Creative Ventures is a very simple service company with three core lines of revenue:

• Presentation – the keynote and breakout multimedia presentations
• Education – teaching and developing the core curriculum
• Application – taking companies through strategic platforms

At different times, each of the three plays lead in our business.  During May, our Education lines were leading the pack as I was building curriculums for companies and teaching both communication and thinking skill set workshops.  In times of rapid change (by the way, that’s ALL the time) people play an even greater role in the success of an organization. Finding, as well as keeping, key talent becomes a paramount goal. 

The education line is the foundation of this goal.  Study after study shows there are really only two reasons someone is attracted to an organization, and stays with an organization: 

• VALUE:  Providing full engagement between the person and the company that shows what they do is of VALUE.  It’s about creating a true sense of value in the relationship.
• GROWTH:  Is there opportunity for someone to grow.

Learning is about both of these.  Your value increases as you learn more and one of the key opportunities for growth is to increase your skill sets.

Look at the learning opportunities you provide for your team and examine the potential for building value and growth for your people.

In order for most true strategic initiatives to gain momentum and create change there has to be a firm awareness and understanding of “spacing”.

Spacing refers to the distance between cause and effect.  The fact that there is often time and space between the launch of an idea and its desired impact.  Understanding this spacing is critical to finding the value of the idea, and is often an aspect of strategy that goes unnoticed.

We are a society with a consistent focus on “effect”. In fact, instant effect is our favorite management flavor.  We are always “putting out fires”, which is just a way of saying, “I am focused on effect”.  We want the effect to either stop happening or get here as soon as possible. 

We want to see the weight drop off, performances improve, and our short game get better – or we want the frequency of the defect to stop.  All of these are issues of “spacing”.

The fact is, what drives the effect is the cause, and despite our best efforts, the effect takes time.  We need to change our eating habits and add a bit of exercise to get the weight drop, and it takes time.  We need to go to the driving range and maybe take a lesson to see our short game improve. That takes time and we need to make operational adjustments to reduce our defects. 

The observation is focused on time and space.  We need to KNOW that committing to cause, in an effort to change effect, takes time. Add to the equation that we often have to push the system in a different location than the actual effect, and you get the impact of space.  Sometimes the place where the defect is occurring is located further back in the process – space separated cause from effect.  That’s the time and space aspect of change. 

This single aspect of real strategic thinking can be the difference between success and failure.  It’s knowing when to wait and when to cut and run. 

Proctor and Gamble launches and retires products regularly.  They understand the power of cause and effect and it plays a key role in both product launch and product retirement.

We spend a lot of time on cause and effect when we launch an initiative. By gaining a consensus on its impact we set the stage for success.

It’s no secret that service is rapidly becoming THE battlefield for differentiation in the business world.  Companies are continuing to discover that there is a shift in our world of product commoditization from defining value in a product to defining significance in the way you service that product.  Your products may be generating initial revenue, but your service is creating the return loyalty that drives your future.

To learn how the forefront of service is developing, look at these examples:

• Health Care:  Though the field is a real nightmare, it is also pushing new ideas in service.  Why?  It is a “pure service” industry.  They really don’t make anything.  The Mayo Clinic is spending significant time and money on making their service, from check in to check out, a core value.  They are TEACHING, yes, TEACHING skill sets to EVERYONE, with the expectations that when you have the right skills to provide service (communication and thinking – ring a bell?) you should see those skills applied.
• Transportation:  Southwest Airlines already has one of the most robust training programs in any service sector, so what are they doing to push the service frontier forward?  They are examining MEANINGFUL DATA.  Yep, stuff that really means something in their service abilities.  They already have reams of statistics, but they have shifted their focus to the TIME side of the “cause and effect” cycle.  Think about it. What better field could they find to improve your travel experience?  Are there ways to reduce the time you have to wait for luggage, wait in line to get a boarding pass, or reduce the steps for any process through simplification?
• Power of Loyalty:  Over 70% of all guests at Disney theme parks are RETURN guests.  Think about that.  The overwhelming majority of their buyers (forgive me for not calling them Guests) have come back.  What does Disney sell?  Service.  Every exit poll for the past 50 years have said that the “friendly” nature of the employees (forgive me for not calling them Cast Members) is one of the highlights of their experience.  How do you get that level of consistency?  Marry intense training and meaningful data.

Bottom line is that a focus on service IS the key to separation and differentiation, and every study from Wharton’s to Stanford is showing the same result: TRAIN and MEASURE.  Two simple, powerful and elegant steps to creating and protecting VALUE!