Resnick Unplugged

Intelligence Unplugged: Top 25 Tweets of 2011

We’re three months into 2011 and there’s a lot going on! Following are the best tweets so far this year covering healthcare, marketing, insurance and strategy.  There’s tons of information, so click through for a deep dive on topics such as PPACA, Long Term Care, business trends, marketing gurus, wellness, and digital customers.

HEALTHCARE

Healthcare’s efficiency & cost dilemma: any fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple - http://bit.ly/hpIJ7o

Long Term Care needs are the big dark cloud hanging over boomers – fail to prepare, prepare to fail - http://bit.ly/harIj9

With Medicaid set to grow by 16 million, looming question is who’s going to meet this group’s pent-up demand for medical care - http://bit.ly/hqbEIO

Today’s wellness conundrum is measuring ROI – is it hard dollar savings or number of employee engaged? - http://bit.ly/h0qqNJ

“The Hot Spotters” or “stats-and-stethoscopes” attacking medical cost problem across US by stealth targeting - http://nyr.kr/hLme4u

Hospitals can’t sit back while PPACA takes hold; must retool, reengineer and reestablish in healthcare ecosystem’s new value chain - http://bit.ly/enYeSe


MARKETING

Future of marketing is data, direct and digital...and the big guys get it better than most - http://bit.ly/gDvNzC

Best practice database marketing tracks and measures customer interactions and turns data into intelligence to predict the future - http://bit.ly/fkF3Rx

History’s your marketing timeline bellwether of keeping pace with fast & furious change: anticipate, prepare & act - http://bit.ly/9xmfPb

Modern day “mad man” speaks about data, innovation, globalization and going BIG “only dead fish swim with current” - http://bit.ly/fjXqQB

Marketing’s forces of change...crowdsourcing, apps, boomers, green, health, travel...and much more - http://bit.ly/ewf94y

Keeping your brand alive with digital consumers takes different right time, right places tactical formula - http://bit.ly/gmTGAw


INSURANCE

Health Care Reform still has most people confused is opportunity for brokers & insurers to get out front to educate, advise & guide - http://bit.ly/fWFvUZ

Nursing home@$80k/yr & home care@$20k/yr, is PPACA CLASS Act answer to Long Term Care when boomers are ready- http://1.usa.gov/gLVe0W

A workable compromise to PPACA’s individual mandate means exploring alternatives and making tough decisions and compromises - http://bit.ly/eFdvfo

Medicare Star Ratings are driving this industry segment hard, will the force (aka CMS) be with them? - http://bit.ly/i1NGrH

PPACA’s big challenge: who wins regulators or entrepreneurs? Place your bets - http://bit.ly/a3G5GC

Healthcare consumerism means customers (member/patient/beneficiary) have skin in the game, but all players must ante-up - http://bit.ly/gQo6wn


STRATEGY

Cool business ideas across the entrepreneurial spectrum to get your innovation genes moving - http://bit.ly/g66avm

Good luck keeping up mega-trends shaping the competitive landscape throughout 2011- http://bit.ly/gmP1Ko

Social media at a tipping point, a step backwards or an inconsequential blip in society’s ability to communicate and influence the revolution - http://nyr.kr/fLqX1e

We’ve entered the Year of the Boomer, what’s their view of future: money and retirement - http://linkd.in/hCGBGG

TMI, multitasking, screen envy, communication overload–how’s it affecting productivity and creativity of today’s executives - http://bit.ly/g2gfJF

Always worthwhile Trendwatching– keep an eye on wealthy and urbanomics - http://bit.ly/fVxN7P

Best way to anticipate and stay ahead of trends is with top 50 healthcare industry blogs - with Resnick Unplugged @ #15 - http://bit.ly/hsukba

Strategy drives...everything!

Strategic vision is the futurity of today’s decisions. It works to anticipate change, focus on competitive threats, and assess long-term business implications. To be effective, it’s essential that your vision draws on sophisticated customer insight. The goal is to take an organization where it needs to be by creating a roadmap on how to get there.

At its core, a sustainable strategy is built around an effort that allows management to look deep within the organization, ask & answer tough questions, and make informed decisions about strategic options.

The following questions provide a strategy “stress test” to help refine your planning process starting at the intersection of three key business drivers: competitors, customers and company.

