We’re operating in a working world in which we’re overloaded, overextended, and overstressed. As we try to handle customer demands, workload, and the daily pressures of our jobs, we’re struggling to stay focused on what matters most.

The challenge of having to be ‘always on’ forces us to spend much of our time working on automatic pilot, as it’s the only way our brains can cope with the pressure. Recent research by Microsoft on British employees found that 86 percent had experienced anxiety due to work pressure in the last year. And 30 percent regularly sacrificed their personal life for work. 

Having a workforce on automatic pilot is no good for business. It means we’re not paying enough attention, but that’s no surprise: there’s too much to pay attention to. As our stress levels rise, pressure builds, and we have less time to pay attention to what matters to us as people, our productivity and creativity plummets. We turn up to work when we feel bad, we make choices born out of frustration, and we can’t make good quality decisions.

No surprise, then, that we’re talking more about the importance of employee wellbeing. And in this modern world of work, that means more than discounted gym memberships and health insurance. Our prosperity as individuals is inextricably linked to the environments in which we operate, and the obstacles and strain we face. As leaders, that means we need to clear the path if people are to do great work.

According to Bill Gates, “As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.” Taking a conscious approach to leadership will best meet the needs of both the shareholders and the delivery engine — the people you employ. That means being focused on creating an environment that balances autonomy with support, pressure with balance, and which pays attention to people’s fundamental human need to matter. Conscious leadership is based on these five essential factors:

Awake: Recognize that you don’t have all of the answers. But through radical listening, and through being present for the people around you, you will give people the space to express themselves, unleashing an army of people who can solve the challenges they’re facing. 

Resilient: Become conscious of the way you work. When you have more time to re-energize and seek solitude, you are more effective at your job (and you become a better person).

Together: Recognize the power of emotional connection and help people to spend more time together, and spend more time getting to know the people in your team too. Be there to offer support when people need it. Then know when to get out of the way and allow people to create their own answers and possibilities.

Growing: Believe in your people (even if you don’t always believe in yourself). Coach them to understand themselves and where to focus. And allow them to build on their strengths. That’s where all of the untapped potential, energy, and commitment are.

Purposeful: Instill radical focus through setting clear direction, allowing everyone to pay attention to what matters most. This requires you to be disciplined, stick to plans, and make conscious decisions to course-correct when things need to shift. 

When leaders see that their role is to empower and to help individuals to sustain their energy and then place it where it matters most, it provides a new focus. Leaders can’t solve all of the problems, because there are too many to solve, but they can bring much-needed meaning and growth to employees’ roles. If we’re expecting them to keep grinding, there has to be something in it for them besides a paycheck.

Instead of wasting so much energy by seeing long hours as a badge of honor, thinking that people need to be told what to do (rather than being given clear direction), and seeing work as a delivery machine, conscious leaders create a place of real growth and true alignment. People can work in a way that allows them to manage their energy, express their opinions, and shape their roles and objectives around their strengths and values, as well as the needs and goals of the organization. 

Growth. All businesses and professionals should desire it and most certainly need it. But achieving and sustaining growth in today’s uber-complex environment — whether corporate, entrepreneurial or personal career growth — takes multifaceted vision, ingenuity and agility.

Indeed, a lack of growth in business speaks volumes. It says a business or individual hasn’t fruitfully evolved in its own lifecycle (or career cycle), hasn’t kept pace with industry trends, that increased profitability isn’t being prioritized (or valued) … or all of the above. Even when all of these things are successfully realized, there’s still quite a macro fight to be had as one endeavors to advance. 

For companies, economic indicators are a useful benchmark which often portray how ominous or encouraging the growth opportunity landscape may be. For example, according to intel from The Conference Board’s Economic Forecast for the U.S. Economy, GDP data shows that “… growth slowed in the final quarter of the year [2018],” and that, “during 2019, expect growth to slow further, as effects from fiscal stimulus measures wane …” Such intel can put things into perspective and prompt businesses to pivot on activities and expectations for the period.

But even as businesses at large strive to thrive, so too must the individual professionals that drive them. At the end of the day, a business’ success, or lack thereof, is a direct reflection of their people — from ownership and management to frontline and support staff and everyone between. 

