Shift

World class companies are winning...and they are losing.  By now, we’ve all heard all of the buzzwords: Product Experience, Marketing Experience, User Experience, but what about Customer Experience? Understanding Customer Experience and how to create delightful experiences for your customers still remains a mystery in most large organizations.

The most successful companies are continuously developing three customer-centric disciplines: Designing for Delight, Delivering for Delight, and Engaging Customers, Talent, and Partners for Delight. Mike Kendall, Managing Director of the Customer Lab and former Director of Customer Experience for Capital One, helps corporations deliver for delight and build loyal champions, not just followers.

In the latest episode, Mike shares critical insights and learnings you need to put to delight your customers to achieve maximum growth potential.

1. Why do organizations NEED to change?
2. How to Design, Deliver and Create Winning Customer Experience?
3. What are key factors behind Customer Experience?
4. How you create a human, customer-centered culture?
5. How can YOU Design for Delight?

Award-winning lean innovation coach and entrepreneur George Ankomah keeps his teams motivated through all obstacles and inspires them to consistently raise the bar for performance and success. Like all coaches, he must also keep growing personally and professionally and make sure his techniques and approach continue to be relevant and effective. How does he do it? In the latest episode of our Innovation Coach Spotlight series podcast, George shares his coaching experience and tenets for personal and team success.

Topics covered include:

• The key elements of successful lean innovation coaching
• The most common coaching pitfalls and how can you avoid them
• How you as a coach can anticipate potential roadblocks and set yourself and your team up for success
• George’s three-word mantra for keeping his coaching skills sharp and his contribution dynamic

George Ankomah is an active member of the Dutch lean startup scene and a former founder and alum of Startupbootcamp. These days he helps corporates in the Netherlands and abroad accelerate their innovation teams, design innovation ecosystems and set up global innovation training programs. His clients include Rabobank Group, Liberty Global and De Volksbank.

Understanding the key to finding the next growth opportunity for your company means you need to start with the right people. However; knowing how to build an inclusive team that best represents your customer takes time, energy and expertise. As the Vice President, Brand & Culinary Innovation at Dunkin' Brands, Dan has world class teams creating breakthrough innovation. But how did he do it?

In the latest episode, Dan shares unique perspective from the battlefield by answering the following key questions about what it’s like to create a high impact team that can find the next big growth opportunity for our organization.

1. How can we strive for extreme diversity?
2. What are key factors that create diversity?
3. In addition to looking for ethnic, gender and functional diversity, how can YOU incorporate team members that view the world differently?
4. How can YOU, as a leader, have a deep understanding of team members?
5. How can YOU apply this to increase the chances of success in situations of extreme uncertainty?

It’s no secret that Financial companies and banks are heavily regulated, highly fragmented. These factors make the journey to innovation more difficult. As the Innovation Manager for Rabobank, Koen Bosma is taking on this incredible challenge.

In the latest episode, Koen shares his experiences in answering the following key questions when it comes to what it’s like to be an Innovation Coach for some of one of the world’s most beloved banks:

1. As a coach, how do YOU make the right decisions at the right time in the right way?
2. What are three common misconceptions about being a lean innovation coach and how do we overcome them?
3. What does continuous growth look like for YOU?
4. Why should we call it a decelerator vs. accelerator?

How can design thinking and lean methodology could help grow your company? This week, Dan Kaiser shares insights and important perspective that he has gained during his successful launch of the CUNA Innovation Center.

In the latest episode, Dan shares his expertise in answering the following key questions when it comes to creating breakthrough initiatives and launching and innovation center in large, successful insurance companies:

1. How do YOU get started with a new innovation center?
2. What are some key aspects of launching an innovation center?
3. How do you balance stakeholders and grow the program in a sustainable way?
4. How do you break through internal political barriers?
5. How do you build internal policies critical to the long term survival of the Innovation center?

In this week’s podcast, Roy Rosin demystifies barriers to growth and how key behaviors can break down these barriers in large, successful healthcare companies.

As Chief Innovation Officer for Penn Medicine, he shares unique insights about his role in creating and inspiring recent initiatives such as Heart-Safe Motherhood program resulting in significant impact across the company.

For over a decade, Roy has served in leadership roles where he built innovation programs that dramatically increased entrepreneurial activity. In his previous role as the first Vice President of Innovation for Intuit (the makers of TT, Quickbooks and Quicken), he increased annual new releases from 5 per year to 30, while time to market decreased from one year to a few months. After five years at the helm of Intuit's new approach to growth, the company had delivered shareholder returns of three times Google and 33 times the S&P 500.

In our very first episode of the Innovation Coach Spotlight Series, we caught up with Jeremy Gardner to some key questions about how organizations can foster and empower their innovation coaches to create sustainable innovation transformation from within. Beyond the buzzwords and script, Jeremiah breaks down what it means and what it takes in this candid interview.

In this Episode, MTN co-founder Aaron Eden hosts entrepreneur and intrepreneur, Dan Toma.   As an entrepreneur, Dan has been involved with high-tech startups globally.  Over the last few years he’s been primarily focused in the enterprise and has worked with companies like DT, Bosch, Jaguar and Allianz.  He has also recently co-authored a book titled The Corporate Startup - How established companies can develop successful innovation ecosystems.

Our areas of focus for this episode are:

• Why the enterprise ecosystem should mimic a living organism.
• Innovation thesis.
• What is an innovation thesis and why is it important?
• Is it different from a company or product vision?
• How can we use it to ensure we aren’t killing opportunities too early?
• Why it is important to focus on arenas rather than industries.

What Dan Toma is reading:

• Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs
• Beyond Budgeting: How Managers Can Break Free from the Annual Performance Trap

In this episode, MTN Co-Founder Aaron Eden is interviewed by James Carbary of Sweet Fish Media on their B2B Growth podcast.

We narrow in on how marketing professionals can support innovation transformation in their own organizations. Key areas of focus from this discussion were how marketing professionals can:

1) Think big and start small to move quickly.
2) Guard against premature scaling to reduce risk.
3) Behave like a product leader to increase impact.

In today’s episode, the tables turn and my frequent co-host and MTN Co-Founder, Aaron Eden, is the interviewee. We cover many of the most pressing topics that come up time and time again when folks try to drive innovation within their organization. This is an all-around great episode including what Aaron learned at a recent trip to SpaceX to demystifying “transformation”.

Topics include:

• How SpaceX launches rockets faster than most companies launch websites
• How to create a culture and workforce unified around a compelling mission
• What separates the top 1% of corporate innovation initiatives from the top 10%
• How Aaron defines transformation and the ideal state to work toward when undergoing transformation
• Other learnings from recent engagements
• Some of Aaron’s recent favorite books like Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, and Unlocking Potential: 7 Coaching Skills That Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations