As I thought about writing this post, I searched this site for the word “Passion”, and found I’d used it in at least 13 of the more than 70 posts I’ve put up here since I started blogging about a year ago. I guess that shows how important this theme is to me. This post then may simply be a variation on a theme, but, heck, Mozart wrote 12 variations on the theme of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, so…
An organisation without passionate leadership will fail.
In fact, having drafted this and several other blogs, I canvassed Facebook on which one to post up next, choosing just from the title, and they all said “Passionate Purpose”. As my good friend David Kirkaldy put it “Passion. Without that the rest would never exist or have any meaning.” Well said, David !
Now, I’d like to zero in on one particular business, Hotels. From my experience, Every hotel must have at least one leader with passion working on the property. No ifs, ands or buts.
What happens though, if that passionate leader moves on ? To both make your business great and keep it great you must spread the passion to all the staff, from top to bottom. That way the passion becomes ingrained and will succeed that one passionate leader.
Very few of the top 100 companies of 100 years ago, when measured by stock market value, still survive… but most of the top 100 brands are still with us. IBM isn’t a computer maker anymore, but a professional services firm full of “IBM’ers” with a distinct culture. Ritz Carlton doesn’t have staff, it has “Ladies and Gentlemen, serving Ladies and Gentlemen”.
Ingrained identity and brand personality is what has keeps leading companies focussed and on top.. or… Passionate Purpose. So…another lesson….
An organisation without Passionate Purpose will not survive
Back to Hotels, and let’s look at one Hotel in particular. Start with this quote :
“You can set standards for a hotel operation, but the standards need to be carried out by a team that wholeheartedly embraces them and has the ambition to excel in everything they do. We do not only want to meet guest expectations with our service, we want to exceed them every step of the way, and our team shares this philosophy.” - Karolin Troubetzkoy, Executive Director, Marketing and Operations, Jade Mountain, Saint Lucia
That’s the “organisational behaviour” was of expressing passion in running a hotel, but try this from Tripadvisor (see review on Jun 27, 2009) :
We were surrounded by passion – the owner/architect Nick Troubetzkoy, put his very soul into the design of Jade Mountain.
Ms Troubetzkoy emphasises the importance of their team having “the ambition to excel in everything they do” and that “our team shares this philosophy”, but boy that sounds like it comes from a management handbook.
Now, though, consider that Mr Troubetzkoy is a passionate guy who put his very soul into the design of the hotel.. NOW you’ve got something that the team can follow !
In our daily lives we are bombarded with “news”. We have our 24 hour “news” requiring a rush to be first, forget checking the accuracy. If that wasn’t enough, we also have the “puffery” of the “news” on celebrity culture, “reality” TV etc dumbing down expectations. Who’d be a real journalist ?
And yet….
A commonly used “netarati” phrase is “eyeballs follow content”. However, as we are seeing in all forms of media, nobody has yet found the magic bullet to convert eyeballs into dollars when it comes to news content. Where, then, can journalists convert there content to dollars right now until the news media universe settles into alignment ? Simple. Corporate websites.
Consumers are increasingly googling new contacts and businesses we interact with. This need to “validate” is increasingly driving us all to clamour for information that is both timely and accurate, ie that we can rely upon to be current and true.
The most common failing of corporate websites I see these days is not their “look” or their layout, but their content. They hire marketers, web designers and developers, but who then writes their story, as well as keeping it current ? All too often that responsibility falls upon someone in the company themselves, but it is rare to find that employee who has the skills to research, analyse and report what matters in the “story” of the business.
Journalists are trained in the who, what, when, where, why and how. More simply put, they collect, verify, report. Journalists are used to working to deadlines (so can keep things current) and to the process of gathering the relevant information and writing the “story”.
Connect the thinking. Organisations need to hire journalists to interview them and write their content. Journalists, apply your skills to doing this.
This is already happening with the largest organisations (and their agencies), but rarely below that scale. If you are a freelance journalist in a small town though, recognise that this scales down. Every small and local business has to have their personality captured on their site. For this they need a local journalist to visit them and “interview” them, then “report” on it via their website content.
Whether you are the person with the story or the teller of the story, take this opportunity to connect the dots.
Minority Report, released in 2002, was set in 2054 and was full of innovative ideas that were so well thought through that one could certainly think of them as SciFi that could turn to science fact. Fast forward to 2010 and there is much buzz behind “location based” social media like Foursquare.
I’ve played around with these, but, much as I like, I just can’t see them working in their current form. Why ?
They rely on the user leading the experience, consciously wanting to tell the world where we are at any given moment, with nothing in particular promised in return, as the “points” earned are currently meaningless and the most you can hope for is a free coffee if you manage to be obsessive enough to become the “Mayor” at your local coffee shop.
Still, one thing that we know for sure is that this shows that many of us are willing to give up more and more privacy if the trade off is that our lives become easier, better, or just more convenient.
Now, rewind to this scene from Minority Report, where location based advertising is pushed to customers as their irises are continually scanned as they move through a mall. I know the phrase “eyeballs = dollars” is big these days, but not quite that literally !
It’s amusing to see how marketing has moved on in the intervening years. Who now would be interested in pushing generic magazine/tv style awareness ads at customers ?
Instead, imagine a location based service focussed not on your Iris, but the GPS chip in your mobile device, and pushing information at you based not just on your name, but your entire online identity, including interests that you have voluntarily shared in order to benefit from targetted offer advertising as you literally move through life ?
Now THAT is a future I can see happening and people paying for.
Inspiration to foment innovation in your particular area of expertise can come from many sources, but a great starting point is to simply take time to follow other fields of interest to you, and the more passionate about them you are, the better.