For some insight-oriented motivation, here’s a glimpse at how some business owners and professionals are growing their businesses and capitalizing on opportunities in their respective industries while promoting professional self-development. 

#1 – Embrace Your Uniqueness, Don’t Try to Blend In

Whether with respect to a company’s offerings, approach or image — or to staffers, themselves — uniqueness and authenticity can be key in attracting and entrenching customers. Sure, it’s easy to “play it safe” and still turn a profit, but to fully achieve breakthrough goals and hit seemingly impossible targets requires taking risks — true, and even unconventional, sincerity among them. Harvard-trained lawyer Chinwe Esimai, the first African to secure a global executive role at one of the world’s largest banks, encourages individuals to embrace “shining in their own lanes,” even in corporate America. By not downplaying her efforts or her Nigerian-born immigrant background and by staying true to her uniqueness, Esimai achieved extraordinary success with a banking industry leader. 

#2 – Increase the Value of Your Brand

For companies, your brand isn’t your brand until you’ve legally maximized all of your resources. This is according to patent lawyer JiNan Glasgow George, who underscores that, for multi-billion-dollar companies like Apple or Nike, their trademark, logo and patent is what they focus on to drive value. George, who helps small businesses understand the power behind copyrighted brands, explains that intellectual properties (IP) provide protection against other companies from “borrowing” your ideas while also solidifying the uniqueness of your brand.  

When it comes to one’s personal trademark, Karen Leland, author of “The Brand Mapping Strategy: Design, Build, and Accelerate Your Brand,” suggests developing your brand by design, not default. “Know precisely where you are so you can discern where you need to go,” she says. “Every business person, from secretary to CEO, needs to start by assessing the personal brand they currently have and be truthful about the degree to which it exists by design — or default. Then they need to take stock of the impact that current brand is having. Is your brand producing the reputation you desire? What is it about what you do, or how you do it, that makes you unique, distinct and special? What sets you apart? Positioning yourself by specifically articulating how your brand speaks to the needs of your audience, coupled with the unique way you address those needs, is critical to creating an effective personal brand. And the more specific you can be, the better.”

#3 – Double Down on Failure

Many in business are understandably discouraged after taking a loss, let alone experiencing a series of losses or rejections. However, with a fresh point-of-view on failure you just might be able to turn those setbacks into growth springboards. In fact, in his book, WTF?! (Willing to Fail) Brian Scudamore (founder and CEO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK?), explores the notion of “failing upward” and, in the process, “using setbacks to change your business for the better.” He asserts that “being an entrepreneur means letting go of fear,” and I contend that all aspiring professionals (not just entrepreneurs) should embrace this paradigm. 

Speaker and business guru Anthony Russo was able to wrangle his fear and rejection worries–to an extent that he built a seven-figure business in less than 18 months. Russo achieved this remarkable revenue benchmark by “doubling down” that, as he puts it, “is the art of leveraging failure to accelerate success.” By this, he means absorbing everything he passively learned from each prior failure and proactively learned about each situation by seeking and researching new tactics and trying again. While Russo concedes that failure is a significant part of nearly any business process, especially relating to company ownership, he urges that powering through can lead to success that may not just meet, but exceed, original expectations.

#4 – Fractionalize Unforeseen Problems

Unanticipated problems or events are always spontaneously occurring, and that unpredictability — especially with complications — can wreak havoc on the most well-conceived plans, sabotage timelines and send expenses soaring. This is why many companies invest so largely in prevention development teams — a strong resolution department to solve problems before and after they happen to keep the momentum and productivity flowing. But, not all companies — and certainly not individuals — have the luxury of having a department team at-the-ready to alleviate the angst. Franchise and small business expert Brian Clark, owner of Service Team of Professionals (“STOP”) franchises, uses a simple method to avoid unforeseen obstacles from overtaking his businesses. According to Clark, “Every problem can be solved by asking the right questions and breaking down the problem. Fracturing each challenge to small, accomplishable tasks will not only be less intimidating, but also easier to maneuver.” 

