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Leadership

Be Remarkable- Word Cloud

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In this season of rebirth, renewal and new beginnings I am reposting one of my most popular posts, Be Remarkable, in a word cloud. Thanks to everyone who has joined me in exploring the intersection of leadership, advice and technology.

I started this blog as a creative outlet for me. I did zero market research to determine an audience and have done nothing special to promote it.  In just a few short months, it has been read thousands of times in more than 35 countries, and I have discovered scores of bright people making an impact on the world around us. I look forward to our ongoing exploration.

This was a speech I gave to coworkers about turning their day to day “jobs” into a rewarding career by connecting to the strengths and passions within themselves. You can read the original post here.

How to Rebuild Trust in Financial Institutions

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I always enjoy reading Ron Shevlin‘s work. He is a senior analyst with Aite Group, where they say he is

“…a recognized thought leader for his pioneering research on right-channeling consumer interactions, the impact of customer advocacy on future purchase intention, and developing sense-and-respond marketing capabilities to improve sales and marketing efforts.”

I’ll buy that.

I also read his provocative and funny insights on his blog Snarketing 2.0 , so I was pleased that he linked to my March 27 post Why Should Your Clients Trust You? in his April 3 post on The Financial Brand, titled 9 Critical Ways Financial Institutions Should Rebuild Trust With Consumers.

In his post, Shevlin says that he has concluded “…that “trust” is too complex a construct to boil down to a simple formula. Trust is multi-dimensional, comprised and influenced by many attributes.”  I agree– I cited David Maister’s formula for trust in my post not because it’s the complete mathematical computation, but because it’s great shorthand for thinking about the way your (and your firm’s) behaviors impact how your clients perceive and trust you.

Shevlin cites Aite Group’s research that found nine critical areas that financial firms must address. It’s only fair that you read his entire post in context to get the whole list, so I will only quote the top three here:

  1. Have friendly and helpful service reps
  2. Listen to problems and concerns
  3. Empower employees to fix issues

None of the items on the list are any more complicated than that. So why is it so difficult for financial institutions to drive trust and brand loyalty?

The simplest concepts are sometimes the most challenging to implement. And the larger your firm, the harder it is to do it consistently.

I still go back to the whole “divided by self-interest” part of Maister’s formula.

If you can only implement one great idea– make it creating and nurturing a culture that really understands client needs and delivers what they want and need, in their best interest.

It’s usually easy to figure out “what’s in it for the firm” in any given interaction. Focus on “what’s in it for the client”.

Why should your clients trust you again?

When Your Accountability Exceeds Your Authority, Increase Your Influence

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When I graduated from college and entered the workforce, I received some good advice from an older executive: “Make sure you don’t end up in a job where you have accountability without authority“, he told me. I nodded sagely as I drunk it in.

I even repeated the advice from time to time to other friends as they interviewed for jobs.

It took me quite a while to understand that as well intentioned as it was, it wasn’t always possible to follow.

It’s actually great advice to keep in mind in your discussions when you’re receiving a new job or a new assignment. You should ask questions to understand how your success will be measured and what the limits are for your authority. Can you replace team members if they don’t perform? Will you have a budget to acquire needed resources? What decisions can you make independently, and which ones do you need to defer to someone more senior?

But ultimately, every job has accountabilities that exceed its authority.

There will always be resources you don’t own, people who report to someone else and circumstances beyond your control potentially standing in the way of your success. Even your CEO can’t control the analysts who opine on your stock, your regulators, your customers, your competitors, or the economy; no matter how important any of those might be to your company’s success.

So what can you do?

Influence.

The best you can do is influence those around you.

Steven Covey talked about the circle of concern and the circle of influence in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People . Your circle of concern can be vast– the economy, existing competitors, the threat of new entrants, your family members’ health, peace in the Middle East. And your circle of control is always smaller than you want it to be. Spend your energy trying to expand your circle of influence, rather than trying to expand your circle of control.

Your formal “authority” is limited to your circle of control. Your “accountability” is your circle of concern. If you’re a financial advisor with the accountability to grow revenue on your book of business by 10% this year, it would be easy to be overwhelmed by the the huge gulf between the relatively few things you can control and the huge amount of things that concern you.

Focus on increasing your influence…

…on your cients.

…on your co-workers.

…on your boss.

…on the world around you.

“The greatest ability in business is to get along with others

and to influence their actions.”

