2. employee HEROes and their projects

Rob Sharpe is a do-it-yourself kind of guy. He likes to build stuff; he remodeled his own kitchen and built a deck on his house. So it’s no surprise that he’s a loyal fifteen-year veteran employee of Black & Decker,¹ a company that makes power tools. And it’s no surprise that when it came time to improve the way Black & Decker trains its sales staff, Rob Sharpe figured out a perfect do-it-yourselfer’s solution.

Rob is head of sales training, which is a big deal at Black & Decker. The company has hundreds of complex products, which have to be explained and sold to retailers as huge as Home Depot and as small as your local mom-and-pop hardware store, so they in turn can serve up the information to consumers. And Black & Decker has lots of competition. Whether it’s a reciprocating saw from Makita or a cordless power screwdriver from Hitachi, Black & Decker’s sales staff need to know just how their tools stack up—a task that, as you might imagine, is always changing.

Black & Decker’s sales training appeared to be doing just fine, with an in-house learning system that organized the documents and PowerPoint slides. Rob and his team would bring the sales folks in and run them through training in a 17,000-square-foot workshop outside Baltimore, Maryland, with every imaginable device for working with wood, tile, screws, nails, and concrete. But Rob had an inkling there was a better way.

In 2007, Rob got a close look at YouTube. Where others saw cats on skateboards and bad music video takeoffs, he saw potential. Then, about a year later, he got a look at the Flip video camera, a $150 device about the size of a pack of cigarettes, and brain-dead-simple to operate. “I’m a visual learner,” thought Rob. “A lot of these tool guys are visual learners.” So he got the idea to include video in the Black & Decker sales training. Consumers use YouTube for fun; why shouldn’t he use the same technique for training?

But because Rob is a highly empowered and resourceful operative, he took the video idea one step further. First, he worked with his reluctant IT group to set up a video server, so he would have space to upload a lot more videos. “The initial resistance from IT,” he says, “was not really about the project, but about security and getting space on the server.” Rob talked them into it.

And second, he started arming the do-it-yourself sales staff with the tools to make their own videos. “Why wouldn’t I issue a Flip camera to everyone who goes through a presentation skills course?” asks Rob. They’re so cheap, after all. He also equipped the staff with Windows Moviemaker, a simple, free video-editing program, and showed them how to use it.

Then an amazing thing happened. The do-it-yourselfers started creating their own training materials.

One guy started sending in video of competitors’ products, highlighting their weaknesses in a highly visual way that other salespeople could really relate to. Rob calls this video the “seed” since once other salespeople saw it, they immediately saw the value of video. And they saw they could create it easily, too.

More video started pouring in. Salespeople began documenting their challenges, their product features, and the solutions that worked best in sales situations. “Now we get fifteen to twenty videos a month,” he says, and you can tell he’s excited to have created something so useful. “How power tools are used on job sites. Feedback on the tools. And the content is already completely edited”—that is, ready for viewing.

Rob was able to succeed because his boss, Les Ireland, Black & Decker’s president of commercial operations in North America, supported his efforts. As Les puts it, “The concept of getting our teams involved in delivering ‘real world’ content was a powerful idea.” Like any good manager, he weighs these decisions carefully. “How quickly can we execute a new technology in order to capture the productivity across our commercial team is always a critical question,” he says. The emphasis on speed here is what sets apart the best managers of HEROes—they look not just for benefits, but for benefits delivered quickly.

Rob’s team used to spend hours building PowerPoint training courses. Now he and his staff review videos, upload them, and highlight what’s most useful. And he makes his own videos. “I will not let people in this department create a forty-five-minute course again,” he says. “It’s not what the staff need or what they want. Speed to execution is just as important. The training staff can spend a half hour with the product, come up with our own opinions and competitive analysis, and send it out the next day with an assessment.”

Now videos on the Black & Decker server can attract hundreds of views from Black & Decker workers; the most popular videos get viewed by over half of the sales force. Training that used to take two weeks now takes one. New staff spend fifteen hours online before even coming to the training center. Senior management, corporate marketing, and public relations people are perusing the training site for useful bits of content and motivational nuggets.

