Nicholas J. Webb's Blog, page 5
November 14, 2018
As Healthcare Organizations Get Bigger, Leaders Need to Stay Connected
The healthcare industry is changing rapidly. Among many other seismic shifts in our national economy, the healthcare sector is growing faster than any other. During the first quarter of 2018, for the first time in history, healthcare surpassed both manufacturing and retail, the most significant job creators of the 20th century, to become the largest […]
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America’s Nurses: The New Superheroes of Innovation
When you think of cutting-edge innovators, who comes to mind? Probably a scientist in a lab, working on a new invention. Or a software engineer dreaming up a cool new app. True enough. But many people may be surprised to know that among the leading innovators of today are America’s registered nurses. They are the […]
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March 26, 2018
America’s Nurses: The New Superheroes of Innovation
When you think of cutting-edge innovators, who comes to mind?
Probably a scientist in a lab, working on a new invention.
Or a software engineer dreaming up a cool new app.
True enough. But many people may be surprised to know that among the leading innovators of today are America’s registered nurses.
They are the new superheroes of innovation.
While this may be news to people outside the healthcare industry, it’s no secret to the 2.9 million RNs who work on the front lines of American healthcare. Their new ideas play a critical role in advancing the practice of healthcare at every level.
The American Nurses Association recognizes the value of nurse-driven innovation, and says: “ANA believes that nurse-focused innovation is vital in addressing the challenges that the health care system faces. By harnessing the creative thinking power of nurses and the expertise learned from frontline experience, we can positively impact nurses and patient outcomes.”
Capturing and Leveraging New Ideas
In their daily interactions with patients and the healthcare system, RNs see first hand what works and what doesn’t. In response, they come up with their own solutions. This incubation of innovation never stops—it’s going twenty-four hours a day, seven days week.
The problem isn’t a shortage of new ideas; it’s capturing these new ideas and leveraging them to benefit patients.
Recently I had the honor to address a meeting of over 1,000 registered nurses. During my presentation, I asked the members of the audience to raise their hands if they ever saw a procedure or system that could be improved. To my astonishment, nearly every person in the audience raised their hand. Clearly, they had a lot of ideas about how to improve healthcare!
Then I asked their workplace offered a method for submitting and evaluating new ideas—what’s called an innovation pipeline.
Very few of the RNs raised their hands.
This demonstrated that America’s healthcare organizations—hospitals and other care providers—would be well advised to more aggressively tap into this tremendous wealth of innovative ideas.
Fewer Consultants, More Listening
The leaders of many organizations, including many healthcare providers, believe that capturing innovation means hiring a consultant, who then devises a complicated and expensive innovation “program.” These cumbersome solutions invariably deliver poor results before fading away as expensive write-offs.
The real solution is much simpler.
With millions of RNs working on the front lines of patient care and having ideas about how to improve service, it’s clear the number one task of any administrator must be to listen. Open the lines of communication, solicit new ideas, have conversations, do simple cost-benefit analyses, and leverage the power of America’s innovation superheroes.
Why pay for expensive consultants and studies when an army of hands-on practitioners are ready and willing to innovate and bring more value to the healthcare marketplace?
Encouragement From the American Academy of Nursing
The American Academy of Nursing (AAN) has developed The Edge Runner initiative, a robust program of proactive encouragement and recognition of nurse innovators. These are the RNs who, despite the pervasive indifference to new ideas from the front lines, have spearheaded significant innovations that in many cases have saved lives.
The Edge Runner initiative recognizes nurse-designed models of care and interventions that improve healthcare quality, reduce cost, and enhance consumer satisfaction.
In addition, the AAN has launched the Raise the Voice campaign to showcase how nurses are leading the way in transforming the health care system. This campaign provides a platform to inform policymakers, the media, health providers, business leaders, and consumers about nurse-driven solutions for an ailing health care system and the victories that are being won every day.
In the words of the AAN, “We all have a stake in transforming America’s fragmented, expensive, and often inaccessible health care system. Solutions generated by nurses can save the health care system money, reduce adverse events, improve patient outcomes, and promote health. It is time for a new system; current and future generations of patients are depending upon a successful transformation.”
America’s registered nurses are the new superheroes of innovation—and they deserve our support!
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March 22, 2018
As Healthcare Organizations Get Bigger, Leaders Need to Stay Connected
The healthcare industry is changing rapidly.
Among many other seismic shifts in our national economy, the healthcare sector is growing faster than any other. During the first quarter of 2018, for the first time in history, healthcare surpassed both manufacturing and retail, the most significant job creators of the 20th century, to become the largest employer in the United States.
Healthcare organizations are consolidating and getting bigger. The past year has seen mergers in all shapes and sizes, from national hospital system expansions to the vertical combination of retail pharmacy giant CVS Health and insurer Aetna. In every case, the business goal is to achieve scale and turn it into a financial and competitive advantage.