#5 – Work Smarter, Play Harder

Productivity is a key priority in the labor supply-and-demand chain. It’s easy to focus on profits and products, dismissing the “how” it all gets done. Yes, Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it also wasn’t built single-handily either. Many businesses and professionals have been taught strategies to “work smarter not harder.” But well-respected business advisor and company CEO Richard Polak subscribes to “work smarter, play harder.” He’s advised the world’s largest companies, including the likes of General Electric, to focus on time and output. To invest in the well-being of its staff as well as invest in technologies that boost its efficiency and capacity, thus maximizing work time and morale to boost bottom lines. Polak differentiates himself by referring to his model as “compassionate” productivity strategies.

According to an Accenture study, “The parallels between a superior customer experience and employee experience are striking. An optimized customer experience generates loyalty and additional sales. A stellar employee experience attracts talent and boosts workforce engagement, productivity and retention. This, in turn, directly improves a business’s financial performance.” The net result? The report revealed that “companies with highly engaged workforces are 21 percent more profitable than those with poor engagement.”

#6 – Embrace Value System-Driven Victory

Pak Chau, the wildly successful tech entrepreneur who operates in various sectors like social networking, e-commerce and esports, did the unthinkable. As a value-driven entrepreneur, Chau had undertaken a successful ICO (Initial Coin Offering) to raise nearly $2.5-3 million for his esports platform. But, subsequent to raising these funds, he had an epiphany. Chau returned the money from investors and told his team they were going to start raising sales-driven capital from scratch. Why? As months passed after the ICO, Chau harbored an ominous feeling. “Deep down in my heart,” he recalls, “I felt that something was wrong. I felt that the energy in the office was slowly draining.” One reason for that was the newly-established investors from the ICO. “They knew nothing about gaming,” Chau laments. “They were offering advice that did not resonate well with me or my team, and it was starting to obviously impact the company culture.”

Chau was looking for more than generating revenue, but rather to actualize a more holistic measure of achievement. Having foregone the funds from the ICO — undeniably a gut-wrenching decision most entrepreneurs would never have the stomach to execute — he had to figure out a way to launch on a shoestring budget. He believed that he could build his new business directly with the customer; in this case as a community-based marketplace. So, Chau pressed ahead without the ICO-driven funds and ultimately launched his community-based solution. Within days, it attracted more than 20,000 users and now, less than a year later, it boasts more than 70,000.

Chau feels that, at the end of the day, it’s really about the conscience of the entrepreneur. He personifies this notion and walks the walk… all the way to the bank.

#7 – Control What You Can

While cliché, they are undeniable truths: Perception is reality and “image is everything,” as painfully vain as these maxims sound. From one’s physical appearance to how one behaves, people tend to judge first and reason later. The same holds true for a business facility. Whether an office lobby, a retail display window, a website home page or even the body condition of fleet vehicles, aesthetics play a mission-critical role in overcoming the litany of obstacles and objections that are initially present with a new engagement. The influence of appearance is something serial beauty and cosmetics industry entrepreneur Dawn Hunter knows all too well, having built an empire helping people cultivate and refine their image by putting their best face forward.  

Looks aside, the idea of “controlling what you can” is about far more than trying to make yourself as outwardly attractive as possible. It’s about embracing your inner beauty, strength and fortitude and being utterly and unequivocally confident in your capabilities. 

Epitomizing these philosophies is former Ms. Olympia 50+ Sheryl Grant who, after leaving a corporate career, discovered that transforming her body began with a shift of what she could control: her mindset. She developed what she now calls the “F.I.T. for Business” model based on principles of faith, intuition and tenacity and went on to win Ms. Olympia her first time competing at age 55. Today, Grant teaches entrepreneurs and executives that, while they can’t always control their external surroundings, they can determine how they respond to situations.  She imparts that their perspective and beliefs often drive success, or lack thereof, and play a big role in shaping their future.  

As the old adage goes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat … and there’s certainly more than one way to spur growth for your business or career trajectory. The seven strategies above, particularly when employed in multiplicity, can catapult your professional endeavors to new heights. It’s never too late and there’s no better time than now.

