The assessment model for understanding multiple perspectives is inspired by the board game Trivial Pursuit. The Trivial Pursuit “pie” represents six different viewpoints. The pieces of the pie are termed Customer Aces, Make Promises You Can Keep, Follow the Money, Lean Not Mean, Flesh and Blood, and Imagine New Futures. Let’s examine each of the six viewpoints:

1.Customer Aces: How will consumers react to the crisis? Leaders should inventory relevant assumptions customers hold about the company itself, its products and services, and its competitors and search for proof of how these views could be transformed to benefit the company. Leaders should spend time as customers to gain an authentic viewpoint and converse with customers to understand the buzz surrounding their business, product, or service.

2.Make Promises You Can Keep: How does the company make decisions, design and implement plans, and monitor the delivery of promises? Crisis situations result from a business’s inability to fulfill a promise. Businesses can rebuild by reviewing and strengthening their forecast process and annual budget process, with a focus on improving communication and clarifying purposes and principles.

3.Follow the Money: Where and how does the company generate and use revenue? Understanding cash flow into, out of, and within the company is central to a successful recovery. Leaders must be able to communicate to stakeholders how they plan to generate revenue.

4.Lean not Mean: What is the structure of the company’s cost base, and how can leadership modify it? A decrease in sales may be the cause, not the result, of the crisis. Managers should quickly and realistically reconsider sales assumptions they use to form decisions and maintain sensitivity in communications with lenders and investors, employees, and suppliers, whose trust and belief in the company may be damaged.

5.Flesh and Blood: How is the crisis affecting internal and external stakeholders, and how may they respond? Business leaders should not forget that their stakeholders are human beings. Understanding how employees, customers, investors, and suppliers feel about the crisis can give leaders important new perspectives and insight they can use to develop their recovery plans. Failing to understand the human beings involved in the company’s core operations can severely limit the recovery’s success.

6.Imagine New Futures: How can the company transform itself as it recovers from the crisis? Leaders should consider how any changes or emerging trends could affect the company and study the company’s past successes in responding to change. Instead of trying to predict the future, teams should imagine various scenarios of potential future situations and brainstorm ideas for how they could react and profit in all scenarios.

Like successful Trivial Pursuit players who are knowledgeable in several categories, effective leaders possess knowledge in multiple facets of the business.

Another step in the process of identifying and finding real genius is recognizing both hard and soft assets. Hard assets are skills, strengths, and expertise that are usually developed on the job, while soft assets include passions, creativity, and values that are tougher to quantify but are just as important as hard assets. The point where hard and soft assets intersect in a person is the place where real genius lives.

Identifying hard and soft assets requires taking a personal inventory. Hard assets are generally those things that are identified in a job description or on a résumé. They are the qualities that are measurable within a common context of accomplishment.

Hard assets are comprised of:

* Skills: The functional abilities that are learned in school and have been honed and sharpened in professional life. These include communications, problem-solving, and analysis.

* Strengths: These are often expressed in adjectives and might be identified as areas of excellence during performance evaluations.

* Expertise: This is the body of knowledge where mastery and authority are demonstrated.

Soft assets are innate qualities people possess and which are likely to be reserved for the weekends and leisure time. Soft assets are comprised of:

* Passions: These include hobbies and favorite activities but also comprise daydreams. Play is frequently the greatest expression of passion.

* Creativity: Creativity is the ability to make new connections between existing ideas or concepts. It can be fueled by either conscious or unconscious insight.

* Values: Values refer to a belief, mission, or philosophy that is meaningful. It might be something concrete such as a belief in hard work and punctuality or something more abstract such as self-reliance or authenticity.

Discovering where the hard and soft assets meet and living life at that point requires a meshing of the professional and personal worlds. It means finding a new approach to work and life and tapping into both hard and soft assets in every situation., whether that is running an organization or playing softball.

Employing real genius is a multi-dimensional approach to life, and being successful at it requires three steps:

1. Making a conscious decision to marry hard and soft assets.

2. Utilizing hard and soft assets that comprise the real genius.

3. Identifying new and stimulating experiences that offer the opportunity to explore and expand hard and soft assets.

Real genius is about deliberate practice and painstaking hard work.

According to American engineer and futurist Buckminster Fuller, “Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses you.” This process of living makes many people unconsciously compromise some of their greatest natural assets because of the expectations and influence of others. Most of these de-geniused individuals believe that genius is a quality like creativity that not everyone has–it is a gift that is not bestowed on the masses.

