Four Iconic Companies & Learning Agility

November 1, 2024 Edition | Join Over 60k Readers Of Our Email Version: Sign Up For An Email Version | Don't Miss A Thing!

opening NOTE

Starbucks, Southwest, Nike and Boeing

We see four iconic brands getting back to business of customer centricity. In the process, we will see four different turn-around stories play out and four CEOs (3 new) write their own piece in corporate leadership history. Earlier this year, we saw one such leadership story in the split of GE by Larry Culp. 

But what ties all the four companies together in their search for customer centricity? 

1. The pursuit of customer centricity is a multi-disciplinary game (Both Starbucks and Nike have won the digital play but lost the experiences basics)
2. Leadership matters more than technology: All of these companies have thrown money and technology at customers. What they should instead have done is ensured the leadership was the first thing that went closer to the customers.
3. Learning Agility Matters: Especially when knowledge is increasingly getting commoditized with AI Models. The ability to learn faster than your customers is being tested at all the four companies.
4. Work design is key: Increased digital at Starbucks led to increased customizations that led to overworked staff, leading to unionization. Southwest's simplicity is what kept it as a leading low-cost carrier. But with technology, work design can be a revolutionary approach to help staff create amazing customer experiences. All while creating new revenue opportunities.

the latest from OUR FACULTY

Uber-Expedia, Q-commerce, and the Seductive Lies of Network Effects

Uber is looking to buy Expedia. This is a continuation of Uber's bet on building demand-side advantages—customer loyalty, network effects, and the elusive super-app vision.

But if we look at the few businesses that have performed well in local markets, they have done so by doing the very opposite - by building asset-intensive supply-side advantages.

Network effects have become the fallback 'how-we-win' argument, often applied indiscriminately to any platform connecting producers and consumers. More producers bring more consumers, creating a nice, little flywheel.

Local market players like Uber, Doordash, Zomato, Zepto are often explained in terms of network effects. Or in terms of data-driven learning. Gain enough users and the data will be invaluable. But what if these theories don't apply to local markets at all? What if adding users actually creates inefficiencies? What if more data leads to diminishing returns? And how do you create advantages when your network doesn't create defensible network effects and your data isn't useful beyond a point?

Are Human Powered Robots The Solution We've Been Searching For?

Every time someone presents a humanoid robot prototype, one of the first comments is almost always something to the effect of "it's just a robot powered by a human in a VR headset!" But while this is normally presented as a "gotcha!" the concept is actually extremely powerful, and could solve a whole host of problems while creating new jobs at scale.

Here in the US, for example, copious amounts of digital ink has been spilled about the issues many young men are having gaining and keeping employment. Traditionally "male" jobs have been outsourced, and for reasons far too complicated to enumerate here, men have not gone to work in female-coded fields. So what is left is a swathe of the population left adrift and angry. But if there's anything that is a common thread among many of them, it's that many of them are tech-savvy and especially interested in video games. Hence, a solution.

Fintech Chronicles: Brazil's PIX, US Innovations, and Future Trends

Two of most popular DPIs — Digital Public Infrastructure- are undoubtedly UPI and PIX.

UPI was designed with the objective to integrate government services digitally and create the India stack with Aadhar and the likes.PIX has a different objective and as a result PIX is designed for programmable money and UPI isn't.

 The Brazilian Central banks wanted from the start to design a system that digitally interacts with programmable money. For now, the fraction of the payments in Brazil that are programmed is small, but the vision is to increase it. Currently, in Brazil through the PIX app one can get cashbacks, a capability that is only possible because of the baked in programmability.

Soon the PIX rails will allow every cash registry in any store, in any village where there is no bank or no ATM, to be able to perform banking services starting in 2026. This has a major economic and social impact, as there are over 1000 cities in Brazil that have no banks and no ATMS. It is a functionality that can scale only because PIX is designed natively to be programmable.

spot LIGHT 

Rajan Kalia, CEO of Salto Dee Fe and Faculty on The New World People Leader moderated a panel discussion at the Annual SHRM Summit in India. 

 Navigating the Employer-Employee Balance: Insights from the Annual India SHRM Conference

 As organizations adapt to evolving workplace trends, a key question has emerged: Whose interests should take precedence—those of the employer or the employee? At the recent India Annual SHRM Conference, panelists from leading organizations such as Pernod-Ricard, Perfetti, House of Cheer and Pepsi engaged in a debate, tackling this question from multiple angles, with a focus on how modern work environments are reshaping this balance.

Jessica Groopman, Founder of Regenerative Technology Project and Faculty on Regenerative Enterprise & Ecosystem Innovation delivered a keynote at Sustainable Brands 2024, San Diego.

Reorienting technological innovation to be in service of ecosystemic, societal and human health

 The future of tech is unwritten, yet crucial to societal resilience and innovation. How can tech evolve out of accelerating the extractive economy, and into a force for systemic regeneration: technology in service to life? Applying regenerative principles the Tech industry can profoundly change its next chapter, and all our lives! The Regenerative Technology Project is ushering in a new era for tech. This talk introduces Regenerative Technology and invites visionary brands, investors, entrepreneurs and builders to co-create it together.

Ravin Jesuthasan, CFA, FRSA and his co-author Tanuj Kapilashrami shared insights from their new book, The Skills-Powered Organization: The Journey to The Next Generation Enterprise (MIT Press), with some amazing business leaders in New York City.

They had an engaging discussion about why becoming a skills-powered organization is so important and how companies can embark on this transformative journey. Here are some key takeaways from their discussion: (1) The volatility and velocity of change in the global economy necessitate making skills the currency of work; a smaller set of building blocks of human capability that can be connected more seamlessly to rapidly evolving work. (2) AI is both the driver of this change and a critical enabler, allowing us to better translate the demand signals of changing work into skill implications while understanding the supply of skills and the numerous ways in which demand and supply can be connected and gaps closed. (3) There is a science to embarking on this journey and demonstrating its impact (i.e., you don't have to eat the elephant in one bite!) (4) The ROI is unlike any other as we bend the demand and supply curves of work in a fundamentally different way.

If you want to dive deeper, check out The Skills-Powered Organization (https://lnkd.in/gSDMd2JP)

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