Human-Centered Change & Innovation

Errors You May Be Making in Your Customer Experience: "Maintaining a website or mobile experience with a high degree of usability is essential to maximize business outcomes, and people who are frustrated often take for granted how easy it is in the digital world to simply click over to a competitor. Even worse are cases where determined customers simply cannot figure out how to proceed to complete a transaction, or otherwise achieve their goals. At FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency, we regularly conduct both in person and online usability tests for our clients to observe “real” users engaging with their digital experience. This gives us enormous insight into where users are encountering frustration, confusion, or other difficulties, and while we are huge believers in robust usability testing as a tool to identify and prioritize which aspects of a digital touch point should be optimized (and really, it’s not terribly time-consuming or expensive), there is a little-known trick that can start to identify many problems. While not as comprehensive as user testing, it’s generally much faster, and therefore, a great place to start! What is that place? The server’s error logs. While it may not sound super sexy, your error logs contain a treasure trove of data." Continue reading Howard Tiersky's latest guest post for Human-Centered Change & Innovation here: https://lnkd.in/eWCCPDWY #customerexperience #marketing #digital #transformation

Five Keys to Company Longevity: "The quest for immortality is as old as humankind. From King Gilgamesh in 2100 BCE to Jeff Bezos and Larry Page, the only thing that stops our pursuit of longevity is death.  So why don’t we apply this same verve and vigor to building things that last forever? Why don’t we invest in corporate longevity? Consider this—in the last 80 years, human life expectancy increased by almost 30% while corporate life expectancy declined by almost 500%. Other research indicates that the average company’s lifespan on the S&P 500 Index dropped from 60 years in 1960 to just under 15 years in 2024. We spend billions on products to slow, stop, and even reverse aging. Yet, according to the New York Times, there are just seven keys to living longer. Could achieving corporate longevity possibly be just as simple?" Continue reading Robyn M. Bolton's latest guest post for Human-Centered Change & Innovation here: https://lnkd.in/gcD-rSAA #innovation #growth #leadership #success

You Are Probably Not Prepared to Innovate: "Becoming a successful executive is a fairly linear path. You start at the bottom and learn to solve basic problems in your field or industry. As you gain experience and improve your skills you are given more responsibility, begin to manage teams and work diligently to set up the practices and processes to help your team succeed. The best executives make those around them better, by fostering a positive work environment, minimizing drama and providing strategy and direction that will enable the team meet its objectives. That’s how you deliver consistent results and continue to rise up through the ranks to the top of your profession. At some point, however, you need to do more than just plan and execute strategy, you have to innovate. Every business model is disrupted eventually. Changes in technology, competitive landscape and customer needs make that inevitable and, unfortunately, executive experience doesn’t equip you for it. Here are four things that will help you make the shift from operations to innovation." Continue reading Greg Satell's latest guest post for Human-Centered Change & Innovation here: https://lnkd.in/dJ2gKR5v #innovation #leadership #motivation #success

SpaceX is a Masterclass in Innovation Simplification: "This capture from a recent SpaceX tweet is a stunning visual example of smart innovation and simplification. While I’m not even close to being a rocket scientist, and so am far from familiar with all of the technical details, I’ve heard that breakthroughs incorporated into this include innovative sensor design that allows for streamlined feedback loops. 📠 But this goes beyond just impressive technical innovation.  To innovate at this level requires organizational and cultural flexibility as well as technical brilliance. That latter flexibility is probably far more broadly transferable and adoptable than specific advances in rocket science, and hence more useful to the broader innovation community. So, let’s dig a little deeper into that space. 🥤 Secret Sauce? Organizationally SpaceX is well known for ..." Continue reading Pete Foley's latest guest post for Human-Centered Change & Innovation here: https://lnkd.in/gJqRB254 #technology #innovation #design #success

This week we bring you articles from Shepard (Shep) Hyken, Mike Shipulski, Greg Satell, Dr. David Burkus, Howard Tiersky and Robyn M. Bolton on innovation, artificial intelligence, customer service, growth, branding, technology and change. #innovation #technology #ai #change

Who Are the Most Important People in Your Company? "When the fate of your company rests on a single project, who are the three people you’d tap to drag that pivotal project over the finish line? And to sharpen it further, ask yourself “Who do I want to lead the project that will save the company?” You now have a list of the three most important people in your company. Or, if you answered the second question, you now have the name of the most important person in your company. The most important person in your company is the person that drags the most important projects over the finish line. Full stop. When the project is on the line, the CEO doesn’t matter; the General Manager doesn’t matter; the Business Leader doesn’t matter. The person that matters most is the Project Manager. And the second and third most important people are the two people that the Project Manager relies on." Continue reading Mike Shipulski's latest guest post for Human-Centered Change & Innovation here: https://lnkd.in/gGg4qzpy #innovation #technology #leadership #success

Aligning Leadership Goals with Customer Service Excellence: "My friend Sterling Hawkins just wrote a great article about the tension between the leadership of a company and the salesforce. Hawkins reports the president of a Fortune 500 company told him, “Tension between the salesforce and leadership is normal. One is always bargaining with the other for more. The sales team wants more time and budget, and the leadership wants more sales.” That made me think of the tension that is sometimes created between leadership and the customer service team. In the end, it’s mostly because of unrealistic expectations. It reminds me of an episode of Amazing Business Radio when I interviewed Bill Price, Amazon’s first VP of global customer service, who shared founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’s philosophy about customer service, which was that the experience should be so frictionless that customers wouldn’t need support." Continue reading Shepard (Shep) Hyken's latest guest post for Human-Centered Change & Innovation here: https://lnkd.in/ehfrJmZh #leadership #alignment #customerservice #customerexperience

What We Have Learned About Digital Transformation Thus Far: "We are well into our first decade of digital transformation, with both the successes and the scars to show for it, and we can see there is a long way to go. Realistically, there is probably never a finish line, so I think it is time for us to pause and take stock of what we have learned, and how best we can proceed from here. Here are three lessons to take to heart. 🏈 Lesson 1: There are three distinct levels of transformation, and operating model transformation is the one that deserves the most attention. The least disruptive transformation is to the infrastructure model. This should be managed within the Productivity Zone, where to be fair, the disruption will be considerable, but it should not require much in the way of behavior change from the rest of the enterprise. Moving from data centers to cloud computing is a good example, as are enabling mobile applications and remote work centers. The goal here is to make employees more efficient while lowering total cost of IT ownership. These transformations are well underway, and there is little confusion about what next steps to take." Continue reading Geoffrey Moore's latest guest post for Human-Centered Change & Innovation here: https://lnkd.in/d8Y-idTM #digital #transformation #learning #leadership

The Coming Leadership Confidence Crisis: "Executive Trust in Their Teams is Plummeting – Here is How to Rebuild It" "“Trust no one. Suspect everyone.” Great advice if you’re an MI6 agent trying to uncover a spy at the height of the Cold War. Not great advice if you’re a senior executive responsible for leading a team to deliver record results. So, when a report titled “Leadership Confidence Falls to Three-Year Low” was published, I hoped it was clickbait. So I clicked. Things only got worse. While two-thirds of CEOs believe that their teams role model the right culture and behaviors, work together effectively as a team, and effectively embrace change, everyone else disagrees. Only about half the C-suite believes their teams work together well, are role models, and embrace change. The lower in the organization you go, the lower those percentages get. Why confidence is at an all-time low:" Continue reading Robyn M. Bolton's latest guest post for Human-Centered Change & Innovation here: https://lnkd.in/gweea-dW #innovation #transformation #leadership #success