The Customer Mission Podcast with Andrea Belk Olson

During the 1980s, top executives were judged on their ability to restructure, declutter, and de-layer their corporations. This often translated into overly flat and overly lean organizations, where remaining staff worked longer and harder with less. While the approach benefitted the bottom line, it didn't increase organizational efficiency, effectiveness, or productivity. Now, leaders are examinin...

As a leader, one of the jobs you have is to identify organizational gaps. Whether it be operational, resource-based, process-centric, or sales-driven. But what happens when you overlook or completely dismiss gaps that you know exist? Some might say that's negligence, but the real question is, what's the cause of that negligence? Is it laziness? Ignorance? Or avoidance?

We all know when two employees have a conflict, there are countless articles on how to coach and mitigate the situation. But what happens when departments have conflicts? In virtually every organization, there are teams that don't work well together. It may be a rub between marketing and sales, or operations and production. No matter the departments, this rub impacts morale, culture, communication...

When the strategy doesn't deliver on anticipated expectations, the strategy-execution gap is the scapegoat. In fact, thousands of articles have been written on this phenomenon. For example, here's one of the top results from a quick Google search: "What causes execution gaps? There are numerous potential causes of execution gaps, such as goals and timelines that are too ambitious, little to n...

Strategy is a hard concept to digest, especially for stayed institutions that have seen past success but have reached a growth plateau. New competitors are coming in, the organization has started to move slower, and sales are anything but impressive. They're surviving, but not flourishing. Often, the first step is to refresh the "organizational strategy". This comes in the form of a series of meet...

A tenured employee is someone who has worked for a company or organization for a number of years. Employees that have worked for a company for more than five years are considered long-tenured employees, while those that have worked for a company for less than five years are considered short-tenured employees. Employees with tenure usually have more expertise in their positions than others. Bu...

Executives often spend months (sometimes years) putting together a strategy to grow their organization. However, these strategies are often abandoned, changed, or lose momentum within a year or less. Why? How is it that we spend so much time, money, resources, and effort in creating a strategy, which becomes proverbially obsolete once the rubber actually meets the road? Here are the top 6 reasons...

I recently had a conversation with a C-suite leader of a company that has 6,000+ employees who were implementing a significant organizational structure change to build in more accountability and ownership across 50 interconnected departments. The goal was to create an umbrella team who would be in charge of ensuring there was more transparency and communication between each department. This layer...

Differentiation; by definition, is what branding is. Which is precisely why I’m so baffled by blanding. Blanding is the copy-paste model of consumer product development and brand marketing that follows repetitive patterns in the name of modernity but at the expense of authenticity and originality. With results that are, in a word, bland.

We can't be all things to all people, though as companies, we often try. Take a hospital. You try to provide superior care, ensure patient safety, manage insurance claims, recruit top-tier staff, maintain excellent facilities - the list goes on. It's a daunting task, and it's hard to say that any one of those items listed sits at the top of the proverbial importance pyramid. But if you don't have...

Typically, taking your car to the shop isn't a pleasurable experience. Even if you roll in for a simple oil change, there's always something else that needs to be addressed. Often customers are skeptical about a shop's recommendations and have a perception they're being upsold on unnecessary repairs. You could attempt to change that perception with advertising, and push the message that your shop...

Sandbagging is a strategy of lowering the expectations of a company or an individual's strengths and core competencies in order to produce relatively greater-than-anticipated results. Unlike Quiet Quitting, which focuses on stopping the completion of any tasks not explicitly stated in the job description, Sandbagging fundamentally drags down overall company performance. We've all seen it, exp...

Change is uncomfortable. Inherently so because it's different. It's unfamiliar. It's new. It's unknown. Yet, most changes in organizations aren't changes at all. They are the reshuffle of existing deck chairs. They are so soft and subtle as not to burden or worry the masses. They are often minuscule. It's no wonder that organizations that seek change and enact their soft modifications are disappoi...

Many leaders want their organizations to be more innovative and strategic. (In fact, there are tens of thousands of articles out there on fostering innovation and making teams more strategic.) Often this gets translated into directives, initiatives, or organizational values around these principles. And of course, those directives and initiatives never manifest into action, no matter how many goals...

I was at a brewery around 9:00 pm when a group of cyclists rolled up. There were around 7 of them, of varying ages ranging from their early '30s to late '40s. It was a beautiful, slightly cool Thursday evening, with a light and comfortable breeze. They parked their bicycles, dumped their gear, and proceeded to order multiple pints. Clustering around a single, small table with additional chairs pul...

The answer to this question may seem obvious, depending on what side of the proverbial fence you sit. Traditionalists may say business is fundamentally about creating value and generating profit. Others may say that it's about being good stewards of the environment, people, and society, creating something of value greater than simply money.

A widely known term, at least in academia, is “the tragedy of the commons.” The term “commons” describes a resource that everyone can use at no cost, such as air. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School Lawrence Lessig explains that the tragedy is that when there is a limited amount of a commons, the competition over it causes its depletion because people work out of self-interest, whereas if they...

Consider this scenario. A company has recently upgraded their office space, with a new shared area for employees to use to collaborate and hold meetings. The room has no restrictions - you can use it anytime, and for anything. Within the first week, someone leaves food and spilled drinks on the tables and chairs. This is brought to the attention of leadership, and a new set of policies and process...

Steve Jobs found pleasure in reducing a product’s feature set. He hated clutter, loved simple. As business leaders, we often have a hard time saying no to new features, products, or initiatives that support growth. However, too much stuff creates complexity and in turn, reduces the organization's effectiveness. Wharton researchers report that 74% of executives believe complexity is inhib...

What does losing weight, learning to play an instrument, and growing a company all have in common? They take time. Often, a lot of time. However, we are in an age of instant gratification. Whether due to advances in technology, or a decline in our attention span, the drive to get results faster has sped up to an almost breakneck pace. And what's the drawback to this? We dismiss new ideas and oppor...

Simplification is one of the hardest things to do, but it is also one of the most effective. When you examine your own organization's projects, initiatives, strategies, and engagements, take the time to consider what you can eliminate, rather than what you can add to make it more effective.

Consider a situation where a major change for an organization is being debated amongst a leadership team. The group discusses the pros and cons, evaluating whether it should be implemented and if it will produce the outcomes they're trying to achieve. After a lengthy back-and-forth, they choose to proceed. However, the results fall short of expectations. Does this sound familiar? Why does this occ...

Yes, a best practice is often arbitrary and based mainly on habit – the result of conditions that no longer apply. What we call best practices were at one point good or smart business moves, but we seldom do the work to determine how long they stay the “best” or whether they’re universally applicable. In short, best practices are only the best until they aren’t.

Imagine you're faced with creating organizational change. You need to do something big and bold to turn around the organization's downward trajectory. Or you need to catapult growth. You have some great, innovative ideas that you've vetted and know they'll make a positive impact. You have a budget, resources, and a rollout plan. You're all ready to go - or are you?

In the 2019 ESPN Tournament Challenge, there were even fewer, with only nine flawless basketball tournament brackets  after the initial round of March Madness in 2019. Why? We have such a huge amount of data and computing power at our fingertips - why wouldn't there be a better level of accuracy? Because people are involved.