In everything you do as a business leader you have to constantly ask yourself the question ‘does what I am doing, or asking others to do, support my belief that integrity is a core principal of my leadership of this business?’ Or put another way, ‘do my actions compromise your or my integrity?’ Integrity has to be a fundamental pillar of any leader’s behavioural traits and ignoring that fundamental principal can destroy you as a leader. In time, you will lose the respect of your peers, your colleagues, your subordinates and ultimately your clients.

Of course, erosion of integrity happens slowly over time but unless you constantly check your actions against your core principals you won’t notice that it’s happening. Actions that compromise your integrity become the norm until gradually people realise that what you are doing is wrong; and they react. Staff will feel compromised and start to consider if they can continue working for you, stakeholders in the business question your actions and fitness to lead the business and clients vote with their feet and opt to buy from someone else.

So what do you do to ensure you remain true to your core values and that those around you understand what they are?

• Know what your values are. Write them down and share them by producing a ‘value charter’ shared with your staff, clients and stakeholders. Display it in the office and on your website for all to see.
• Adhere to your principals. Don’t just write them down. Make them real; practice what you preach.
• Trust your judgement. If something doesn’t feel right, then it probably isn’t. Be prepared to challenge any behaviour or actions that you feel compromise your and the businesses integrity.
• Don’t turn a blind eye. Don’t pretend things aren’t happening when you’re pretty sure they are. Act!
• If in doubt; don’t do it! Trust your instincts to do what is right. Challenge yourself and others to ensure actions match words.

And what do you do if your integrity is being compromised?

• Say something. It’s not always easy but doing nothing can’t be an option. Be respectful but explain clearly why you believe what you are being asked to do compromises your integrity and core values.
• Is the other person listening to you? Do they understand and appreciate your point of view? Or are they looking to force you to accept that what they are asking is correct regardless of your considered, and respectful, objections?
• Walk away. Ultimately, if there is a refusal to understand your view, then you have to walk away from the situation. This could mean refusing to participate in the action or even leaving your job. Hard to consider, I appreciate. No one wants to voluntarily walk away from their job but ultimately, if your core values and beliefs are real, you may be left with no option. After all, if integrity really is a core principal that you firmly believe in, would you want to work for an organisation that does not respect that? And are you being true to yourself if you don’t follow your principals?

So, is integrity in leadership important? Of course it is. Integrity and the consistent adherence to a set of core values bring respect. Respect brings loyalty. Loyalty brings commitment and commitment leads to a successful business built on mutual respect and trust.

Be aware of your actions and of what you ask others to do and constantly check back against your core principals to ensure that they adhere to them.

It’s a tough business environment at the moment and the temptation to cut corners and compromise values is sometimes difficult to resist. But, if your integrity is being compromised, then speak out, calmly and with respect. Ultimately, the business will be a better place for it.

I read the book in less than 10 hours and loved it.

The following week I was in New York and was eulogising to a colleague about The Alchemist. Purely by chance, we were walking past Barnes and Noble on 5th Avenue at the very moment that I was praising the book. So we popped in and did another impression of a man lost in a bookshop. And then, as if by magic, a young lady came up to me and asked if she could help. I explained what I was looking for and she pointed me in the direction of Paulo Coelho’s books. Five minutes later I was at the till, where the same young lady was waiting to serve me. “Awesome choice!” she said as I fumbled for my credit card. “Yep – it really is a great book, isn’t it. What was your favourite part?” I asked. “Oh, ummmm…” she stammered as she went red and looked at the till “I haven’t actually read it, I just know that it’s supposed to be great”.

Now we all know that sincerity is the new black when it comes to customer service. And we all know that when Americans say “have a nice day” it is more through Pavlovian habit than authenticity. So is the UK now setting the standard for genuine, heart-felt, properly sincere service?

Ok – you might think that I’ve taken one small coincidence and blown it into a bigger story for a blog. Wrong. The (English) lady at the check-in area at Heathrow was truly outstanding, whereas the (American) chap who sold me a ticket for the bus into Manhattan was a scoundrel. The waitress at the restaurant in Time Square cared more about her nails than my food, whereas the waitress at Veritas wine bar in Banbury was the equal of the lady at Heathrow. And so on, and so on…

What’s your experience? Do you think that the advent of authentic service sounds the death knell to the days of American service dominance? Or am I being a hopelessly jingoistic Brit?!

We received some excellent feedback from our Bicester session held on 26 April. The charts indicate that our audience of around 50 local business people found that the event met its objectives, they found the presentations useful and they wanted to attend future session.

The point they didn’t rate as useful was networking, and we’re not quite sure why.

Our audiences are filled with bright, exciting business people from the Oxfordshire community who openly shared ideas and questions in the discussion sessions.

So how would we get more value from the networking side of the event?

