Business Change Management

We were introduced to HubSpot two years ago and immediately found it a very effective and efficient Inbound Marketing platform to build on our business growth strategies. In this blog I thought I would share with you why it works so well. Whether you are looking for better lead generation or social marketing, maybe our experience can help you chose your inbound marketing platform wisely.

Here are the two main reasons it works so well:

1. It is an excellent dashboard providing clear, insightful information in a ready to use fashion.
2. Second, It is a strategic platform that enables us to clearly convert strategy into execution to grow our leads and business.

There is an adage among folks who work in innovation and creativity that the more ideas you have, the more likely you will have great ones—you just don’t know which ones they are. Often they occur at the intersections of ideas…more random than scientific, more by chance than by choice, and more likely to come from luck than rigor.

This is very important if you are going to find a Blue Ocean Strategy. While you are trying to grow your business by adding value in innovative ways, the opportunities could be right under your nose. You just aren't finding them, aren't able to see the possibilities as opportunities. Is there a way for you to turn observation into innovation to sustain your growth? Yes!

What?!? Anthropology in my business?

I heard that more than once over the past few weeks of "Change Matters" workshops. I started talking about how powerful corporate anthropology or business anthropology can be for driving business growth. It’s true. The link between social science and business growth is deep and powerful, and growing. As business model innovation has become essential as company's adapt to today's fast changing environment.

Understanding human behavior and how to change a company's cultures is at the heart of building business success. I know it sounds obvious, but often it is ignored. At their core, all businesses are inextricably linked to the humans who work together and whose customers they serve — even if it’s sometimes hard to see the connection of business to culture.

Corporate anthropologists are finding that people know all too well the challenges of building and sustaining a business, especially in these fast-changing times. They often need a new toolkit, an anthropologist's toolkit. What worked in the past isn't doing so well today. But change is quite literally pain, and they fight it.

Is this how you feel, pushing your business forward? For far too many of our clients, growth has slowed. Maybe even stalled! Gone in the wrong direction? Let me share some of the illustrations and see if they fit your company?

• One case was a fast growing entrepreneur who found his network shifting to other solutions.
• A client in the B2B world was watching his competitors get acquired and the roll-ups were better able to buy and supply his clients. Growth was a challenge.
• After a talk I gave to real estate brokers we heard the endless lament that they weren't growing because of how younger people bought homes.
• In another case a real estate broker couldn't seem to find new agents.
• Another was an insurance company that was frustrated that young people weren't getting married in their twenties any longer. So they weren't buying houses and needing insurance. In fact, those millenials were renting apartments and not even buying cars.

When we looked at the business environments from the outside in, the problem seemed to be with those millennials or the other solutions or the roll-up consolidations. "Not my problem" was the common retort. 

The solution was going to be hard if we had to change our societal trends. Instead, as corporate anthropologists we suggested that they look at their strategy and business to see if it was time to change their business model, their culture and their strategies.

In these highly turbulent times, the old saying really is true: the only constant you can count on is change. But even when change is necessary to survive, why is it so hard? So painful? It's much easier just to keep doing things the same old way, even when that way is obviously no longer working. The big problem with that kind of thinking is that when you continually resist change, you risk being left irretrievably behind by your competitors, your customers and the world.

Is meaningful and lasting corporate culture change possible? Yes. Here's how!

It takes genuine buy-in from the executive leadership and a strong understanding of the current vs. desired corporate culture. If these fall into place, culture change can indeed not only happen but revolutionize a company. 

Perhaps you are ready to learn how to change corporate culture? We have been working with clients for whom the process of culture discovery was a real eye opener. Realizing that employees wanted a different type of culture that was more innovative and supportive of risk-taking, leadership found themselves wrestling with deep and important questions:

• What type of ingenuity and individual empowerment would be accepted and encouraged?
• How would they choose which processes could be modified or improvised upon? What did it really mean to become more ad-hoc and empowering?
• How could management become more skilled at relaxing some rules? Would production and compliance wither?

These are difficult discussions to have for any group of people who work together, let alone a corporation with an established track record of success. Questions of power, responsibility, trust and teamwork take on entirely new meanings when examined in the context of intentionally changing the culture of a corporation.

Last month I wrote a blog entitled: "Starting a Business While Working at Another." I received a terrific response with a large number of reads and "shares," which prompted me to write this one, offering top tips I would share with anyone trying to start a new business, particularly after retiring. 

So if you are thinking about un-retiring and might be in the start-up mode, here are some critical do's and don'ts to think about before launching yourself (again).

Four things To Do when you are thinking about going into business again

As President and Founder of Simon Associates Management Consultants, I have been working as an Innovation Games® consultant with numerous healthcare providers, helping them become more creative and innovative. Inevitably, I am often asked to make this often-arduous change journey easier to implement. 

The constant challenge in any change process is to make the undesirable desirable. That means business people have to have a good deal of help, not just hope, to find new ideas and convert them into effective innovations. Furthermore, these cannot be occasional events. They have to become part of the way people do things in an organization. 

Here are the 10 things you need to do to build a culture of innovation in your organization—whether it is a healthcare institution or not. To learn more, please click here for our website.

At Simon associates Management Consultants, a client of ours recently struggled with sluggish growth. As this is not an uncommon problem in today's business environment, we showed him how to use some of the tools of corporate anthropology to help him see the possibilities that were all around him—which he had sadly ignored. 

Why are Innovation Games® changing the way we work, now and in the future? Because they involve collaborative play, which leads to consumer insights. And these insights help you make better strategic decisions, build better products and offer the solutions that today's consumers are looking for.