Many organizations use the agile scrum model — from the simplest forms advocated by the Scrum Alliance to more complex models such as the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFE). These tend to prescribe a small set of specific, new roles on each team, while allocating most team members to a generic “team member” role. We now have several years of experience with agile teams: what are we learning about the success of these models? 

Leadership for agility provides a framework for understanding the results we see. Our organizations typically comprise many smart, creative, opinionated people designing and building complicated new things in an uncertain context, making thousands of decisions that need to result in something that fits together and runs with few flaws. The leadership model emphasizes rigor (making fact-based decisions after considering multiple options), alignment (getting large numbers of creative, smart people all moving in the same direction), and efficiency (doing the above in a way that respects people and their valuable time). 

Viewing this leadership model against team roles, here are 6 tips to make your efforts more effective: 

1. Scrum roles are too simple. The simplest scrum models specify just a few roles: Product Owner (prioritizes needs), Scrum Master (facilitates ceremonies), and team members. More sophisticated models like SAFE add roles like “Release Train Engineer” and “Full Stack Engineer.” While avoiding over-specialization and consequent handoffs on the team is valuable, so can be specialized skills and experience. For the sake of rigor and efficiency, we need to cultivate experts. Lean product development emphasizes “towering technical competence.” What specialized roles make sense for your teams and your organization? 

2. “Traditional” roles can still be valuable. New approaches introduce valuable new roles, but for much of our work, we can leverage proven roles (and proven people!) with decades of skill and experience. These roles can help drive rigor and efficiency. For example, systems analysts master the art of understanding and articulating incoherent business needs to enable unforgiving coding. Scrum typically subsumes this role in the Product Owner or undifferentiated team member. Don’t forsake expert roles like system analyst, test manager, or project manager just because the new methods don’t include them. 

3. Missions, not tasks. Some scrum roles are overly focused on the tasks – e.g.; the Scrum Master conducts the specified ceremonies, the Product Manager prioritizes the backlog. To best enable leadership for agility, roles are better defined by their mission, not their tasks. Sure, the test manager develops the master test plan, but their mission is to ensure that the decision to go live is made with a full understanding of remaining defects. We want people to have the freedom to innovate how to accomplish their missions, leveraging all of their knowledge, skills, and teammates. 

4. Many teams need a robust formal engineering leader. There is an agile principle that the best work comes from self-organizing teams. While this is ideally true, in practice, formal positions of leadership for engineering are often needed. I learned this from Toyota, where a respected senior engineer leads each new car design/engineering program. These chief engineers typically have few direct reports, are fully engaged with the team, and exercise leadership through influence, respect, and relationships with senior leaders. Several firms involved in agile transformations report that this kind of leadership position is struggling to emerge. The role is often called “lead developer” or “architect.” Consider making it a formal role to which the entire engineering team is indirectly or directly responsible. 

5. Standardize team roles just enough; err on allowing diversity. The advantage of standardizing team roles is that we then hire, train, tool, and utilize them more effectively. Chief engineers aren’t typically employed or developed without specific intent. Standard roles also facilitate inter-team and management communication. A good example is a commercial software product firm that releases a few times a year to corporate customers. This organization has a dozen or more scrum teams sharing a common code base and release train. The test managers can all work together, as can the chief engineers and the scrum masters.

Beware, however, of the alternative case. When an organization doesn’t require such deep cross-team collaboration, let teams and leaders adjust roles as needed. Amazon is an excellent example of this approach — its API-centric approach obviates the need for team uniformity. 

6. Formal reporting hierarchies still matter. Hiring, firing, career development, compensation — all most often remain a function of formal management hierarchies. As you design your agile organization, optimize the formal hierarchy to drive rigor, alignment, and efficiency. Should all team members report to the team leader? What if the team leader has a marketing focus: can that person effectively manage technical staff? Should product managers roll up to marketing, so there is a consistent view of the market? One sophisticated firm well into persistent product teams has morphed its formal organization structure around its teams, with all technically-focused team members reporting into the CIO organization and other team members into business lines. This works for them, at least for now.

What is right for your organization? 

