THE POCKET SUITE APPROACH

I was recently reading a blog post from Eric Flamholtz, Professor Emeritus at UCLA, a former colleague who I respect immensely.  It reminded me about his book Growing Pains and how a company must excel at many different levels (see his chart on management effectiveness) in order to be successful.

This made me think of The PocketSuite and how we in some ways think about our clients just like medical professionals think about their patients today.  A good doctor doesn’t just give you a pill for your high-blood pressure and tell you to take one every day – they push you to eat better, get enough sleep and make sure to exercise.  It’s not about just treating the symptom but about treating the underlying causes to make sure that you live a long, productive life.

Here at The PocketSuite we focus on 3 key areas – the customer, data and analytics and culture.  Why these three?  Because they are are critical to making sure that your company will be successful and are inherently linked to each other.   Think of them as spokes on a wheel – if they are not all the same length and make your wheel a nice circle then you’re in for one heck of a bumpy ride!

Customer – you have to know your customer to make sure that your value proposition, brand & marketing strategy and customer experience all are aligned to your target customer.

Big data – in order to understand your customer, execute on your customer experience and measure your performance you need to have the right data, systems and processes in place.

Culture – finally if your leadership team is not aligned and your culture doesn’t incent the right behaviors, how will the right strategies be implemented in a coordinated cohesive manner to ensure that you are successful.

How many of you have worked for a company where you had all the right people, good reporting and KPI’s but for some reason growth was not quite up to expectations?  Maybe you hadn’t determined who your target customer was, or your customer was actually different than what you thought.  Or how about a team where the product was great, customers were great but you seemed like a company somewhat out of sync – cultural and organizational misalignment.  Or even trying to run a business without having any visibility into how you were performing.

What my PocketColleagues (PocketCMO, PocketCGO) and I (PocketCXO) have found is that if you struggle in one area you tend to struggle in others.  If you haven’t defined your customer then different groups are making assumptions about your customer and running in different directions.  If you’re not organizationally and culturally aligned then you’re not focusing on the same metrics and working together.  And if you don’t have data then everyone is making assumptions about everything.

How do you feel after taking our twelve questions?  Do you think you are focused on your customer, aligned in your culture and have the right infrastructure?  We would love to hear your thoughts!