Value Added Thinking to Ace Instant Gratification

We, as a nation, have to think of new ways of adding value to our people and teams and get out of the instant gratification syndrome.

Today, it was reported that the Indian Cricket Captain said it is ok if one player wants to not play in a match.

This makes a lot of sense. We have 11 players in a country with a population of 1.3 billion. In contrast, Australia has 26 million, the UK 67 million and New Zealand 5 million. Imagine the pressure of being 11 out of 1300,000.000 versus 11 out of 5,000,000. Twenty-six times more.

We have so many great player waiting in the wings.

With this kind of pressure and competition, Indian players have to preserve their positions. They play somewhat scared and cautious. Add to this the tremendous onslaught of experts, of media putting a player who does well on a pedestal and bringing him down the next time he fails. Look at Surya Kumar Yadav. Hero of 20-20, killed by ODIs.

Players like Sehwag played their strokes naturally and played commandingly. Many Indian players seem dominated.

This cautious thinking goes into our research where we tolerate no wrong moves but expect instant gratification; into our investments and through our expectations.

We as a people must mature, and go beyond being competitive and looking for winners.

When I lived in the USA, it took me time to understand:

Why winning was everything

That USA has no idea what competition is.

Why winning is everything: I used to be amazed to see in American football, and other games where people were willing to kill to win. Winning was everything, and controlled value co-destruction to become winners was important. I came from India and a culture of it is not about winning but how you play the game. Our athletes are learning that winning is important. Our media downplays our losses and aggrandises our wins. The media does not display a sense of balance when it comes to players not performing. Aggrandise less and accept some poor performance.

The USA has no idea what competition is: I used to think Americans are very competitive. See Coke and Pepsi as an example. When I returned to India, I realised Coke and Pepsi competed with known rules of the game. When they came to India, they could not fathom how to compete with and win over ThumsUp. The only solution was to destroy it somehow or to buy it.

In India we compete to get into a bus, into a school, into a college (even 23 IITs are not enough, we need more to reduce competition). Availability becomes more important.

So, to end, we need 4 to 20 national type teams. That may be impractical. How about allowing national teams to play in IPL for example to show that some of these Indian teams are not inferior. For example, many non IIT students are not inferior if given a chance.

Our way of thinking has to change. How do we add value to our people and our teams? Your ideas for such a change?

Gautam Mahajan, President, Customer Value Foundation
Founder Editor, Journal of Creating Value jcv.sagepub.com
New Delhi 110065 +91 98100 60368
mahajan@customervaluefoundation.com
http://www.customervaluefoundation.com
Twitter @ValueCreationJ
Blogs: https://customervaluefoundation.wordpress.com/
Author of Value Creation, Total Customer Value Management, Customer Value Investment, How Creating Customer Value Makes you a Great Executive, The Value Imperative, Value Dominant Logic, Customer Value Starvation can Kill
Join the Creating Value Alliance at creatingvalue.co

Does Value Creation Need Financial Incentives?

When you wake up in the morning do you say I will Create Value today?

Before you can think of financial incentives for Value Creation, it is important that Value be understood and recognized and also be measured. As you read further, you will relate to these important aspects of Value Creation.

Studies have shown that incentives do not improve the innovativeness of creative people. An experiment was conducted on two groups of creative people assigned to create a faster process. The first group was asked to increase the average speed. The second group was incentivized as individuals: the fastest two would get rewards. The first group members did better than the incentivized group. Further studies have shown that incentives work best for routine jobs. ‘More pay for laying more bricks’ works.

Value Creation by employees has hitherto been an unconscious process. Few employees get up in the morning and say today I will create value. In fact, they do not know often know when they are creating or destroying value.

We are now suggesting to companies that the role of an executive and leaders is to create value. We give examples of how value can be created or destroyed.

Now employees start to consciously think about creating value. What is this value and how is it perceived by others? How can it be measured? Intangibles are the most difficult to measure. Intangibles include corporate culture, brands, intellectual property, and employee assets. Value Creation impacts all these. So, Creating Value in intangibles is even more difficult to measure unless one is using quantitative measures. Qualitative metrics ask recipients about value creation or whether they perceive value? Did they feel good, did they see a benefit? Were they happier with this? Would they do business again? What did they think of the employee? Were the errors reduced? Were systemic problems identified and corrected? Is the brand equity of the employee increasing?

Intangible assets include all your stakeholder assets (such as customer assets, employee assets, partner assets, ESG assets, shareholder assets) and goodwill, brand equity, Intellectual properties (Trade Secrets, Patents, Trademark and Copyrights), Knowledge assets (including what does not work), licensing, Technology assets, social assets, value creation assets (and avoiding value destruction).