I always believe that “Anyone can achieve or discuss or express something so extraordinary that it could change the world.” However not everyone has an inner Isaac Newton or Leonardo da Vinci within them, but that everyone does have the opportunity to be a fully realized person with a practical, everyday genius that can change their life.

Traditionally, the definition of genius has meant someone who was gifted with an exceptional skill, talent, or an extremely high IQ. The word “genius” was originally derived from the same Latin root as the words “gene” and “genetic,” and the first definition of the word “genius” referred to a spirit given to every person at birth. It was not until 1711 when Joseph Addison wrote his essay “On Genius” and defined the term as “exceptional talent” that the word became popularized.

I imagine that if people were granted the title of genius they would be motivated to perform at their highest ability. Individuals, communities, and even whole societies would make better, bolder, more confident choices. However, finding a more personal, practical genius is not a small task. Practical genius is about people combining their strengths, passions, and values to achieve success.

To discover one’s practical genius, people must:

* Identify genius: Consciously acknowledge and take active responsibility for unique strengths, skills, expertise, passions, creativity, and values. The intersection of these quantitative and qualitative characteristics is where practical genius lives.

* Express genius: The greatest challenge for most people is visibility. It is important to actively and purposefully share a unique narrative with the world.

* Surround themselves with genius: Network with others who are living purposeful, inspired lives by reaching out in non-transactional ways and cultivating deeply valuable relationships.

* Sustain their genius: Cultivate and focus on activities that promote critical thinking.

* Market their genius: Project and broadcast genius consistently with clear purpose and passion to attract, engage, and grow an audience.

Such promises include those made to investors and lenders in order to secure and keep necessary financing, those made to customers in order to maintain loyalty, those made to employees in order to recruit and retain talent, and those made to suppliers in order to ensure continued partnerships.

The business leader sits at the center of four categories of stakeholders: customers, investors and lenders, employees, and suppliers. Leaders must negotiate expectations and promises, as well as ensure the delivery of promises between themselves and each group.

Because transactions with customers provide the company with sustainable funding to pay employees and stakeholders, rebuilding relationships with customers is central to the success of the recovery plan. Importantly, leaders must ensure that promises made to customers are also smart business decisions. Promises should provide customers value, result in profit for the business, and produce enough money to deliver promised returns to stakeholders.

This could be analyzed through a tool which encompasses four parameters: 1) quality, 2) value, 3) service, and 4) innovation. Leaders should anticipate customer concerns about these four parameters. Customers may ask themselves if product quality has changed; if the company will continue to support, trade, and provide post-purchase service for the product; and if development support or upgrades for the product will remain available. When considering the vital relationship with customers, business leaders must carefully plan the promises they make when attempting to regain and maintain customer trust and loyalty.

After focusing on rebuilding customer relationships, leaders should reexamine promises to investors and lenders. Investors and lenders provide the funds businesses require to operate, including bonds, equity, and letters of credit. While promises to investors and lenders once consisted primarily of financial assurances, these stakeholders have become more interested in the reliability of the supply chain and in the brand itself. Stabilizing relationships with investors and lenders is fundamental to ensuring the funds necessary to recover from a crisis.

Next, business leaders should focus on promises made to company employees. Promises made to employees extend beyond compensation; they also include an equitable work environment and professional development opportunities. Leaders should understand that rebuilding and maintaining trust with employees after a crisis is fundamental to moving forward, since employees are central to planning and implementing the recovery.

Finally, leaders should consider the standing of their suppliers. Suppliers includes both trade suppliers and those who insure their credit. Additionally, suppliers may include any regulators or government agencies that provide operating licenses.

The following drivers necessitate learning and adaptability in organizations today:

* The disruption of the business context. This refers to those large and unpredictable changes that redefine the rules of business. Those companies who continue to abide by the dated set of rules in the face of disruptive change are bound to fail. In a time where fundamental changes are occurring across political, economical, and social platforms, organizations must work even harder to stay ahead of the curve, and learning is now a necessity rather than another advantage.

* The rise of the knowledge-based organization. Now that knowledge-based organizations have flourished, the management of knowledge is a vital factor in a company’s success. Organizations must determine the type of knowledge that they require and how to find, accumulate, and best utilize this knowledge. Knowledge management also requires organizations to share relevant information with the appropriate people at the appropriate time. Similarly, knowledge management must also learn to eliminate information that has become irrelevant to the business moving forward. Therefore knowledge management requires an infrastructure that blends technical support systems and an environment conducive to sharing ideas with the appropriate people.

