Leverage Relationships to Achieve Your Business Goals
By Dave Bayless
(This article was originally written as a column for SCORE. This version includes Windows media audio commentary by Justin Bigart, an entrepreneur featured in the article.)
Whether your business address is on Wall Street or Main Street, you will increasingly be held to a national, or even global, standard of execution. Smart entrepreneurs look to relationship value to achieve their goals in this demanding environment.
The Importance of Execution
George Gendron was the editor-in-chief of Inc. magazine for 20 years. During his tenure, the magazine systematically interviewed thousands of successful entrepreneurs regarding their assumed sources of comparative advantage. As George tells the story, until six or seven years ago, entrepreneurs regularly attributed their success to having a better product or service idea. But, in an increasingly networked world, good ideas spread rapidly. So, it should not surprise us to learn that entrepreneurs began to change their tune a few years ago. These days, entrepreneurs almost invariably attribute their business success to superior execution.
So what does superior execution mean? I believe that it means learning about, and adapting to, customers' evolving needs and wants faster and less expensively than anyone else. Jeff Shuman and Jan Twombly at The Rhythm of Business, a Boston-based consultancy, refer to the process as "getting smart fast for short dollars." Easier said than done. Nevertheless, it's a fair statement of the challenge that all businesses face. Customers' expectations are shaped by their improved access to information and alternatives. If you can't deliver the goods, customers will find someone who can. Customers truly are in the driver's seat.
Resources and Value
So, what does this mean for small businesses? How can they hope to compete against large companies that have superior resources? Part of the answer lies in understanding the difference between owning a resource and using a resource. Other insights come from differentiating between money and value. If you want to get to Los Angeles from New York, you don't need to own the highway. Indeed, you don't need to own the car you ride in. Nor do you even need to rent the car. If you could find someone who needed his or her car transported to the West Coast, you could provide that person a service and accomplish your own goal in the process.
Shuman and Twombly assert, "Value is whatever is useful for achieving desired outcomes." Small businesses can increase the scope and depth of their capabilities by shifting their mindset away from buying or renting resources in financial transactions and toward the purposeful cultivation of relationships and the exchange of value.
What set of needs do you want to satisfy for your customers? What is hindering your ability to serve those needs? What goals do you want to achieve to overcome those hurdles? Who has what you need to meet your goals? What value can you offer in exchange?
Vacuous networking isn't the solution. However, the purposeful cultivation of relationships can give you access to value that, in many cases, can't be purchased for cash.
Complete Article
|
| |
What's a wiki?
We asked this of our associate, Dave Bayless, as he explained to us that he was developing a wiki www.esupportorg.net to ignite and sustain a conversation among a group of 70+ folks who've raised their hands to participate in a conversation we're facilitating about the impact of entrepreneurial support organizations on jobs, regional economies, and support for business transformation.
As we've learned from Dave, a wiki is a web page editable by everyone who has permission to access it. It doesn't have fancy graphics or Flash® intros. Instead, a wiki is essentially a conversation carried on through the written word. If you can use Word®, you can create and edit a wiki.
- Dave is a relationship technology guru. He understands how to use technology to facilitate conversations, learning, and relationship building. He's the founder of Small World Networks, and the choreographer of Pioneer Entrepreneurs a network of peers focused on developing entrepreneurial intelligence and iterative decision making skills - especially in places where entrepreneurial role models aren't prevalent, such as his hometown base of Bozeman, Montana. Dave's also the author of our lead article, Leveraging Relationships to Grow a Business.
Oh - we learned from a prominent Wall Street Journal column this past Monday, that wiki wiki is Hawaiian for "quick."
Not surprisingly, as the WSJ article predicted, Dave had the wiki up and running in a matter of hours and the conversation commenced within seconds of letting folks know the forum existed. All entrepreneurial support organizations are welcome to join the online conversation.
Timing is everything.
Keep on dancing!
Jeff & Jan and The Rhythm of Business Team
|
|
|
|
| Measuring the Value of a Strategic Relationship Management Organization White Paper Now Available |
| |
 Click Here for your copy of our latest paper.
As relationship-focused philosophies and practices embed themselves throughout organizations, strategic relationship managers are increasingly being asked to demonstrate the value they bring to the company. These managers can be found throughout a business - working with customers, suppliers, technical partners, and local communities - indeed all relevant stakeholders. Each challenge is unique, yet has similar aspects to it. Chief among them is the ability to identify, measure, and manage value that has yet to turn into revenue or easily visible cost savings.
Fundamental to the challenge is the lack of a common language for non-monetary value and an appreciation of the true nature of value. As a purchasing manager at one of the world's largest companies told us:
"If I have two suppliers and one charges me $1.00 and another $1.10, I'm forced to go with the lower cost, even though both the guys on the manufacturing floor and I would rather work with the higher priced supplier, because they are just better to work with. But I can't quantify 'better to work with,' so I'm forced to equate price with value. I know it is wrong, but I don't know how to measure it."
