Friday Books and Talks 10/09/2015

Human Sigma
by Jim Asplund, John H. Fleming, Ph.D.

Human Sigma offers an innovative, research-based approach to one of the toughest challenges businesses face today: how to drive success by effectively managing the moments when employees interact with customers. The authors offer essential ideas for business leaders at all levels and show how sales and service companies can flourish in today’s new global economy. Blending strategic analysis with hands-on, practical steps and advice, this book summary will change how you view your work, your employees, and your customers.

Rule 1: You can’t measure and manage employee and customer experiences as separate entities; they must be managed together under a single organizational entity.

Rule 2: Feelings are facts, and emotions frame the employee-customer encounter.

Rule 3: Think globally, measure and act locally: You must measure and manage the employee-customer
encounter locally.

Rule 4: There is one number you need to know. We can quantify and summarize the effectiveness of the employee-customer encounter in a single performance metric that is powerfully related to financial performance.

Rule 5: If you pray for potatoes, you had better grab the right hoe. Improvement in local  performance requires deliberate and active intervention through attention to a combination of transactional and transformational intervention activities.

The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor

In his international bestseller The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton M. Christensen exposed this crushing paradox behind the failure of many industry leaders: by placing too much focus on pleasing their most profitable customers, these firms actually paved the way for their own demise by ignoring the disruptive technologies that aggressively evolved to displace them. In The Innovator’s Solution, Christensen and coauthor Michael E. Raynor help all companies understand how to become disruptors themselves.

Clay Christensen and Raynor not only reveal that innovation is more predictable than most managers have come to believe, they also provide helpful advice on the business decisions crucial to truly disruptive growth. Citing in-depth research and theories tested in hundreds of companies across many industries, the authors identify the processes that create successful innovation—and they show managers how to tailor their strategies to the changing circumstances of a dynamic world.