* The rise of the knowledge-based organization. There are core competencies at the base of any successful organization’s competitive advantage. These competencies are difficult to emulate and they serve as lenses through which an organization is viewed by others. These competencies can derive from a company’s founding principles or can be acquired through organizational learning. Once a company has determined their core competencies and devised a business strategy that relies on these values they must also nurture these competencies by hiring individuals whose qualifications reflect these values. They must also create a system of mechanisms within the company that reinforce these ideas.

* The growing importance of the periphery of organizations. By empowering those at the periphery, larger organizations are able to remain competitive and retain the flexibility of smaller organizations. Top leaders must learn to relinquish control of operational procedures and instead focus on strategic goals. This enables middle management to become more entrepreneurial and make creative-based decisions. The organization’s policies must also reflect the desired learning culture in order to support leadership, the spread of responsibility, and creative thinking.

* The transformation from self-contained hierarchical organizations to globally networked co-creation clusters. Globally networked organizations should not be focused on being the best. Rather, they must learn how to most effectively and efficiently co-create with others. “Co-create” refers to the performance that is ultimately the responsibility of an interdependent network of organizations. This performance cannot be lead in the same way a company manages from within itself. Rather than a vertical model of leadership, these interdependent organizations must utilize horizontal management models to thrive. Creating a win-win environment for organizations within one’s network is vital for success.

Corporate learning is currently too narrow of a discipline to appropriately take on these learning imperatives. The process of adapting these learning imperatives should be slow and carefully planned. Business leaders must learn to reconsider corporate learning in order to broaden their company’s capabilities.

It puts a focus on problems so leaders can see when and why things are not working, and allows them to address the problematic areas. Whether leaders are creating a new plan or revising an existing one, they must consider who needs to be involved. The team should be comprised of several individuals who are deeply involved with the business and who can provide insights that will help the organization achieve its goals. An individual who is comfortable in addressing the financial aspects of the plan must be included on the team; however, it important to remember that finance is only one piece of the process.

Revising the business plan provides the opportunity to change operating procedures for the better; however, before devising new strategies, leaders must review the current and past performance of the organization to provide context for any changes. As part of this review, the leader must examine the figures from the last three years, and forecast financials for one year into the future. It is important to be honest and realistic; bankers or investors may need to see this plan at some point and if the plan is misleading, legal action could result. The core of an effective financial plan is an insightful and honest vision for the future. Strong, detailed plans fit into one of three categories.

1. Monopoly: Includes factors such as locations, regulations, contracts, patents, size, and dominance.

2. Barrier to entry: Creates a barrier between competitors since it will cost more for them to copy the effects of the strategy.

3. Being different: Includes finding a new way of engaging in activities that is different from the competitors.

Strategies need to include a contingency plan; this will show that the organization has the potential to survive in difficult times. Planning and determining the exact skills that will be necessary to carry out the vision for the organization is also crucial. Staff must be trained to ensure that they have the required skills and, if necessary, new members should be recruited to fill the voids.

1. The Information Architect. In this role, strategy, data, and technology are combined. Information architects place an emphasis on raw data as an asset and work to acquire, grow, and integrate data in order to drive better decisions.

2. Number-Crunching Creatives. These individuals blend analytics with the art of marketing. A marketer’s greatest need is to deepen his or her understanding of consumer behavior and use analytics to calculate return on investment. Marketers can use analytics to proactively stimulate and optimize spending allocations at the macro level using micro-level data.

3. MBAs and the Mathematicians. In this role, strategists and scientists meet. These employees as the most valuable people in the organization. Trilingual, they are well-versed in computing, analytics, and business.

4. Executive Decision Natives. These leaders have a strong background in math and statistics; have a breadth of knowledge of business and computing technology; and are experienced leaders. Decision natives understand decision management and have a passion for using analytic tools to improve business processes.

In the future, companies will need more people in executive positions who have as strong grasp of analytics, computing, and business operations, as well as the leadership skills that enable analytic experts and business talent to work well together. Decision management technology works best when business users, IT departments, and analytic experts work in tangent, putting everything together at the business-unit level.

Companies rely on information architects and number-crunching creatives to perform important analysis, but these employees must also be able to put the output of analytics into a business perspective. When decision natives join a management team, it is a sign that an organization has recognized analytics as a competitive resource. Few companies have decision natives in leadership positions today, but seeing more of these leaders in the future. Leaders of this nature possess highly transferable skills that take advantage of a foundational set of technologies, such as predictive models, descriptive segmentation models, and decision models. These skills are proven to deliver results when applied to a variety of business problems across multiple industries. As a result, more companies will begin adding people with advanced math and computer modeling skills to their marketing teams in order to gain competitive advantage and use customer data more effectively.