1. How are you different from competitors…comparative market advantages/disadvantages?
2. Are you leveraging a sustainable Dominant Selling Idea that delivers customer value?
3. How are you selecting new markets, products and services?
4. Who are your top five competitors and why do you beat them…why do you lose?
5. Have you developed proprietary insights and translated them into actionable strategy?
6. Are you ahead of competitive trends and industry best practices?
7. Where’s the customer in the marketing mix…product, price, promotion, and place?
8. Have you identified and/or neutralized uncertainty in the decision process?
9. Is there cross-management buy-in and commitment to addressing the future?
10. Are you managing institutional bias to facilitate diversification and innovation?
11. Is there a willingness to invest in execution…talent, capital, operations and distribution?
12. Is strategy translated into an action plan…scenario planning, timing and accountability?

In healthcare and insurance, like many other industries navigating today’s economic and political woes, the future belongs to those best able to manage in markets characterized by intense competitive rivalry, continuous regulatory disruption, and information empowered consumers.

Smart companies are raising their “opportunity index” by thinking about their business in ways that look very different from today’s enterprise. They are embracing a strategic planning process that openly challenges leadership across the organization in order to pinpoint future direction—make data-driven decisions, embrace customer centric thinking, adjust business assumptions, and act with deliberate speed.

 

A 2010 Recap

Healthcare, Marketing and Strategy

Healthcare’s Big Picture
Covering over 100 million people means Blue Cross Blue Shield has a pretty good perspective on healthcare in America. Their 8^th annual report, Healthcare Trends in America provides an excellent overview of where the sector stands, from the uninsured to benefit trends to improving access to care. It’s a 99 page resource filled with useful information about the “who, what, where and why” 17.3% of our Gross Domestic Product goes toward healthcare.

To access this report CLICK HERE.

Two Sides to Every Story
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was signed into law on March 23, 2010. The debate continues to rage on as HHS moves ahead with releasing regulations, and those opposed to PPACA are looking to either stifle it through limiting appropriation funds, or hold-out for total repeal after possible administration change in the 2012 elections. In the meantime, insurance companies are adjusting to a new world order where mandated minimum loss ratios and pared-back risk selection are the norm.

For a year-by-year PPACA implementation timeline CLICK HERE.

Also, to find out how people really feel about HCR CLICK HERE.

Medicare’s Opportunity Index
The Medicare market opportunity has never been bigger. Today, 11.8 million beneficiaries are enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans, approximately 18 million have a Part D prescription drug plan, and another 9.5 million have a Medicare Supplement (Medigap) plan. And, when you add the 3.6 million baby boomers aging into Medicare every year for the foreseeable future, it’s easy to see why opportunity abounds and, why this niche requires a specialized approach to solution selling.

To find out more CLICK HERE.

Back to the Future With ACOs
While they seem like HMOs or EPOs of yesteryear, Accountable Care Organizations are being hyped as the solution that brings a “whole person” orientation to care delivery, coordinating care across all components of the patient’s clinical community and all stages of need–acute and chronic, wellness and prevention, and end-of-life. This patient-centered model aligns payment incentives (and disincentives) so payers, physicians and hospitals are all financially at-risk to meet quality and cost targets.

For a recent RWJ policy brief on ACOs CLICK HERE.

Also, for a health care executive perspective on ACOs CLICK HERE.

The Social Media Train Has Left the Station
Marketing has moved from brand monologue to customer dialogue. Low-engagement traditional marketing has been replaced by interactive social engagement. It’s the new marketology!  With 206 million Americans online an average of 18 hours every week, and 2.5 billion text messages sent every day, letting customers know what you stand for, why you are different, and what value you deliver is a challenge extraordinaire. With 550 million users, Facebook would be the third largest country in the world.

To access the social media White Paper CLICK HERE.

Also, to see a history timeline of the Internet CLICK HERE.

Failure to Prepare is Preparing to Fail
When transmogrification strikes a marketplace (aka, $h*! happens), decision paralysis or intolerance of new ideas means certain demise. Smart companies must anticipate change, make data-driven decisions, and react with deliberate speed. This means creating a roadmap for the future—critical success factors, possible obstacles, retooled business assumptions, and a sequence implementation plan. In fact, it pays off to take an entrepreneurial approach by putting together a ground-up business enterprise plan.

For a classic “how to” on writing a business plan CLICK HERE.

Brand Aid: Time for a Refresh

Balancing product advances, marketplace differentiation and customer acquisition in today’s competitive landscape is tough. Sustained growth…and ultimately, market dominance, relies on flawless execution – strategic, operational and tactical. Before this can happen, a solid brand framework needs to be in place and functioning.

