The Principle™

How to Achieve Sustained Growth and Profits in the Digital

Age by Transforming Into a People-Centric Business

Copyright © 2016, By Geoff Ables and C5 Insight. All rights reserved.

by Geoff Ables

Infographics and Insights

The LUCK Principle™Numerous studies have found that when organizations engage employees and customers,

they achieve breakthrough results in terms of sustained growth and profitability. Businesses

have invested billions in pursuit of these results. But the outcomes have mostly been

disappointing – legacy approaches to solving business problems no longer work.

Success requires a new way of thinking about relationships. The LUCK Principle is a proven

framework that leaders can adopt to create a people-centric organization in the digital age. It

scales the 5 timeless rules for relationship success from individuals (outlined below) to the

enterprise (outlined on the following pages).

Listen

Great connectors listen. They listen to what is and isn’t said: words, subtle nuances, body language, eye

contact. And they remember. Facts, names, stories and ideas are all stored in their heads.

Understand

They spend time thinking about others. They analyze. They have empathy. They invest time in

understanding the journey that the other person is on.

Connect

Armed with knowledge and insight, they find relevant ways to connect. Using an approach that is both

consistent and flexible, connectors make building relationships look effortless.

Know

Forming relationships isn’t instinct, it is learned habits. And the best never stop learning. They know what

the results of their efforts have been, and are always fine-tuning their approach to people.

Good LUCK

The best connectors approach life and relationships with a people-centric sense of purpose. They balance

serving other people with passionately pursuing their own goals. Leaders never forget that people are the

most important thing, and that they are one of those people.

References

1 Gallup, “State of the American Workplace,” 2013.2 Peppers & Rogers Group, “Customer Experience Maturity Monitor,” 2009.3 Kenexa study, 2009.4 Nucleus Research, Profitability Case Studies, 2012-2014.5 McKinsey & Company, “The Social Economy,” 2012.6 C5 Insight, “CPR for CRM Study,” 2014. AIIM, “Connecting and Optimizing SharePoint,” 2015..7 Gallup, “State of the American Workplace,” 2013.

Resources:

Buy The LUCK Principle™ to dive deeper.

Visit www.theLUCKprinciple.com for more resources.

More info is shared at the end of this e-Book.

Introduction Infographic1

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ListenOrganizations that engage their customers and employees are organizations that know how

to listen and remember what is being said in a corporate memory.

In business, listening and remembering is about data.

But there can be so much data coming from, and being stored in, so many different places,

that listening can be complex and frustrating. Complexity will continue to increase as

businesses are forced to listen across an ever growing number of channels. Simplicity can be

attained through fewer, more intelligent systems, for people to use to get their jobs done.

Most organizations don’t listen in enough places.

Listening includes structured data such as transactions, clicks and returns. It includes listening

across channels such as web, email, point-of-sale, phone, social and the Internet of Things.

But great listeners also listen for what isn’t said. They invest the time to ride along on the

customer and employee experience, and to capture qualitative data from observations,

interactions and interviews.

Most organizations make it too difficult for employees to find data.

Too often it requires a heroic effort for employees to comb through multiple systems to find

the information they need to help a customer. People should feel like technology is being

made to work for them. Instead, they often feel they are being made to work for technology.

Remembering means making the corporate memory – data – easily accessible at every level

of an organization to make better decisions. From the front-lines to the executive suite, each

role in the organization needs its own way to see the information that it needs so that it can

get the job done.

References

1 Zendesk, “Omnichannel Customer Service Gap Survey,” 2013.2 North American Technographics, “Customer Experience Online Survey,” 2009.3 Accenture, “Big Success with Big Data,” 2014.4 The CMO Club and Rakuten Marketing, “The CMO Solution Guide: Demystifying Omnichannel Marketing to Create a Winning Strategy for CMO’s,” 2015.5 SmartFocus, “Marketing Pain Points and How to Overcome Them,” 2015. Harvard Business Review, “The New Science of Sales Performance,” 2014.6 Gartner, “MDM is Critical to CRM Optimization,” 2014.7 C5 Insight, “CPR for CRM Study,” 2014.

