I’ve been facilitating strategy away days for many years now. But I’ve also been a participant, as a director/manager within the various organizations in which I’ve worked. So I’ve been able to look at them from both sides of the fence.

I’ve been interested in what people think about these events, so I recently decided to search for “away days” in the FT. I came across a great article by Andrew Hill  from 2016  – “Strategy days away days are an absurd but useful ritual”. Still very topical.

His premise was that away days are becoming ever more complex, increasingly whacky (“I’ve brainstormed, flipped charted, post it noted and erected spaghetti and marshmallow towers with colleagues”) and the destination (hotel/resort) is seemingly more memorable than the discussions! He quoted a couple of predictable, if depressing statistics. 39% of managers felt away days had no impact on productivity and nearly 1 in 10 thought they were negative or very negative.

I’ve looked at my experience of away days and what I typically found as a participant was that they were either run by an ill prepared CEO or outsourced to some larger than life character who just didn’t seem to understand either the business or the culture. Either scenario resulted in increasing discomfort amongst participants.

I’ve also noticed how away days have become some sort of strategic sheep dip! 200 managers; divided 25 groups; syndicate rooms plastered with post it notes; some unlucky people from training and development assigned the impossible task of making sense of the “brainstorms”. Everyone starts to feel a bit disenfranchised. What was the point?  Roll on the bar!

This is all fine if away days are symbolic jollies. But what a missed opportunity.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

Strategy away days can be a real force for good. But only if the participants have played an active part in formulating actual outputs. Here are five pointers:

• Define the territory. For an SME it can cover the whole business. For a larger organisation maybe a function, a product or a segment.
• Define the purpose – focusing on something completely new or reviewing an established product/service.
• Adopt a formal process for the day/s – incrementally building to some options and decisions. Ensure that everyone is comfortable with the process.
• Small is best. 20 max, preferably 15. Can work with 10.
• It’s fine for the CEO/chairman to be involved but they should be equal participants, not facilitators.
• Create a decent working environment – rooms with windows and access to fresh air are more important than compensatory two-hour lunches and never ending Danish pasties.

My experience of away days has led me to design my own away day process. My approach is built around the premise that success is dependent on the participants developing the strategies themselves, but through a logical and tested process. The process is based around practical application of very accessible academic models.

The models (which are taught at different times of the day – about 15 minutes per model) help participants to make sense of the world around them and create strategies with a logic to them. They are the opposite of post it note brainstorming which sounds good but tends to go nowhere.

At the end of the day or the days, the managers themselves will have reached some interesting conclusions – and owned them as well. Then it’s up to them to work out how to apply. And, they’ll also have learnt the basics of the strategy process which can be used in future activity.

I’ve seen some dramatic results come out of away days. New product launches reassessed, in one case cancelled; directors realising they need senior admin support to free up earning time; management teams re-focusing on competitive advantage; over wordy strategic plans cut down in size so that the strategy, not the planning, stands out. Away days really can work!

Julian Rawel is an expert at facilitating away days. Please visit www.marketechoes.co.uk to find out more.

I recently typed this question, “Why are front line customer service people so confused?” into Google. In 0.43 seconds I received “about 250m results”. In fact, I couldn’t find any answers as to why customer service people are so confused. What I did find were many articles about confused customers – “Tell-tale signs your customer is confused” or “Why your confused customers are non-retained customers.”

But over the last weeks several experiences have led me to believe that it’s not the customer but the front-line staff who are seemingly constantly confused. And I am not sure why.

Here are the examples – nothing complicated with any of them, but the complete lack of service let alone interest, left me puzzled.

Last week I was staying on business in a hotel in Belgrade.  As this hotel was out of the town centre, I asked for a walking map of the area. The receptionist found one and I asked where abouts on the map was the hotel? She looked very confused as did her colleague. She said the hotel wasn’t actually marked on the map and proceeded to mark with her pen an area that she thought the hotel was in! Not hugely helpful, especially as when I started looking at the map in a little more detail, I not only found the position of the hotel, I found its name printed in big bold letters! Why did the receptionists seem confused as to where they worked?

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were staying at a very nice hotel in Brighton. In the evening we decided to eat at the hotel. We quite fancied eating in the outside courtyard rather than the main restaurant as the weather was very pleasant. Despite some customers already eating outside, this request caused all sorts of confusion. Eventually the person we were talking to found somebody else, that person also looked confused but just pointed to a table, so there we went and sat down. It took some time to be served because I think the restaurant staff didn’t quite know what to do about someone eating outside in the courtyard even though there were others eating there already.

A couple of days later at breakfast at another hotel, my wife asked if we could have some toast. Other customers had all been served toast. But this appeared to confuse the lady waiting on us. She said she would have to go and ask another waitress which she did. We eventually did get served some toast but it all seemed a somewhat complicated and long process.