Moshe Davidow of Carmel Academic Center in Haifa, Israel and I had a delightful conversation on identifying and measuring value. Certain transactions, said Moshe create value because the transaction ended in your buying something. countered, if you had no choice but to buy, the transaction might have destroyed Value (for example having to buy an expensive plane ticket on a route having little competition). We agreed value can be created or destroyed and this can be recognized by the receiver. We went on to discuss how value can be measured, and the value of a transaction.

Measurements change and improve, added Moshe, but we have to start somewhere. What gets measured gets done. The model he used to measure complaint handling when he was a manager is different (and less good) than the one he uses today. Rules change, and measurement changes (leading to managerial changes). In soccer, a tie was worth one point, and a win was worth two points, so there were a lot of tie games. When winning became worth three points, suddenly more teams started to go for the win instead of the tie. The game had changed….

Typically, said Moshe, satisfaction or service quality is expectation minus perceived performance, and is measured soon after the transaction. Value is what it cost versus what benefits you got. Was it worthwhile? When you read this article, you are expending your time, and value is created for you if the time was spent in a worthwhile fashion or you got something worthwhile out of the article. Value therefore goes beyond satisfaction, and you can measure Value of a transaction on a 10 point scale (and preferably against competing transactions). So how would you rate this article vs. the time you spent on a ten point scale?

And you can see why I am against a rating of a lecture or a workshop at the end of the lecture. Do you rate based on what you learnt or on the quality of the lecture (was it fun?) or should you rate it on how you can use the learning. And if your boss sent you and he paid for you to attend the workshop, I would ask him a month later was it worth your while to send Joe Blow to the workshop. He would rate the workshop based on how Joe used the learnings or how he had changed (and versus the cost such as fees and travel and the loss of Joe’s time at work), and not on whether Joe had a good time. That is why Value goes beyond satisfaction on a transaction and can be measured on a ten point scale. Moshe agreed.

So as Value is being created and is being recognized, we can also measure value albeit in some kind of a personal, perceived fashion. This concept can be improved by smarter people than me (read you).

Take Jim Carras who worked with Phil Crosby. He told me that a potential customer, a current customer and a past customer are the primary targets for Creating Value. Till a company or organization truly understands the customer’s emotional feelings and traits (the key drivers companies should impact), and what changes these emotions, they can never know what it takes to create value for the customer. Let’s assume a company does have good data to support how customers really feel, and they also know what their company can do to increase “Customer Value”, they have the bigger problem: how do they translate that down to their company employees so they can make a deliberate attempt to change what they do to impact Customer Value. You can’t just tell employees to create Customer Value, because they need to know and then apply action based on factual information. While I agree with Jim on expected or suggested Value Creation, I believe as a start just going beyond your job requirements will create value or not doing your job will destroy value (being rude is an example of value destruction).

I believe (says Jim) the critical component of Value Creation is first, the ability of a company to truly understand the emotional drivers for what drives their customers value, and then second, the ability to translate that into every employee in the company, the processes they follow, and the tools or technology they use.

And then we come to incentivizing the Value Creation. As long as the activity is new and increases value to the stakeholders (including employees, customers, partners, unions, society and the company), it requires some creativity and often conscious creativity. Can we or should we incentivize such creativity? And how do we differentiate between Value Creation and expected work or expected tasks? And then how do we measure these?

The easy answer is that Value Creation becomes obvious. We notice it, just as we would notice a smile on a normally frowning person, or helpfulness of a generally unhelpful person (or company). But sometimes you Create Value in not so obvious ways, or in ways people do not notice. You replace 4 spoke revolving office chairs with 5 spoke ones which are much safer, but no one realizes safety has been improved and Value has been created.

However, there are means to measure Value as pointed out earlier, and slowly measurement methodologies can be implemented.

For these creative people, can we improve their value creation propensity by incentivizing? Will they create more value? I have 18 patents, and incentivizing would not have made me more creative. Nor was I less creative because I received no incentives.

What is your take on this?

Moshe ended by saying, this is an exciting time to be working on Value Creation!

Best,

Gautam Mahajan, President, Customer Value Foundation
Founder Editor, Journal of Creating Value jcv.sagepub.com
New Delhi 110065 +91 98100 60368
mahajan@customervaluefoundation.com
http://www.customervaluefoundation.com
Twitter @ValueCreationJ
Blogs: https://customervaluefoundation.wordpress.com/
Author of Value Creation, Total Customer Value Management, Customer Value Investment, How Creating Customer Value Makes you a Great Executive, The Value Imperative, Value Dominant Logic, Customer Value Starvation can Kill
Join the Creating Value Alliance at creatingvalue.co

Workplace Questionnaire

Dear Friends:

I am happy to share the news of a Value Addition Courses at Delhi University.

