Kihlstrom Agile Consumer

Navigating the Empowered Economy and the Future of Customer Experience
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5439-7581-9
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 330 Seiten

We are living in an agile world. What started with technologists and marketers has spread across entire organizations, and didn't stop there. Consumers are thinking agile as well. They are more willing to be part of product development and the process of building brands than ever before, due to a number of social, technological, and economic factors. Also, as employees, they are also more interested in sharing values with the companies they work for, and are looking for new types of management and work environments. All of this adds up to the makings of an Agile World led by newly-empowered consumers in an evolving economy. The book gives practical examples of how agile thinking and approaches, as well as a shift in consumer behavior, are changing the brand-consumer relationship with the opportunity for better outcomes for both. As brands become more sophisticated and consumers have an increasing amount of choices, the power dynamic in the brand-consumer relationship has shifted to giving consumers more control than ever before. While this is a shift from the early days of branding and marketing, it is one that provides new opportunities for consumers and positions brands as facilitators of an evolving creative economy. It provides examples of how companies like Procter & Gamble, ING, Google, Betabrand, LEGO, and others are shaping this new dynamic while achieving innovative and profitable outcomes. The book features a foreword from Lisa Nirell, Chief Energy Officer of EnergizeGrowth and author of EnergizeGrowth NOW: The Marketing Guide to a Wealthy Company and The Mindful Marketer: How to Stay Present and Profitable in a Data-Driven World. The Agile Consumer is the third book in Kihlström's Agile series, which started with 2016's The Agile Web, and continued to 2018's The Agile Brand.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kihlstrom, Greg

Leseproben

Introduction

“When you aim for perfection,
you discover it’s a moving target.”

George Fisher

I think I was born agile. They didn’t have a word for it until long after I entered the world in the late 1970s, but there was something about the way I approached things that often didn’t align with others’ expectations.

By the age of five, I was studying classical piano and, unlike a lot of kids, I actually enjoyed it. Having the discipline to practice every day, an interest in learning about classical music, as well as the aspect of musical performance that allowed me to get up and play for others, I became one of the better pianists in my very small private school. I wasn’t exactly on my way to Carnegie Hall, but I held my own in the small pond I was swimming in.

I always strove for perfection but always felt that I never quite achieved it while playing the piano, despite continual improvement. What I did learn from taking lessons for a little over 11 years was that there is something powerful about practicing the same piece of music again and again and doing iteratively better each time. Learning a piece of music consisted of several things. First, the skill of reading music, and second, learning how to apply a bit of an artistic touch to the piece—knowing how and when to get louder or softer, or to speed up or pause just the right amount for effect. But just as much as those things, it took practice to get it right. You didn’t play a piece of music well the first time, or even the second or third time.

The other thing I learned from studying piano is that as hard as you practice, as much as you play, there’s always someone else willing to push things further and faster. Inevitably, I was eventually overshadowed by other kids who were willing to put in more time than me, who were arguably more talented, and who “iterated” the quality of their performances more quickly.

My first big lesson (no pun intended) about perfection came from a very large piano competition I attended in my senior year of high school. All throughout my childhood, I was the “star” pupil at piano, in my small private school world, and in the competitions in which I had participated. It was easy to think a lot of my abilities based on the feedback I had received, awards I had won, and reputation I’d gained in the circles I moved in. No one had ever told me about the concept of “big fish in a small pond” when I was eleven, though. So when it came time to perform against my peers in the largest competition I had been in thus far, I didn’t just fail to win, I failed to even place. Obviously, perfect in one world wasn’t perfect in others.

So, as any agile person would do, I chose something that built on the concepts I’d already learned, the discipline I had been taught, and applied those ideas in a way that ultimately led to more success. Music had always been a creative outlet for me, but it failed to combine the visual aspect of creativity that I had also always appreciated. What started with a desire to learn design (initially by way of architecture and eventually by graphic and interactive design) ultimately led to a career in a truly agile profession: digital strategy and marketing. This then naturally gave way to my current focus on customer experience. On a long enough timeline, it all makes sense as one thing iterated into another.

How can a person be agile?

Anyone familiar with the term agile already knows that it started (at least in this context) in the software development world in the 1990s, descended from lean manufacturing in the 1960s. So, how does a coding methodology translate to a human? There are a few ways I would define this, which I’ll explain now.