And in the ultimate turnaround, the IT group is now using the same video techniques to train people on stuff like how to set up 3G mobile broadband in laptops.

Rob turned the tools that consumers use into visual training. Why? Because he’s a tool guy and a do-it-yourselfer, a highly empowered and resourceful HERO. It just made sense to him. And eventually, once he got it working, to the whole sales and management team at Black & Decker.

HEROes and their projects are diverse

At your company, what happens to people like Rob? If you were Rob’s boss, would you support and encourage his experiment? Or would you shut it down, tell him to go back and do his job of creating PowerPoints, and avoid the hassle of trying to lobby people in IT and marketing?

If you’re like most managers, you’d probably respond, “It depends.”

Empowering your workforce means saying yes to HEROes more often. It also means saying no to projects where the effort, budget, or risk is too great, or where the value is questionable. Some of the projects connect directly with customers (like Best Buy’s Twelpforce) and others, like Rob’s video sharing, help employees in customer-facing departments like sales, but they all need a careful evaluation of effort versus value.

We’ve now reviewed dozens of HERO projects like Rob’s. Here’s what managers need to know about the people who come up with these projects: they’re doers, like Rob Sharpe. They’re not rebels. They want to help the organizations they work for to be successful; they’re often the most enthusiastic backers of the companies’ goals and missions. But they’re also driven by a desire to create improvements on their own initiative, rather than to live with the status quo.

What varies is the size of their projects, their level of technical skill, and their roles in the company. What’s constant is their natural desire to take up the new technologies that now surround us all—mobile, video, cloud, and social—to create solutions.

For example, Mark Betka, a program officer in the U.S. State Department, wanted to get positive messages about America out to people all around the world. He came up with the idea of creating international teleconferences between prominent Americans and ordinary citizens in other countries. Unwilling to be stopped by a lack of funding, Mark found an unused license for Adobe Connect—a cloud Internet service for online meetings and videoconferences—and created “CO.NX: A Public Diplomacy Outreach Project” pretty much on his own. Among many other events, CO.NX hosted sessions that included a marketing expert in Hartford, Connecticut, training Iraqi widows on how to market their crafts internationally on the Web and thousands of people commenting live on President Barack Obama’s address in Ghana. Mark used Facebook to promote the program. The CO.NX Facebook page² has ninety thousand fans and lists several programs a week, some of which get audiences in the tens of thousands.

Molly Mattessich had a little bit bigger project in mind. She’s manager of online initiatives at the National Peace Corps Association, a nonprofit group that advocates for the overseas efforts of the U.S. Peace Corps and connects and supports former Peace Corps workers when they return home. In “forty days and forty nights,” as she puts it (actually, it took a few months), she hired developers to create an online community called Africa Rural Connect,³ uniting former Peace Corps workers and Africans living around the world to find new ways to help African farmers succeed. Within months, twelve thousand people from one hundred eighty countries had created profiles and contributed almost eight hundred ideas for a contest to reward the best rural farming ideas.

Some HEROes take on projects that could just as easily be major IT efforts. Take Boyd Beasley, who runs most of customer support at the game company Electronic Arts. He developed a system that allows the company’s game-playing customers to contact support from right in the middle of the game. As a result, people having some sort of technical challenge while in the middle of a quest or contest don’t have to quit the game or make a call. Using offshore developers in India, he designed a system that hooks the game directly into the interfaces for his support function. Even though this project cost half a million dollars to implement, customer support had to run it; the IT and game development resources are all focused on game-play features, not technical support.

These projects are all over the map. Some were simple, some were complex. But what they all had in common was a clear expectation that the value being created was in line with the effort required.

sizing up HERO projects

HERO projects vary widely in size, scope, and benefits to the company. But all these projects generate resistance. As we explain throughout this book, ideally management, IT, and HEROes in customer-facing departments work together. But in a typical company today, HEROes face challenges from all over the organization: senior management, the legal department, and IT people. Sometimes the value the HERO is attempting to create makes the effort worth it. Sometimes it’s not.

