Tag Archives: delivering happiness

Innovation begins in the heart

in Innovation, Leadership

How diluted has the word innovation become that, on top of confusing it with anything new, we rationalize why we should innovate.

Here are a few:

  • Let’s innovate so we can grow our business, otherwise we won’t!;
  • Let’s innovate so we can eek out a little more revenue from existing products and services;
  • Let’s innovate so we can develop new revenue streams, new business, new products & services;
  • Let’s innovate so we can be competitive with the rest of the world;
  • etc..

I’m sure you’ve heard some version of these before, and there are more like these. The above rationalizations are correct, but does it get you fired up? I’m sure it doesn’t.

An indicator that all this rationalization it doesn’t work to spur action is how many people still ask themselves: what’s the point?

Why do you want to “innovate”? Seriously, think about it…

Is it because you’re embraced common rationalizations followed by everyone else who can’t think for themselves? If you are, it sounds to me like you are playing not to lose.…

Why ‘Delivering Happiness’ is a must-do

in Behavior, Customer Service, Leadership, Psychology

happiness

Making people happy is such a radical idea that it’s a sad thing to see when . That’s why . I’ve previously written about . Yet there’s still a lot of doubt around this ‘radical’ concept, see this Forbes article that asks:

When I see questions such as these I cringe. Well of course it is! Seriously, why would anybody want to work at a place that makes them unhappy? I understand answering this questions is a lot more complicated because it deals with human nature, but it really doesn’t have to be. Grab a pen and paper, an important idea is coming up…

A recent . According to a study by David Rand of Harvard: People who spend time with happy people are more likely to become happy themselves.

Think about that for a second. Is that something too complex to understand? Do we really need this type of research to understand something so human? No. We don’t really need this type of research to know that hanging out with happy people will makes us more happy. Or that making unhappy people happy makes us happier. It’s common sense!

And that’s not all. Even more telling is that sadness is twice as infectious as happiness. No surprise here either, as an unhappy customer is more likely to tell five people how much your product or services sucks as opposed to telling just one. And by the way, this also includes your employees. Their part of the equation too.

With so much at stake, why can’t we get our heads around that happiness is actually simple?

Here’s the problem: Organizations have a lot of ‘business sense’ but not a lot of ‘common sense’.

Simply understanding that happiness and sadness are contagious should be enough for any organization to treat their people and their customers with decency. Would you rather be know for spreading sadness than happiness? Didn’t think so!

The BIG idea is very simple then: make people happy. Why? Because if your employees are are happy then your customers will be happy. It’s a win-win scenario. Everyone is happy and it all originated from you. That’s what people will remember, trust me Smile

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Zappos: Delivering Happiness through experiments

in Strategy

tony hsieh, ceo, zappos.com

Image via Wikipedia

 

We talk about doing experiments a lot in the innovation space and I personally get asked about this a lot. A major problem I see with some businesses is they don’t know what they should be experimenting with: experiments around what?

I was just listening to about his new book . One of the things that he talked about was how they do experiments and I think it highlights an important point: The Zappos brand is all about customer service, so their experiments are focused on improving their customer service.

Whether this is by design for them I don’t know, the points is that if you don’t know what you stand for then you have ways to go but if you do then you know where to focus your efforts. The no. 1 search engine on the planet, Google, runs because they know users expect the best search results all the time. What these experiments look like we don’t know but the fact is companies make experiments and they expect most of them to fail in one way or another and that’s also important.

Do like Zappos, appreciate the value of experiments to improve your core business and don’t be afraid to fail. Try a lot of stuff and keep what works!

I haven’t read the book yet but in the meantime the 18 minute interview is well worth listening to, listen and learn.

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose — live with author and CEO of Zappos.com’s Tony Hsieh from GasPedal on Vimeo.

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