This means a brand position and architecture constructed of a well-defined value proposition, brand awareness strategy with powerful messaging and creative execution.

A strong brand increases market share. Constant new product and service launches (and relaunches), rapidly changing technology, and new consumer attitudes make a challenging environment even more complex. Business acquisition and customer loyalty is built on brands delivered with distinctive articulation and unique personality.

Brand Position
A solid brand position means providing a sustainable competitive advantage, or brand promise, for the customer experience. The result helps you manage a range of critical success factors:

• Increased market share
• Increased awareness
• Increased differentiation
• Increased lead generation
• Increased customer loyalty
• Increased internal motivation

It is easiest to define your brand as the sum of all experiences your prospects and customers have with the product or service you are selling. In our brand-driven culture, strong brands take up a larger percentage of mind share. They influence decisions to try, repeat and remain loyal to a product. And over a customer’s lifetime, that loyalty represents a huge value.

Brand Architecture
A key component of brand development is the selection of a brand system structure. A brand system is important to companies with multiple products or service lines and numerous customer constituencies. This becomes particularly relevant to companies investing in an aggressive sales expansion or acquisition strategy. Examples of brand systems include:

• Umbrella brand: One brand name, no product or service names, several markets
• Range brand: One brand name per market segment, no product or service names
• Line brand: Single brand for lines of very closely related products or services
• Endorsing brand: Separate brands with own identities and positions; visible endorsement of brand guarantor
• Product brand: Separate brands with own identities and positions; no visible endorsement of parent company

A brand system generates a strong unity or synergy between overall brand, product/service lines, business units and sub-brands.

Brand Equity
A strong brand is simply a bottom line issue—a long-term asset that drives margin and volume. Brand equity follows a basic model. To those prospects that are not aware of your brand, it does not exist. For those who are aware, the challenge is to continually seed brand-supportive knowledge into the mind share. If what your customers perceive, and know, about your brand corresponds with a positive use experience, you will see preference and market share growth, ultimately followed by loyalty and potentially dominative brand pricing.

Strong brands are able to demand a premium price. Brands such as Starbucks and Nike produce a much higher margin than weaker brands, on the perception of name alone. This is in spite of the fact that there may be little or no actual extra value in the product. A strong brand also has a head start when it comes to launching new products. Think of the leverage and influence of Apple, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Google, GE or Sony.

In an environment of product parity and commoditization, your brand may be your most precious corporate asset. So, whether building a new brand or revitalizing an existing brand, making any kind of adjustment must be done with a high degree of insight, deliberateness and precision.

Rising Stars: Future Investment

Rising Stars: Future Investment

A Change Agent Team can be an effective, low cost/high return resource available to most organizations. More importantly, it’s a way to invest in the next generation of talent inside your company and elevate your human resources commitment.

You can draw from the organization's mid-level “rising star” talent pool and create a team to address critical challenges facing your business. The results work for everyone:

- It’s an effective method to inject change management skills in your employees’ development process—an investment with significant long-term payoff.

 - The organization gains fresh ideas to address important business issues, often backlogged on the corporate “to-do” list.

 - Team members get valuable problem solving skills along with exposure to senior management. The result is a morale boost and level of enthusiasm not easily achieved in most companies.

 Simple steps can help establish this value-added program:

 · Identify a key issue facing your organization requiring some degree of change in the way you do business—an issue or task that’s been identified but never made its way up the priority list.

 · Select a four to six member multi-disciplinary team from your “rising star” employee pool, every company has them. Assign them the task of drilling-down and defining what needs to happen, and have them create a “promise” around their deliverable. Next come an action plan and project scope that identifies what it’s going to take in terms of resources and managing the change process to completion.

 · Provide the Change Agent Team (CAT) with an advisor or mentor from senior management to act as a guiding resource (vs. decision-maker or rule-maker).

 · Allow the team adequate time on a regular basis to manage the process and draw upon internal expertise to achieve their objectives. In other words, understand that they have a day-job and set them up for success.

 · Require informal sessions with management to act as a project “gut check”. This will help build internal relationships by allowing the team to have face-time with management and break down communication silos. This senior-level “exposure factor” will serve to motivate and challenge CAT members.

 · Recognize and whenever possible, reward the team's accomplishments once they've successfully completed their tasks.

Change Agent Teams can emerge as a training and development tool, project management resource and focal point for innovation. They establish a driver for change that has long-lasting effects as team participants grow within the organization. It’s a low cost, visible investment with big payoff for the company and your employees.

