CEOs: 3 Ways to Reduce Health Risks posed by Business Travel

As a business leader you cannot avoid travels even being aware of it’s negative impact on health. I have been experimenting and finding out from fellow passengers to travel healthy.

As noted by Tomas, CEO and Professor of Business Psychology, risks of business travel are accelerated aging, increased chances of stroke, deep vein thrombosis, pathological germs, radiation.

And if it were not enough frequent travel also lead to poor diet, lack of exercise, increased consumption of alcohol, jet lags, sleep problems, and gastrointestinal problems.

Peter Bregman, CEO and consultant to CEOs advises to use the strategies of ‘athletes’ while travelling. Athletes are conscious of their travel and have an objective of staying in their best shape despite frequent travels. Peter advises to have ‘discipline’ mindset of an athlete while traveling.

Based on Peter’s advice and some from my own experiments there are 3 simple things (apart from exercise) that we frequent travelers can do to reduce  the risks.

1. Lots of Water: Start drinking extra water a day before the travel and one bottle (500ml) every 30-45 minutes while flying. Have an alarm on your phone.
2. Sleep 7-8 hours: Prepare your presentations before and make sure to sleep properly the night before the travel.
3. Own food: Carry your meals to avoid eating flight and airport food, one of the worst culprits.

Think like an athlete when you take that business travel - be conscious of the health risks and be disciplined to take all possible actions to reduce it just like we take steps to reduce risks our businesses face.

Author: Vishal Tulsian is Director of PT Bank Amar Indonesia and CEO of Tunaiku, a FinTech Startup. He is Harvard Alum, has Master from Uni of Liverpool, ACA, ACS, CWA (Int), DBF.  

Stories at Work

We all intuitively know the power of stories. There are some interesting studies cited in the HBR article referred below on this topic. Essence of the research is that stories affect the behavior both positively and negatively. The study cited quotes an example of increased cheating among the people just by believing that someone else in the same cohort is cheating. Implication of this study at work could be quite significant - if as a leader we turn a blind eye to one star performer's some unacceptable behavior then many more in the organization could resort to similar behaviors.

Another study shows that people are lifted up by the stories of those at the bottom behaving generously. No surprise that I was never uplifted by the news of generous donations by the likes of Gates or Buffett. The implication is that as a leader we should first spot such real life stories within the organisation and then make it sure that its spread within the organisation. No matter how small or irrelevant it seems.

Another finding shows that people are particularly discouraged by stories about higher-ups misbehaving. This is a no-brainer. However, still we hear lot of such cases which suggests that at times we may find our behavior as acceptable while the same is not acceptable from the perspective of most of the other people in the organisation. As leaders we should possibly be more introspective of our own behavior, as these become stories and then spread without one's knowing.

Refer: The Unexpected Influence of Stories Told at Work

McKinsey article: New approach to business-model innovation

This article is authored by Marc de Jong and Menno van Dijk. Following is the gist.


Existing industries such as financial services, education, telecommunication are being disrupted by the likes of Bitcoin, MOOCs, Wattsapp. What can an existing player do to disrupt themselves instead of being disrupted by other companies:

1) Reframing beliefs: Existing players have set of beliefs about the value creation and what drives profitability. Authors suggest an approach to articulate the underlying notions and reframe them.




The fuller process and the questions to ask along the way look like this:

1. Outline the dominant business model in your industry. What are the long-held core beliefs about how to create value? For instance, in financial services, scale is regarded as crucial to profitability.

2. Dissect the most important long-held belief into its supporting notions. How do notions about customer needs and interactions, technology, regulation, business economics, and ways of operating underpin the core belief? For instance, financial-services players assume that customers prefer automated, low-cost interfaces requiring scale. Because the IT underpinning financial services has major scale advantages, most of a provider’s cost base is fixed. Furthermore, the appropriate level of risk management is possible only beyond a certain size of business.

3. Turn an underlying belief on its head. Formulate a radical new hypothesis, one that no one wants to believe—at least no one currently in your industry. For instance, what if a financial-services provider’s IT could be based almost entirely in the cloud, drastically reducing the minimum economic scale?

Executives can begin by systematically examining each core element of their business model, which typically comprises customer relationships, key activities, strategic resources, and the economic model’s cost structures and revenue streams. Within each of these elements, various business-model innovations are possible. Having analyzed hundreds of core elements across a wide range of industries and geographies, we have found that a reframe seems to emerge for each one, regardless of industry or location. Moreover, these themes have one common denominator: the digitization of business, which upends customer interactions, business activities, the deployment of resources, and economic models

HBS Research: Link between incentives and quotas

1) Link the bonus with clear goal
2) Keep your high performers in seasonal goods if you want smooth sales

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7810.html

Link between happiness and investment

I read an HBR research that discovered an interesting link between the happiness and long term investment tendency of a firm. While it sounds intuitive (as most of the research results) I would be interested in it's application - should a city (company) invest more to become happier or should it first work on being happy to attract more investment. 

"Companies located in places with happier people invest more, according to a recent paper by Tuugi Chuluun of Loyola University Maryland and Carol Graham of Brookings. In particular, firms in happy places spend more on R&D. That’s because happiness, they argue, is linked to the kind of longer term thinking necessary for making investments for the future."

https://hbr.org/2015/06/companies-in-happy-cities-invest-more-for-the-long-term

Summary HBR Article: You’re Spending Your Money in All the Wrong Places

Old MetaphorMarketers have long used the famous funnel metaphor to think about touch points: Consumers would start at the wide end of the funnel with many brands in mind and narrow them down to a final choice. Companies have traditionally used paid-media push marketing at a few well-defined points along the funnel to build awareness, drive consideration, and ultimately inspire purchase. But the metaphor fails to capture the shifting nature of consumer engagement.

Shifting Nature of consumer
Today’s consumers take a much more iterative and less reductive journey of four stages: consider, evaluate, buy, and enjoy, advocate, bond. (CEB and EAB)

Consider: Old spending - highest amount in this stage. Digital Age - Don't spend too much at this stage

New Concept
First, instead of focusing on how to allocate spending across media—television, radio, online, and so forth—marketers should target stages in the decision journey.

Wrong Spending: 70% to 90% of spend goes to advertising and retail promotions that hit consumers at the consider and buy stages.

Digital Age Correct Spending: Consumers are often influenced more during the evaluate and enjoy-advocate-bond stages. In many categories the single most powerful impetus to buy is someone else’s advocacy.

Action Steps
Understand CDJ and reorganize roles

The shift to a CDJ (Customer Decision Journey)-driven strategy has three parts: understanding your consumers’ decision journey; determining which touch points are priorities and how to leverage them; and allocating resources accordingly—an undertaking that may require redefining organizational relationships and roles.

New Roles for Marketing
Orchestrator
Many consumer touch points are owned-media channels, such as the company’s website, product packaging, and customer service and sales functions. Usually they are run by parts of the organization other than marketing. Re-organize.

Publisher and “content supply chain” managerCompanies where the marketing function takes on the role of publisher in chief—rationalizing the creation and flow of product related content—consumers develop a clearer sense of the brand and are better able to articulate the attributes of specific products. If not marketing then re-organize.

Marketplace intelligence leaderIn many companies IT controls the collection and management of data and the relevant budgets; and with its traditional focus on driving operational efficiency. Marketing data should be under marketing’s control.

Prepare A Customer Experience PlanA deep investigation of decision journey often reveals the need for a plan that will make the customer’s experience coherent.


https://hbr.org/2010/12/branding-in-the-digital-age-youre-spending-your-money-in-all-the-wrong-places/ar/1