I once got this CD from Microsoft (perhaps the MSN team) with “What do you want to do today?†in bold black writing on an orange background. I liked it so much that I made it into a clock by ripping the guts out of an old ugly clock.
This is the phrase that came to mind recently when I was contemplating “What is the Thingamy?†and “How do I promote it to people?â€. Sig has taken to referring to it as a Value Creation System or VCS and I guess this is what most people who run businesses what to hear. They want a system that rewards them for using it not punishes them!
What I was trying to with my resurrecting of the “What do you want to do today?†(I hope that’s not a trademarked phrase) was this forward looking mentality where the key word is ‘want’. Of course there are a number of things in life that you ‘have’ to do but when you want to do something you are more likely to drive through its success and shout about it when it happens. Is your passion to provide superb customer experience? If so don’t you think it could be good to make sure that their order doesn’t get lost? If they have a query don’t you think it would be nice to answer their question by looking for the answer, finding it and telling it to them? I remember a colleague in and consultancy group that I used to work for telling me some enormous percentage of calls to call centres (or is the correct phrase “contact centres†now) are because something has gone wrong. However, they rarely are logged as “complaints†they are just handled. We have armies of people whose only job is to deal with exceptions that if they were captured in a coherent manner could probably be dealt with to stop everyone else suffering the same fate. Of course if you product or company is so dire that it can’t change in response to issues you might as well just give up now!
What the Thingamy can do is capture your processes quickly and when they need to change, change them quickly. It puts them in one place if you let it. This responsive agility enables accelerated innovation. Wow! What a phrase… Want some of that?