I am also enclosing global survey on Workplace conflict and collaboration done by my associates Karin Hurt and David Dye. Do take 5 minutes to complete this. Thanks

Will you help share the future of workplace conflict and collaboration? Would you please take a few minutes and share your experiences and insights in the World Workplace Conflict and Collaboration Survey. It takes about 5 minutes to complete and will inform Karin Hurt and David Dye’s next book. They will be joining us at our New Delhi conference in December and we will be amongst the first to review their findings.

THANKS!

Best,

Gautam Mahajan, President, Customer Value Foundation
Founder Editor, Journal of Creating Value jcv.sagepub.com
New Delhi 110065 +91 98100 60368
mahajan@customervaluefoundation.com
http://www.customervaluefoundation.com
Twitter @ValueCreationJ
Blogs: https://customervaluefoundation.wordpress.com/
Author of Value Creation, Total Customer Value Management, Customer Value Investment, How Creating Customer Value Makes you a Great Executive, The Value Imperative, Value Dominant Logic, Customer Value Starvation can Kill
Join the Creating Value Alliance at creatingvalue.co

Attitude is Key to Value Creation

Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude…Zig Ziglar

The difference between Aptitude and Ability is that aptitude is the potential, which has as yet not been tapped and trained to a skill level, whereas ability as the word describes is, it is present here and now in the individual.

Attitude is a positive or negative or indifferent feeling towards a person, object, event or idea. Aptitude is a competency (ability) to do certain kind of work.

Attitude is about how we do things or how we approach things and the state of mind- positive-negative or bored, while aptitude indicates the things, we are capable of doing.

The idea of this article to show how important attitude is for humans, and for your work life, whether a manager or a worker.

In my 8A’s of management, I talk about Awareness, Attitude, Agility, Anticipation, Adaptability, Ambidextrousness, Ability and Aptitude, and of course, Action.

You can see attitude is very important. It is a mindset that allows you to do or not do things, to want to do or not want to do. If you approach work or a task with a positive attitude, you will be a winner. “Having a positive attitude means being optimistic about situations, interactions, and yourself. People with positive attitudes remain hopeful and see the best even in difficult situations. In contrast, those with negative attitudes may be more pessimistic and disagreeable, and typically expect the worst outcome in tough situations.” (Taken from https://blog.hubspot.com/service/positive-attitude). If you wish to create value, a positive attitude helps. It helps in being optimistic, reducing stress, dealing with disappointments, becoming more understanding and empathetic and more grateful. Positive attitudes help you change your perspective, become more compassionate, not take things personally, and being happy with others success. Courage, optimism, gratitude, acceptance, willingness to change direction and thinking, acceptance and being self-forgiving, especially for failures. Allow others to love you. Accept no one is perfect including yourself, and accept failure, and tackle it, be resilient. People with great attitude tend to be more accepting, more cheerful, willing to do with little etc. You have more energy, and you come across as better people than negative people. You have a can-do approach versus a cannot do thinking, and more self-confidence.

You can see these are all traits that you need to create value for yourself and others.

Obviously, you need aptitude and ability to be able to do things.

Attitude gives you faith. The enemy of faith is doubt (even though it is a necessity for seeking knowledge and removing ignorant beliefs and reduces errors). So, for success embrace faith tempered with doubt is part of attitude.

Thus, when you look for people look for those with ability and a positive attitude. People’s sense of purpose and passion is important, but cannot make up for lack of ability and a poor attitude. Look for attitude and purpose and passion to create value, and you too will be a winner.

The Man Who Thinks He Can
BY WALTER D. WINTLE

If you think you are beaten, you are;

If you think you dare not, you don’t;

If you want to win but think you can’t;

It’s almost a cinch you won’t.

If you think you’ll lose, you’re lost;

For out of the world we find

Success begins with a person’s will;

It’s all in a state of mind.

Life’s battles don’t always go

To the stronger and faster human,

But sooner or later the people who win

Are the ones who think they can.

Best,

Gautam Mahajan, President, Customer Value Foundation
Founder Editor, Journal of Creating Value jcv.sagepub.com
New Delhi 110065 +91 98100 60368
mahajan@customervaluefoundation.com
http://www.customervaluefoundation.com
Twitter @ValueCreationJ
Blogs: https://customervaluefoundation.wordpress.com/
Author of Value Creation, Total Customer Value Management, Customer Value Investment, How Creating Customer Value Makes you a Great Executive, The Value Imperative, Value Dominant Logic, Customer Value Starvation can Kill
Join the Creating Value Alliance at creatingvalue.co

You have already reduced Customer Value if you need Service Recovery

My comments on Service Recovery as Your Superpower. So often I hear having a service and doing a great service recovery is good for you. Is an unnecessary service because of a defect good for a customer? Get rid of these to increase value.