Despite its explosive growth, healthcare remains a labor-intensive industry. The two most destabilizing forces for labor in the last few decades have been globalization (outsourcing jobs) and automation (replacing human workers with robots and machines). But health care is substantially resistant to both, because it’s both local and by its nature person-to-person.
The healthcare sector is seeing bigger organizations and more employees at a time when creating and maintaining a close connection between leaders and employees is more critical than ever.
Today, the winning healthcare leader is a holistic leader. While even a decade ago a successful healthcare leader could have been a technocrat, well versed in one facet of the business and dependent on external reports and data inputs to fill in the gaps and make up for the fact that he or she was functionally myopic. Such a mindset won’t work today. Every leader needs to make a solid connection with as many employees as possible.
Here’s how.
A Solid Connection = Intellect + Emotions + Aspirations
This equation is very simple. In the marketplace of today—where change is accelerating and disruption deepening—the winning leader needs to connect with his or her stakeholders on three levels: with intellect, emotions, and aspirations.
Intellect
Important decisions—things like project timelines, budgets, and product rollouts—must be made by a CEO who is well informed.
The winning leader knows the practical aspects of the business. Not every detail, but the broad strokes. Remember, in a big company you need to know how to delegate. You need to hire trustworthy, knowledgeable people who will provide honest opinions and data. But you also need to know enough to question them and ask for evidence to back up their opinions. If your technology services manager says, “We need to buy five more MRI machines,” you need to know enough to ask, “What’s our average down time for our existing units? How many hours per day do they spend sit idle? How many are out for repairs, and for how long?”
Winning leaders don’t always know the answers, but they always know what questions to ask.
Emotions
Winning leaders know that people aren’t robots. People have feelings, opinions, dreams, illusions, and fears.
Not logic, but human emotion drives business. It drives your business.
People make major life decisions based on emotion. They’ll take a job at a company based on emotion. They’ll quit a perfectly good job at a company because of an emotional response or incident.
Winning leaders know that the emotional side of people—customers, employees, leaders—is a very powerful force, and that no two people are emotionally alike. Different things appeal to different people, and different things repel different people. There is no “one size fits all.”
The only way to manage a human being to be highly productive is by getting them into the right place emotionally.
Aspirations
Imagine one of your employees came to you and asked, “Why are we in business?”
If you were asked a question like this, what would you reply?
I hope you wouldn’t say, “To get rich.” That’s probably the worst answer imaginable. While it’s important for your company to earn a profit, it’s not what separates your company from thousands of others.
Remember, as a winning leader your job is to create the maximum value possible within your organization—value to your stakeholders, your investors, your employees, and your community. You need highly motivated and inspired employees.
You motivate and inspire them three ways:
1. By showing them a tangible plan for success (the intellectual part).
2. By showing them you respect them and want nothing but the best for them (the emotional part).
3. By showing them what they do matters—to themselves and to their community (the aspirational part).
Ideally, the mission of the organization will be in alignment with the personal interests of your leadership team, investors, and employees.
As a winning healthcare industry leader, it’s up to you to hire people who are passionate about what they do. In fact, passion is more important than skills. You can teach any intelligent person a skill, but you can never teach them to have a passion. You can only help unlock the passion they already have within themselves.
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March 13, 2018
Honored to have made the #CX list
Honored to have made the list again this year for the Global Guru Top 50 in Customer Service. My book What Customers Crave continues to be the number one top listed book on Amazon from more than 50,000 customer experience titles. I would love to take credit for all of this, but I must say this body of work was based on the discoveries from some of the coolest people on the planet. It turns out when you love what you do and the customers you serve, customer experience is a natural and organic derivative. I find that so many organizations somehow lost their way as they moved their gaze away from the customers and back to the operation and minutia of their enterprise. Yes, we have to manage our businesses, but let’s not forget the amazing customers that make our business possible.
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December 29, 2016
Don’t Be a App Hole
Digital ubiquity and enabling technologies provide us the opportunity to create beautiful solutions that deliver meaningful organizational and customer value. I find however, that there are basically two problems when it comes to leveraging enabling technologies to drive customer value and they include the “Type A Problem” and the “Type B Problem” and I would describe them as follows:
The Type A Problem
This is when organizations assume that connection architecture, artificial intelligence, digital ubiquity and enabling technologies mean virtually nothing to the way in which they operate their business and/or deliver value to their customers. In my consulting practice I’ve sat in board rooms usually comprised of older men that essentially believe that all of this technology stuff is hogwash and over exaggerated. I get it – I am an old guy too, but I’m not an idiot! I spent virtually all of my time reading the technological tea leaves to make certain that these massive trends do not make me irrelevant. The Type A Management style tries to ignore technology as much as humanly possible. Not surprisingly these organizations are routinely blindsided by emerging disruptive innovators.
