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If It’s Not Broke – Fix It

By CRP Partner Gene Baldwin, as published in Franchise Times

Good customer service is all about consistency. When one of your regular customer shops with you, it is very important for that customer to receive the same quality products and service every time – in every store. Employees are trained and retrained on the elements of good customer service. When sales are soft, management goes back to promoting and featuring its most popular products – the ones that never change. At the same time you are placing a great deal of time and energy on maintaining what has made you successful in the past, you must continue to innovate and respond to the changing tastes of your customers. As the pace of change accelerates, the way in which you respond to the dynamics of the marketplace must change too. In other words, the old saying, “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” will not be good enough.

Wikinomics is a book that describes how product innovation will be done in the future. You have probably heard about the very successful website, Wikipedia. This website is an online encyclopedia that is many times larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica. It has been developed and continues to be improved by people from all over the world. Its content is added voluntarily and free of charge. Anyone can add an article, edit or improve the content of an existing article. Once an article is posted, it is edited by both other contributors and the small staff of employees at Wikipedia. Other popular websites involve substantial interaction with frequent visitors. Your children or grandchildren probably communicate with friends on MySpace, exchange pictures on Flickr or download video clips from YouTube (recently, Google purchased YouTube for more than $1 billion). What these websites have in common is that visitors to those sites have substantial, direct involvement with the contents of the site and add their own content directly and quickly (wiki means “quick” in Hawaiian).

There are numerous examples in the book about how open software programs (such as Linux) grow and improve from the voluntary input from people from all over the world. The Fortune 100 company Proctor & Gamble now allows many of its patents to be shared with persons and companies worldwide to develop new products. P&G now has a goal of sourcing 50% of its products from outside the company. Many firms offer financial rewards for those who develop new products using this open-sharing technique. There is even one story about a Canadian mining company that shared its geological data in an open forum and experienced unbelievable results from the exploration ideas presented by people from many different locations and disciplines.

The point of this book is that the Internet is not just about finding and viewing information any longer. The original paradigm of measuring “clicks” and “eyeballs” is being left behind. More and more Internet users want to interact directly with the websites they visit. They want to add content, download content and be a part of the website’s growth and expansion. This egalitarian process is much different from the way companies have traditionally operated. Corporations have been closed and self-contained. Intellectual property and proprietary products have been closely guarded and protected. Companies have been managed using a traditional command and control system. This system will change dramatically due to the influence of the Internet. The author of Wikinomics puts it this way: “For the business manager the number-one lesson is that the monolithic, self-contained, inwardly focused corporation is dying. Stability is dead. The idea that you can invent a business that will never be disrupted by technology is over”.

Your company will have to change with this trend. Your customers will want to be more directly involved in the products and services of your company. Employees will seek more input into the policies and procedures that affect them and the way your company does business. In my opinion, it is a long-term trend that will not go away. You must find forums for your customers and employees to feel more directly connected to your business and its products. I have no concrete ideas as to exactly how this trend will affect your company. It may be that a person outside your company will provide the research and development for your next great product offering or one of your employees may provide the next big productivity idea.

What you should be alert to is the fact that your customers and employees will expect much more direct and meaningful involvement and interaction with your business as their involvement and interaction with other institutions (such as the Internet) increases. It is a trend that you should embrace and not fight. It is here to stay.