To help managers to evaluate these decisions, we’ve created a tool called the EVE Score (EVE stands for Effort-Value Evaluation). Before starting (or supporting) a project, you should answer the questions in this evaluation to see what you’re in for (see tables 2-1 and 2-2). We’ve also put this evaluation online at http://www.forrester.com/empowered.

TABLE 2-1

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Effort questions

1. Tools: Does the project require tools or resources? (Select all that apply.)

a. Requires a purchase from a software or service vendor: Add 5 points

b. Requires IT involvement for access to applications: Add 5 points

c. Requires IT involvement for security: Add 5 points

d. Requires help from an outside development company: Add 5 points

e. No additional tools required or tools are free: 0 points

2. Time: How long will the project likely take to show results? (Select one.)

a. Less than 2 weeks: 0 points

b. 2–8 weeks: 5 points

c. 3–4 months: 10 points

d. 5–6 months: 15 points

e. More than 6 months: 20 points

3. Cost: What is the total budget? (Select one.)

a. Less than $500: 0 points

b. $500 to $2,000: 5 points

c. $2,000 to $10,000: 10 points

d. $10,000 to $50,000: 15 points

e. More than $50,000: 20 points

4. People: How many people are involved in the development? (Select one.)

a. Just the HERO: 0 points

b. The HERO plus 1 other person: 5 points

c. 3–5 people: 10 points

d. 6–10 people: 15 points

e. More than 10 people: 20 points

5. Governance: Does the project require any of the following? (Select all that apply.)

a. Approval from the HERO’s immediate boss: Add 0 points

b. Legal or compliance approval: Add 5 points

c. Security or risk management approval: Add 5 points

d. Accounting or finance approval: Add 5 points

e. Public relations approval—project affects corporate image: Add 5 points

f. IT group approval: Add 5 points

g. No approval necessary: Add 0 points

Add the answers to effort questions 1 through 5 to create the effort score.

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TABLE 2-2

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Value questions

1. Revenue: Does the project increase revenue? (Select all that apply.)

a. Creates a new product or service customers can buy: Add 20 points

b. Shortens the buying cycle by more than 10%: Add 10 points

c. Increases the average order size by 10%: Add 10 points

d. Makes company’s products or services relevant for new customer groups: Add 10 points

e. Increases revenue significantly in some other way: Add 10 points

f. Does not increase revenue: Add 0 points

2. Cost: Does the project save money? (Select all that apply.)

a. Decreases marketing costs: Add 20 points

b. Decreases customer service costs: Add 20 points

c. Decreases the cost of sales: Add 20 points

d. Allows measurement (e.g., marketing effectiveness) that will lead to cost savings: Add 10 points

e. Saves money in other measurable ways: Add 10 points

f. Does not save money: Add 0 points

3. Productivity: Does the project make an internal process more efficient? (Select all that apply.)

a. Improves internal communication: Add 10 points

b. Improves the speed of resolving an issue: Add 10 points

c. Improves the quality of an outcome: Add 10 points

d. Streamlines or accelerates a process: Add 10 points

e. Improves sales productivity: Add 10 points

f. Improves another important business metric: Add 10 points

g. Improves the effectiveness of 20 or more employees: Add 10 points

h. Does not make an internal process more efficient: Add 0 points

4. Advocacy: Does the project improve loyalty and positive word of mouth? (Select all that apply.)

a. Leads to higher customer satisfaction or improves customer loyalty: Add 10 points

b. Improves the customer experience in some measurable way: Add 10 points

c. Creates more influential word-of-mouth advocates: Add 10 points

d. Has a track record of turning detractors into advocates: Add 15 points

e. Does not improve loyalty and positive word of mouth: Add 0 points

5. Reach: Does the project increase the organization’s reach? (Select all that apply.)

a. Helps marketing messages to reach 20% more people: Add 10 points

b. Helps marketing messages to reach better-qualified people: Add 10 points

c. Generates between 10% and 20% more leads: Add 10 points

d. Generates more than 20% more leads: Add 20 points

e. Generates better-qualified leads: Add 10 points

f. Increases brand awareness in at least one new geography or market: Add 10 points

g. Does not increase the organization’s reach: Add 0 points

Add the answers to value questions 1 through 5 to create the value score.