Strategic Partnerships: Celebration or Separation?

Strategic Partnerships: Celebration or Separation?

It's all the buzz — joint venture, strategic alliance, value-managed relationship. The lure of two organizations' combined resources is great: economies of scale, expanded market access, spread of investment risk and complementary skill sets.

Theoretically these arrangements make sense. However partnerships prove difficult when it comes to aligning objectives, coordinating operations and cross-organization communication. All too often there are two shining moments of every strategic partnership — the day both parties sign an agreement and the day they say good-bye!

For health plans, market conditions are making strategic partnerships inevitable. Most notably, the need to link with external resources such as banking, technology and customer interaction management. These can no longer be cast as “business process outsourcing” – the stakes are too high. Banks are holding health plan members’ money, call centers are acting as the frontline touch point of the customer relationship, and technology platforms such as transactional smart cards and price/quality “infomediaries” are integral to customer benefit navigation.

Establishing a formal process of controls to select, manage and measure strategic partners are critical to a successful relationship. Following provides guidance to help manage the three phases of strategic partnerships.

Selection

Partners must be scrutinized to assess compatibility and value. Prior to entering the selection process, predetermine your partner evaluation criteria. This should include both strategic indicators (e.g., organizational flexibility and style, business philosophy and integrity, market position and reputation, long-term commitment and vision) and operational standards (e.g., financial and legal, market share and scope, technology applications, operations and service performance record).

Next, proceed with due diligence. Selecting a strategic partner requires an appraisal process no less intense than an acquisition.

And finally, prepare a formal options analysis comparing partnership candidates. This provides a critical look into the future of the relationship, answering some tough questions such as:

• What’s the relationships primary objective? What is its staying power?
• Who's bringing what to the table: resources, products and services?
• What are the value points and areas of potential gain or failure?
• Where's the exposure – up-front investment vs. payback?

Management

As a supplement to legal terms there needs to be consensus among parties regarding operating and performance expectations. Well-defined partnership expectations will go a long way toward minimizing surprises and maximizing value. Expectations should be formalized around key functional components – strategic decisions, management roles, resource allocation, communication checkpoints, operating responsibilities, financial performance, and reporting standards.

Measurement

A performance scorecard is an important tool to track and evaluate results. It should be directly tied to the partnership’s objectives and value metrics. Quantitative and qualitative "key indicators" can provide baseline information needed to measure results — highlighting areas of acceptable and unacceptable performance. This information will enhance partners' ability to redesign core strategies, speed-up/slow-down business decisions, and facilitate corrective or alternative actions.

Celebration or Separation

Strategic partnerships are common in today's turbulent marketplace. For businesses willing to make the right investment, these arrangements can yield rewards — open-up new markets and introduce innovation. However, partnerships can also be costly — lost development time and financial disappointment.

Successful strategic partnerships must incorporate effective, well-defined controls — know as much as possible prior to selecting a business partner, commit resources to aggressively manage the venture and employ meaningful performance measures.

 

© Lindsay Resnick

 

Intelligent Implementation

...Be Nimble, Be Quick

At a time when competitive rivalry has never been more intense, managers are worried. They are hearing words such as decision paralysis, over-analysis, death-by-committee and risk adverse used to describe their staff. It’s not sitting well. Add to the mix “…but that’s the way we’ve always done it” and they get the message — the ability to make informed decisions and take timely action will determine success (not to mention job security). 

Profitable topline growth defines success. Competition defines markets.

Look at the competitive fray shaping today’s healthcare sector. Regional health plans are doing battle with deep-pocket national mega-plans. Health insurance companies own banks and banks have healthcare business units. The pharmaceutical industry is forever juggling brand and generic pricing while using PBMs to manage formularies. And for the last few years they’ve been looking over their shoulder at Canadian drug reimportation.

On the provider side, community hospitals are going head-to-head with academic medical centers that are spending big bucks on expansion – locally, nationally and internationally. On top of that, there’s a growing buzz about medical tourism. Physicians are moving to pay-as-you-go business models letting patients deal directly with insurance companies. Others are embracing concierge medicine, requiring annual patient membership fees. At the same time, retail clinics in chain department stores, groceries and pharmacies are stealing routine office visits from local doctors.

It’s tough out there!

Going head-to-head in today’s markets means having intelligence to understand your customer, an ability to turn intelligence into implementation, and swift execution of an action plan.

