The Luck Principle™

Are you looking for some luck to run your business? It may not be as crazy of an idea as it sounds like.

"I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it."

--Thomas Jefferson

After many years delivering projects that improve collaboration, we have found that successful organizations follow four best practices when collaborating with colleagues, customers, prospects and partners. These four best practices form The LUCK Principle™. We apply these principles to how we run our business, and our mission is to help our clients improve their practices in each of these four areas.

Listen

Individuals that collaborate well start relationships by listening. They ask probing questions, and they take care to remember the answers.

Businesses that collaborate well do the same thing. They listen by asking smart questions. They listen by capturing documents, transactions, sales and marketing interactions, social channel dialog, preferences and complaints. And they remember what they hear in a corporate memory such as a web portal or a customer database.

Understand

You intuitively know that someone is collaborating well with you, when they have taken a sincere interest and they understand you.

The same is true in business, but to support complex relationships cross-crossed among hundreds of colleagues and thousands of customers, more planning and technology is required. Individuals need to be able to search for the information that they need to interact with each other and with customers quickly; and organizational leaders need to have reliable dashboards and business intelligence at their fingertips.

Connect

Collaborators know how to connect. After they have taken the time to listen and understand, they are intentional about talking to others in terms that are relevant to them. They connect people on their terms, and align what they can do with what they know that their audience needs.

Once a business has taken the time to understand their audience, they connect at both a personal level and a corporate level. Individuals engage in relevant conversations – even when relationships are maintained across large teams that are distributed globally – by having instant access to customer information and other business knowledge on desktops, mobile devices and in the call center. Leadership makes better decisions through analysis of business and customer information; and those decisions are more rapidly carried out.

Know

The best collaborators intuitively know that they can always improve. So they check their results. They are constantly working on ways that they can do a better job working with others.

Intelligent businesses continuously learn. They track the results of their interactions. They are able to constantly refine productivity, job satisfaction, customer loyalty, partner effectiveness by analyzing results and changing processes.

Wondering why your collaboration project, such as CRM or SharePoint, isn’t returning the results you were expecting? Test it against The LUCK Principle. How has it helped you improve your luck with colleagues, customers, prospects or partners? C5 Insight helps businesses implement successful collaboration projects the first time; and provides Collaboration CPR™ when your project fails to meet expectations.