Build capacity first to prepare pathway for executing great ideas
Thursday March 31 2022
Ideas must be executed without procrastination, which I define as the position held by people who have been deceived to think they are in control of time and circumstances. ILLUSTRATION | COURTESY
To address the needs of organisations to get to the heart of the customer experience and make it a scientific process that can be repeated over and over, we developed a customer experience index based on the surveys and interactions with other organisations.
We made nine categories out of the responses to the question: "What makes a great customer experience?” My book, The Experience: From Customer to Ambassador covers the outcome of the interactions and the dynamics of giving customers the best experience possible.
The bulk of customer complaints have to do with things that were either poorly executed or not executed at all. Many executives know exactly what they need to do but do not do what they know. They do not execute.
This is not limited to organisations. Think of the number of ideas that you have had that you were very convinced could change your life but you did nothing about them. Later you hear someone has done the same thing and it has become a great hit. Your claim to fame then becomes your bragging to your friends that you got the idea first.
Life never rewards who got the idea. Life rewards who executed the idea. Just the same way seeds do not grow on a shelf, ideas do not deliver results in your head. They must be executed without procrastination, which I define as the position held by people who have been deceived to think they are in control of time and circumstances.
Great ideas do not get executed for a number of reasons. Firstly, it may be that there is no conducive environment for execution to happen. No matter how gifted you are in marine science, you cannot execute your skills in the Sahara Desert. I have had many people say that they want to establish a Google-like culture without taking stock of what is required. For this reason, many great ideas do not get executed — there is a gap between the strategy and the working environment.
Another reason why great ideas do not get executed is because there is a gap between the idea and the capacity of the executor. Everyone wants to win a gold medal but medals are not won on the platform of desire. They are won on the platform of capacity. Capacity is never about looking cute. It is about having the ability to deliver.
Growing up in Nigeria, we understood the meaning of capacity in a real sense. We had an erratic power supply and so having a generator was never a luxury. It was always a necessity. All generators produce electricity but their output is a function of their capacity. If you tried to power anything bigger than this, it would go off because those other gadgets were beyond its capacity.
Even life rewards capacity and tough times are the litmus test for capacity. You will never know what you are made of until you go through some things.
We all remember a time when certain things we are able to buy now without thinking were in our list of expensive things. The price did not change. It was our capacity that changed. Once we grew our capacity, price became irrelevant. Similarly, a lot of people complain about the targets that they are given. The problem is not with the targets. The problem is with capacity. Once you grow your capacity, targets become attainable.
Wale Akinyemi is the chief transformation officer of PowerTalks [email protected]