I recently took my car in to be serviced at a very well-known car brand’s showrooms and service centre. They’ve obviously gone “very modern”. When you go in now, there’s no reception area, no signposting. Just lots of round tables with people sitting at them. The problem was I wasn’t quite sure whether the people sitting at the tables worked for the car dealership or were customers. And in fact, I’m not especially sure whether they knew. When I asked where I went to book my car in for the service, the people who obviously did work for the car company looked somewhat confused. They did tell me that there was a reception area but that was upstairs and well out of sight.

Finally, recently checking into a hotel in Dubai, I asked whether my request for a no-smoking room had been confirmed. I was checking in relatively late in the evening. The very polite receptionist looked at me rather bewildered. He wasn’t quite sure which rooms were smoking and non-smoking and eventually told me that unfortunately there were no no-smoking rooms left but I’d be quite happy because they were going to upgrade me to a better class of smoking room. Was that not ok?

We know that confusion results in uncertainty. We know that if customers are uncertain they develop all sorts of anxieties about the delivery of the product or service they’re purchasing. It’s the role of service companies and service people to get rid of this confusion. But how can this happen if those very same people appear so confused themselves? And these examples I’ve given you are by no means the only ones I’ve noticed recently.

So what is the problem? It would be easy to trot out the normal responses – lack of good training, lack of formally written down procedures, lack of appropriate recruitment etc. But this is all obvious stuff. And none of the questions I asked at any of these places were in the slightest bit difficult. Nobody needed special procedures or special training to answer them. I’m not even particularly sure that the people serving me were without intelligence or common sense.

So I’ve started to think, what is the reason? My view is that service personnel had probably just become increasingly demotivated and bored with the whole thing. Maybe it’s because they don’t like dealing with customers. Maybe it’s because they’re not looked after by their employers. Maybe it’s because they see service delivery as a transient – here today, gone tomorrow type of job. The answer though, is I just don’t know! I’d be interested to hear your views on this. What do you think?

Market Echoes can help you take a common sense approach to your customer process, or as we call it, journey. Please get in touch.

An interesting article in Business Insider UK (May 2017) discussed the importance for new students of reading. It came up with ten key ways in which reading can help – see below.

While I wouldn’t challenge the principle of reading being a key part of academic learning – I think the volume we now give them to read is out of synch with how they live their lives.  So in the process of encouraging reading – academics are actually encouraging them to avoid it altogether.

In this blog I outline what I am seeing first-hand with students and my own tips to get around this. I think this is a pragmatic approach – or is it admitting defeat for the whole academic rigour process?

First, that list of ten key ways that reading can help students:

• You’re more empathetic
• Your vocabulary is richer
• You understand that patience is a virtue
• You become calmer
• You sleep better
• You’ll have stronger critical thinking skills
• Your writing skills will improve
• You’ll be more creative
• Your memory gets a boost
• You’ll be a more well-rounded person

There’s no doubt at all of the benefits of reading, but what the article probably failed to take into account was that the world has moved on over the last 20 or 30 years. When I was a student, reading was very much the background to your academic studies, but there weren’t any alternatives. It was books… or books and perhaps the occasional academic article. As we move through the generations to a time when students are now principally Millennials or Generation Z, so we’re in an era when long term reading is not necessarily that fashionable or popular. Instant access to answers is what students want. Googling or YouTubing to get that information nugget, example or soundbite is what students really focus on.

And yet, that old fashioned skill of reading, looking at a subject in greater depth actually provides those important life skills.

At universities we should, as academics, be encouraging our students to engage with the printed word. But it appears to me that academics, people who live by the printed word, are inadvertently encouraging quite the opposite.

The problem is that we tend to see everything through our own world/job where depth of knowledge is everything rather than the student’s world where the treadmill of academic study leads to a focus on the next assignment, the next examination, the grade, the result.

My academic activity is focused on business schools. So I looked at directed reading of a couple of highly respected business school courses.

The first was an undergraduate year 3, 10 credit course. Firstly, there’s the text book. A medium sized academic text book. Directed reading accounted for 268 pages. Next, I looked at the recommended academic article reading. There were 71 journal articles accounting for some 1220 pages. That’s 1488 pages in total.

The second was for a 10-credit executive MBA course, typically studied over four days. Exec MBA students lead pressurised lives – big time management jobs, family commitments and of course the MBA. The text book reading list required them to study 308 pages. The directed academic journal articles totalled 110 with a total number of pages to read of 1212.That’s 1520 pages in total.