–John Hancock

Best of Bank Innovation 2012- Part 2

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Yesterday I brought to you some of the best thoughts from Day One of the Bank Innovation conference held last week in San Francisco.  It was a great event filled with some of the sharpest minds in financial innovation. Today, I bring you  some of the best ideas from Day Two, plus a few of my closing thoughts.JJatBI2012

Channel Agnosticism: Being Everything to Every Customer

“Multi-channel strategy is solving issues that exist in a single channel world…Think full service vs. self service, not traditional vs. alternative (channels)”

—Ginger Schmeltzer, SVP, Digital Channel Management, SunTrust Banks

“Be the right things to the right people in the right channel…Focus on optimization, not migration…” Think in terms of an analogy to eating:

  • Snacking- wherever, whenever = check your balances, transfers
  • Lunch- diverse, habitual and regular = online banking, bill pay
  • Fine dining- staff assisted =  important and meaningful decisions”

—Geoff Knapp, Vice President, Online Banking & Consumer Insight, Fiserv

“Mobilize and optimize– don’t miniaturize…Continuously evolve the experience as devices change…so many mobile capabilities to leverage– maps, GPS, messaging, speech input, camera, video, etc., etc.”

—Brian Pearce, SVP, Head of Retail Mobile Channel, Internet Services Group at Wells Fargo & Co

My Closing Thoughts

  • There continues to be a tremendous amount of innovation in the payments and transaction space, both from within the banking industry and from disruptive forces outside the industry.
  • Several speakers talked about moving beyond the efficient utility of flawless execution to creating more engaging experiences.
  • There was also increasing talk of creating more consistency in functionality and experiences across multiple channels (web, mobile, apps, mobile web and “real life”)– what Steve Jobs would have called an “ecosystem”.
  • Accordingly, financial institutions are beginning to integrate Big Data into the ecosystem (and vice versa), but most have a long way to go.
  • Most financial institutions are still in the early stages of integrating digital marketing and social media into their overall strategies, and many are still struggling with more basic concerns of sales and revenue growth, talent management and trying to figure out how to take market share from one another.
  • As far as I know, I was the only person in the room with a background in wealth management. I continue to be energized by how much white space there is to explore at the intersection of leadership, advice and technology.
Related articles

Best Ideas From Bank Innovation 2012- Part 1

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Last week I attended the Bank Innovation 2012 Conference in San Francisco. I met a lot of great people and picked up some new ideas. Here’s what stuck out for me (in a good way):

What Is “Banking” Today?  A Debate on the Future

“We need to marry the online experience to the real world experience– especially for high value transactions, while lower value transactions need to get more efficient.”

—Noah Breslow, Chief Operating Officer, On Deck Capital

“In essence, banking is a utility. Removing pain is a win. You need to give clients a reason to care…The key is to use data to predict what customers want, not dictate it.”

—Shawn Budde, Co-Founder & Chief Risk Officer, ZestCash

“We’ve reached the tipping point on electronic banking, but people need a better reason to go with a direct bank.”

—Dan O’Malley, Founder & CEO, PerkStreet Financial

“We should be trying to build brands that people want to be associated with. They should want to wear our logo because it says something about who they are.”

—Jeff Stephens, Founder, Tribed and CBC

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New Product Strategies & Possibilities


“We don’t have an ‘innovation department’. All 2500 associates are responsible for innovation.”

—Todd Sandler, Head of Product Strategy & Deposits, ING Direct

“Consumers want a lot of help, and they still look to banks for it. They are moving past transactions and history, and they want help and advice for the future.”

—James Shanahan, President, Shanahan & Associates, LLC

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Social Banking Without Being Insecure or Annoying

“Companies don’t blog, people do…we replaced logos with faces for our twitter responders and we expanded our 6AM-6PM coverage to 24×7…We pay more attention to sentiment rather than number of followers.”

—Darius Miranda, VP, Social Business Strategist, Wells Fargo

“We actually sat down and wrote 20,000 personalized emails…We got a 40% response rate”

—Josh Reich, CEO, Simple Finance Technology Co. / BankSimple

“You have to think anywhere/anytime and you have to be authentic…You have to connect your brand to employees first. You have to work inside out.”

—Eric Rinebold, Industry Principal — Digital Engagement, Infosys

Coming Up Tomorrow: 

Best Ideas From Bank Innovation 2012- Part 2


Sorry, But You’re No Steve Jobs

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Today is Apple’s 36th anniversary. Appropriately, there was an amusing article in the March 30 Wall Street Journal (Bio as Bible: Managers Imitate Steve Jobs) that described managers who take their admiration of the Apple co-founder beyond inspiration to imitation.