Intelligence
Competitive intelligence is an integral part of any organization. Gathering, analyzing and communicating intelligence is a systematic process. It allows you to see a total business environment and group data (qualitative or quantitative) to reveal the “big picture”. The result increases your probability of making a sound decision.

Intelligence cuts across stakeholders and strategic drivers that influence every level of your business. There are three distinct phases of intelligence:

1. Data is raw material. Its numbers or facts presented in a vacuum. It’s discrete, scattered, and has no larger meaning.
2. Information is data in context. It’s the result of analysis that suggests action, strategy or decision-making.
3. Intelligence is actionable. It’s grouping data to reveal a larger view of the marketplace so it has more meaning.

A learning organization is able to put intelligence to work.  For example, using intelligence to understand your customer base helps shape product differentiators, messaging and buyer/non-buyer sales predictions. Competitive intelligence is also important. This creates a "snapshot" of your competition by defining key characteristics about their business. It dissects an adversary’s leadership, operations, market position and financial structure. Understanding your competition reveals how they make decisions, implement strategies and ultimately, position themselves against you in the market. 

Having complete intelligence to support internal decision‑making sets the stage for a business to take action.

Implementation
Turning intelligence into action is the most critical and most difficult stage of executing a business or marketing plan. Avoiding problems that get in the way of implementation can go a long way toward guaranteeing success. A study of private sector CEOs identified these top five implementation pitfalls:

1. Time commitments and resources were underestimated
2. Competing activities and crises distracted attention
3. Training and instruction for lower level employees were not adequate
4. Key tasks and activities were not defined in enough detail
5. Information systems used to implement and monitor were inadequate

Implementation starts with intelligence and is embodied in a well-defined, well-communicated plan of action — great implementation of a poorly conceived strategy doesn't get you anywhere. Successful implementation means dedicating sufficient resources (money, time, technical, human), and planning sequenced action steps built around specific responsibilities and measures (who does what, when and where).

In competitive markets simply surviving requires a basic ability to evaluate customer needs and wants, adapt best practices, understand vulnerabilities and learn from your competitors.  Moving from survival to success means a capacity to take action — be nimble, be quick…be successful.

© Lindsay Resnick

Strategy

Future Vision - Lifting the Fog

In competitive markets great strategy empowers a business to identify and capture opportunity. It enables smart managers to anticipate change, manage through obstacles and build on a company’s advantages.

Strategy and the vision that drives it aren’t easy. They call for analytical thinking, informed judgment, objective decision-making and well-structured implementation. It’s a process that continuously works to improve achievement of corporate objectives. It is not a "fill out the forms" exercise to be delegated or one that’s an afterthought to a budget process. Strategy is a task for business leadership. Vision is a task of futurity.

Strategic vision takes the day-to-day out of the mix and focuses on the future. It creates a rallying point for a preferred state of a company. It goes beyond pedestrian business plans used to peek over a one-year horizon or a list of goals for the next budget cycle. Strategic vision evaluates today’s decisions in tomorrow’s context – as uncertain and volatile as that may be – it creates a snapshot of the future.

Formulating strategic vision begins when management seeks answers to the tough questions. Far reaching inquiries that delve deep into the organization's "reason for being". Examples include:

• What are your top three comparative market advantages?
• Are you reaching the right prospects…with the right message?
• Why do you lose sales to competitors?
• What is your big idea - the why choose you clutter buster?

Answers to these and other challenges will help leadership analyze and most often, reconsider an organization's most basic business assumptions. It’s a process that helps refine (or re-set) stakeholder expectations, business practices, performance metrics, market positioning, and customer values.

Great strategy without execution is a waste of time and resources. Taking action is the most critical and most difficult stage of any strategy process. Tactical output such as product introduction, facility start-up, market entry (or withdrawal), brand positioning or reengineered operations are complex undertakings. The implications are far-reaching in terms of resource deployment, operating capacity and human talent.

It takes balance, business acumen and common sense to succeed in a competitive marketplace. Too much reliance on strategy will lead to bureaucracy, decision paralysis and missed market opportunity. Conversely, if you are not prepared to take action based on strategic vision, either because of inadequate resources, poor communication or “ready-fire-aim” leadership, results will disappoint. Future success calls for the right mix of strategy, action and leadership.

NOTE Look for an upcoming posting on Intelligent Implementation - the critical balance between informed decisions and taking action.

© Lindsay Resnick