VOE information.  Collect VOE data more frequently than annually and evaluation the relationship between VOE and VOC.
  4. Point of Contact Feedback – Gather VOC data that can be directly related to a particular employee or point of contact is crucial.  Bringing data and feedback to the individual level is crucially important to positively effect the customer experience.
  5. Text Analysis – Dealing with unstructured data that comes to the organization from listening posts, verbal feedback and social media sits at the top of the “must have” list.  Technology that can make sense of thousands of pieces of text on a daily basis is invaluable to determine issues and trends for both customers and employees.

Customers an business leaders depend heavily on VOC professionals to serve up actionable insights linked to demonstrable business outcomes.

February 17, 2011 Posted by | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Passion Play

Passion’s a word that’s made it’s way into the lexicon of everyday life like never before.  We’re  passionate about everything from baking cupcakes to processing accounts payable.  Passion reflects such a range of potential definitions from deep emotions to boundless enthusiasm.  I hear the word used so often that it’s lost the oomph it once had for me.

Children use it to describe their excitement over a new video game.  Executives use it to proclaim their focus on a business objective.  Job seekers put passion into their interviews as a way to show desire for the open position.  It’s all a bit confusing, really.

Last week during a client meeting a senior executive exclaimed “a passion for customer service”, followed by explaining that with that passion came a focus on reducing costs to serve and increasing revenue per customer.  All very worthy goals with complete consistency.  Yet it left me very confused as to that executives real emotion.  Was it a driving love of being face-to-face with customers and serving their needs? Was that passion for designing cost effective customer service solutions?  Or was it simply an enthusiasm for getting positive feedback for a job well done?

Interestingly vague word this passion thing. 

Rick Neuheisel, (UCLA football head coach) coined the term "Passion Bucket" on the Dan Patrick Show when he said "When you’re at UCLA, you have to have your passion bucket full when you play the Trojans."  What I think Coach Neuheisel meant to say was that his players should bring their highest level  enthusiasm and desire to win.  Very colorful use of passion as an adjective to describe a bucket.

Passion is a powerful word I suggest should be reserved for things we are truly passionate about.  Personally I have a great passion for my family and my country.  Very clearly these reflect the values that are closest to my heart, I would sacrifice everything to protect and hold true to these things I have a passion for.  It would seem a bit ingenuous to  say I had such a deep emotional connection as passion to the pizza I made for dinner last night, although it was quite fresh, tasty and a joy to assemble.

As business leaders let’s reserve our passion for those key components of the business that we would sacrifice deeply to maintain.  We should be passionate about our communities, our mission, our values and our associates. 

Happy Valentines Day!

February 14, 2011 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Unfreezing Your Most Important Asset

Snow is falling everywhere!  News footage of folks across the country chronicles the myriad of ways motorists try to unstick their vehicles from snow banks, slush wells and icy parking spots.  These scenes are reminiscent of my teen years in New England having every helpful device possible stashed in the trunk of my ‘65 Buick Special to thwart the embarrassing  stuck car.  Every type of unsticking aid possible lived in the massive trunk from the pedestrian bucket of sand to the often used under-tire blanket.  Prior to the advent of cell phones getting stranded meant hiking to the nearest phone booth to call for help.  Ha! Never!  Well, maybe once or twice.

Most executives pack away similar embarrassment relief kits to allow for the rapid extraction of their company from management slush wells.  Over the past couple of years we’ve seen these kits pulled out and used to varying results.  In some cases the cost reduction tools were wielded like corporate neutron bombs emptying building after building of employees while leaving the furniture and office space standing and survivors stunned.  Other devices  like hiring freezes, pay freezes, training freezes, travel freezes, (man, it’s getting cold in here) were used to get the company moving again.  In every case the result has been a dramatic loss of confidence in leadership by associates.  With lots of cold stares.

An ever growing trend in the marketplace is a resurgence in employee engagement initiatives.  Leadership teams have seen the devastation left in the wake of the “big freeze” and are making real efforts to regain the confidence of their most important asset, the workforce.  Customer confidence and employee confidence go hand-in-glove.  Corporate leaders understand the relationship.  Contemporary tools can now put numbers around the relationship with both the frequency and precision required to take action.

Regaining confidence demands clear, visible action.

