Authenticity drives intuitive collaboration

Authentic excellence is where every person matters, every time, where their values, behaviors, and standards are in line with organizational values, behaviors, and standards, and both live their values. For such a culture to work, it involves a lot of trust (including sharing vulnerability), self-responsibilities, and collaboration within and across teams.

It is not easy to instill such a culture given that each individual of an organization is different, and each has his/her intention within the organization. For example, being selfless and empathetic is essential in a chaotic and uncertain situation. One should intuitively collaborate, breaking down silos and barriers, knowing their roles, in responding to a volatile situation at the workplace. Being bureaucratic and hierarchical will worsen unforeseen circumstances that require prompt decisions and remedial actions.

We can learn how ants can intuitively collaborate in seeking food without any formal instructions given to each ant on what to do. We need to manage our defensiveness for collaboration cultivation. Eliminating adversaries and internal competitions (or office politics) through effective defensiveness management will increase our skills in resolving conflicts and collaborating for productive outcomes.

In summary, I believe that authentic excellence culture promotes happy bosses and employees working in an organization that rewards teamwork, intuitive collaboration, and selflessness, empathy, sincerity, trust, accountability, and responsibilities. Happy bosses and employees will bring about an aspirational corporate brand image that continues to attract, engage, and retain communities for business sustainability and success.

Accelerating exponential transformation

Albeit the good news of the forthcoming vaccine, companies are under tremendous pressure to transform themselves digitally. The global pandemic is a wake-up call to all companies. Companies need to react quickly to leverage exponential technologies to transform themselves.

How can companies accelerate the process? What would be the typical timeframe? I find that you can reasonably accelerate the process. You can consider the following:

Day 1: Explore the problem that you wish to solve, and identify the external factors that are relating to the problem. Learn more about exponential technologies and disruptive models that can be leveraged.

Day 2: Based on the learnings of Day 1, draw inspiration to generate as many exponential initiative ideas as possible. If you have not crafted your MTP, you can take this opportunity to create MTP ideas. MTP refers to a Massive Transformative Purpose, a highly aspirational purpose that sets the guidance for all policy and initiative decisions. Each exponential initiative idea defines the solution or internal reaction to the problem or external disruption identified. The solution or internal reaction should be disruptive and scalable. The idea can disrupt or keep the current business model.

Day 3: You have now generated a list of possible exponential initiative ideas on Day 2. On Day 3, you will define the key hypotheses of your ideas. Determine whether your intended user group is facing the problem or not. Define the assumptions of the solution idea. You will then run multiple experiments to validate or invalidate the key hypotheses. At this stage, you are essentially testing your preliminary ideas. You have the opportunity to fail early and learn from the failures.

Beyond Day 3: Based on the evaluation of the experiments, select and iterate or generate and test new the idea(s). Besides, developing and testing a minimum viable prototype will help data collection to validate the idea. Throughout the experimentation, work out how the business model hypotheses in generating expected results from the exponential initiative idea(s). The iterative process of developing a workable solution is aimed at bringing your digital transformation idea to life! Of course, please do not forget to learn from the attributes in developing exponential organizations throughout the transformation journey.

Bringing your idea to life will require accelerated implementation involving the right capacities and capabilities. The right capacities and capabilities of people include traits, mindset, attitudes, behaviors, and leadership qualities. In conclusion, having the right people enabled with the right process will accelerate exponential transformation.

Use design thinking in growth marketing

As a junior staff when I started my consulting career, my bosses expected me to sell and develop our services. It has therefore become part and parcel of my career development to build and develop business at an early stage of my career.

Maybe I was naive and am still an infant in sales and marketing. The disruption caused by the pandemic was another wake-up call to me. I need to transform my approach to sales and marketing. I saw how exponential technologies are disrupting businesses and industries, and hence the need for organizations to transform their sales and marketing in the last ten years.

When I was running Genovasi, I learned the need to develop and execute marketing strategies that aim to create awareness and convert the opportunity to sign-up for our courses. Creating awareness and impression that is long-lasting is essential to build loyalty and communities of influencers.

At that time, we have tried and tested many approaches to reach out to our target audience. We used social media channels and traditional channels such as printed media and radio broadcasts. Besides reaching out to the young fresh graduates and working professionals and entrepreneurs, we developed market messaging aim at their parents or guardians, as well as the employers.

We did not have any defined tool to assess the effectiveness of the various channels - we did not have any marketing automation tool nor marketing analytics/dashboards to track and measure the results. We measure the results based on actual sales (or signups) converted. Simple signups league table.

After I left Genovasi, I had the opportunity to learn about various aspects of growth marketing: data-driven marketing campaign, structured digital marketing, unique selling propositions, customer engagement programs, branding. I learned that having the right and relevant market messaging is critical to generate the market results required. It is important to collect and analyze market data results so that market messaging can be quickly tweaked.

I was intrigued by how I could apply the design thinking methodology in growth marketing. I have presented below an illustration of how to create market messaging to deliver a product's unique value proposition using the design thinking methodology.

After all, the design thinking process provides a structured creative problem-solving approach.