The Customer Mission Podcast with Andrea Belk Olson

Small things can have big, lasting impacts. For example, 60% of the fish food that organisms living in coral reefs eat comes from the tiny larvae of tiny fish. Coral reefs could not survive without them. We often don't consider the small - especially in business. Small changes are typically overlooked, and the big changes usually get all the attention.

Recruit and retain top talent. Increase market share. Improve customer satisfaction. Expand into new geographic markets. Diversity product offerings. Are these actually strategies or not?

Every organization we've worked with has reams of consumer feedback. Often it is utilized to make critical decisions. Sometimes, it's not. Sometimes, the feedback itself becomes the exercise, where study after study is created multiple times a year, and the insights are simply shared across the organization - nothing more. While customer insight collection is one thing, how companies analy...

When organizations design strategies, the focus is typically on crafting an approach to achieve key organizational goals. These plans usually take hundreds of hours collectively, and once complete, are presented to the organization in a series of town halls, beautifully illustrated documents, and leadership meetings. Yet while we believe the strategy itself is the path to success, it's the peo...

Efficiency is fundamentally about using less input and getting more output. When CEOs talk about increasing "worker efficiency", it usually means getting fewer workers to do more work. You can have the most efficient workforce in the world, but if the company, the system, and the process they’re working in are wasteful, none of it really matters. Eliminating waste is actually way more im...

You likely remember Mickey Mouse and the Sorcerer's Apprentice. It's a story that revolves around an apprentice of a great sorcerer who has grown tired from repetitive manual labor and decides to automate his chores with a bit of help from his departed master's hat. There are multiple interpretations of lessons from this story. The one most frequently cited is about the consequences of...

Let’s say you’re trying to teach an elephant how to recite poetry while balancing on a soccer ball. How should you allocate your time and money between training the elephant and designing the soccer ball? The right answer, of course, is to spend zero time thinking about the ball. But most people will rush off and start designing a really great soccer ball first. Why?

Innovation can change industries and systems, but real innovation causes   a change in how people behave. Consider technologies like Slack, iPhones, or even the Cloud. For these large innovations and the organizations that adopt them, there is a dramatic shift in how time is spent, how communication happens, how team members relate to one another, and, significant changes in productivity. We might...

Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly vs. Explosion. Pre-Owned vs. Used. We've seen a lot of terminology changes over the years, and it's because words matter. How you communicate and frame something has been a technique used by marketers for decades. Yet as organization leaders, we often make terminology more abstract and complicated instead of simple, compelling, and clear. This is one of the ma...

Budgeting season is coming soon for many companies, and this usually includes the review of major initiatives, costs, resources, and activities for the coming year. Sometimes, it's also the time to re-evaluate the organizational strategy or even create a new one. And while creating a strategy can be a daunting task, many leaders actually go through long and convoluted processes to create one,...

Some organizations go through CEOs and department heads like Kleenex. Today, the average tenure of a CEO is 4.6 years. In other cases, C-Suite leaders rotate out of the organization within 1 or 2 years, and a new leader is installed. And it's always "This one is the right one - they're bringing incredible experience/ideas/perspective to the organization." They try to install a fe...

The greatest stories start with imperfection. Something went wrong - usually in a dramatic fashion - then a roller coaster of ups and downs until the recovery and eventual happy or hilarious ending. Perfect stories - where everything goes smoothly - aren't stories at all. They're a lecture.

It's easy to document and communicate the "what". What is your department doing this quarter? You have a laundry list to show them. It reinforces that you have "lots to do" and are valuable to the organization. But where's the strategy? Why is this approach different, unique, compelling, or the right way to achieve the bigger goal? 

Imagine two people meeting up on a blind date. The first person begins by introducing themselves, going through a 10-15 minute detailed introduction and overview of their life and history. They then move quickly into explaining how and when both of them will get married, buy a country house, and have three children, illustrating how this plan is the best and right option, and that no other person...

What is Conway’s law? It comes from a 1967 paper by Melvin E. Conway, and the basic idea is that organizations tend to design products that reflect their internal communication structures. Put another way, Conway’s law implies that the quality of a product or service is reflected in and linked to the working methods of the business that produces it. This means that successful product or service de...

Most business leaders stress the importance of understanding and responding to ever-changing customer needs to stay relevant and competitive. Yet why do so many companies spend the majority of their time focusing inward?

Poker is a game of concentration, reactions, and critical thinking. While luck still plays a large factor in the distribution of the cards, your skill at reading common poker tells can give you a significant edge. This means focusing on your opponent’s body language to decipher subconscious shrugs, sighs, and signals that give away their hand. It's the same in business, but often tells are eve...

Floods are typically predictable. There are forecasts which discuss river levels, and projections for where the water will rise to and over what period of time. No one dismisses these projections, and we always prepare accordingly. But these floods don't happen because there's monsoon-level rain in the area. It happens because of extensive snow hundreds of miles north of us. The snowpack d...

We're all familiar with the concept of financial debt - money you owe, often with interest. Some of us are familiar with technical debt - taking shortcuts while writing code (or making repeated changes to code) that has downstream consequences later. Financial and technical debt plays an important role in organizations. But another type of debt exists — organizational debt. Organizational Debt...

While politics are inherently part of business, time wasted and money lost are typically blamed on inefficiency and lack of productivity. People aren't working hard enough. They're slacking off. They're not really working when they are working from home. This all stems from the perception that people can't really be trusted to do their jobs without extensive supervision or oversigh...

In business, we talk extensively about value, specifically how we can create it. But more often than not, in our quest to find new ways to develop value, we have many overlooked opportunities to unleash existing value and underlying things in our organizations that kill it.

One of the traditional steps in developing a strategy begins with a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis. The results are usually unremarkable, highlighting the same things year after year, and failing to reveal any new, unique ways for the organization to compete. So can a SWOT really form the foundation of an effective strategy?

We've all been in the hospital waiting room. You sometimes seem to sit there forever. You see people come and go, and maybe you see your appointment time come and go. You don't know whether they're running behind, forgot you, or simply have an emergency to deal with. While a changing schedule flow is understandable, it doesn't bode well for the proverbial customer experience. But transparency can...

We all have worked for dysfunctional companies at one time or another. Most of the time, we view them through the lens of people - whether it be domineering bosses, hostile work environments, or sweat-shop-like circumstances. However, there are three common behaviors that can permeate a company and create dysfunction, even if the people and teams are the nicest on the planet.

We've heard it before. A new initiative or focus is announced to the organization. There's an explanation as to why it's important, and why the company is addressing it. Then crickets. Or worse, a few superficial, window-dressing activities are conducted before it goes radio silent. Why? Why bother with starting something that's just going to get brushed under the rug? Is it bad leadership? Lack o...