Neither of the directed reading lists contained any weighting, direction or quantification. Doubtless the course leaders, the academics, had read everything. But if you’re a third-year undergraduate on that nonstop treadmill of study, or an executive MBA student just trying to get through week, how are you going to approach such text intense reading lists?

The answer is simple. Students ignore the reading and go to Google instead. I know this because it’s what students tell me.

I’ve taken a different approach:

• I always try and select a short academic text book, maybe 350 pages rather than 950 pages. Typically it contains the same amount of information as in the larger book. But, psychologically students will pick up the 350 page book and get into it. That 950 page book just remains on the shelf. Something uncomfortable to be avoided.
• For journal reading, I suggest one journal article for each study session. And, if time permits, I’ll ask students to dissect one or two of these in class – What does the article tell you? How can the findings be used in practice? Do you have any criticisms of the article itself?

And I find that when faced with a more manageable reading list students readily embrace the content.

Of course, this approach might appear to some academics as a dumbing down approach, a defeat to the soundbite society. But this misses the point. Don’t we want our students to leave university education remembering some of the reading, taking it into the outside world of management, gaining those 10 really important reading skills?

Academic or student, what do you think? This is surely a discussion to be had.

If you’d like to know more about my own research, please do download my book Excellence in Business School Teaching  – Click here or contact me at julian@marketechoes.co.uk

Time for business schools to practise what they teach? This article appeared in AMBITION, the magazine for MBAs and business schools.  For decades business schools could do no wrong …. Read more

However, data, algorithms and perhaps marketing people who don’t quite understand how to use them are resulting in many good customers being turned off and turned away. Not because the product or service is poor, but rather because the marketing or “relationship marketing” is anything but. This isn’t about impolite or disrespectful behaviour. Rather it’s the overkill of “great service” that is turning loyal customers away.

Here’s a couple of examples

(1) I’ve got a good brand of car. I’ve been loyal to the brand for some ten years. Typically I buy new and replace every 2 years. This time, after a visit to the dealership and a test drive, I felt it was not worth the change, the price had increased by 20% over two years, and so decided to hold on to my current car. But of course I’d already shown an interest in the new car, so both the dealership and the brand were not going to leave me alone. I was inundated with a stream of emails, letters and phone calls, all imploring me to take up the latest fantastic deal on a new car.  I was obviously not a loyal customer with a history, rather just another prospect to be mined.

But I wasn’t actually leaving the dealership.  I had taken out a three year service plan when I’d originally bought the car. The car needed servicing and so I returned to the dealership. Not a wise move. After the service I was bombarded with another round of marketing communications, promoting their fantastic service plans. Problem was, I already had one. By about the fifth phone call I started to get mildly angry. You can’t get abusive with the person on the telephone who is just doing his/her data generated job. But why nobody seemed to listen to what I had said or used the data to see whether I had a service plan is beyond me. And the company just did not leave me alone. Chasing me everywhere, mobile; emails; letters. The only way I could see to stop this was to look up the marketing manager’s name, track him down on LinkedIn and politely tell him perhaps his relationship marketing wasn’t anything of the sort. Communications have now ceased.

(2) I visit Dubai a few times a year on business. I always stay at the same hotel. It’s a good hotel, nice rooms, nice pool, pleasant staff and so on. They’re always trying to build their relationship with me whilst I’m on site through “great service”.  But their definition of “great” borders on the sycophantic.  When I return to the hotel at the end of the working day I have to run the “reception gauntlet”.  I will probably be politely accosted by five or six people between that door and the lift (elevator). Each person welcoming me to the hotel (even though I’ve been staying there for a few days), inviting me to check in (that’s because I have a bag full of work stuff with me) and generally trying to find out if there’s anything they can do. It’s a relief to press the floor button.  At breakfast it’s even worse. I love the hotel’s breakfast, a great way to start the day. But I don’t need two waiters hovering around my table so that the second I put a spoon down somebody comes to clear it away. I don’t need waiters asking me every five minutes whether my breakfast is OK.

What am I asking of these providers, both whom I highly rate, both to whom I am brand loyal?

Please leave me alone, not all the time but maybe 75% of the time. I want them to save on their communications and training budgets.

We are customers. We don’t want to set up home with our providers!  We just want good, efficient and friendly service. We want it at appropriate times, not all the time.

Which takes me back to relationship marketing. Relationship building is vital to business sustainability and customers like to be a valued part of those relationships. But it’s got to be done on a more equitable basis. So if you’re managing in consumer facing businesses, just remember that the key performance indicators you might be setting for your teams – the number of people contacted, smiled at etc. during the course of one day, week or year, might actually be causing dissatisfaction, might actually be compromising customer relationships.

So how should businesses reflect on their relationship building activity?