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The EVE Score is intended to help you think through what you’re about to do. The first set of questions, the effort questions, show where you’ll encounter resistance, not just in gathering resources and budget, but in parts of the company that may need to be brought in, like IT, PR, or legal. The second set, the value questions, help to clarify the exact benefits you’re seeking.

Based on these two scores, you can evaluate whether the project is worth it—whether the effort exceeds the value, or vice versa. Our evaluation can’t capture all the challenges or all the sources of value, so you may want to go beyond the scores in your own assessment, but at least you’ll have an idea of how to balance the two sides of the equation, effort and value.

Finally, you’ll be able to evaluate your project in context, to determine just how big a task you’re taking on. Boyd Beasley’s in-game support system was a huge job. Molly Mattessich’s online community was much more manageable. You want to go into these projects with a clear idea of which size project you’ll be working on.

the six types of projects and what to do about them

Based on your scores for value and effort, you’ll end up in one of six categories (see figure 2-1). The first two are cases where the value and effort are out of alignment, the no-brainer and the Quixote project.

FIGURE 2-1

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Projects fall into one of six categories

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If your value and effort scores are within 25 points of one another, you’ve got a viable project where value and effort are commensurate. But you need to know what you’re in for. Viable projects fall into four classes based on the level of effort required.

Class 3 and 4 projects are significantly more complex and challenging. To see what it’s like to complete one, we’ll share the story of Ross Inglis, who undertook a shadow-IT-level project to create a new set of customers for Thomson Reuters.

CASE STUDY

Thomson Reuters finds new customers in the cloud

Thomson Reuters collects real-time financial data, descriptions, lists of executives, and other crucial information about nearly every decent-sized company on the planet. If you want to know about a company, stop first at Thomson Reuters—you’ll be smarter. It’s a perfect example of the kind of information that empowers customers.

Ross Inglis is responsible for, among other things, alliances and distribution partners in the Americas. So he’s continually trying to find new markets for Thomson Reuters’s information. In 2007, he began to see an opportunity for the company, one that would come from an untapped market—independent investment advisors—and a new way to distribute content, through the cloud.

First, the market. There are nearly half a million independent investment advisors in the United States. They typically have dozens or hundreds of clients—but not thousands. They’re very interested in company information, since quick access can help them make investment recommendations. But unlike Thomson’s current customers, they’re not large institutions willing to pay six- or seven-figure fees and install infrastructure to get access to information. A hundred bucks a month is a serious expense for these folks. Not only that, they need a solution that’s easy to install and trouble free to use.

That’s where the Internet cloud comes in. Cloud services are lightweight and easy to deploy, just what investment advisors need. They scale up without any capital investment. And in this case, there’s a natural channel. Salesforce.com’s contact management system is attractive to small firms like investment advisors exactly because it’s cloud based: you just hook up to the Internet and point your browser at a site, and all your contacts are instantly available. Salesforce.com is so connected to the cloud, its logo is actually the word software with a circle and slash—“no software”—to indicate that there’s nothing to install. If Thomson could piggyback its information onto Salesforce.com’s contact management tool, the result would be just right for investment advisors—easy to get to through a browser, and with both contact information and corporate data available just when the advisors needed it.

So in late 2007, Ross set out to build a product to deliver Thomson Reuters’s information through Salesforce.com.

This application started, as many do, with unstructured exploration. One of Ross’s staffers was an application developer; Ross pointed him at Salesforce.com and asked him to try it out. This was followed, as Ross puts it, by a period of “playing around.” As with many HERO projects, exploration without a detailed goal is often required to get a feel for what’s actually possible. Play is fine, as long as you don’t make a long-term career out of it.