To me one such field is Design.
Recently I had the opportunity to catch up again with Colin Burns, formerly a leading international design consultant with a major agency, and now a fellow “one man consultancy” now also focussed on a role as “innovation consultant”, among other things.
We had a wonderful brainstorming lunch in his gorgeous home base of Pitlochry, Scotland, and threw around numerous ideas on innovations. What fascinated me was that we seemed to think very much alike on innovation, but coming from very different angles.
I can’t say specifically what it is about Design that so often inspires me to think innovatively, but perhaps it is just a passion for the subject, it gets the synapses firing !
Another area I follow with passionate interest is Behavioural Economics, and yet another is the whole field of customer experience. Whilst the idea of “social media” is a new one, my interest and work in that field is therefore a natural extension of those last two fields of passionate interest.
So, if you are seeking inspiration to innovate, think about fields you can immerse yourself in that are not related to your business, but that you have a passionate interest in.
You can be as expert as you like in your field, but often the true value you can create comes from outside your comfort zone.
As my friend Dready put it in designing my new “cube grenade“, McCallum Solution is “the box… and everything outside it”, and it is the “outside” where the truly highest value is created.
Closing here by posting a talk from TED by David Kelley of Colin Burns’ old firm, IDEO, on “human-centered design”. To me this particular field is of particular interest, I love thinking about customers and the customer experience. This is eight years old, but still some excellent food for thought. By the way, if you ever have half an hour or more to seek inspiring ideas, watching TED talks on their site is a great option to choose !
Only when your mind is open will inspiration to innovate come to you. With that in mind, this past week I spent a few days with the creme of wedding planners, dress designers, stylists, bloggers.. and the “Michelangelo of Wedding Cakes” (the incomparable Ms Sylvia Weinstock!) at Engage10, the latest in a series of “Luxury Wedding Summits” of top international wedding industry professionals, held right here in the Cayman Islands. Whilst I have some degree of knowledge of the fast-growing Destination Wedding business through my work with travel and tourism marketing, as well as clients in the creative industries, this was clearly something “at a tangent” for me.
“Engage” is an innovative event, raising the bar for itself every time. Rebecca Grinnals and Engaging Concepts (including Kathryn Arce, holder of the all time best job title, “Director of Awesome” !), continually challenge themselves to improve. The results are clear to see !
Such an environment of smart, innovative and enthused people is always great for ideas and inspiration. From the wedding industry, having “superstars” like Sylvia Weinstock, Marcy Blum, Randy Fenoli and many more gave the event a certain “rock star” quality for the attendees. Beyond that though, the organisers went beyond their niche to bring in other world class talent. To pick out just two :
Cindy Novotny, a pocket rocket of energy, and, in this social media age, one of the most powerful “face to face” presences I’ve ever seen. No wonder she travels 50 weeks of the year ! You can get a good sense from her blog, but boy, like Springsteen, she’s “better live” !
Todd Avery Lenahan was a revelation. An internationally prominent interior designer, his ideas and clarity of expression on business branding, positioning and marketing were top notch.
I didn’t take away lots of specific nuggets of advice, but the freedom to be at an event where I was seeking only to be inspired was a powerful thing, helping me develop and adjust some core concepts I take with me to whichever industry I am working with.
My strongest over-riding thought was that, simply, “business is business”, and the keys to success are the same. Have passion for your business, work hard, be a good leader, talk to your customers, always be working to improve yourself and your business.
I would be remiss though, to not focus more on Todd Avery Lenahan, whose handout at his sessions, called “Style Defined”, laid out seven keys :
Style is an admirable point of view
Style is a re-assuring confidence
Style is a compelling voice
Style is consistency
Style is authenticity
Style is a sense of accomplishment
Style is effortlessness
Within each point he had a number of detailed questions ? I won’t repeat them here, these are not my intellectual property, but they were absolute gold, every single one, so I’m going to ask Todd separately if he can put these up somewhere.
Whilst Todd shared the floor in his sessions with Randy Fenoli, who gave some wonderful personal fashion and style “don’ts”, I asked Todd “this is a very powerful set of branding and positioning keys, how do you differentiate between style and branding ?”. His answer ? “Style and Brand are one and the same, you can’t separate them.“
So…this afternoon I found myself at a family oriented luncheon (for a swim club). As His Excellency the Governor of the Cayman Islands was there, the organisers had asked people to dress appropriately smartly. With some kids still running around looking like badly dressed mini drug dealers in baggy shorts, my boys asked “Dad, why are we wearing long trousers when it is so hot ?”. I didn’t say “Todd and Randy taught me there is no time your style shouldn’t represent you”, but you know I was thinking it
Coach John Wooden just passed away. Few would argue his position in the sporting pantheon as the greatest coach ever, but his teachings have also been very influential to business leaders.
From his incredible career at UCLA, to the influence he had through continuing to teach beyond the world of sports after retirement from coaching (take 18 minutes to listen to this TED talk on the difference between winning and success), we have lost a massive figure.
Many who knew him well will write long and thorough tributes, I will just look at one Wooden quote :
“The most important key to achieving great success is to decide upon your goal and launch, get started, take action, move.”
If you are waiting to commit to something until you have everything totally planned and organised in advance, you are missing the lesson that Coach Wooden is teaching.. and that so many entrepreneurs instinctively know… as Nike used to say, “Just Do It”.. have the confidence to launch, even if you are not what you think is 100% ready.. then adjust, adapt, shift.
One thing is for sure, if you never start, you’ll never succeed.
