Short on time? Here’s an overview of pivotal business insights excerpted from in-depth interviews with a variety of expert sources that appeared in the January issues of Travel Weekly PLUS.
Customers are changing: are you keeping up?
“Companies that fail to see how customer behavior and customer desires are changing will die. These companies will perish because their competition will come out with mobile apps and other capabilities that will give them a huge leg up in the market; customers will flock to the companies that are providing the technology capabilities they want.”
Excerpted from Tech Trends: The Top Four Game Changers of 2013, an interview in the Jan. 2 issue with Scott Klososky, technology futurist, strategist and founding partner, Future Point of View.
Cooperate and coordinate: Refocus on the customer journey
“If we’re right and the disconnect between customer expectations and the way they interact with travel suppliers online continues to widen, we may not see a continued increase in travel demand. … That’s why we really stress the need to break beyond the four walls of your organization and think about customer journeys. The opportunity to coordinate is there; the incentives to communicate across companies is there, and it’s really just a matter of solving the technical challenges around that cooperation and coordination.”
Excerpted from How To Fix the Online Distribution Mess, an interview in the Jan. 9 issue with Steven Peterson, IBM global travel and transportation leader, IBM Institute of Business Value; and author of “Travel 2020: The Distribution Dilemma”.
The unifying force of travel and tourism
“I believe that people who travel internationally have a greater appreciation of other people and cultures, a greater sensitivity. You make connections with people everywhere you go. You make friends. You create a sense of community as you make your way around the globe. And that sense of community can be a unifying force in both good times and difficult ones as individuals rise above political interpretations to draw on the memories and connections they have with other people, the men and women on the street so to speak.”
Excerpted fromDisney’s Randy Garfield on the Prospects for Tourism as a Force for Peace, an interview in the Jan. 16 issue with Randy Garfield, EVP of worldwide sales and travel operations for Disney Destinations, and president of The Walt Disney Travel Company.
Is Google really an ‘open system’?
“By ‘open’ what I mean is a system that interacts with other systems. Throughout most of the history of travel, you had these closed computer systems; you could only have the information that was available to them, the same way we talked about closed-wall gardens on the Internet versus open spaces. Google is open. Anybody is free to use any part of it they want. Nothing is connected to anything else in a way that anybody can't change. What we want to do [is] to give the best answer to users to any question they ask, and even for questions they don't ask. And if the best answer is giving them a link to somewhere, that's great.
Excerpted from The Google Grill: Hard Questions, Asked and Answered, a transcription in the Jan. 16 issue of the question-and-answer session following the keynote presentation of Jeremy Wertheimer, Google’s vice president of travel and co-founder of ITA software, during The PhoCusWright Conference 2012.
Be prepared: economic volatility is here to stay
“There has to be recognition that the heightened level of economic turbulence and the accompanying risks and uncertainties are not going to subside — they are built in now as a permanent part of the system. You’re not going to be able to just slow down and take a breath. You need to rethink and rebuild your company, including your people’s thinking and how they’re going to deal in the new environment.”
Excerpted from How Your Business Can Soar in Choppy Economic Skies, an interview in the Jan. 23 issue with John Caslione, founder, chairman and CEO of the global advisory and investment firm GCS Business Capital LLC; and coauthor of Chaotics. The Business of Managing and Marketing in the Age of Turbulence.
Train yourself to see things the way your customers do
“We are hardwired as human beings to be supply-side thinkers. We get up every morning thinking about my product, my people, my assets, my competencies, my revenue, my profitability. That's just the way we are. The people who are really good at creating demand have, by hook or by crook, taught themselves to be the exact opposite. They get up thinking, "What's the hassle map of my customer? What drives them crazy? What makes them angry? What frustrates them? What are their pressures? What are their economic problems? What are their internal politics?" Business leaders who do this use it as a tool to force themselves to see the world through the eyes and emotions of their customers. Once they understand the hassle map then they need to have the attitude they they’re going to connect the dots in a radical, significant, and elegant way to solve those problems. That's how the process of demand creation gets started. And it's a tricky process, because it can be punishing on the ego.”
Excerpted from To Create Demand, Solve Your Customers’ ‘Hassle Maps’, an interview in the Jan. 23 issue with Adrian Slywotzky, partner of the global management consulting firm Oliver Wyman and author of Demand. Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It.
That high IQ you have is just a foot in the door
“Once you’re in a top-level post, you of course need an IQ about a standard deviation higher than normal. That’s about 115 points of IQ or better. But you have to realize that there’s what’s called the ‘floor effect’': You’re competing with people who are as smart as you are, so IQ drops out as a strong predictor of success. What makes the difference among leaders is how they manage themselves, how they handle their relationships. That’s emotional intelligence. The distinction I’m making is between a threshold competence — that is, an ability or skill that you need to get the job and keep it — and a distinguishing competence, one which predicts the difference between people who are star performers and people who are average. IQ and cognizant skills at high levels turn out to be threshold competencies — the ones you need to get the job — whereas emotional intelligence becomes a distinguishing competence, one that will predict who’s going to be a star performer.”
Excerpted from The Argument for Emotional Intelligence in the Business World, an interview in the Jan. 23 issue with Daniel Goleman, psychologist, science writer, and author of Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence.
Make your company magnetic
“The simplest way to illustrate what makes a magnetic product is to draw the product as a little box in the middle of a piece of paper, then draw a big circle to the left of the little box and another big circle to the right. The circle to the left is employee excitement, and the circle to the right is customer conversation. You and I know a lot of products where those circles are very small. The employee excitement is not there and the word of mouth on the customer side is not there.”
Excerpted from Make Your Company Magnetic: Here’s How, an interview in the Jan. 30 issue with Adrian Slywotzky, partner with the global management consulting firm Oliver Wyman and author of Demand. Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It.
The ‘emotionally intelligent’ salesperson
“They’re the salespeople who know it’s the feeling they have with the client or customer — it’s the relationship they have — that comes first. The sale comes later. They’re the people who can naturally form a rapport, a chemistry with people. They’re the people others feel good about being with, they enjoy being with. That takes emotional intelligence. I’ve seen data on star sales people that showed that the very, very best really nurture their relationships with customers. And, at a certain point, if a customer was looking for something that they didn’t have, they would direct them to someone who did. They were willing to lose a bad sale and keep a good relationship.”
Excerpted from Emotional Intelligence: Why It Matters To Your Bottom Line, an interview in the Jan. 30 issue with Daniel Goleman, psychologist, science writer, and author of Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence.
Hilton International: how it all began
“As often happens in life, it’s a question of being in the right place at the right time. We started [Hilton International] when the door was wide open. The war had ended just a few years before, and nobody could afford to travel except Americans. So we built our first hotels where Americans wanted to go, in Madrid, or in Istanbul. We went into a lot of places that had never had any hotel at all, let alone a five-star or four-star hotel. It's a more thrilling experience than doing it in well-established capitals like London or Paris, or even in Berlin. We built a hotel in Berlin when Berlin was still practically destroyed after the war. There was only one hotel there, in West Berlin, with 100 rooms. And we opened our hotel the same day (former Soviet Union Premier Nikita) Khrushchev gave West Berlin the ultimatum to give up as a separate political unit and join East Germany. That was kind of fun.”
Excerpted from Curt Strand: Insights from Hospitality’s Genteel Pioneer, a dialogue in the Jan. 30 issue with Curt Strand, hospitality industry pioneer, former chairman and CEO of Hilton International Hotels.