Perhaps our mental models keep us from recognizing the real value of our acquaintances and friends. We’re used to paying consultants on a day rate or seeking ‘funding’ to get projects off the ground. What if our ‘community’ could provide some or all of that support free of charge just because we live in the same place or were part of the same economy?

It might be a bit naive to pose the question but it’s at the heart of the big society agenda. Rip out the banal political rhetoric and you find an argument for creating communities in which the members support each other.

Could the Practical Innovation ‘gang’ – the folks who have been attending and contributing to our short evening sessions – form a networked community that offered our ‘friends’ some help free of charge and based on shared experience or advice?

Does this happen today? How could we accelerate it and make it happen more effectively in future?

What do you think?

Mucking around makes markets
How experimenting is critical to innovating. You can‘t design everything on paper and, even if you could, you wouldn‘t be able to second-guess the nuggets of insight that you will get by simply having a go at something.
Frank Nigriello, Director of Corporate Affairs for Unipart Group

She works in a retail business that actively solicits customer opinions with comment cards and surveys. Occasionally, one of those cards yields a complaint and she springs into action.

Her plan is always the same: she invites the customer to have a cup of coffee to discuss the complaint. She listens, takes notes, questions for clarification, asks for specific examples and then checks that she has understood.

She then does two things that are gold dust. First, she asks the customer for a suggestion as to how the issue could be resolved or improved, and then she thanks the customer and offers a small token of appreciation like a complimentary coffee.

Every time a customer complains, she gets a ‘free’ idea. It’s innovation on the cheap. Her customers have often thought through a problem and come up with a better way to do things.

The improvement can save time, money or deliver a better level of service. When it’s implemented, not only does she impress all her customers who benefit from the innovation, but she gains a life-long champion ‘innovator’ who returns again and again often with more ideas.

Cost: a coffee and a comment card.

Benefit: innovation delivering benefits that customer’s value.

It’s the oldest trick in the book but one that we often forget. When customers complain, don’t get a upset – just ask them for your next practical innovation.

My long time friend, Barrie Giles, challenged my premise that a great business needed to have passion, to demonstrate continuous innovation …and to be sexy.  It was obvious that certain products were sexy (like the iPad), but how could a service business have the same appeal?

For me, a service business is all about the customer experience, so to answer Barrie’s point I looked to the best …and sexiest .. customer experience that I could remember – Disneyworld.

When I was first dragged to Disneyworld in 1993, I knew I would hate it.  But after two weeks of being immersed in ‘the magic’ I realised that I was learning at the feet of masters and I’ve been back to study every year.

So what makes it such a sexy customer experience? That’s too much for one blog post, so let me focus on one simple ride: Star Tours II.

Last year Disney revamped the much-loved homage to the Star Wars films and upped the experience value by 100 percent. Here’s what makes that experience sexy:

1. It tells a great story as ‘context’  – The rebels, the evil empire, the princess…what’s not to love?
2. It has compelling characters that create a relationship with the audience
3. It delivers value (In Disneyworld, ‘value’ = fun, and Star Tours is great fun)
4. It engages the audience – In a simulator ride, just bouncing about is engaging, but Disney goes one step further by identifying one member of the audience and, with clever video trickery, puts him or her into the story
5. It changes and surprises – As a result of some great video editing, you can ride Star Tours 10 times and get 10 different experiences

So, mathematically, context + relationship + value + engagement + surprise = the Disney ‘magic’ or what I’ve called a ‘sexy’ service offering.

Could you use that formula to innovate in your service business? What do you think?

And yet the government is doing almost nothing about it except to say it is the responsibility of local government. David Robertson at Oxfordshire County Council is trying his best, but this is one area where the issues cannot be solved at a local level. It needs an integrated national strategy and our local MPs are of no help in this. Some countries – especially in Scandinavia are a decade ahead of the UK.

So my first step would be to divert the £30bn destined for HS2 to digital – and by the way this would be a much better strategy for the anti-HS2 lobby to follow than playing NIMBY games.

Do I have a vested interest? You bet I do! But it is in the national interest too and particularly Oxfordshire’s which has such an important education sector. Here goes:

LeaderShape is  a leadership development organisation, and although we do our work primarily at a senior level and the work is often bespoke and customised, there is a growing demand because of globalisation and the cost of “man-hours” to increasingly provide virtual, remote and distance learning environments and interventions.

There is a lot of dispute about whether remote & distance learning is effective. The reality is that it is happening and is the future and therefore organisations like LeaderShape are putting a lot of effort into understanding neuroscience better so that the environments and interventions we develop are indeed effective.

There are many thousands of organisations in the UK involved in training, people development and education which realise the future is remote / distance learning – from the niche companies like LeaderShape to the large universities and business schools. It is a big industry in the UK, and worldwide probably only second to the US. Many other service organisations and large companies with their own in-house learning and development departments have similar requirements.

