Alison Bond

Being a market research consultant means I spend my time questioning ideas and people, writing up findings and sharing insights. This have given me a privileged position of seeing how these findings and insights are understood and used, often at the very highest level in large organisations, and from this vantage point allowing me to see what skills contribute to brilliant leadership.

Just as a note there are not too many exceptional leaders, but there are quite a lot of really good ones, and those generally demonstrate at least two of the key qualities outlined in this piece. All of these qualities could be practiced but, and this is a very big but, I think that in the exceptional leaders they are just there. Whether this means that those of us not born with these traits will have to accept being a really good leader rather than an exceptional one is a point up for debate, but if anyone thinks they have learnt them I would love to hear from you because it would be great to...

One of the agreements I had with my husband when we got married twelve years ago was that we were not going to do "busy." What this meant in practice was giving up watching nonsense on TV, not worrying about what we "should" be doing and think more about what we wanted to do. What we were aiming for was to feel the benefits of life rather than the burdens. It worked really well, (smart readers here will notice the use of the past tense here) but life sort of got in the way. We moved to a bigger house, had a family and our business changed and developed. What was required was a radical shift back to the mantra of "let's get better, not busier." But, how to do this?

In theory we are in the perfect position to make this shift as we have developed a way to help organisations and businesses make just this shift, and have been doing this with them over the last eight years. This includes some big, blue chip names, as well as smaller, dynamic companies and numerous public sector...

If customers buy benefits, why do most businesses spend so much time measuring transactions?

Benefits are the things that are derived from an organization. Transactions are the things that people and organizations do.

Benefits might be the ability to drive your car—the benefit derived from filling up with petrol—or something more prosaic than the obvious. For example, a pension provider's main benefit to those buying the service is confidence that one's financial future is secure. It has nothing to do with how quickly the provider answers the phone, although this might add to the feeling of security but everything to do with maturity values and the integrity of the company.

The...

Wespac, the Australian bank, has introduced a new idea. It is going to make outbound calls to credit card customers who are "exhibiting payment stress issues." The first thought I had when I read about this was that you could have a bit of fun writing the scripts for the outbound callers to use. Something along the lines of "Oi, listen up! You've been spending too much money on beer, mate, and not paying us back on time." But in reality, the people doing the calling are going to need far more skills than merely script reading to pull this idea off.

The concept of early intervention in these cases is a very good one, if the team conducting the calls has enough clout in the business. Then the employees making the calls may well be able to inform the new business process, which could wind up making Wespac a very responsible lender.

I remember our local vicar writing about an altercation he had with his bank when it kept mailing him large loan offers. His point was...