Mindless repetition of another’s actions in hopes of repeating their success may work for a simple task, but not for something as complex and artful as leadership.

Not a new phenomenon

Blatant imitation in the quest for success is hardly a new phenomenon. When I joined the business world in the 1980’s, GE chairman Jack Welch was widely regarded as the prototype for the modern manager. There were a number of factors that contributed to his success, including his contribution to a strong internal culture of developing leaders throughout the company (not to mention the tail wind of a strong economy and stock market during much of his tenure).

But for much of the public and the popular press, he was known simply as “Neutron Jack” in a wry reference to the neutron bomb for his ability to eliminate mass amounts of people while leaving their buildings intact. Welch was not alone. “Corporate raiders” like Carl Icahn, arbitrageur Ivan Boesky, junk bond LBO king Mike Milken and later “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap all grabbed headlines for their particular brands of  cost-cutting to “unlock shareholder value”.

Their ethos was personified in the star of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street– Gordon Gecko, who famously proclaimed that “Greed is good“.

Regardless of the unpleasant (and at times illegal) activities of some, there was a core of truth that many firms and many industries had become bloated with non-productive assets and expenses.

Imitation Without Integration

But other managers blindly imitated these activities, often without  broader context.

Suddenly, managers of every level thought that the key to the corner suite was cost cutting. Never mind that some of those costs were actually investments in their firms’ very future– infrastructure, key activities and key people whose disappearance could prevent paying customers from becoming, well, paying customers any more. Let alone loyal, raving fans.

A unique version of this played itself out in the banking industry too. For sure there were too many competitors with too many expenses to be supported in an efficient market. That’s a big reason why the total number of banks has been cut in half in the past 22 years, as I discussed in my March 26 post Is Bank Merger Mania Imminent?

The New Corporate Buzzwords

But now, the corporate buzzwords that seem to be in favor are some of those favored by Steve Jobs– “innovation”, “ecosystem”, “product focused” and “obsession with perfection”.

Those are all fine traits in the right context, but simply lifting them out of Steve Jobs’s biography and forcing them on your team blindly is not necessarily going to lead your company to become the most valuable in the world.

I recently spent some time with a senior executive who confided to me that her colleague was driving her crazy with his obsessive attention to all the wrong details while major issues have been left unattended. Knowing I can default to sports analogies when trying to make a point, she smiled and said “Let’s put it this way– his team is only scoring two field goals a game, but he’s obsessing over the right shade of color on the uniforms and the selection of halftime music.”

Worse, he had recently read Jobs’s biography and was now using it to justify his unproductively obsessive behaviors.

After all, he was just trying to make the company “insanely great”…

“Sorry, but you’re no Steve Jobs” she wanted to tell him.

Most of us probably aren’t.

Be You Instead

It’s great to pull inspiration from other successful people, but you have to channel that inspiration in a way that is consistent with who you are, and in a way that works for your team.

There was only one Steve Jobs.

Be you instead.

Stop When You Get to Yes!

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That’s classic sales management advice, yet I have seen countless sales professionals ignore it at their peril.

The advice applies outside of sales too, and I just witnessed it yesterday in a whole new context on my flight to San Francisco.

We are all buckled into our (relatively) comfortable exit row seats and the flight attendant had just finished giving us the instructions for operating the doors. As per FAA regulations, she said that she needed to make sure that each and every one of us understood the instructions and that we were ready, willing and able to assist in the event of an emergency, and then she began checking with us one by one.

When she motioned to me in the window seat, I looked her in the eye and said “Yes”, as did the poor guy stuck in the middle seat next to me.  When she turned  to the man seated in the aisle seat, he looked up quizzically and said “Hmm?”.

The flight attendant asked him again if he understood the instructions and if he was ready, willing and able to assist in the event of an emergency.

The passenger replied in a thick accent “Yes. My English is not that bad”.

The flight attendant replied that she was concerned that he might not be able to understand instructions in the chaos of an unlikely emergency and that she was going to have to move him to another seat.

He protested with a few sentences in fluent, if heavily accented, English; trying to assure her that he did understand.

It was too late. the flight attendant had to make a judgment call on the potential safety of passengers, so she moved him.

The guy in the middle seat shrugged and slid over into the now vacated aisle seat, giving both of us the next best thing to first class– reclining exit row seats with an empty middle seat between us.

He knew how to stop when he got to yes.

And I did too.