As soon as you believe this, you are a loser. If you need service recovery it means you are already losing customers for not being effective and for not doing the right things in the first place. If you reach this point, you do need service recovery. But why reach this point? How can you prevent reaching this point?

Have a policy of zero defects. This means we try our best that the customer does not require service other than routine maintenance. This should become your motto. If this happens, your market share will rise, and if you are looking to service recovery, then your market share is by definition lower and you are trying to get out of this problem by super recovery.

Imagine a car manufacturer knowing fully well there will be a defect and his attitude is if the defect surfaces, we will service the car, and give super service. This is a loser’s way of thinking. He should be avoiding defects.

Reach the point where your products do not need service other than routine maintenance.

We know this is a difficult plateau to reach, but it is a worthwhile goal. How can you achieve zero defects and zero complaints? If you have zero defects, then there should be no complaints on the product and the system. If there are problems with the system, with your information, ease of using your product, ease of getting information, ease of building a relationship, then you are close to reaching a point of no need for service,

What does this imply:

1. A change of mindset: This includes a change of thinking we can solve problems if they occur. The mind set of creating customer value is to have no problems whatsoever.
2. Get a chief problem solver who understands what customers want, collates customer complaints and comments, and then sets a course of action to make this happen
3. Make service a profit centre. It will become one when you are not fighting fires and doing service recovery
4. Measure customer value and see where you are worse than competition on important items that customers consider create value for them. You want to be better than competition. Do a root cause analysis and eradicate issues that are irritating or troublesome.
5. Make it easy for the customer to contact you, solve problems and even build a relationship. Many companies such as Ecovacs have this policy and when I first needed help, the person who took care of me said, here is my mobile number, call me whenever you need help. How comfortable for me.

Service recovery is like reworking items that did not pass QC and reworking them to bring them up to snuff (instead of making them right in the first instance). Customers do not have the time or energy for this. Fix problems so that the customer is really happy. He does not want unnecessary experiences. No experience is a good experience. This is what most customers want.

Fundamentally learn where to place your energies to create value and think differently to create no problems for the customer that you may need to rectify.

Best,

Gautam Mahajan, President, Customer Value Foundation Founder Editor, Journal of Creating Value jcv.sagepub.com New Delhi 110065 +91 98100 60368 mahajan@customervaluefoundation.com http://www.customervaluefoundation.com Twitter @ValueCreationJ Blogs: https://customervaluefoundation.wordpress.com/ Author of Value Creation, Total Customer Value Management, Customer Value Investment, How Creating Customer Value Makes you a Great Executive, The Value Imperative, Value Dominant Logic, Customer Value Starvation can Kill Join the Creating Value Alliance at creatingvalue.co

Value Centers

I recently wrote about Customer Relevance. One way to make any department or stakeholder relevant is to convert it into a value center.
Value Centers are what were traditionally thought of as cost centers. Later we tried to make these profit centers. They really need to be value centers

For example:

Service was considered a cost center. Some companies have tried to convert these into profit centers. Fewer have tried to make them value centers, whereby customers and those contacting and working with the value center receive high value, i.e. they feel good, they feel valued, they feel they are special, and the service is first rate. This then converts service users into advocates of the company, increasing its sales, and thereby profits. Make service a value center. HDFC Ergo’s cashless health insurance service is so fast and seamless, that customers like me would be foolish to leave them. It is becoming a value center.

Call Centers are a prime example of a center that can create value, i.e. become a value center. Unfortunately, many call centers leave customers disgruntled, or frustrated, with half information or half-finished tasks. The problem is the reporting system of the call centers. It is based on efficiency and speed of action and shorter duration calls. It is not based on the customer satisfaction or experience. Generally, call center people are at the lowest rung of the corporate ladder. They are not properly empowered with the right software, information or tools to solve customer problems. I always tell my client’s VPs to spend an hour or so every now and then with call canter people so that the VPs can listen to the problems faced by the call center people and consequently the customers, and get a sense of customer issues. Another idea for companies is to have one call a week sent at random to a CXO. If they cannot solve the customers problems, the call center software will be changed. AI can also help. Convert call centers into value centers. We had call center people meet VPs of a Godrej division. The VPs who had been looking for years at call center reports and seeing improvements in number of calls handled etc. were shocked at basic problems faced by customers, which they proceeded to correct.

