The New Management Imperative

I was reading Bruce Temkin’s free book The 6 New Management Imperatives the other day. It’s only 16 pages, so it’s a quick read. It’s also a very good collection of principles that all managers should incorporate into their businesses:

1. Invest in culture as a corporate asset.
2. Make listening an enterprisewide skill.
3. Turn innovation into a continuous process.
4. Provide a clear and compelling purpose.
5. Extend and enhance the digital fabric.
6. Practice good social citizenship.

I wanted to highlight the fifth point (“extend and enhance the digital fabric”) since it ties in closely with what we do at ArrowQuick.

Bruce argues, and I agree, that there are huge opportunities for technology to improve your business. Whether it’s adding capabilities and automation, or lowering costs, technology is “an enabler for the entire business.” He mentions four guidelines:

• Understand digital economics. Quantify everything and measure your ROI.
• Assume increasing adoption. Expect new technologies to become more popular and for employees and customers to become more comfortable with them.
• Improve usability, a lot. This is an area that ArrowQuick specializes in, but is sadly often overlooked.
• Connect online with offline. Tie your online and offline marketing activities together into a unified experience.

Download the PDF of the book for the full text, and also take a look a Bruce’s blog Customer Experience Matters for more tips on improving customer relationships.