Application:

Engage with customers and employees across all channels, capture data.

Integrate, migrate and eliminate systems – identify one system per job function.

Eliminate asking customers the same question twice.

Listen Infographic

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UnderstandSuccessful organizations not only give their people the tools to listen to customers and to

each other – they give them the tools to extract the right insights from that data, and to make

better decisions, faster.

When it comes to finding insights in their data, most businesses focus on developing big data

systems. But the big problem is not big data – it’s little data. Here are the four ways that

successful organizations are doing a better job of understanding people.

Search: Harvard Business Review estimates that workers spend 19% of their time trying to find

the information that they need to get their jobs done (Harvard Business Review, “Social

Media’s Productivity Payoff,” August, 2012). That’s one day each week. If your company

employs 1,000 people with an average salary of $50,000, that’s $10 million spent each year

looking for stuff!

Little Data: The data that is in most engagement systems (such as customer relationship

management, marketing automation or employee collaboration tools) is a mess both in terms

of the quality of the data and the ease of using the data. Little data leads to big data, big

data leads to big decisions. Keep it clean.

Medium Data: Managing complex individual and team workloads is a challenge. Medium

data – prioritization and reporting interfaces to little data systems - gives managers and

employees what they need to set priorities and evaluate progress.

Big Data: Last … and least … is big data. Data is exploding, and mastering data separates the

champs from the chumps. Big data is the summary of thousands of customer and employee

stories, and big data success is driven directly by little data quality. Three customers consume

big data: (1) executives use high level big data to understand the big picture of the company,

(2) analysts dig into granular big data to find subtle trends, (3) little data systems consume

feeds from big data to make more data available to users of those systems.

References

1 IBM, “Leading Through Connections: Insights from the IBM Global CEO Study,” 2012.2 EMC, “The Digital Universe of Opportunities: Rich Data and the Increasing Value of the Internet of Things,” 2014.3 Gartner, “Dirty Data is a Business Problem, Not an IT Problem,” 2007.4 AIIM, “Automating Information Governance,” 2014.5 Gartner, “Strategic Road Map for Enterprise Information Management,” 2013.6 Networking World, “The Cost of Ineffective Search,” 2007.7 Ventana Research, “The Mandate for Social Collaboration in Business,” 2012.8 Aberdeen Group, “Executive Dashboards: The Key to Unlocking Double Digit Profit Growth,” 2009.9 Nucleus Research, “Business Analytics Pays Back $13.01 for Every Dollar Spent,” 2014.

Application:

Deliver the ability to quickly find any document, customer or other company

knowledge; automatically surface new relevant knowledge to each employee.

Present a 360o view of relationships to customer-facing employees.

Engage leadership and managers in making better and faster decisions using social

conversations and customer data.

Understand Infographic

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ConnectConnecting. It’s where the action is. But the action is not what most people think.

Successful organizations have learned that relationship processes combine two qualities: rigid

at the core and flexible at the edges. There are rules and steps that are always followed, and

there is the human-touch and empowerment that allows flexibility.

Balancing these qualities can be difficult. Most cultures gravitate towards structure or

flexibility, but not both.

Think of a high-performance tire and wheel. Both components are required to bear the

weight of an entire organization (the wheel, the rigid core) while at the same time gripping

the road to make fast turns without creating too much friction (the tire, the flexible edge).

Relationship processes without enough structure lack control and can never be measured,

scaled or improved. But when organizations treat relationship processes like any other

process – removing the tire from the wheel – sparks inevitably fly and relationships are

damaged.

Creating and maintaining relationship processes that combine flexibility and rigidity is itself a

process: governance. Governance defines the rigid core and the flexible edges and keeps all

of the stakeholders in alignment. A wheel out of alignment won’t last long.