Governance: often becomes a compliance tool, must do to avoid penalties. It is not considered a value center where companies can become better citizens and are sought by their customers for their ethics, their fairness, in short for their values and traits. The Tata companies in India are an example of good governance, and in a sense their governance is considered a value center.

Sustainability: Many companies consider this a necessary evil. Others try to use PR to pretend they are sustainable, and this leads to green washing or value washing. If companies convert sustainability efforts into profit centers or value centers, they will soon find that this leads to their company being chosen over competitors or being quoted for their good work which causes customers to prefer such companies. Unilever was preferred for edible oil in retail because they phased out non-sustainable production of palm oil, and their procurement of such oils from sustainable conscious suppliers increased the cost. Customers were willing to pay for this and selected Unilever for their effort.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): Here is yet another area that can be a value centre and promote your company. For example, in India, heavy earthmoving equipment suppliers are setting up skilling centers whose cost is covered by CSR funds. This increases their visibility, their reach, and users understand the advantages of their equipment, making them the preferred and word of mouth supplier. This also ensures proper and efficient use of the equipment by skilled operators.

The above are just a few examples of value centers. Remember these will break silos, encourage a different mindset, and help make companies more profitable, because of increased customer recognition and desirability and therefore more sales.

Values Create Value: We have shown at Tata Power through studies that Values Create Value. Customer choosing a power company were not influenced by the quality of electricity and service (they were similar in most companies) but by the trust in Tata Power, their ethics, their efforts to be sustainable and reduce costs. This caused more customers to move to them over competition.

We believe creating Value centers will lead to better and stakeholder focussed thinking, and will make companies more human, more approachable, more desirable and more relevant to the stakeholder with fewer complaints.

Are you working toward such value goals?

Best,

Gautam Mahajan, President, Customer Value FoundationFounder Editor, Journal of Creating Value jcv.sagepub.comNew Delhi 110065 +91 98100 60368mahajan@customervaluefoundation.comhttp://www.customervaluefoundation.comTwitter @ValueCreationJBlogs: https://customervaluefoundation.wordpress.com/Author of Value Creation, Total Customer Value Management, Customer Value Investment, How Creating Customer Value Makes you a Great Executive, The Value Imperative, Value Dominant Logic, Customer Value Starvation can KillJoin the Creating Value Alliance at creatingvalue.co

Value and Relevance: Display Customer Relevance

So much is written about value and about customers, and customer value. Likewise, money is spent on creating value. One prime example is CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility). A given percentage of corporate profits has to be spent on CSR. Most CSR spending is not relevant to creating value for the company, other than as a charitable tool. If spent wisely in areas that could improve the company’s image, especially with customers and other stakeholders, and get more people wanting to do business with them, then the CSR money is spent on creating value for the company and the spending becomes relevant.

So much work is done by companies to improve the lot of the customers. However, the spending the work does not lead to an improvement in satisfaction (see the ACSI or American Customer Satisfaction Index). The ACSI score is 73 today, the same as what it was in the year 2000.

Has satisfaction not improved? Are people working on relevant areas or spending money foolishly led by eager executives and consultants with little knowledge? One must ask and get answers for this question.

Recently Prof. Prasad Naik suggested among other ideas, a Customer Focused Strategy. He went on to say: Measure what is important and focus on it.

He is making a case for relevant work.

Experience is too omnibus a term and that is what makes it less effective. It is not always focused on what is truly relevant to the customer. One learns very soon that one cannot be all things to all people. We have to be relevant and useful.

The Role of Customer Mindset Metrics is important as Prof Naik says, ‘It is not experience alone but the mindset.’ Experience can influence the mindset to some extent, but it is the customer’s mind we must understand. This is what I have been preaching. Your mindset truly differentiates you in the eyes of the customer and it shows on how you deal with him and how relevant the dealing is.

Experience and trying to do everything is like the story of the golf balls and sand and coffee. In this, if you put golf balls in a jar, you can fill the spaces with coffee and sand. But if you put the sand in first, there will be no space for the golf balls.

What this says is, if you do not take care of the big things, the important thing, the relevant things first, you will fill the jar with sand and the important things will never have a chance. If you first take care of relevant things, then the small things fall into place or are so irrelevant that we do not need to worry about them. Let this be a lesson for people who want to manage all experiences.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=646465275742722

In the measurement of customer value through a metric called customer value added, we also find out what is important and therefore can concentrate on important things instead of trying to do everything

Measuring Value (Customer Value Added)

Lastly, remember what Bill Price the first global customer service manager for Amazon said to Jeff Bezos: No service is the best service. Service is irrelevant if you are doing things right, when you have zero defects, which leads to zero complaints. How much money you can save by having no defects and no complaints and no service!