Far too many organizations design their strategy with antiquated approaches designed to make everyone feel good, and then fail to implement anything meaningful. To avoid yet another year of wasted strategic planning, organizations must let go of myths that muddy their ability to develop a winning business strategy. 

Too often, business executives pursue strategy “black holes” that fail to align the organization’s activities with those real competitive advantages that will necessarily make customers want to seek out their products or services. 

Within an organization, there is a lot of confusion around the features that constitute an organization’s actual competitive advantages. For example, executives may point to exceptional employees as the feature that gives their business a competitive advantage. Yet, employees are not a competitive advantage. Customers buy from an organization for a small set of promises that the organization pitches as the reason to bypass competitors and buy from them. Employees are the way that the organization delivers on those promises, not the reason that the customer is purchasing a particular product or service. The performance of each employee can make the experience better or worse, but it’s rarely the “why” of the customer’s decision to do business with an organization. 

Many myths prevent organizations from getting to a real competitive advantage. They include the fallacy that SWOT is an analysis tool, or that product life-cycle or brand are real differentiators, to name a few. Instead, a winning strategy separates what’s generally expected in conventional operations — the table stakes, if you will — from the organization’s two or three competitive advantages that make the organization special, why customers buy from them regardless of price, or what they offer that the competition doesn’t.

For example, in a tire store, features such as courteous service representatives, same-day service, or product variety are table stakes. Yes, they need to meet customers’ expectations in these areas, but further effort to exceed expectations in these areas would be wasted money, time, and resources. Goals around these areas need only focus on bringing them to the median expectation.

Features representing a competitive advantage must not only separate the organization from its competitors but also be something that the organization can hold onto long enough to make real returns. 

Organizations can never be sure about what features constitute their competitive advantage. They will want to generate a master list of what might be a competitive advantage, asking themselves: Why they think customers buy from them, what makes them unique in the market, and what are the areas where customers choose to pay them more than their competitors. 

Armed with this list, the leadership team will then be able to use a modified version of resource-based analysis to examine each potential advantage — whether it’s a product, a consulting service, or a piece of equipment, for instance. Each must meet five criteria to constitute a real competitive advantage:

1. Rare. Is it unique when compared to competitors? The capability must be exceptional (or relatively so). Customers won’t reward the organization with extraordinary returns for merely offering the standard, expected elements of a business.

2. Durable. Will the organization be able to hold on to this rare capability and see real returns before a competitor adopts it? A new resource or capability is only of value if the organization can capitalize on it. Note that every industry is different, and the necessary time frame for durability will vary. The online women’s clothing industry will have a relatively short time frame, while the time frame in the offshore oil gasket industry will be quite long.

3. Relatively non-substitutable. Most potential competitive advantages fail at the rare and durable stages, but if they pass, the next criterion to consider is whether there’s a substitute available. This could mean that a customer could obtain a similar “value proposition” from another organization. The second part of this examination is determining whether these substitutes negate the competitive advantage. 

4. Relatively non-tradable. The organization will need to determine if the resource or capability could be sold off (traded), without tearing the organization apart. If so, why would the organization hang its strategy hat on something that the next CEO could sell? A tradable resource or capability isn’t a real competitive advantage.

5. Valuable. It’s generally the case that most potential competitive advantages fail at “rare,” and next most at “durability,” followed by “non-substitutability” and finally “non-tradability.” To save the leadership team’s time, discussions of value creation should only take place if the resource/capability passes those criteria. To attain real value for the organization, this potential competitive advantage must allow the organization to either charge more than its competitors, have a lower cost basis, or capture the competition’s customers — or possibly all three. 

Kim Highfield is a lifelong entrepreneur and founder of SportPort — a producer of women’s athletic apparel. After becoming aware of the potential dangers of cellphone radiation, she developed a patent for protective pockets in clothing that blocks electric and magnetic fields (EMF). Her technology recently went national and proves that intelligent design, paired with women’s health, can be profitable.

Highfield first learned to be an entrepreneur at six-years-old dancing at family events. “Dad paid me a quarter per dance because I was good at imitating Shirley Temple,” she recalls. “It was my first lesson in business — don’t be afraid to put yourself out there if you feel you have something to share.”

