a la 360 by Gadi Shamia

We all know that companies that offer superb customer experience and enjoy high customer satisfaction are more successful and competitive in the long run. Often when I meet managers in for Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) companies, I hear that they are convinced that their customers love them. When I ask for a “proof,” they say that they just know it: they don’t need to measure it since they talk with their customers all the time. When I dig more, I usually discover that they think that measuring customer satisfaction is too hard and expensive for a small company. In this post I will try to offer an easy way to measure and compare customer satisfaction for SMB companies.

Why measure? You should measure customer satisfaction for the same reason you measure sales. When you want a number to go up you ought to measure it so you can establish a baseline and a way to measure the impact of business strategy on customer satisfaction. Imagine investing in marketing without checking the sales impact, and you will get the idea. Read more »

I am often asked about strategy, execution and the relationship between them, and I ended up explaining the issue in an e-mail today. After reading the e-mail again, I figured it was generic enough to be widely shared, so here goes…

Rule # 1- No need for “VP of Strategy”: strategy is so well embedded in the organization operating system that outsourcing it to a VP of strategy is hardly ever a good idea. The rationale is clear: when you are not making/selling/marketing anything, your strategic ideas will dwindle or become disconnected from the company reality. Say you promoted your bright director of product marketing to be the VP of strategy—sooner or later she will lose the source of inspiration she had, which was the constant work with customers and partners and the actual creation of the product and will not be able to impact strategy as she did before.

Rule # 2- Strategy is the business of the CEO: Read more »

Here is a radical thought: take the one most important parameter you measure in your business and publish it. I don’t mean publish as in a press release. I mean make it available in real time, 24/7 to your customers, employees and competitors. Read more »

Here is one more reason why startups innovate so much and create new categories time and again where the large enterprise guys do more of the same thing: Entrepreneurs spend most of their time looking outward, rather than looking and focusing on internal affairs. Read more »

Seth Godin is writing about Apple’s grand move of firing 800 retail employees for double-dipping into their iPhone benefits. Seth thinks it is marketing and he is probably right. Apple sent a clear message of high ethics to other employees and to the market.

The bothersome question is the fact that Apple actually had to fire 800! employees to make this point. I could only think of two reasons for this massive misbehavior: The rules were not clear for Apple employees or that there is a low ethics atmosphere in Apple stores. Read more »

I assume you’ve heard everything about the SAP and Business Objects Acquisition. After all, there are 182,000 search results in Google for this query alone… If you followed the news you also know that John Schwarz, Business Objects CEO, will join SAP’s executive board as its seventh member (SAP is a German company and the executive board acts as the company’s management team) and will get to manage both the former BO business and SAP’s fast-growing Business User division, that is led by Doug Merritt, SAP Labs top brass. Lots of power and influence from day one.

Major acquisitions like this one seldom have only one motive, and they are much more a form of art than science. One can assume that SAP liked the technology and products, was intrigued by the large installed base and the synergies with SAP’s Business User strategy. There are also many other hidden motives— I would like to speculate* about one of them—the succession motive. Read more »

After posting the article about small business goes global I got an email asking me to share my experience about managing a global team. I did manage a team of about 100 people that spread across 4 continents and 10 countries and learned a lot by doing it. Here are the 10 commandments of managing a global team (the ones I used and the ones I wish I had used): Read more »