Leading Practices to Unfreeze Engagement: 

  1. Collect and analyze employee engagement. TODAY! Not last years results.  Real time, where are we now results. Getting unstuck begins with understanding where the grit is in the gears. 
  2. Act immediately on the findings.  Fox’s Under Cover Boss reality show illustrates the power of real-time action.  The senior leaders that have just experienced real time feedback act on that feedback immediately.  No multi-week deep dive into the data while mold grows on the issues.  Show your leadership and take quick, decisive action.
  3. Celebrate the value of your assets.  Studies repeatedly validate that engagement isn’t about the compensation, it’s about the emotional boost we get when we are recognized.  Celebrate your people.  They will pay it forward to their customers.
  4. Repeat the process predictably.  Once is never enough.  Unleash the power of the organization through regular pulse checks.  Employee engagement data collected annually is as useless as a jet ski in a sand dune.  Monthly or quarterly pulse checks of a sampled employee population offers the best possible opportunity to thaw the organization.  CFOs review financials monthly. Your assets drive financial result.  Stay as close to employee feedback as financial feedback.

There’s no more satisfying feeling than watching your vehicle gain traction on the pavement after spinning your wheels in an ice rut.

What have you done recently to unfreeze employee engagement? bcaruso@endeavormgmt.com

January 29, 2011 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

What Gets You Up Every Day

 

Want to find out what’s bothering someone?  Just ask. What keeps you up at night?  A flurry of issues and concerns will come flooding forward.  As we enter 2011 my preference is to ask quite the opposing question.  What gets you up in the morning?  or as one of my entertainment clients likes to say “What geeks you out?”  Same point, more fun language.  So I’m going to use it.

I am totally geeked about 2011.  This past year had the entire world crawling back onto the shore from the shipwreck that was 2009.  Slowly individuals and companies walked onto the beach, dried off and began to get familiar with the new world.  A bit like exploring a new world.  Through the course of the year as everyone felt a bit more comfortable about the new world ideas began to pop.  Amazing to watch as my clients began to see the light after the eclipse.

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2011 is the year to be geeked about for sure.  Orders are up in all industries from B2C to B2B, hiring in some sectors is picking up, services are seeing gains in momentum, and best of all it’s not an election year so Congress can sit down and get some real work done to support business in pushing the economy forward.

I’m geeked about 3 big things for 2011. 

1. Customers Rule: The rising tide of customer feedback through every means available has shaken every organization out its tree.  Every Fortune 10 conglomerates to small non-profits and even Congress has gotten the message about customers having a voice in how things are done.  2011 will see a deeper and greater demand for building understanding of what consumers want from their providers.

2. Forward Outlooks: Recovery is on the horizon.  Organizations feel the positive vibe rising.  2011 will be a festival of vision and forward thinking based on the new realities of the world economy.  Not looking back to evaluate the whys but looking forward to vision the what’s next.

3. Truly Virtual Companies: For over 10 years organizations of all types  have been moving further and further away from the vertically integrated model.  The past 24 months have shown that vertical integration isn’t the answer for the future.  You need not own the entire value chain to be successful just the customer’s heart. 

A striking example of this is the electronics manufacturer Vizio.  This company in Southern California with a mere 160 employees, over 50 percent of which are in customer service, has risen in 8 short years to become the first American brand in over a decade to lead in U.S. LCD HDTV sales.  Its success is a result of a passion to deliver the latest technologies at an affordable price.  Vizio is not vertically integrated, they are totally virtual, building synergistic partnerships with customers and suppliers to delight both.

As we enter 2011 ask yourself, What are you geeked about?  What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Have a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year!

December 29, 2010 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

CEO’s Letter to Santa

Dear Santa,

I’ve been an avid admirer of yours ever since I can remember.  Your attention to detail in meeting my needs over the years is unprecedented.  You’ve never missed a deadline. 

Every December 25th each customer request is filled promptly and accurately.  I marvel at your order and supply chain management capabilities.  Millions upon millions of orders are processed within a matter of weeks followed by just-in-time production of everything from apparel to high technology gadgets.  Using a follow-the-moon logistics strategy your team makes pin point deliveries within a 24 hour period without a single missed delivery at no-cost to the customer.

Clearly your employee engagement strategy is remarkable.  It’s widely reported that some of your team have been with you for well over a hundred years.  Managing a workforce with that level of commitment to the organization must be a pleasure indeed. 

With the advent of new technologies  over the past decades you must have had some significant force reductions up North, we’ve been struggling with those challenges at my company too.  I can only assume that your Human Resource staff is irreplaceable and very well compensated.

Additionally your organization leads the world in understanding your customers.  Tracking each person’s good deeds and not-so-good deeds throughout their life and correlating those to wants and needs through life events must require a monstrous database.  My Vice President of Marketing would pay top dollar for a peek at that piece of business intelligence.  Personally, I’d like to know what type of software is used to analyze all those letters written in so many different languages so accurately each year.

As a CEO myself I’ve worked tirelessly to build a team that understands customers as well as yours and can perform with as few defects.  I am writing this letter in the hope you’ll share some of your best practice tips with my team during your slow season.  My team and I are willing to travel and will share some of our practices with your team.

Look forward to your response sometime in January.

Best regards

December 16, 2010 Posted by | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

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