The Type B Problem
This is an organization that understands that their industry and for that matter their business is being impacted and in some cases attacked by disruptive innovators that are leveraging emerging technologies. So they become what I call “APP HOLES” in other words they put together some poorly thought out technology with the erroneous assumption that this is delivering real value. Last month, I had three back to back speaking engagements, when traveling from Florida to Chicago I walked down to the front of my hotel running a bit behind I simply grabbed a cab rather than my normal Uber car. When I got in the car I asked the cab driver if he accepted credit cards, almost yelling at me he said in a derogatory tone YES! He drove the car to the airport in a reckless way that put my safety at risk and when we got to the airport he claimed that his credit card machine has suddenly stopped working. I also notice that he never turned on the meter he was obviously trying to perpetrate a cash deal at my inconvenience and expense. On the back of his seat was an advertisement for their companies app “CURB” – it was as if this horrific experience could have been fixed if they created an app with the idea that it would compete with Uber. The problem is, they’re missing the point! Uber delivers exceptional experiences across the customer journey through a wide range of business practices and technologies. To think they could fix all of the other major problems they had with an app was shockingly delusional.
The moral of the story
The best organizations don’t take swipes at technology, rather these organizations leverage technology as a tool in combination with the necessary business practices that provide the necessary life support systems that make technology actually work.
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Don’t be a App Hole
Digital ubiquity and enabling technologies provide us the opportunity to create beautiful solutions that deliver meaningful organizational and customer value. I find however, that there are basically two problems when it comes to leveraging enabling technologies to drive customer value and they include the “Type A Problem” and the “Type B Problem” and I would describe them as follows: The Type A Problem This is when organizations assume that connection architecture, artificial intelligence, digital ubiquity and enabling technologies mean virtually nothing to the way in which they operate their business and/or deliver value to their customers. In my consulting practice I’ve set in board rooms usually comprised of older men that essentially believe that all of this technology stuff is hogwash and over exaggerated. I get it – I am an old guy too, but I’m not an idiot! I spent virtually all of my time reading the technological tea leaves to make certain that these massive trends do not make me irrelevant. The Type A Management style tries to ignore technology as much as humanly possible. Not surprisingly these organizations are routinely blindsided by emerging disruptive innovators. The Type B Problem This is an organization that understands that their industry and for that Read More
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December 27, 2016
NO shoes, NO shirt, NO service = Bankruptcy
After three years of researching the concept of customer experience as an innovation design process, I unearthed many interesting things. The first thing I discovered is that in lieu of innovation, organizations create a hate vacuum? In other words, when we not willing to do the heavy lifting of inventing new exceptional experiences across the customer’s journey we simply default by developing punitive policies that proved to our customers that we hate them. This may sound like an exaggeration, but I found that the “no shoes, no shirt, no service” mentality to be alive and well across small, medium and large organizations. Let’s take for example an art gallery located in the central coast of California. This organization in my opinion made two very basic mistakes that will result in bankruptcy. So here is my assessment: This business doesn’t know who their customers is You will note in the mission statement in the photograph of this blog post that they don’t even mention the customer, they only mention their supplier the artist. I got news for you Art gallery your artist is not your customer, this may not sound profound but… your customer is your customer. Your organizational mission statement Read More
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December 26, 2016
And the answer is, (drum roll please) …….. NO!
If customer experience is a design process, and it is, then it’s incredibly important that we pay attention to micro-moments. Today we have the power of digital ubiquity, connection architecture and a wide range of enabling technologies to invent perfect human experiences. The problem is, most organizations are using the wrong tools to glean insights about what customers hate and what customers love. I suggest to my clients to become far more thoughtful about micro moments so that we can create contiguous experiences that are amazing. Let me give you a small, but important example. I typically go to Chevron stations to get my gas. When I go to the pump and insert my card it always asked me the same question “are you a Safeway rewards member?” and my answer is always the same NO. It turns out most people aren’t a Safeway rewards member (See the worn out NO button in this post) so why does it keep asking, and for that matter why should I care. Getting gas is a pain, but when the wind is blowing and you’re trying to fill up your car the last thing you need this for Chevron to ask you the same damn question. Asking Read More
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December 15, 2016
Customer Service Crack
After three years of research and writing my book What Customers Crave I discovered some very shocking things. One pervasive phenomenon I entitle, “Customer Service Crack” (CSC). So what is CSC? Simply put, it’s when organizations try to leverage technologies to gain insights about customers hates and loves so that they can set around a conference table and look at beautiful graphs and charts about customer satisfaction. I call this crack because it’s a bizarre addictive behavior that produces a mood altering mindset that everything is going to be okay because we have great data from these technologies. These technologies are like the automatic vacuuming robots that are sold in stores like bed Bath and beyond. The technology is awesome the the only problem is they don’t really work. Bathroom experience rating systems are well… crappy – pun intended! I travel to about 70 events worldwide each year and of noticed the newest form of CSC is a bathroom rating kiosk that allows you to let them know if your experience was great or well… crappy, sorry I couldn’t help myself. So let’s break down this new technology and ask yourself some very basic questions. First, if you’re anything like me, Read More
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