1. Use data properly – make sure your databases include all the information about your customers.
2. Appoint a customer data champion – someone who creates systems which don’t make your customers believe that you really have no idea about who they are/what they purchase.
3. In customer facing businesses make “customer service” a heart felt way of working, not a quasi scientific process.
4. And, of course, put yourself in your customer’s place. It will make you think. It will make you change.

Market Echoes can help you take a common sense approach to your customer relationships. Please get in touch.

In many years of working at business schools, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with faculty who deliver the product and marketers who largely sell it. As a marketer by profession, the whole notion of market segmentation, understanding particular groups to target and their distinctiveness amongst these groups is second nature. Marketers at business schools are very good at identifying such market opportunities and tailoring the message accordingly. That’s why so many business schools have international offices and representatives. You need to be able to talk to prospective students in the language they understand, understand what to say and importantly, how to sell to them.

But this practice does not seem to translate into the lecture theatre, into the minds and consciousness of faculty. Many times I’ve listened to students who have said that certain faculty members just didn’t understand them as people, didn’t understand their culture. This is bad enough if you are a student travelling to the UK to be taught. It’s even worse if you’re a faculty member travelling to one of your business school’s international locations where you are parachuted in to an already existing culture. Students would expect you to be able to understand.

Diverse international segments – being taught together

At home, international students make up the majority of business school post graduate places. But international students are a diverse body. Western European, American, Australian students, will be demonstrably confident, used to arguing and discussing and never afraid of stating an opinion. Students coming from South East Asia will have been brought up to listen to the teacher, to write down what he or she says, not to ask questions and certainly not to argue. This is all obvious stuff and yet so frequently the teacher arrives in the class and goes straight into one mode of teaching – for everyone. This can result in two stream teaching where it’s much easier to engage with those eager westernised students. Why push those other who don’t appear to want to engage? The issue is it’s not that they don’t want to engage, it’s that they don’t quite know how and are nervous about losing face. Recognise these differences and work with them. All students have their own relative strengths.

Think of MBAs as a homogeneous group – at your peril!

And of course, segmentation is not just international. It’s different students having different requirements and needs. A good example is MBA students. Many faculty just think of them as a homogeneous group. But some MBA students are different from others. Full timers are likely to be in their mid-20s to early 30s, have taken a career break and might well be career changers. They want to be immersed in the subject matter, working typical 9 – 9 days. Contrast this with executive MBA students. They’re more likely to be in their mid-30s to 40s. They’ll already be successful, but in a specialist type of way. They want that rounded understanding of business but, unlike the full time group, they have so many other pressures – a demanding job and quite often a demanding family life as well. Whereas the full timers want the MBA, indeed expect the MBA to dominate their life, part timers need it to fit in with the rest of their life.

I’ve spoken to many faculty who enjoy teaching the full timers but not the execs. Why? Firstly, because they rarely do the pre-course preparation asked of them. Second, they are pretty vocal if they don’t find the teaching up to the standards they are expecting. Faculty just see them as complainers. The reality is anything but. They have different lives from full timers, different pressures and, in general, much wider management experience than the faculty who teach them.

Final year under graduates – engage with both placement and non placement students

Finally, what about under graduate students? There’s a massive difference between first year and final year students and in the final year, there’s a massive difference between those students who’ve gone out on a one year placement and those who have just moved from year 2 to year 3. Those placement students come back highly motivated, raring to go, hard working and, will frequently have had more recent work experience than the faculty teaching them! But those students who’ve gone straight into year 3 will have none of these. They’ll have studied well but they’ll have partied  well and they’ll be less mature. Many times faculty say I just love teaching these returning students, but don’t like the students who are just sailing through. Or sometimes faculty say I really don’t like to teach these returning students – they think they know everything, they’re always asking questions, they’re always looking as though they already know the answers. Very rarely do faculty use the mix of students they now find in the final year in order to create a really exciting teaching environment, mixing up returning students with sail through students. Making sure that they leverage the experiences of the returning students whilst not alienating the sail throughs who have their own experiences as customers and through part time jobs.

So how should faculty approach segmentation?

1. Familiarise yourselves with the principles of segmentation
2. Understand the motivations of each segment you teach
3. Understand the differences in behaviour between each segment
4. Don’t take the easy way out, by only engaging with those segments who find it easy to engage

Get this right and you’ll have loyal, happy, motivated students. Get it wrong and it will always be the us and them mentality. Us faculty, them that homogeneous group of students (we think).

If you’d like to know more about my research, please do download my book Excellence in Business School Teaching  – Click here or contact me at julian@marketechoes.co.uk to find out about our 8 Bite Sized Workshops in a Day programme where we can deliver up to eight best practice teaching workshops in one day with faculty selecting what they’ll find most useful.