A little ambiguity is okay as long as there’s a goal

I know some people who have a hard time with not knowing exactly what is going on. You must know them too. They are what I refer to as “zeroes and ones” people, who only deal in black and white and are uncomfortable with grays. They prefer to see the world in terms of what John D. Caputo refers to as “absolute truth1,” or the notion that there is only one correct way to believe, and that this one way applies to everyone and everything in the universe.

I’m not one of those people. Much to the contrary, I’ve always considered myself someone who sets their own goals. But I think it’s easy for some of those who lean toward the absolute truth style of thinking to confuse knowing that you’re between two defined goals but not quite knowing the path to get to the next one with being aimless and without ambition.

Agile methodology includes a set of goals and requirements, and a series of sprints or iterations which are performed until the goals are reached.

The agile methodology teaches us that we don’t have to know exactly how we’re going to reach the goals as long as we have clearly defined requirements, and a process that allows us to create, analyze, and iterate until we achieve success.

Note that the process is important. Just like practicing the piano regularly, we can’t just try to do something once in a while and expect to be good. The famous saxophonist Charlie Parker would put in as many as 15 hours per day2 of practice, and Malcolm Gladwell famously introduced the “10,000 hour rule3” in his 2008 book Outliers, which subscribes to the (much debated) idea that greatness can be achieved with enough practice.

A first draft isn’t finished; it’s for review

The first reason I define myself as an agile person has to do with how I approach a first draft of any document or deliverable. I’m the kind of person who needs feedback early in order to do a great job on a team effort. There are a few reasons for this.

First, if I work for too long on something, I might go way too far down a particular path that isn’t on target with external expectations.

Second, I’m the type of person who thinks about something by talking through an idea. In other words, I learn by teaching. The need to explain something forces my brain to think through nuances, potential questions, or potential objections in a more in-depth way than I would otherwise. If it’s just me thinking through things, I tend to agree with myself more easily than a colleague or peer might!

An important aspect of the agile approach is that the first iteration of a deliverable isn’t going to be completely polished. This makes a lot of sense to someone like me. I want to get a quick idea, prototype, or document out there so that others, and even myself, can look at it, beat it up, and help make it better.

Constant tinkering towards perfection

The second way I define myself as an agile person has to do with perfectionism and how something perfect, or near-perfect, is achieved.

Another symptom (or strength, possibly) of an agile person is the constant need to improve and make things better.

Perfection is always the goal, but the funny thing about perfection is that its definition can evolve over time. Look no further than beauty or fashion trends over time to see what I mean. Believe it or not, in the time of Queen Elizabeth I, it was all the rage to have black teeth4, which apparently gave the impression that one had access to sugar and was thus wealthy.

So, for an agile person, the idea isn’t necessarily that one is ever finished with anything. This, surely, can lead to many issues such as stacks of unfinished ideas, or the inability to move on from a single project or task. This can be good in cases where this continual improvement makes things better.

One example where better is arguable is George Lucas’ continual tinkering with his Star Wars films. The original film now referred to as Episode IV: A New Hope, released May 25, 19775, was an instant classic and set box office records. But, when it came time to re-release the first trilogy as “special editions” on the 20th anniversary of the release of the original film6, he had a choice: release them “as is”, or utilize the newly-available cinematic-quality computer graphics capabilities of his LucasFilm studios to enhance them. Even if you’re not as much of a science fiction fan as I am, you probably know that he chose the latter. And the fan base, in many cases, was not amused. Some enhancements were rather subtle, though others, such as a new musical number in Return of the Jedi, were not. There is even a movement to offer fans the original, unenhanced version of the films.

But there are many great examples where continual tinkering does make things better. We’ll read about a few of those in the pages that follow. I do count myself lucky that I can usually move on, however. After all, this is my fourth book, and I’m not still working on the first one. Having a solid set of requirements and a firm end date can help.

What are we chasing?

Quite simply, we’re chasing perfection. Yet we know that perfection isn’t just impossible to achieve in a moment in time, it is not possible to define in the same way from one moment to the next. Tastes and trends change, competition changes, and even a perfectly functioning piece of machinery may degrade over time.

So, we chase perfection, but we are realistic enough to know that perfection, if achievable at all, is only possible for a...