There has never been a better time to be a business professional with a mind for mathematics then in the digital age. Decision management is a business approach that pulls together the know-how of mathematicians, information technologists, executives, managers, and employees.

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Would like to warn managers against being seduced into believing that optimal business performance is achieved by maximizing profits. Improved business performance is only fully realized when leaders recognize and address the importance of key business metrics and begin viewing their company as not profit maximizing but profit seeking.

Three techniques can be used to develop this view:

1. Adaptive Control is a software tool used to facilitate experimentation and learning by enabling business leaders to test new decisions in real-world operating environments.

2. Decision Models are analytic techniques that evaluate conflicting trade-offs driven by real-world constraints.

3. Decision Yield is a business framework for categorizing and evaluating business benefits.

Decision management, from a technology perspective, is also a class of technology products that take algorithms and run them inside IT systems. Many decision management technologies continuously perform analytics inside IT systems to support the automation of decisions. In some circumstances, analytics serve as a guide for an individual to make a business decision. Other times, decisions and actions are completely automated. An array of decision management technology exists to facilitate the deliberate, systematic, and scientific management of operational decisions, and there are a number of characteristics of decision management that have proven most effective in creating a competitive advantage.

The companies that best use decision management rely on an executive champion who takes a systematic approach to decisions, integrates experimentation, and adds human creativity to the business model. Leaders should approach the decision-making process as a journey, one that is based on discovery and contains building blocks leading to greater levels of sophistication and success.

In order to invest in decision management, there are three key steps that must be taken by an organization–each step requires different levels of technology, sophistication, and commitment:

1. Develop a Rules-Based System. This step is intended to automate high-volume operational decisions in order to make decisions consistent and increase control. A basic rules-based decision process can assist a company in executing policies and procedures quickly and consistently.

2. Incorporate a Predictive Analytics Model. Introducing a predictive analytics model into an operating environment can mathematically evaluate trade-offs among conflicting objectives while also executing decisions. Such a model captures the decisions that were made for a particular customer, what actions were taken, the corresponding consumer behavior, and the impact on profitability.

3. Connect Decisions across Multiple Dimensions of the Business. As a company standardizes and automates processes across product lines and geographical locations, it should move to more sophisticated decision models to apply adaptive control in more decision making areas.

The most successful businesses learn from customer interactions in order to improve their processes and results. There are three characteristics that companies of this caliber share:

1. These companies are systematic and quantitative. Analytics gives decision makers more precise ways to compare multiple business objectives, such as profit per customer and growth in market share, but being systematic and quantitative is more than just using automation to make better decisions; it is also about managing a company’s decision yield more effectively.

2. Companies that excel at decision management are always learning and improving, and everything that happens is seen as an opportunity to learn, refine, improve, and move on.

3. The best performing companies are bold and creative. Best Buy, which used customer segmentations to change its store formats. When proposed, it was a revolutionary idea; when implemented, it was highly successful.

In most circumstances, decision makers are concerned about multiple business objectives, which are often conflicting. Analytic tools give decision makers more precise ways to compare multiple and competing business objectives. These tools can enable a company to improve its service propositions while decision management can help it continually gain and retain new customer knowledge. If a company is growing fast, analytics can accelerate its growth. In this way, analytics is important to making customer services more effective.

One such company that employs both analytics and empathy is Netflix, which differentiates itself by rewarding its regular customers. With the help of analytics, Netflix recognizes the movie choices its customers prefer, gives them more of what they like, and provides them with greater options. This relationship helps Netflix connect with customers and understand what makes them happy, what is convenient for them, and what they want from the company’s services. Through customer interactions, Netflix has more closely aligned its business strategy with its customer base, resulting in a greater understanding of how consumers behave and think. This increasing exchange of information leads to better communication and understanding between companies and customers, and the best companies are using this information to not only enhance the customer experience but also the process in which managerial decisions are made.

As a result of the widespread use of analytics and the more prevalent use of decision management, a new democratization has been reached among companies and customers. Today more than ever, customers and companies both know more about each other’s behavior than in generations past. Many of today’s companies are taking advantage of this relationship by using analytics, information technology, and creativity to envision new sources of customer value. This also results in new sources of profit. For example, the emergence of social media and interactive online communities has allowed consumers to connect with their favorite brands or receive personalized services. In this way, consumers are interacting with companies by watching, paying attention, and responding. As companies collect consumer information, a new form of consumer-centered marketing has emerged.