Relationship Economics® Newsletter

The Nour Group, Inc. | April 2007

Do you have a Cool Hunter on staff?

There are currently four generations at work in the market – Mature, Boomers, Gen-X and Gen-Y or Millennials.

Each generation has its own specific nuances, trends and preferences, but they also learn very differently. They engage each other differently. They adapt to environments differently – and to not only be able to engage them or sell to them, but to also leverage their respective strengths within an organization, it is critical to keep your finger on the pulse of how they think, what motivates them, and the key attributes that drive their performance.

This is especially true with Gen-X and Gen-Y. If your products and services cater to this market, or if your workforce comprises a disproportionate number of employees in these generations, you must have individuals on your team who can speak intelligently and recommend specific action items to engage this audience.

Madison Avenue has created a new role – that of a cool hunter. These are 19 to 30 year-olds whose sole mission is to scan the blogs, nightclubs, podcasts, and social networking sites in an effort for companies to keep their finger on the pulse of that generation (something that is nearly impossible for the “suits” to do, who sit on many corporate boards today with cobwebs hanging from the sleeves).

Should your business have cool hunters?

When It's Broken At The Top!

If you are a senior executive and your relationships, mutual trust (and we define trust as credibility + empathy), and respect for your senior team is broken, questioned, and in short, dysfunctional, what kind of effect does it have on the rest of the organization?

In our experience working with a multitude of client companies, we see many high level executives who face similar challenges when it comes to getting the team to work closer together. Recently, I met with a division president and a handful of his business unit leaders – with both overt and covert trust and respect challenges. In what one could argue is a fairly manageable sized team in close geographic proximity, fairly complementary product lines, and what should be logically integrated functions (such as sales, marketing and professional services) they have managed to build fortified silos of product offerings, fiefdoms of service resources, and a culture that does not foster teamwork.

Organizations like this one are commonplace in today’s market and make it extremely difficult for team members to work together. Though the outward appearance of these organizations may be “rosy,” they are truly broken at the top. And by the law of cascading effects, this brokenness often crumbles all the way down throughout the organization.

So, what’s the answer?  The team needs a common cause or a common enemy; key strategic initiatives towards something or a battle against something such as a competitive market position or what they perceive to be unfair legislation or oversight.  That which they believe will benefit not only the overall division, but their respective business units as well.  If an independent, outside perspective can help them embrace the collective shared intellect, individual performances and deep relationships with customers, distributors, and key employees in an optimized series of processes, could they deliver critical milestones on those key strategic initiatives?  If they collaborated, communicated, and worked closer as a team, could they double or quadruple their top lines, reduce employee attrition, and outperform the very competitors they are beaten by today?

Is your organization broken at the top? How do you know? Click here for a checklist of the Top 5 warning signs.

What's Your Percieved Limit?

This past winter, while researching opportunities to speak at the 2008 National Ski Areas Association’s (NSSA) annual meeting, I had the chance to go on three different ski trips.

As many of you know, I am a classic workaholic entrepreneur, so when I had a chance to speak in Salt Lake City on a Thursday afternoon, what better opportunity to stay the weekend and ski at Deer Valley and Park City?

Although it has been a number of years, I have always enjoyed skiing and feel fairly comfortable at an intermediate level. Two weeks after the trip to Utah, having heard some great things about Jackson Hole, Wyoming, we decided to book a family vacation. Every time I mentioned Jackson Hole to my friends, there was the same sense of surprise. They all asked me the same question, “Are you that good of a skier?”

I never understood the nature of this question until I was standing on top of Laramie Bowl. If you have never skied Jackson Hole, it is, by far, one of the steepest mountains I have ever seen, much less attempted to ski down in one piece. With great trepidation, as I began to head downhill, I found myself deliberately concentrating on not only a strategy of where to avoid, but the tactical execution required to make it to the bottom and have any prayer of seeing my family again.

Many experienced skiers will tell you that the blue runs at Jackson Hole (green runs are often called “bunny hills,” blue are considered “intermediate,” and blacks are classified as “expert”) equate to and are often even more challenging than the black runs at many other resorts. I am pleased to report that not only did I survive the week, I had the time of my life. Surviving each run made me more confident in not only my ability, but made looking back at the sheer rocks that much more gratifying. (By the way, the kids had a blast at ski school and won’t stop asking when are we going back.)

This experience made me ponder: What perceived limits are keeping us back in our respective functions, performance, and strategic relationships each and every day? Which jobs are we afraid of taking on? Which challenging current or perspective clients are we perceiving to be simply too difficult? Which corporate or team-based goals seem so insurmountable to cause trepidation and worse yet, fear of trying for each of us? The interesting aspect is, unless you try, unless you fail, you will never overcome those fears.

One last point: we went to Jackson Hole with another family and the experience of making those runs with Dr. and Mrs. Hilton somehow lessoned the fear. Which relationships can you build and nurture to provide that support mechanism for you to try that which you previously believed was beyond your reach?

(In case you are wondering, the third trip we took was to Breckenridge, Colorado, which has many tamer slopes. I was bored.)

The Tail Wagging The Dog

In the March 1st edition of CIO Magazine, I found an article about Sheppard Mullin, an AmLaw 100 firm with offices throughout California, installing an Enterprise Relationship Management (ERM) system.

Victoria Spang, the firm’s CMO, was hailed as a visionary implementing what I am certain is just another useless application in a crowded Knowledge Management (KM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) environment. What she and CIO Magazine neglect to understand is that, consistent with the demise of both KM and CRM, ERM has very little to do with the system and much more so with a process.

Personal, functional, and strategic relationships critical to cross-selling to various practice competencies within a law firm will heavily depend on the systematic, disciplined, consistent and quantifiable manner in which individual attorneys develop and nurture those relationships.

Software that tracks e-mail patterns to detect relationships lacks any credibility in identifying the intent, diversity, or quality of those relationships. Furthermore, ranking relationships according to their perceived strengths is myopic at best without taking into consideration or incorporating in a business rule the actual business stature of both the attorneys within the firm as well as the executives they engage outside the firm.

Although I commend Ms. Spang for her leadership in this area, we believe the painful lessons learned from failed KM and CRM implementations in the past should mandate any organization embarking on strategic relationship planning to validate a concrete process before attempting to “leverage relationship capital with little human intervention.”