March 29, 2024

Why Can’t Companies Be More Like the Iroquois?

English: Flag of the Iroquois Confederacy, Hia...

English: Flag of the Iroquois Confederacy, Hiawatha Belt Français : Drapeau de la Confédération Iroquoise (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If ever there was a cooperative organization that had less reason to endure until today, it is the Iroquois League.

First formed sometime between the 15th and 16th centuries, it brought together five distinct tribes that had been warring and otherwise squabbling for centuries prior. Each tribe had its own language, customs, and culture. Located mostly in what is today northern New York State, the tribes’ unity (a sixth joined in the 18th century) allowed them to wield serious political power as Dutch and English colonists came to North America.

Caught on the Wrong Side
The league probably should have fallen apart after it backed and fought with the losing side in the American Revolution, the British. With most of their former lands seized by the Americans, the tribes were forced to move to Canada; those that remained were relocated into small reservations sprinkled across New York.

Yet despite all the wars, relocations, deprivations, and disease epidemics brought upon the individual tribes, the league survives. Perhaps it has to do with the flexible style of governance that has been in place since the beginning. Each tribe has the freedom to govern itself, yet there is a Grand Council of 56 (that number has never changed) Hoyenah (chiefs) or Sachems that confers about issues that concern the league as a whole.

Women hold a strong place in Iroquois society, leading individual clans within tribes, helping determine chiefs, and holding veto power over treaties and declarations of war (the Iroquois declared war on Germany in both world wars). In the 19th century, no treaty was binding unless it was ratified by 75% of the male voters and 75% of the “mothers of the nation.”

Why Can’t Companies Do This?
So the obvious question becomes, why can’t companies cooperate like this? Most are riven by silo (tribal) warfare, as employees who are all supposed to be working for the same cause – serving the customer – engage in turf battles and subvert one another in an attempt to appear to be the most effective contributors to the company.

It’s happened to me multiple times in my fewer than three years at SAP: nasty emails from someone I’ve never met demanding to know who gave me permission to publish a story that touches on his or her silo but that does not overlap with anything they’re trying to do. There’s no discussion of whether what I’ve published is of good quality or could be helpful to a customer – it’s all about fear and power. I’m guessing you’ve experienced the same thing at some point if you’ve ever worked in a big company (or maybe a small one, too).

This has got to stop.

Customers are demanding that we deal with them in a unified, cross-channel fashion. They don’t want three different calls from three different sales areas of your company. They don’t want duplicative or conflicting messages coming from different parts of the marketing organization.

How Do We Stop the Infighting?
Research by my colleague Rob O’Regan has revealed a few ways to develop cross-channel cooperation:

  • Put someone in charge. Organizations need someone to orchestrate the cross-channel experience, even if they don’t own it. This person must be relatively senior in stature and visible across all functions, serving as an internal partner to connect disparate groups around a customer-centric strategy.
  • Develop plans collaboratively. More organizations are moving away from traditional top-down, bottom-up planning. Instead of having sales, marketing, finance, and operations each develop their own strategic plans, these companies have introduced collaborative planning, which puts everyone in the same room to create a shared plan, with the customer at the center.
  • Talk to the frontliners. Companies should also tap into customer-facing employees, who are a rich source of insights. Whoever heads up customer experience should oversee an effort to ask every frontline employee what’s impeding their ability to deliver excellent service.
  • Form temporary problem-solving teams. Companies have pockets of expertise about the customer experience spread across the company. They should look for ways to tap into these people to quickly resolve specific customer problems.
  • Focus metrics and incentives on long-term retention. Customer experience initiatives should be measured not on short-term transactions but on longer-term measures, such as lifetime value. For example, instead of measuring how quickly a call center agent answers a customer’s question, measure how infrequently customers call back.

I’m sure there are other ways to reduce silo and channel conflict that I haven’t mentioned. What do you recommend?

 

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The TV Is No Longer a TV

I am in the vanguard of cord cutters, a small but growing group of cable TV subscribers who have decided to ditch the cable box in favor of a variety of geeky devices that serve up entertainment through an internet connection.

Between 2008 and 2013, 5 million (or 5%) of US cable subscribers cut the cord, with 1.3% brandishing the scissors in 2013 alone, according to Toronto-based Convergence Consulting Group.

When I told my wife and daughter we were trendsetters, they rolled their eyes and said I was just being cheap (again). Regardless, a change in the way we think about entertainment has swept through my household and 5 million others in the US: The TV is no longer a TV; it is simply the biggest screen we have for watching entertainment.

It’s All About Screens Now
That’s because our new content providers, Hulu and Amazon Prime, are as easy to watch on a computer, an iPad, or, in a real pinch, a phone, as they are through the Roku device attached to the former TV. (When we absolutely need to see live network broadcasts – my wife and daughter insisted on seeing the Oscars live, for example – I plug in a set of Radio Shack digital bunny ears to turn our big screen back into a TV for a few hours.)

The New York Times says that cord cutting doesn’t save much money but I can attest that in my house (near Boston) it saves $125 per month. Not exactly chump change. Plus, we never watched that much programming to begin with, so the savings are that much more satisfying.

As you might imagine, stories like these are starting to throw a scare into the cable companies and the entertainment industry as a whole. “In the U.S., consumers are seeing fewer differences between telecommunications and entertainment,” says Jack Plunkett, CEO of Plunkett Research. “It’s all the same thing. We have truly entered an era of convergence where data, entertainment, and communications are all falling into one package.”

Except now it’s the consumers doing the packaging rather than the cable and telecom providers. Research by my colleague Polly Traylor turned up three ways that the status quo is threatened:

  • Frictionless consumption. There is a reason why Netflix and Apple iTunes have been so successful: they both have world-class selection and make it extremely simple to find what you want and begin listening or viewing immediately.
  • Everything is an entertainment device now. Even the top providers of gaming platforms– Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft– are now vying for the same entertainment eyeballs as the studios and networks and are retrofitting machines into multipurpose entertainment devices that stream content from Netflix and other Internet video providers.
  • Disruptors are everywhere. I’m sure that by now you’ve heard of an Internet TV startup called Aereo that uses tiny individual antennas to let consumers in several U.S. cities watch live broadcasts on Internet-connected devices and store shows in the cloud to watch later. All the major broadcasters have sued for copyright infringement and pushed it all the way up to the Supreme Court. Needless to say, if a tiny, barely two-year-old startup is already having its day in (Supreme) Court (against its will), we are in the midst of interesting times for the entertainment industry.

How have you changed the ways you consume entertainment?

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