Succeeding with little

Our first experience of the country was a tour around some of Iceland’s beautiful hotspots. Hot, because this is very much a live volcanic island. I’ll not bore you with travelogue, but, what we noticed was that there really is very little. No trees, not that much good farming land and just mile upon mile of nothing. What did the population actually do? The second day we started to find out.

Resilience and volunteering

Our first visit was to Ice-sar, Iceland’s Association for Search and Rescue. Over 1% of the population of the country volunteers for the organisation, needed because of harsh climate and terrain. This typifies the culture. The organisation is not publicly funded and volunteering is not cheap, with kit etc. to purchase. But this typifies a culture – where everyone pitches in and gets things done. This set the scene. Resilience and involvement.

The lesson for business? A culture of volunteering contributes to the common good and in this example sees all echalons of society working together.

Resilience and making do with what you’ve got

Our next visit was to Ocean Cluster. Here we saw the resilience culture applied to business philosophy. Ocean Cluster is a hub for small companies interested in creating businesses out of anything to do with the sea. A mixture of thermal, sea, current and of course fish. These are some of Iceland’s few natural resources. Seventy companies now make up the hub, offered cheap rents, networks and in certain circumstances, investment. There are no government subsidies. Entrepreneurs just get on with it. We saw some fascinating products including wound dressings made from cod derivatives and all sorts of ways to use 100% of a fish rather than 30% used in most countries. Again, resilience and an ability to leverage scarce resources. Ocean Cluster’s success has taken it across the Atlantic – it now has hubs in the US.

The lesson for business? Great creativity and entrepreneurial spirit can make a virtue out of limited resources

Some of the group at Ocean Cluster

Resilience and lack of natural resources – met with creativity and drive

The next organisation that we visited was Ossur. If you’ve ever watched the Paralympics, you’ll be very aware of blade runners, those fascinating extensions that sprinters use. Where did they come from? From Ossur in Iceland. It’s an organisation that’s absolutely focused around improving lives through innovation in prosthetics. How did it start? An Icelander, an amputee, wanted to find ways of improving mobility and in the spirit of Iceland, improve people’s lives – make money/do good. Traditional prosthetics were rudimentary and not especially helpful. We saw innovation through bionics which really make the difference. The company now has a global turnover in excess of $10m. Its origins were resilience and innovation.

The lesson for business? Great creativity and entrepreneurial spirit can completely replace limited resources!

Resilience – turning disaster into success – now!

The final organisation we went to see was the Icelandic tourism board – “Promote Iceland”. Yes we learnt about the different attractions within the country, many of which we had seen and also about use of resources – the country has a booming winter tourism industry, despite little natural daylight and no major ski resorts. But we learnt something else. The 2008 financial crisis was a challenging time for Icelandic tourism, indeed the country nearly went bankrupt. That was then “complemented” by the huge eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano (you might remember the impact it had on flights around the world) at the start of the summer tourism season. Most regions would have just written off the season. Promote Iceland and related stakeholders did not. Within weeks they’d created a dynamic publicity campaign and once the eruption had slowed, the summer season was a great success. They weren’t prepared to let things happen. They made things happen instead.

The lesson for business? Disaster does not have to be terminal. The winners don’t wait, they create

Our short visit was enlightening. And what are the key learnings?

1.   Make use of all the resources you have – it’s surprising what they will deliver.
2.   Be resilient. Don’t rely on somebody else or some government organisation providing the training, the funds or whatever to actually get your idea into commercialisation. It’s not always necessary.
3.   In times of crisis, it’s a matter of working together and working fast. Turnarounds can be effected very quickly – the problem is that in many countries, we just expect a problem to take months or even years to resolve.
4.   Culture really matters, in this instance working together for the common good.

Julian Rawel is chief executive of Market Echoes and interim director of MBA programmes, University of Edinburgh Business School. Market Echoes offers a common sense approach to business building.

On the 29^th March I’ll be speaking at the Universities UK conference, Innovation and Excellence in Teaching and Learning . It looks a good conference and I’ll be running a workshop entitled Teaching excellence – turning the challenge into a strategic advantage for universities.

The workshop will follow up to my recently published book, Excellence in Business School Teaching (available as a free download from www.marketechoes.co.uk). I’m going to involve delegates into a number of themes I believe are fundamental to the future success of universities.