As proprietor of women’s athletic apparel company SportPort, Highfield is now scaling operations based on her patent for EMF-resistant clothing design and her original patterns and florals. She spent nearly a decade in personal study and two years in formal R&D to create the first EMF-resistant SportPort bra.

“Entrepreneurs face intense obstacles every day and adaptability is key to success,” Highfield notes. “I don’t have a fashion or legal degree. I was successful in the world of design and patent processing because of my passion to conduct my own research, based on ideas that I believed in.”

Family has always played a pivotal role in Highfield’s drive, in both her personal and professional life. “I began researching everything around cellphone radiation after my mother got cancer,” Highfield recounts. “I believe in actively pursuing knowledge around a problem to help solve it — we should adopt this same attitude in business. During the time of my mother’s illness, I also studied pediatric psychology to understand the issues and organize programs for my sons, both of whom were diagnosed with learning disabilities. Through these efforts I was able to help raise their IQs by 15 points to an above-average range. It was something the doctors didn’t think possible.”

Anything I set out to achieve comes from the heart.” — Kim Highfield

Highfield’s passion for unearthing solutions and strong desire to succeed (she’s also a former athlete) has translated into business success and innovation. Her concern for the health of athletes exposing themselves to prolonged periods of cellphone use inspired an idea. She used her years of visual arts training and collaborated with some of the industry’s top artisans, patterners, and compressors to create a lifesaving garment.

“When I started to become aware of the risks cellphones pose when placed against the body, especially soft tissue, I realized a true need in women’s athletic apparel that was lacking — a cellphone pocket that would function for both convenience and also protect our bodies from harmful EMF radiation.

“I’ve been able to share a room with industry leaders because I’m not afraid to experiment in new directions,” she continues. “My passion for new ideas, has always translated into long hours of research around those ideas, so I come to the table equipped with data, professional opinion, and most importantly, direction.”

For Highfield, the road from passion to patent is paved with preparation. “It’s important to have the passion to get you through those down times,” she concludes. “My need to find a safe solution for women who exercise and carry their cellphone is why SportPort exists today.”

Each day, throughout the United States and around the world, teams of law enforcement personnel strive to serve their communities by providing much needed, sometimes life-saving services. Despite the data-rich environments they work in, they don’t always have the proper resources to turn these insights into active crime-fighting or community building projects. 

The current age of rapid digital innovation is overflowing with data analytics and agile workflows. This has created immense value for the private sector, but states and local municipalities in the U.S. often lack the resources and expertise to take advantage of these trends. Recognizing both the complexity and the opportunity of the situation, Benjamin Smith founded Directorate 2, a boutique intelligence consultancy that serves the law enforcement community. “I’m fascinated with failure and experienced with success,” says Smith, who is a longtime army veteran, ex-policeman, and member of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

His work with Palantir Technologies that specializes in analyzing the hundreds of small moments that might go into a terror attack and joins the dots for law enforcement agencies earned him a place among the 30 intelligence officers to ever receive the Galileo Award — the U.S. Government’s highest award for digital innovation.  

“What we find in local government is the same thing we find in private enterprises — layering analytics on top of legacy workstreams, rather than rethinking how work should flow through the system, or which questions we want to answer,” says Smith. “Ideally, we should structure workflows to reflect the organizational architecture that we hope to have in the future, not what we’ve had in the past.”

While education and training have always been solid foundations for law enforcement, they are even more relevant during times of modernization. Conventional law enforcement training has typically been an instructor leading a classroom of employees. Smith believes this training model is expensive and thinks it’s partially responsible for the lack of enthusiasm among law enforcement agencies to adapt to newer systems. “Many local governments can’t afford to bring in data consultants to do this work, so we’ve leveraged online learning platforms to minimize the cost,” he explains.

Advanced training technologies and techniques can prepare officers with a combination of knowledge and skills that improves the effectiveness of law enforcement and directly benefit communities. On a national level, Smith’s work has raised eyebrows at the highest level. James Clapper, former director of National Intelligence, has said of Smith: “Benjamin’s innovative ideas have shaped the future of intelligence in the United States.” 