Processes take time to adopt. Consider that it takes weeks to train and mentor a new barista

to serve coffee. Organizations often acquire the most sophisticated technologies ever

deployed in business and expect a day or two of training to be sufficient to change behavior.

Like a wheel, connecting requires two things: power, and a driver. Many organizations invest

heavily in power (relationship technologies), without even realizing that they have no driver.

Leadership must embrace a new way of leading; or technology investments, like a car without

a driver, will cause more harm than good.

References

1 MIT, "Information, Technology and Information Worker Productivity," 2011.2 Forrester Research, "Welcome to the Era of Agile Commerce," 2011.3 The Economist Intelligence Unit, "The Rise of the Customer-Led Economy," 2013.4 Bain, “Why it Pays for P&C Insurers to Earn Their Customers Intense Loyalty," 2013.5 Corner Stone OnDemand, "Toxic Employees in the Workplace," 2015.6 Inc. Magazine, “Forget Friends: You're 58% More Likely to Get a Job Through Weaker Ties,“ 2015.7 Max Steén, "The Strength of Strong Ties in Business Referral Networks," 2013.8 The Sales Management Association, "Research Update: Sales Process Adoption and Usage", 2013.9 MIT Sloan Management Review, “The Collaborative Organization: How to Make Employee Networks Really Work," 2010.

Application:

Align relationship processes to each of the 5 LUCK principles.

Establish a governance team to improve quality and processes.

Ensure the flexibility exists to treat different individuals differently.

Ensure the rigidity exists to make processes repeatable, improvable, measurable, and

scalable.

Connect Infographic

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KnowGreat organizations are great at failure.

Knowing and improving the score – tracking the right metrics – is at the heart of continuous

innovation and improvement.

Most businesses don’t track the right metrics. It takes forethought and planning to know what

to measure. Leaders have to know exactly what success is expected to look like at the

beginning of each initiative, and the metrics have to be built into the process.

Most businesses don’t take the time to learn and innovate. Even when the metrics are

captured, we’re all so busy working on the next assignment, that learning from the last one

isn’t a priority.

But tracking the numbers and capturing lessons learned is the easy part.

Employee engagement is the hard part. The purpose of employee engagement is to

continuously create a better customer experience – not a better employee experience. But

when employees are given a voice and can see their impact, their experience also improves.

But improving implies that there are failures to learn from. And learning from failures requires

a level of vulnerability that is counter-cultural in the typical workplace.

The highest performing organizations overcome the cultural norms.

Innovative organizations recognize continuous innovation and improvement is a team sport.

They have come to realize that if someone doesn’t really need to know the score to do the

job, then they are not really on the team.

The best organizations track the score, share the score, and go to great lengths to ensure that

every player has a voice in improving the score.

References

1 Deloitte, "High-impact learning culture: The 40 best practices for creating an empowered enterprise," June, 2010.2 Aberdeen Group, "Executive Dashboards: The Key to Unlocking Double Digit Profit Growth," 2009.3 Steve Baker, “Interview with Steve Baker, Vice President, Great Game of Business,” 2015.4 National Center for Employee Ownership, "Open Book Management,“ undated.5 The Social Workplace, "Social Knows: Employee Engagement Statistics," August, 20116 Gartner, "Predicts 2014: Business Process Reinvention Is Vital to Digital Business Transformation," 2014.7 Business News Daily, "Employees Reveal Why They Hate Their Bosses," February, 2012.8 Jeffrey Yip, Chris Ernst and Michael Campbell, "Boundary Spanning Leadership," 2011.

Application:

Make core company metrics available to the entire team.

Identify and share key performance indicators by role.

Establish a meeting cadence and structure to give everyone an understanding of how

to understand the score, and a voice in making improvements.

Know Infographic

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Good LUCKOrganizations that embrace The LUCK PrincipleTM create great customer experiences,

employee engagement and business results.

But sometimes they fizzle out.

Leadership often considers investments in relationships to be one-off projects: develop a plan,

buy the technology, get some training, move on. Like surgery. The truth is, they’re more like

a fitness program.