Be relevant in your sales pitch, in discussions with your employees and in your life. Customer relevance will make you and your customer successful. Make corporate relevance a part of stakeholder relevance.

Best,

Gautam Mahajan, President, Customer Value Foundation
Founder Editor, Journal of Creating Value jcv.sagepub.com
New Delhi 110065 +91 98100 60368
mahajan@customervaluefoundation.com
http://www.customervaluefoundation.com
Twitter @ValueCreationJ
Blogs: https://customervaluefoundation.wordpress.com/
Author of Value Creation, Total Customer Value Management, Customer Value Investment, How Creating Customer Value Makes you a Great Executive, The Value Imperative, Value Dominant Logic, Customer Value Starvation can Kill
Join the Creating Value Alliance at creatingvalue.co

Hire a Chief Problem Solver to Create Value all round

There is no concentrated effort to reduce complaints in companies. Complaints and customer problems are never put on a priority basis or a war footing. The customer effort is based on giving delight to customers by most companies. However, the bulk of the problems occur because there are small, niggling, mind-bugging problems and hassles customers face, see my book with Walter Viera, Customer Value Starvation.

The concentrated effort will also lead to zero complaints, and so this becomes a worthwhile effort. Most companies have the processes and thinking to reach zero defects, but they have not worked on this. This is a call for them to take one more step to customer relief and nirvana. After all, defects lead to complaints. Zero defects normally mean the products are free of defects. But this does not apply to service, web site information, call waiting, customer journey issues and other easily solvable problems. This is an easy and good way to increase customer value.

For example, my Epson printer every now and then states check ink level. When that happens, it overrides print and scan commands. I have to manually close this alert on the printer. The Epson serviceman shrugs his shoulder and says you have to live with it (meaning do not complain, one sure way not to get to zero complaints!)

Do executives and CEOs truly understand the problems customers are facing? Do they really care or look the other way as Epson does? Do they have a problem solver whose first job is to look for and identify problems and then solve them within the company and outside, to internal and external people and entities.
What are they doing about these? What should they be doing?

Do CEOs initiate sessions on looking for customer problems, possible solutions and how to correct and prevent in the future? I have never heard of such meetings, if they are held at all!
Problems are of two types, inside companies and outside.

Inside companies, problems that employees face in dealing with each other and outside world, e.g. not having answers, having wrong info, not being able to answer or take decisions or reach decision makers, not being able to return calls after promising, not being enabled to solve problem. Sometimes they may be empowered but not enabled (which means supposedly they have the power to solve customer problems but no means and tools to solve them)!

What does an employee do when he hears that the ombudsman does not answer the customer’s complaints, or the grievance cell does not work, for example?

I had this problem with Citibank when I was told to escalate the problem to the ombudsman…who never answered!

Outside companies: you think employees do not notice the problems customers face? Most do, because they talk to customers. Most of the time, they have no way of correcting them or escalating them.

The solution lies in hiring a problem solver. And for the employee to make him aware of the customer’s problem or defects in the company’s systems causing the problem.

Think of a Chief Problem Solver and Zero Complaints and you will be adding more value than all your competition put together!

A couple of examples that could be solved if there was a chief problem solver:

Tata Play: I wanted to renew my annual contract. However, there is no option to renew. The only option is to recharge and by an amount I would select. But what is the annual payment? Is there a discount for lump sum payment? So, I decided to get off the net and tried via WhatsApp. In middle of using WhatsApp, the information page was replaced by an ad of the cricket.

Finally had to call to get the amount Why is it so difficult? Took an hour to pay. Does Tata Play care?

Tata Play probably does not even know these problems exist and if they know, they aren’t bothered.

A Chief Problem solver would have been alerted, and even tried a mock exercise to pay and found the problems and possible solutions.

Some people say use data to find problems. This may or may not bring any problems out. To use data, one must know what data to look for e.g. data on wait time, data on repeat calls, data on long calls and why the calls lasted so long? Was it because the customer had to repeat himself, or the service person had no solution but to tell the customer have you tried this or that?

Data on calls promised to be returned and not returned, data on whether bosses are seeing problems, data on whether CXOs receive a customer complaint, or work on a call desk.

The Chief Problem Officer has to devise how to find problems, by talking to customers, by talking to people within the company and front-line people. He would initial Customer Centric Circles (see my article in the Journal of Creating Value, 3-1, 2017). And then he has to get solutions. He should not become a service centre or call centre but have them collect problems for him to solve in a generic fashion.