Next, Ross lined up a senior sponsor, a necessary step for a project of this size—one that will go on for many months, chew up tens of thousands of dollars in budget, and eventually make an impression on customers. Ross’s manager, Matthew Burkley, gave him free rein because he recognized the size of the opportunity. Salesforce had just signed major deals with Merrill Lynch and Citibank, so clearly it was a distribution channel worth pursuing.

The next step was prototyping. Prototyping on a Class 4 project is an excellent idea, because you’ll probably have to line up a bunch of internal stakeholders, many of whom will feel the need to see what you’re planning for themselves. Ross hired a firm that has since become a division of Fujitsu to build his prototype and show how customers would benefit.

As a project of this nature goes forward, the HERO finds that his most heroic qualities are political, not technical. Ross explains that this project “took a lot of persuasion and cajoling and bartering. Apparently I’m good at that,” he adds, not too modestly. “I am able to get what I want. People I need support from become sick of hearing from me, or find I can help them in other ways.”

One essential political element to negotiate in a large project is the support of the technology department. In Ross’s case this meant checking with two different CTOs during the course of the project. Working with these CTOs accomplished two things. It surfaced important technical issues, like data security, that the project needed to address to become a key distribution channel for the company. And it kept the IT department from blocking the project later due to unaddressed concerns or politics. While Ross didn’t do everything the CTOs suggested—some of it was just too expensive—he was able to include them in his list of allies as the project moved forward.

At this writing the project is on schedule. Ross has hired some Uruguayan developers recommended by Salesforce.com and expects the product to roll out and start producing over a million dollars in business in 2010. And it will come in for a total development budget of $100,000.

Ross has also accomplished some of his personal goals. His visibility in the organization has risen. People from other parts of the company come to him for advice. He’s also upset some people by pursuing a project that extends beyond his normal job description, and by inventing new ways of doing business that upset the status quo. But thanks to his heroic political skills, those skeptics won’t keep his project from getting its chance to succeed and make money for Thomson Reuters.

a few words for HEROes

From the examples of Black & Decker and Thomson Reuters, you can see what it takes to be an employee HERO. While most of this book concentrates on managers and what they need to do, it helps to understand the HERO’s challenge. So we’ll leave you with a few words of advice for HEROes.

First, focus on customers. The closer you get to making customers more empowered and happier, the easier it will be to justify your project. Helping people who touch customers—like salespeople and support people—is also a good idea. But when you’re calculating the impact of your project, it’s customer value that will keep you going.

Second, most HERO projects are based on better flow of information. Consider new forms of communication, like Rob Sharpe’s salesperson videos, or new ways to put customers in touch with their information, like Ross Inglis’s financial advisor product. But if you improve information to empower customers or customer-facing staff, you’re probably on the right track.

Third, assess both your level of effort and the value you’ll be producing. Why? It’s not just to know how big a project you’re taking on. The value questions will help clarify the ways you can prove your project is worth it, while the effort questions will help you identify where the challenges are. You’ll be able to see whether you need to concentrate on raising budgetary support, making information technology decisions that don’t run afoul of IT, or winning over line-of-business managers. Without this sort of planning, you’ll doubtless run into unanticipated trouble, and it’s your own fault—you should have thought through who and what could get in your way before you started.

Fourth, it’s harder than you think. HEROes are always going off the beaten track. HEROes learn about groundswell technologies and want to harness them, but rarely realize just how disruptive they may be to organizations. What looks easy turns out to be hard. What looks hard may be even harder than you thought. We tell you this, not to scare you, but to encourage you to prepare for adversity—political, technical, and personal—because that’s what completing a HERO project nearly always means.

Finally, don’t stop with one HERO project. Your project will raise your visibility, as well as tease your customers and fellow staff with new ideas about what’s possible. The rewards of success are higher demands. Think about what you’re going to do about those demands, and how you will maintain and improve what you’ve built.

what HEROes do

The job of a HERO is to find ways to boost the business by connecting with empowered customers. In the next four chapters, we’ll describe exactly how to do that in four steps that we call the IDEA process: identify empowered customers, deliver groundswell customer service, empower them further with mobile information, and amplify their word of mouth.