One of Smith’s secret is to train everyone, not just the analysts. Beyond his ongoing passion for educating others, he has served as an analytic coach and mentor to colleagues, trained foreign intelligence agents abroad, and even taught undergrads at George Mason University. 

Always with an eye on the future, Smith founded the U.S. Central Command’s “Forecasters Club,” which does reference class forecasting in the Intelligence Community’s prediction markets — a method of predicting the future by looking at similar past situations and their outcomes. 

“We know that bad analytics don’t look bad, they look ‘Ok,’” says Smith. “An organization should love the analysis it creates and constantly be asking for more. If that’s not happening, then you’re leaving a lot on the table.”

www.directorate2.com

Business success is easy; you just have to meet your customers’ needs more effectively and consistently than your competition. At least that’s the idea. In reality, meeting customers’ needs is far from easy. The challenge starts with understanding what customers actually want and need, then taking it a step further to anticipate unmet, unstated needs. The founders of Airbnb built a multi-billion dollar business by observing human nature.

You can trace the approach back to Henry Ford. He purportedly said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” The founder of the Ford Motor Company understood that consumers wanted to travel more rapidly but still thought in terms of horses. They hadn’t yet come to want his Model T., but Ford knew they would.

Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple, noted, “Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” Jobs convinced many of us we needed a “thousand songs in our pocket” (his marketing pitch for the iPod) as well as a seemingly endless set of other projects that we never knew we wanted, let alone needed.

Other leaders who created exceptional business success by uncovering unmet customer needs have run brands like Starbucks, Zappos, Mercedes-Benz, and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. Howard Schultz, Starbucks’ long-term CEO, was a visionary when it came to customer needs: Who knew the world had such a need for espresso-based coffee drinks, a coffeehouse experience designed to create the “living room” of the community, or mobile payment and mobile ordering linked to a popular gift card and consumer app?

Now consider Brian Chesky (above right) & Joe Gebbia (above center, with CSO, and cofounder, Nathan Blecharczyk, left), two of the three founders of a brand that went from three air mattresses to a company valued at more than $38 billion — in just over ten years. Chesky and Gebbia had recently graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and were sharing an apartment in San Francisco. After their third roommate left unexpectedly, they decided to try to rent the empty room to attendees of an upcoming design conference in San Francisco. 

Using a rudimentary website targeted at attendees, Chesky and Gebbia connected with three guests who rented air mattresses at $80 per night for the duration of the conference. While hosting those guests, Chesky and Gebbia observed some exciting things: People were willing to access economical travel accommodations; there were benefits to using web tools to secure a reservation efficiently; contrary to popular belief, guest’s where open to staying with strangers; they recognized the powerful bonds that can be forged with this type of arrangement and there was a positive outcome for host and guest alike.

Based on that experience, they solicited the assistance of their friend and computer scientist Nathan Blecharcyzk (the third leader of the company) to help build out what has become Airbnb — an online travel accommodation and experience marketplace that has processed over 400 million guest arrivals worldwide. The company’s meteoric success is all about finding and fulfilling the unmet needs of customers.

Use these three strategies from Airbnb to find the unmet needs of your customers:

1. Pay attention to the changing habits of all consumers. While it’s essential to understand the unique needs of your specific customers, it’s also necessary to pay attention to broad social trends affecting consumers at large. Hotel companies had been making incremental changes to improve the experience of their key customer segments. But leaders in those organizations underestimated customer desires for greater personalization and unique offerings. As such, hotels were improving a reasonably ubiquitous experience (a 325 square foot hotel room in high traffic areas). In contrast, Airbnb offered diverse, crave-able, shareable places, and experiences. 

2. Listen, ideate, try, and do. For Airbnb’s founders, design education shaped their approach to leadership. Using design theory, leaders can inspire teams to listen (both with their ears and through observation) for customer needs, create solutions for those needs, try viable solutions (test and learn) and deploy the solutions that best serve customer needs. Leaders in innovative companies create cultures that consistently listen, explore, try out, and implement the best options.