From our perspective, the answer lies in examining the assumptions underlying the linkages between goals, value needed to achieve them, and activities through which value is created. It is a straight-forward, iterative approach that doesn't require reams of statistics to get started.
We lay out this approach in Measuring the Value of a Strategic Relationship Management Organization, the second white paper in our series: In Pursuit of Value. To get your free copy, just reply to this message with a request and we'll get it right off to you.
And please give us your thoughts. We're continuing our research in this area, interviewing relationship managers across a number of industries. If you'd like to participate, please give Jeff a call at +1.617.965.4777x17, or just reply to this message. The interviews take about 30 minutes. This is an important question where everyone's experiences can build on the central kernel of knowledge.
|
|
| Community of Practice for Entrepreneurial Support Organizations Launched |
| |
We head to Dallas, Texas later this week to participate in the United States Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) 2004 Conference. The conference brings together entrepreneurship educators and entrepreneurial support organizations (ESOs) to learn about new research and practices to encourage entrepreneurial growth in companies and communities, large and small.
USASBE is the US based member of the International Council of Small Business. Some of our readers may remember our article, A Global Entrepreneurial Spirit about the 2003 conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland this past June. What impressed us most about the Belfast conference was the theme of entrepreneurship as a driver of economic development around the world.
Since that conference, we've been talking with a number of entrepreneurial support organizations about the challenges they face in meeting the needs of their many stakeholders. What we've learned from our research is that many ESOs are finding that their incentives and activities are not aligned with desired outcomes. We've also discovered that this is a topic of great interest among ESOs.
So we've convened a community of practice among ESOs to examine the question of how ESOs can act differently in order to better achieve their goals. We're launching it with several initiatives:
§ A face-to-face meeting to at this week's USASBE conference of 70+ leaders in the field
§ A wiki for Entrepreneurial Support Organizations to sustain the conversation and share the results of our meetings. The site homepage is http://esupportorg.net
§ We've posted a quick, 5-question, pre-event survey to seed the discussion. The results are tabulated real time. To access the survey, go to: http://tinyurl.com/2qbcl
§ We're presenting a workshop at the USASBE conference to introduce the skills relationship managers and entrepreneurs alike use to balance the competing interests of their many stakeholders
We look forward to seeing many of our readers at USASBE and having fascinating discussions on fostering entrepreneurship to promote economic development.
|
|
| Value Network Expert Verna Allee Shares Her Approach to Value with Gennova Group |
| |
It was with great pleasure that we introduced Verna Allee www.vernaallee.com to the Gennova Group www.gennovagroup.com community earlier this winter. Verna uses principles derived from living systems theory to help management thinking evolve to support ever increasing levels of complexity. She's developed a methodology we find very complimentary to our work to analyze value flows within networks and support the development of network strategies and skills that help managers see clearly through the complexity of these multi-stakeholder networks.
Gennova Group members are all interested in using networks and non-monetary value to drive business transformation. We had folks in the room who are working to transform the health care delivery system, complex industrial supply chains, community based organizations, and more. What emerged from the discussion was greater appreciation for the fact that we do not have common language with which to describe the non-monetary assets and currencies (many of which are intangible) that are often most valuable for accomplishing one's goals. Certainly, accounting is the language of monetary value, but how do we describe the value that comes from equally important currencies of information and access?
As a result, we have many folks talking about the same thing - but talking past each other. (We think this is very similar to the problem relationship managers face when trying to communicate the value their organizations deliver to their stakeholders.) Certainly, we will continue to explore this in the future.
Under consideration at this time is an intensive workshop to teach professionals how to communicate in the developing language of value networks (what we refer to as a collaborative community). Drop us a line if you're interested in learning more!
|
|
| Article Featuring Dow Chemical's SiLKnet(sm) Alliance to Appear in March 2004 American Executive |
| |
As much as 70% of all strategic business relationships either fail outright or fail to achieve their objectives. So imagine our excitement when, after speaking with three- quarters of the more than two-dozen members of Dow's SiLKnet(sm) Alliance ( www.silknetalliance.com), we realized every one of them felt they had received great value from the participation in the alliance. Stepping back and reflecting on all our learning to date about success in strategic business relationships, we saw six elements that must be present for these relationships to be successful.
We can't give them away until the article is published, but to get a free 6 month trial subscription, visit: http://www.americanexecutive.com/contact.htm.
|
|
| Want to Contribute to "Pursuing Value"? |
| |
 We welcome third-party contributions to "Pursuing Value: The Newsletter for Relationship Business." If you'd like your article or a "Letter to Editor" to be included in an upcoming issue, please submit it to us for consideration with an email to info@rhythmofbusiness.com.
Do you know someone who would be interested in receiving this newsletter?
Please forward using this link.
Send Page To a Friend
|
|
|