I’ll firstly give some results of my recent research. Faculty were pretty confident, just time constrained. Students were generally satisfied but kept stressing how they wanted lecturers to be interesting, organised and very importantly, find a practice home for their research.  A number of academic contributors made the point that as academics we might be fooling ourselves – we don’t tend to discuss our teaching and rarely really admit that we could do better. I also interviewed a high school head teacher because I was interested in getting the secondary education perspective. “There’s a feeling amongst students that lecturers are teaching under sufferance, that they’d rather be doing something else – research.”  And interestingly, when I speak to past students, what they really remember are firstly, their friends, the activities and the life they spent at university and secondly, great teaching, which by inference means poor teaching as well.

So I’ll be raising the issue – does this matter? Is teaching strategic for universities? Certainly since I started writing my book, fees, debt, difficult employment market, T Levels and the TEF have all taken on greater significance. And my own view is that this makes teaching (or value for money) even more important.

Yet, since the publication of my book, I’ve done a little more research, into the internal profile of teaching at universities. The findings don’t necessarily support a culture of teaching being strategic.  The internal newsletter of one business school (over a six month period), included 31 references to research best practice and only one to teaching best practice. And over a three year period, the learning and teaching internal website of another university  included, out of 79 announcements, only 13 with some link to excellent teaching practice.  Both examples were hot on NSS scores – but I was left wondering whether providing these were positive then everything else would be fine.

So, what will I be discussing in terms of how to make teaching strategic?

• Direction

Of course it’s absolutely vital for senior management teams to set the tone for their institution, to champion and celebrate teaching excellence (and put it at an equal level to research), to co-ordinate training, development, time and space.  But, for me, there needs to a good dose of devolution. In an academic institution, directives from above can only go so far. So I’m a big supporter of subject groups and heads of subject groups. If you think about it, they know their faculty well and understand the subject matter that’s being taught. They can involve their colleagues in teaching improvement, working out what’s best, what needs to be developed and encourage group-wide support and mentoring. But to work, teaching must be high on the “agenda” and there needs to be group head leadership with genuine passion and commitment.

• Understanding students by segment

How well do we really know the students they’re teaching? Not individually but by segment? My high school head teacher threw up an interesting observation. In 30 years of teaching he’d never ever been visited by anyone from higher education institutions whereas every year he visits his primary feeder schools. How can HE really understand the needs and expectations of future students? Another example is that of the MBA. Content is pretty much standard, but typical segments FT, Exec and DL have very different needs. students FT are likely to be younger career changers, Execs time poor, regionally based career ladder climbers, and DLs also climbers, but more global and even more time poor. Teachers need to understand these differences  and be sensitive to them. As academics, we might feel worthy recommending 10 journal articles as well as a couple of chapters after each lecture. But this will simply turn off those time poor students. Less is most definitely more.

• Teaching needs to be delivered by experts

I’ll be raising a possibly contentious point. Are academics (and I’m being very broad brush here), experts or introverts? Again, in my research a number of contributors (themselves research academics), mentioned that typically, faculty will have come through a classical academic route, UG, Master’s, PhD, full-time academic. It’s unlikely that they will really understand the worlds in which their students inhabit or want to inhabit. And they will have a cannon of knowledge and a language which most students will never have. So the definition of expert needs to be seen from a student as well as faculty perspective. I thought it worth asking my academic colleagues what is needed to be an expert in the classroom? Firstly, they need to be masters of their material. An expert never reads from a power point slide in class. Next they need to be absolutely up to date. It’s no good being an expert on either a topic or a piece of research that is 20 years old. It’s useful to refer back to but you need to see how perspectives have changed. Experts also make research exciting and accessible.

I cite the experience of a colleague of mine, Professor Stuart Roper. He’s written a book, Corporate Reputation, and one area of his research is about discarded litter and what it says about the brands. He engages with his first year students by asking them to count and categorise the amount of litter that they find on their way home. What’s the result? The students become part of the research process and really see the relevance of research to practice. Other ways of being the expert – use technology to engage students, I know a number of colleagues who use Facebook sites just to encourage interaction about their subject matter. Never be afraid to talk to other experts who might have different insights and use all the resources available. The student body itself is a real hub of information.

• Innovation – never stop trying to improve

I’ll be talking about what I call the Purple rather than Blue ocean. The Blue Ocean is a concept which focuses on doing something completely different in order to compete. The Purple Ocean is more about what we often see in sport – small steps which make that special difference – GLUE – Giving Unexpected Little Extras. When I started DL teaching I listened to previous tutorial recordings to find out how it was done. There seemed to me to be something lacking. A certain sparkle that would engage and keep the attention. I talked to DL students who mentioned the difference between signing in for a tutorial and actually engaging with it, students being able to stay signed in but go off and do something else. So I started to think how could I innovate in order to keep my students engaged? This took me to role models like radio presenters John Humphries and Nicky Campbell, people who consistently grab my attention over the muesli or in the car. What was their sparkle? Could it be emulated? Most definitely yes.