Best,

Gautam Mahajan, President, Customer Value Foundation

Founder Editor, Journal of Creating Value jcv.sagepub.com
New Delhi 110065 +91 98100 60368
mahajan@customervaluefoundation.com
http://www.customervaluefoundation.com
Twitter @ValueCreationJ
Blogs: https://customervaluefoundation.wordpress.com/
Author of Value Creation, Total Customer Value Management, Customer Value Investment, How Creating Customer Value Makes you a Great Executive, The Value Imperative, Value Dominant Logic, Customer Value Starvation can Kill
Join the Creating Value Alliance at creatingvalue.co

Redesign work to Create Value

Value, Not Work should be our motto.

In its article, ‘In pursuit of value—not work,’ McKinsey asked, how valuable is your work. They later defined value as being commercial market value. They state work creates market value.

Unfortunately, the article misses the essence of value, how true value is very important, not just market value. They lose track of the definition of work. True value increases market value.

Work cannot be measured as output alone. it is more than that. It has to be measured as the impact and the real value which is benefits the receiver sees versus the costs (which includes price and non-price). The benefits the receiver sees is not just monetary.

You may design work to educate your employees. Then the immediate cash inflow from this training is nil and there is a net outflow and so by Mckinsey’s definition it is not valuable work.

What if you do things a particular way and down the line you realise it is the wrong way of doing things and you have to redesign your effort. According to the definition of Mckinsey it is useless or wasted value. What you learnt might have given you superior knowledge and a leg up over competition, but that has no value according to the article. It may, on the contrary be extremely valuable.

Or if you set out to deliberately mislead competition by doing work that may make them follow your lead, or may make them think you are not a competitor. I worked for a company developing acrylonitrile beverage bottles (the only company in the business was Monsanto). Our company started work on PET secretly but publicly remained in acrylonitrile work. This caused others to take acrylonitrile seriously, an approach we were abandoning.

We define creating value as:

Creating Value is executing normal, conscious, inspired, and even imaginative actions that increase the overall good and well-being, and the worth of and for ideas, goods, services, people or institutions including society, and all stakeholders (like employees, customers, partners, shareholders and society), and value waiting to happen.

So according to this definition, we increased the overall good for our company and therefore created value.

Of course, each company must rethink work, abandoning routine tasks to machines and re utilising people for greater value creating work. Much has to do with creating more value for customers, employees and other stakeholders. This implies we look at hitherto supposed cost centres such as sustainability and convert them to create value for the company and therefore profit centres. Remember, it is creating value we are after not just monetary profit. This implies doing necessary and relevant work on sustainability that our customers and stakeholders such as governments can relate to and give us brownie points or create value for us instead.

Here is a definition of such work:

Necessary work is essential for, vital to, indispensable to, important to, crucial to, needed by, compulsory required by or requisite for the Customer or stakeholder

Relevant work is pertinent to, applicable or germane to, or appropriate to the
Customer or stakeholder. This is work that can be eliminated without material deterioration of present service or product

What work is the Customer/stakeholder willing to pay for or considers creates value for him/her? That would be termed as Necessary and Relevant.

The mindset of workers and executives must go beyond just performing their jobs to consciously creating value. This is one valuable way of improving work.

Mckinsey in an article “Defining the skills citizens will need in the future world of work” has said, and I quote:

• Add value beyond what can be done by automated systems and intelligent machines
• Operate in a digital environment
• Continually adapt to new ways of working and new occupations

While I agree these are necessary, I feel Mckinsey has defined the skills too narrowly in terms of the future of work and life. First and foremost, the skill needed is not just adding value, but creating value to be able to manage and address the future of ourselves, our lives, our way of life (or what is left of it in the changing environment) our work, to think of rewards and risks of AI.
We need to teach executives and workers the meaning of value and how they can add value to their work, their workplace and themselves

• Workers and executives must create value consciously, and understand that performance is not enoug
• Leaders must ensure values and human values are incorporated; establish controls and checks for human intervention and override and supervision
• Make their executives understand that value is created not only by their direct tasks, but by their ideas, their thought process to create value in seemingly unconnected subjects like the environment or thinking about the product complaints and reaching zero complaints. Create value and ensure that the environment is managed and designed for the betterment of life, and not just for efficiency and for giving up our control because AI can do it better
• Be continually adaptive to create continuing value
• Become multi-disciplinary and multi-aware, and conscious about right and wrong.

These might sound trite, but the lure of technology is to do more with less, and that seems to be what technologists endeavour becoming eventually the human thought process is lost. We cannot allow this.

Ejaz Ghani thinking of India is 2030 says there will be a rise of the middle class and there will be a demographic dividend; India will be part of the global talent race; an urban awakening; India will be close to the largest digital economy; with a changing face of globalisation. There will be green growth and gender will be a growth driver. The problem is managing the transition.