Buying a fitness tracker is a positive step towards improving health. If the fitness tracker

changes behavior, then it can completely transform a life. If not, then it is just a gimmick and

a waste of money.

How does an entire organization make and keep their resolutions? Purpose and balance.

So far, LUCK has pointed outward from an organization – towards customers and employees.

Getting clear on purpose means pointing LUCK inward. Teams that take the time to introspect

and define their own purpose are not only in a better position to realize their goals, they are

in a better position to align with the people that will embrace their vision, their products and

their services.

Great organizations never forget that they exist to serve people. Great organizations have a

clear mission that they pursue with passion. Great organizations learn to balance these

sometimes conflicting priorities. On one side of the scale is people, and on the other is profit

(or other organizational results). Profits aren't the reasons why an organization exists, but

without them, an organization will cease to exist.

References

1 Dr. Fred Keil, Return on Character, 2015.2 James Heskett, The Culture Cycle: How to Shape the Unseen Force that Transforms Performance, 2012.3 Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, Luigi Zingales, "The Value of Corporate Culture," Sept 2013.4 BusinessWire citing Martiz Poll, "Americans Still Lack Trust in Company Management Post-Recession," 2011.5 Modern Survey, Webinar: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/recording/340888559056374274, untitled, undated.

Application:

Model trust and transparency from the top of the organization – in communication,

in who is added to the team, and in who is removed.

Point LUCK inward – know the values and mission of the organization. Communicate

them clearly and consistently.

Balance profits with people (customers, employees, owners, suppliers, communities).

Build accountability and coaching into relationship processes – they are habits, not

projects.

Good LUCK Infographic

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Resources

The LUCK Principle™: Visit c5in.co/preLUCK to

pre-purchase the book for a deeper dive into LUCK.

Individuals who pre-purchase will receive 5 free e-Books

that discuss the secrets of relationship success and how

to achieve a successful digital transformation.

Download an e-Book or Workbook: C5 Insight

offers a range of free resources that can be

downloaded from its website (okay, we trade them to

you for your email address, but we promise to

respect your privacy and only send occasional and

relevant updates). Here is a link to some of the most

popular resources: c5in.co/C5Resources

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Attend an Event: Visit events.c5insight.com for a list of upcoming

webinars and speaking engagements.

About C5 Insight

In business, success relies on people, and process. (But you still have to get the

technology right.) We are fiercely passionate about helping businesses create

contagiously engaged employees that transform the customer experience.

We offer:

Briefings, Workshops and Advisory

Services: Ready to put LUCK into action?

Partner with our experts to lead your

organization through a tailored

workshop. Lasting between 4 hours and

4 days, the topics range from employee

engagement and customer experience

to business process design and roadmap

planning.

Technology Implementation: Not sure

which technology is the best engine for

your organization? C5 Insight helps

clients select, implement and integrate

digital transformation technologies

Project Recovery and Health Checks:

Struggling with employee engagement

and customer experience? You’re not

alone; 60% of these projects fail. Let us

help you recover and set your team up

for success.

Planning and Roadmaps: Do you have

a vision for where you’re going, and do

you have a flexible plan for getting

there? Work with us to build out your

business case, establish measurable

outcomes, and develop a modified agile

process for getting (and keeping) the

team engaged.

Training and Support: If becoming a

people-centric organization is like a

fitness program, who is your personal

trainer? High performance athletes need

expert coaching - so do high performing

organizations. C5 Insight delivers the

support your team needs at the

executive, management, user and

technology levels.

Digital Process Outsourcing: Does your

team lose sight of the big picture

because they are regularly dragged into

the weeds of administering technology?

Stay focused on the important strategies

and outsource the tasks to C5 Insight.

From pushing out an email campaign, to

eliminating duplicate data, to ensuring

that documents are tagged properly, C5

frees your team from grunt work so they

can do the important work.

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704-895-2500 | luck@c5insight.com | www.c5insight.com