• Teaching must engage

My last point is an obvious one. If we want our students to be inspired by our teaching, it must be teaching which engages. So, how? Well I’ll be reminding delegates what we’ve just spoken about. Good direction, good understanding of students, expertise, innovation and passion all lead towards engagement. But it goes further than that. Confidence comes out of preparation. Movement away from the lectern, around the theatre, shows a confidence to go out and engage. Anyone who says you can’t engage with 100 people at undergraduate level in a lecture theatre is wrong. You might not be able to engage with everybody but you can give it a very good go. Start with a question not a statement – sets the interactive tone. Story telling is hugely important – not just knowledge but applied knowledge. Break a lecture for a few minutes – get students to discuss an issue in pairs and then poll their results through online in-class polling. Avoid previous course cross over – find out what’s gone before. And knowing when to pause, to take a few minutes out, to re-engage.

So, how will I be summarising all this? By saying that for some institutions, teaching excellence could be a great opportunity. For others it could be a big threat. You can’t ignore the fact that students expect great teaching – otherwise why do they come to university in the first place? The OU and sites such as rateyourlecturer.com can’t be ignored. And neither can the government threat  –  the TEF.

How I can help

If you’d like to know more about my research, please do download my book Excellence in Business School Teaching  – Click here or contact me at julian@marketechoes.co.uk to find out about our 8 Bite Sized Workshops in a Day programme where we can deliver up to eight best practice teaching workshops in one day with faculty selecting what they’ll find most useful.

These days everything appears to be ever more formulaic. Wherever we go as service consumers we are greeted (or confronted) by processes which are seemingly designed to delight us but in reality either annoy us or just leave us cold?

When working with clients and students, I spend some time looking at service process analysis – plotting the end-to-end customer journey. Discussions often focus on critical incidents and moments of truth – times during the service process when we can make or break the transaction.

Working out the critical eventuality

The problem is that in trying to sort out every critical eventuality, service providers can lose the very nature of a successful encounter – service delivered by people who appear to genuinely enjoy it and on-line systems that actually “appear” to understand the customers who purchase via them.

In the UK, the restaurant scene is now dominated by large chains. Every process is organised to the last detail. I was recently at one chain restaurant in Edinburgh. The manager showed us to our table asking very naturally if we were here for a special occasion or a celebration. That seemed nice and genuine.   Until we overheard him using exactly the same script throughout the evening – and when we visited another branch of that chain in another town two weeks later, we were greeted with exactly the same “greeting”.  This apparent interest was nothing more than a script leaving us feeling part of a process, not part of a genuine service.

Is speed ‘service’?

Chain restaurants are also hot on efficiency.  The quicker that tables are cleared, the better. The problem is that the process has seemingly gone mad. Next time you’re in a chain restaurant, take a look at how they clean the tables around you. They come with their cloth and antiseptic liquids and wipe the tables but, and here’s the ironic thing, clear all the rubbish not into a cloth, bag or dustpan but on to the floor and sometimes even the chairs – probably saves 30 seconds.  If you are so inclined, it’s fascinating to look under your table – a nice mush of trodden-in congealed chips, salad, dessert – it’s all there! But is this really what you want to see when you sit down in a restaurant?

Now let’s move on to retail service encounters. We know that retailers want to promote their loyalty cards and retail staff are duly incentivised. But a 60 second sales push after every transaction can be somewhat trying. And they are going to get through their script regardless of whether you say ‘no thank you’ politely. Again, the process takes over without any real thought as to customer reaction.

Automated ‘service’

Increasingly service transactions are undertaken on-line. Once we’ve purchased a service we want to know everything is going as planned.  But this doesn’t mean we want to be pursued non stop through our inbox. My colleague Victoria Tomlinson recently blogged about a flower sending service  The service was great but the nonstop, over-the-top and gushing emails informing her of every stage in the process, right down to “your flowers are being chauffeured in style” just became plain annoying.

So we could say that, as consumers, we’re becoming victims of the ever more robotic service encounter. However, it’s not only the service provider that has become the robot. We, the customers, seem to be following suit.

Just look at how easily led we have become. A new tactic is to inform customers at the check-out that they can’t be issued with a transaction receipt because company policy is to save paper. But they then say they will be very happy to email it – if you could just give them your email address. And I never cease to be amazed (or perhaps impressed) by how many people just hand over this vital piece of information which will result in a nonstop flow of emails from (a) the service provider and (b) all the other companies to whom the provider sells the information!

Perhaps as a marketer I should be happy with all this. End-to-end processes just lead to a quieter life with even more data and information.

Back to the basics

But I’m not. In just the same way that bankers forgot about the purpose of banking, so service providers are forgetting about the purpose of service. And what’s happening? We just end up being treated exactly the same, in the same way, by the same sort of people. We just become part of the show, part of the script.

