Be Bold & Win

*** Guest post by Flame Conference 2012 speaker, Shaun Smith ***

"To emotionally bond with your customers, you must first engage your employees. So how do you create customer experiences that create an emotional bond with your brand? Here’s one way: Having a purpose beyond profit. This may come as a shock but most employees do not leap out of bed in the morning excited by the prospect of making more profit for their organisation that day. Profit may motivate senior executives but it rarely does so for the front-line unless they are shareholders too, as in the case of the John Lewis Partnership.

What motivates employees is feeling connected to the brand promise. That can be ‘Delivering Happiness’ as in the case of Zappos or ‘saving the planet’ as in the case of the World Wildlife Fund. If you ask employees of Umpqua – the community bank based in Oregon – what their brand promise is, they will tell you ‘making customers feel dealing with Umpqua was the best thing that happened today’. Quite a tall order for a bank!

Connecting people to a purpose is an important way of helping them feel good about your brand and we know from our research that there is about an 85% correlation between the way your employees feel about the brand and the way your customers do.

One organisation that understands this relationship is the mobile phone operator O2, as CEO Ronan Dunne explains: “If you cannot turn your employees into fans there’s no way you will turn your customers into fans.”


The co-author of the award-winning book 'BOLD, how to be brave in business and win', Shaun Smith, is delivering a high-octane general session by the same title at the FIA Conference. Be prepared to learn how to be bold and win from some of the very best.

Book your place now or call 020 7420 8560 for more details.

Chris Ryan says, ’Let’s Talk Tactics’

In a taster exert from the opening keynote speech which he will deliver to delegates at the 4^th annual FIA Flame Conference in Sheffield next, SAS hero Chris Ryan talks about how his team’s tactics could switch from stealth to violence in a blink of the eye, and how they had to be able to adapt to any situation in order to survive…

“When I was undergoing SAS continuation training, it was drummed in to all of us that the role of a special-forces operator is twofold. Sometimes we would be sent in to gather information: this meant putting in an observation post, lying low, watching and waiting. When that was the case we’d need to go in light – armed, of course, but only with the precision tools we needed for the job. Our role was to stay invisible.

“To do our job with the minimum of fuss and without anybody knowing we were there. If we were compromised, our tactic was to ‘shoot and scoot’ – to engage the enemy if necessary then exfiltrate as quickly and stealthily as possible.

“Sometimes, though, we’d be looking for a fight. If our orders were to take out personnel or installations, our tactics would need to be altered accordingly. Stealth would still be the order of the day at the beginning of the operation. Often we’d be setting up an ambush, so it would clearly be essential that we worked silently and without being seen. If it was possible to take out any of the enemy clinically, with suppressed weapons and without alerting anyone to our presence, we’d do that. One less person to worry about later on.

“At some point, though, we knew things would go noisy. When that happened, the tactics changed. Stealth was no longer our best friend; violence was. We’d use all the weaponry at our disposal to eliminate the enemy completely, or to destroy their installations. If things went according to plan, the operation would go noisy at a time and place of our choosing. Good for us. Bad for the enemy.

“Tier 1 operators need to be equally skilful with the scalpel and the hammer. They need to be the Grey Man, able to merge into the background – which is why a lot of the operators working in Afghanistan wear beards, so they don’t stand out when they’re among the locals in-country. But when the situation requires it, these men must be able to bring all the most brutal forces of war to bear in order to overcome the enemy and achieve their objectives…”

The battle field may be a long way from the gym floor, but the lesson we can all learn as professionals  from Chris, aside from sheer courage and perseverance, is adaptability. As the saying goes, all failure is failure to adapt.

You can hear more of Chris’ extraordinary story at the FIA Flame Conference on 27^th June, Sheffield. Places are going fast so book now.

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