So, we need to re-skill and re-teach to manage the future and do so by creating value. Digital democratisation will make people more equal

You must have the right mindset. Creating value is a mindset that can set you ahead and design smartly. Cross disciplinary thinking becomes imperative. Now you are on the path to create valuable work, and to think work is value, and make work valuable.

Thanks,

Gautam Mahajan, President, Customer Value Foundation

Founder Editor, Journal of Creating Value jcv.sagepub.com
New Delhi 110065 +91 98100 60368
mahajan@customervaluefoundation.com
http://www.customervaluefoundation.com
Twitter @ValueCreationJ
Blogs: https://customervaluefoundation.wordpress.com/
Author of Value Creation, Total Customer Value Management, Customer Value Investment, How Creating Customer Value Makes you a Great Executive, The Value Imperative, Value Dominant Logic, Customer Value Starvation can Kill
Join the Creating Value Alliance at creatingvalue.co

Adding Consciousness to AI Creates Value

I have always been worried about the advent of AI, and how it can impact all of us. AI increases efficiency, reduces error and risk, has unbiased decisions and is inhuman.

Do we, for example, want biased decisions? Do we want human decisions or just mere machine decisions? What tasks can we leave safely to AI and which tasks must require human intervention? How can we take advantage of human strengths and machine strengths? Humans have limits in their machine type work. Should AI be used to only help here, or should humans help AI with interventions where consciousness, psychological thinking and awareness is necessary? Can AI become accountable?

I think we need to start with ‘human’ designers, and their cognizance of the dangers of AI, and human limitations. Only ‘smart’ humans can understand and design smart machines, and human like machines that can create value beyond the mechanical and rote value. Can humans think the way AI thinks or could think?

Artificial intelligence by definition is not real intelligence, it has limitations. This has been recognized for years by leaders, and more work is being done in this area. Many humans do not understand that the AI systems could be smarter than humans in logic and systemic thinking.

Much of this started with Guilford in the 1950s when he said creative thought depends on convergent thinking and divergent thinking. Convergent thinking, is the ability to answer questions correctly, and is predominantly a display of memory and logic. Divergent thinking, the ability to generate many potential answers from a single problem or question, shows a flair for curiosity, an ability to think “outside the box.” This is a form of creativity. (Details available in Atlantic magazine). Humans seem to be stronger in divergent thinking than computers who excel in convergent thinking.

However, now systems are being designed with divergent thinking capabilities. This may mean that ‘real’ intelligence is being built in. Perhaps machines can have evolutionary thinking.

For example, Tim Cook suggests that augmented reality (AR) — a technology that combines real-world objects with computer-generated ones — is more psychologically palatable than metaverse. It strikes the right balance of weird and acceptable.

The purpose of this article is not to delve into how artificial intelligence can grow into real or human intelligence but how all of us must understand the limitations. When we use artificial intelligence, we start to realise we are not as smart as we think we are.

Sometimes when creating luxury items and selling them we have to create a n attraction that is human in the buyer: liking, pride of ownership, joy of owning etc. Our approach has to be human centric. Can we use AI to augment our offering to improve mindful attractiveness. Luxury items require us to create extreme value for the buyer. Connecting with communities and sharing values can be augmented by AI. Tickling the imagination and causing psychological value can also be augmented by inputs from humans and machines that can lead the seller intelligently.

Who will control the future? AI or humans? Will there be trustworthy AI systems? For trustworthy systems, we must understand the AI biases, design and how it thinks. Trustworthy systems would let us do this and not misbehave. Systems need to be fair, transparent and explainable. There are many questions that can impact value creation and value destruction.

To create value for ourselves through AI, we then must have this realisation of the limitations, the stream of intelligence and consciousness and awareness that we have and the AI systems have. We must learn where to exercise control, and put safeguards. Then and only then will we create adequate value for ourselves and reduce risks of machine overrides. Remember, AI will be ubiquitous, like electricity, and not like a stealth missile. AI devices maybe implanted in humans, making them smarter.

Gautam Mahajan, President, Customer Value Foundation

Founder Editor, Journal of Creating Value jcv.sagepub.com
New Delhi 110065 +91 98100 60368
mahajan@customervaluefoundation.com
http://www.customervaluefoundation.com
Twitter @ValueCreationJ
Blogs: https://customervaluefoundation.wordpress.com/
Author of Value Creation, Total Customer Value Management, Customer Value Investment, How Creating Customer Value Makes you a Great Executive, The Value Imperative, Value Dominant Logic, Customer Value Starvation can Kill
Join the Creating Value Alliance at creatingvalue.co