2011–The Year of Business Redesign
2011 will be the year of Business Redesign. It’s not a sexy concept. It means hard work. But for service companies wishing to differentiate on the customer experience, business redesign is what many companies are focusing on. Here’s where the new business designs will be aiming: 1. Changing Quadrants In 2011, we’ll see more businesses switch from designs that yield premium price to...
Read MoreThe Dark Side of Growth
“A lot of businesses end up destroying value for their clients because they get too big,” says Mike. “Take the typical consulting company. They start off small, there’s a lot of energy, they get some success, they grow. What do they do? They start farming their intellectual capital, productizing it as offerings, and offer the same thing to everybody. What does this do? It basically makes your next client only as good as the last client you served, but no better. Where you used to be in the business of creating advantage for your clients, you’re now in the business of taking followers almost to the point of leaders, but not going beyond that. Your business then revolves around selling more hours, not delivering better results.”
Read MoreBack to the Mac. Never look back.
“For me, throughput is based on the suite of applications I use and the lack of lag time between switching; you have to close two or three applications, well there’s two minutes. You have to boot the other one up, there’s another minute. On a Mac, it’s like click-go, click-go, click-go. And it never crashes.”
Read MoreTechnologies I Use
Mike Wittenstein’s signature strengths are his abilities to design customer experiences and to listen with particular intensity and clarity. So you may not be surprised that his list of mission critical assets include a high quality digital audio recorder, an HD video camera, an idea outliner, and a large format printer. The “technology” Mike uses to collaborate with clients can be decidedly low tech. “I use various ways to develop the same picture in both people’s minds (his and his client’s),” says Mike. “Sometimes I’ll let the client create on a whiteboard right in front of me or electronically. Other times we’ll take exchange pictures of what represents the thoughts or feelings that are important to us about the issue or project at hand.”
Read MoreAll businesses need clarity around their intent and direction!
What Mike seems to do particularly well is deploy resources to optimize the value only he can bring to his clients. To that end, he invests broadly in contract personnel and technology to maximize the impact of client deliverables and minimize the time he has to spend on administrative chores. Mike estimates that in terms of personnel, his two-person company looks and operates much more like a 25-person company. And to give you an idea of his technology investment, I asked him how many cloud services he pays for and he listed 17 off the bat and stated that he probably missed a few!
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