It’s time for service providers to take a step back, really listen to their customers and actually  observe service transactions.  But taking a step back mustn’t mean going through yet another over-complex research process – because the stats will prove anything.

A great start is for the CEO to become a customer for a few days. Then he/she and everyone else may start to appreciate that genuine, helpful service (off or on-line) is what customers really want.

Market Echoes can help you take a common sense approach to your customer process, or as we call it, journey. Please get in touch.

In a recent blog – “How Strategy Really Works – My Three Cs” – I discussed my views about what makes good strategy. Understanding Customers, Beating Competitors and Being in Control. I thought that provided managers understood these three principles, the pathway to developing good strategies was clear. Understand the principles, develop your strategies around them.

However, recently I have started to reflect. Understanding the three Cs is not the start of the strategy journey – more the middle or even the end.  Discussions with senior managers with whom I work and those attending my Executive MBA classes have got me thinking.  A fairly consistent theme is developing. The theme is that strategy is either for somebody else or so poorly developed that it’s best to nod in agreement and hope it will go away!

So let’s have a look at some of the issues which contribute to senior people hoping that “strategy” will disappear or go away.

1. Strategy is too nebulous for real managers!

   It’s the stuff of MBAs – we need to get on with running the business.

2. I’m too busy to think about strategy.

   Pressure is always on sorting out tomorrow’s (or today’s) issues. Meeting the here and now, today’s budgets or putting out the fires. Interestingly, managers tend to like trouble shooting, whatever they tell us. Short term praise hides the reasons for the fire!

3. We do strategy. Just take a look at our latest business plan!

   Business plans! They start as some sort of best intention strategy paper but pretty soon take on a life of their own, adding incrementally year on year – typically budget and sales forecasts, but certainly not strategic reviews. But that’s okay. If a senior manager produces a big enough business plan then he or she can be pretty confident that nobody will want to read it and certainly not comment on it (or even understand it!).

4. And what about the Strategic Planning Directorate?

   I’ve seen so many large organisations where the office of the Strategic Planning Directorate (typically on the top floor) is a place to be feared rather than revered and rarely actually contributes to strategy. I discovered this a few years ago when I asked a strategic planning director to give a talk on company strategy to one of my MBA classes. The director declined saying she didn’t really know that much about strategy and certainly wasn’t confident enough to say anything in front of a class of ambitious managers! So if you don’t know much about strategy, how can you become a strategic planning director in charge of a strategic planning directorate? It’s quite easy really. Because your role is not to take the organisation forward but rather to make sure that the detailed business plan (yes, that plan!) is put into action through a series of KPIs, metrics, tick boxes, sign offs and so on. It’s in the interest of strategic planning directorate to make sure that few managers actually understand strategy. If they did they’d be able to see the ever expanding documentation for what it is. Strategic planning directorates are gatekeepers rather than innovators. Their job is to keep everyone on their toes or to put it another way, make sure that people become so scared about not ticking the right boxes that the actual reasoning behind those boxes – “the strategy” – is quickly forgotten.

5. We did strategy on our last away day…but it didn’t work.

   For many senior managers strategy is all about the “away day”. Let’s get everybody into a big conference room and do some cutting edge “brainstorming”. This rarely results in anything meaningful. Everyone knows nothing will happen. There’ll be a huge wish list at the end of the morning, the result of lots of flipcharts and post it notes. But have we the energy to deal with the wish list? Well not by the time that big lunch (the other reason for the away day) is over and our focus is on that 5 o’clock finish. But at least we’ve got that over with for this year.

But it doesn’t have to be like this. I spend quite a lot of time working with senior teams and once we’ve got rid of all the “noise” around strategy and focused on what really matters – customers and competitors – it’s amazing how quickly they start to engage. I recently facilitated a board strategy day.  A few weeks later the chairman told me that the 50 page business plan had now been reduced to 5 and, here’s the interesting thing, the business became more focused and more successful.

Does any of this ring true to you? Quite possibly. Is any of this a lightbulb insight? I doubt it. Yet it goes on year after year. Strategy is about the future of the organisation, getting to the issues which really matter, working out what needs to change. At Market Echoes we have a very simple way of working with senior managers. For one day, maybe a day and a half. No more. It’s about getting to the heart of issues, getting rid of all the documentation and working out what the company really needs to do to change for the better. It’s actually about less is more rather than more is best. And it’s certainly not about functions whose title let alone activity is enough to send us to sleep, enough to encourage us to avoid strategy.

Have you got stories to share on strategy?  Are you a strategic planning director and want to defend your cause?!  Would love to hear from you.