None of this can be done effectively without a world class digital infrastructure. We risk losing one of our most important export sectors as well as the ability to effectively educate, train and develop our own workforce.

LeaderShape has a big opportunity in India for example. It’s success will depend on the digital infrastructure. Today I had a Skype call with business associates in New Delhi and London. I got cut off here in Burford (a town of 4,000 people) because the broadband service is not reliable (let alone high speed) and went down for a few minutes. It was kind of embarrassing reconnecting with India to tell them the fault was because of our useless infrastructure – when we are trying to sell them hi-tech learning.

Follow this discussion on LinkedIn http://lnkd.in/SEviNr

You might think I’m saying this because I have forgotten how blisteringly tough it is at the very beginning of a start-up. Wrong. I’m also not saying it because I think start-up funding grows on trees. It doesn’t. My point is more fundamental. To paraphrase Ernest Rutherford (Kiwi nuclear scientist), “if you don’t have any money, you’re going to have to think.”

Being well-funded as a start-up subtly plants the seeds of a crippling disease: arrogance. I’m not saying that you will be arrogant as an individual, but investors have backed your plan and you will be expected to execute the plan. Put another way, you will try to impose your solution on the market, hence the arrogance (you are assuming the market wants what you have).

Contrast this with the bootstrapped-start-up. If you don’t have access to investor funding, there is only one other place you can go to get money: CUSTOMERS! And that’s the crucial point: if you are well-funded, you are encouraged to assume that you are right; if you are under-funded then you cannot afford to be wrong. You will be forced to find-out (“think”) what it is that you can do for customers that they will actually pay you to do.

Follow the journey of a well-funded start-up. You inflate your cost base with expensive people and fancy trappings. Offices, cars, kit of all shapes and sizes (one thing is for sure – if you have £10m you will definitely spend it!). And by the time you realise you’re original idea wasn’t quite right (which will almost invariably happen) you will be out of funds. Bust. Meanwhile, the bootstrapped entrepreneur will have been forced to recruit the most wonderful of breeds: the pirate. No fancy offices, just a battle-hardened pirate ship. And a boat-load of happy, paying customers. I have seen the first hand, which is why the Jolly Roger stands proudly waving on the mast of HMS ByBox!

Constraints are the cornerstone of creativity. Innovation is the commercial application of creativity. If you have limited funds, you will be forced into being innovative. And innovative companies will always win in the long-run.

What do you think? Does the pirate ship always beat the cruise-liner, or am I at sea with my thinking?

Love, Sex and Innovation:
How individuals turn passions into business opportunities – Frank Nigriello, Director of Corporate Affairs for Unipart Group

Part 1

Part 2

Finding your innovation partner
Networking activities are now the right place to find them. Companies don’t just go to networking events to exchange business cards and add contacts to their social media sites – Placi O’Neill-Espejo, Partnership Manager at Bicester Vision

Part 1

Part 2

But before you start embarking on a partnership, you need to start thinking about the people that you already know within your network, or sometimes you need to start networking first in order to look for a partner.

If you asked me what makes a good networker, I could say a number of fixed factors according to my own experience. A cocktail that starts with your own DNA (your genes will define what your personality is from the very beginning), your upbringing and the culture which you identify with, fate and luck in who you meet at different events and, of course, once you are more experienced planning to be more effective when it comes to meeting new people.

If you are starting to network and meet potential business collaborations by attending events, I would suggest that you prepare yourself by making sure you have a clear, concise and sexy networking pitch. Here are 4 steps to build this sexy and appealing networking pitch:

1. Open the conversation by being interesting, sometimes a little bit shocking. Why not?

2. Follow by demonstrating that your business offers a solution to a problem (ideally global and easy to understand). We are in world where benefits to customers follow on from the offer to solve their problems.

3. Use a case study. It could be the most recent customer you have acquired, for example. You can also make it real by giving it a full identity, such as the name of the person, age, situation, etc…

4. Be passionate about what you do. Don’t be afraid to show why you love your job/your business.

So you have an attractive networking pitch, what next?

Make sure you don’t forget practical things such as:

• Wear your badge on the right hand side (much easier for people to see your name when shacking your hand)
• Work the room
• Never corner people (they end up being scared or bored of you)
• Don’t mix food and drink with the conversation as this is quite distressing for the other person whose attention you are trying to get
• Use clear and simple language, avoid technical vocabulary
• Try to be personal and not look like the conversation is simply a business transaction
• Add little touches that will make you seem unique such as the addition of a QR Code on your business card or having your own branded badge
• Don’t be afraid to stand out of the crowd, always for the right reasons, of course.

In summary, if you have decided to give networking a go, don’t be afraid of being memorable, think outside of the box when you attend an event, and start joining the dots between all the connections you have in order to tap into other people’s knowledge, contacts or even funding? And if in doubt, here is what will always work to calm anyone’s nerves in any situation, a good old fashioned SMILE.