3. Stay restless. Great business minds like Marshall Goldsmith and Jim Collins have weighed in on the importance of continually leading change. Goldsmith notes, “What got you here won’t get you there.” Collins suggests leaders should never see “success virtually as an entitlement,” or they will “lose sight of the true underlying factors that created success in the first place.” Routinely ask questions like, “What if? What else might we do? How do we know?” You need to avert complacency and continually stretch in the direction of a tireless journey to customer experience excellence.

This is certainly an exciting time to be a leader. But meeting your customers’ stated needs is not enough. Meeting the obvious needs should be table stakes by now. As leaders from Henry Ford to Chesky, Gebbia, and Blecharcyzk have demonstrated, true greatness comes when you strive to go beyond meeting the obvious needs of your customers. Instead, strive to meet the unmet and unstated needs of those you serve.

Even in the digital age of high tech and low touch, customers still seek genuine caring and personal attention. In fact, the disruptive force happening today in business is relationship building. Here’s how to attain meaningful, lasting relationships. 

One of my biggest pet peeves as a business owner is when I meet a customer who can’t remember who she dealt with in one of my businesses. I tell my employees that this is the worst insult they can receive. 


Even in the digital age of high tech and low touch, customers still seek genuine caring and personal attention. In fact, the disruptive force happening today in business is relationship building. Relationships are critical to customer trust and loyalty. The more companies place technology between the company and the customer, the more they remove the important human experience. 

Company leaders know this. A study found that 89 percent of executives believe relationships are the most important factor in their success, yet only 24 percent of those leaders actually do anything intentionally to promote relationship building. Organizations need specific strategies for helping their professionals develop and strengthen the relationships required to achieve their goals. This is the premise behind the new Relationship Economy era we’re now entering.

It’s not enough to tell your employees to build a rapport with customers. You have to tell them how. Make it black and white, and make it measurable. Companies need to train staff members in social skills — and often basic politeness. Barking out commands to Alexa and Siri may be fine in their personal lives, it should never carry over to interactions with actual humans.

Today, leaders who want to stand out from the competition can benefit from focusing on strategies to help their staff develop and strengthen relationships with internal and external audiences. Research shows that a 5 percent increase in customer satisfaction can increase a company’s profitability by 75 percent. 

Leaders must realize that soft skills and customer service aren’t innate behaviors or common sense. In fact, the vast majority of employees have extremely low service aptitude, especially when just entering the workforce. The five characteristics that make up the building blocks of the Relationship Economy include authenticity, curiosity, listening, empathy and a love of people. Few employees come with these traits intact, but they can be acquired through intentional training. Employees must be taught how to avoid the traps of a low service aptitude and how to embrace the customer’s perspective.

Here are some tools to use for putting the Relationship Economy attributes into action:

1. Apply the Five Es. These include eye contact, ear-to-ear smile, enthusiastic greeting, engage and educate. Together, they’re simple to accomplish, can be executed with the majority of customers, demonstrate genuine hospitality and, importantly, practically no one else is doing them.

2. Encourage staff to collect “FORD” facts. FORD stands for family, occupation, recreation and dreams. These represent people’s hot-button topics — what each individual cares most about. By working FORD questions naturally into the flow of sales or service conversations — without making it sound like an interrogation — staff will build a rapport with the customer. Following the interaction, staff should document FORD information and use it when following up with the customer. For example, if a customer calls to ask a question about a policy and, in the process mentions his favorite sports team, the astute employee will send the customer an email when the team wins a playoff game applauding the team’s win. Such gestures take little time, cost nothing and make a strong impression on the customer.

3. Emphasize conversation dos and don’ts. A sure way to alienate customers is when the employee multitasks while the customer is talking, finishes their sentences as though their concern is commonplace, or steels their thunder. Instead, encourage employees to always make eye contact, wait until the customer is finished before responding and commit to following up. Customer-facing employees need to eliminate “no” from their vocabulary.

4. Focus on creating a relationship, not a sale. Without the hidden agenda of making a sale, the focus can be on building a relationship — which leads to making more sales. Teach employees to educate customers rather than sell to them, with the objective of making sure customers end up with the right product for their needs.