The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.

–Albert Einstein

Related posts:

1. Strategy Quote #001
2. Strategy Quote #002
3. Kingdom Excellence Is The Power Of Always Trying Again

To which William Carey replied, “I will go down, but you must hold the rope.”

I love that.

I love the idea of standing up and volunteering to go bring the Gospel to people who are suffering. The imagery of Isaiah 6, where Isaiah steps forth and courageously responds to to God’s call, “Here I am! Send me!” sets my heart on fire every time I read it. Oh that I were that brave, that I would willingly go forth to endure certain hardship and suffering all for the sake of the Gospel.

Because the truth is that Christianity is hard.

Faith in Christ means submitting to a sanctification process through which the Holy Spirit undoes all of the damage that our sinful nature has caused in us. In order to receive life in Christ, we must die to ourselves… and it is not an easy process. This is not something we can do ourselves, it is Christ’s work through us.

I think C.S. Lewis nails it when he describes Aslan “undressing” Eustace to turn him back into a boy (Eustace had been turned into a dragon in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader [affiliate link]). As Eustace describes it:

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off…

Not only that but we are commanded to go out and bring Christ’s love into the world. And we are told that we will meet with great resistance. That we will be persecuted and suffer greatly all for the sake of Jesus Christ.

Christianity is hard. Anyone who tells you differently is a liar.

But know this: Christ is the only worthwhile thing in this world. Suffering with Christ is a great gift.

It has also taken me a long time to understand that. It’s been easy for me to look at the suffering I’ve experienced in my life: the death of my mother from cancer, my own experience with cancer, developing diabetes, being there on September 11th, my dad’s current battle with cancer, my sister’s struggle with depression, my brother’s struggles with addiction, living through major car and motorcycle wrecks, losing my job multiple times, betrayal by people I love… and think “Why me? Why do all of these things happen to me?”

Well, I know two things. These aren’t answers to the question because only God knows why he has done these things in my life, and I trust that His plan is perfect. But these are two truths I have learned through my suffering:

God has brought me back to him through suffering.

First, when facing suffering I have no choice but to acknowledge my own weakness and inability to overcome hardship on my own. From this humbled position I am able to see how great God is and how much I need him.

Second, my suffering has given me a slight taste of Jesus willingly endured for my sake. I have suffered a mere fraction of what Christ suffered, and I hated it. But through my suffering I am able to better understand the reality of what the cross means. For these reasons I am grateful for my suffering.

My experiences enable me to come along side others in their time of suffering.

I am not a compassionate person.

It’s something that I’ve struggled with for a long time because I feel like I used to be. Over the years, as I experienced different hardships, I slowly put up walls that protected me from being hurt. They also have kept my feelings in. As a result I don’t empathize well. I’m not happy about it. I don’t want to be this way. But I am.

For a long time I thought to myself, “I’ve been through a loved one dying…” or “I’ve lost my job…“, “I should know what to say to someone else in this situation.”

But I never do.

Honestly, I don’t remember what I felt like when I was in those situations. I don’t remember what, if anything, helped me to heal. So I don’t know what to say to people when they’re suffering. I’m actually quite awkward about it (which would be funny if the other person wasn’t going through a hard time).

But I have come to realize that I am extremely blessed to have suffered through so much. Because there are only few situations, a few types of suffering that someone might be going through, where I can’t go up to them and say, “Are you going through hell? I’ve been there too.“

Because I have.

And through those experiences God has revealed to me his plan for my redemption through Christ. God has given me the only source of true hope; hope that not only makes suffering make sense but makes it worthwhile.

I know that suffering exists, that it is inevitable. And if I am willing to accept that and willingly endure suffering, I know that Christ can be found within suffering. Is it not, then, my responsibility to tie the rope around my waist and dive into the depths of hell in order to bring that same hope to whoever is down there?

I still suck at compassion, I’m a clumsy brute attempting to bring mercy. But I now love to say:

“Are you going through hell? I’ve been there too. I don’t know what your hell is like and I don’t have any advice for how to get through it.

But know this, there is something wonderful on the other side. And if you want, I’m willing to go down and be with you for as long as it takes to get through it.“

Related posts:

1. Tony Steward’s Thoughts on Kingdom
2. Thoughts On Examining Sin and Tim Keller’s Counterfeit Gods
3. Some Thoughts on Leadership

Creating Eternal Value through Strategic Management

Business as Mission Metrics – Measuring the Effectiveness of BAM Efforts (part 2)

What the Business as Mission movement does not measure

If the Business as Mission movement does universally agree that a particular metric is not indicative of BAM success, it does is not mean that metric isn’t valid. Of all of the measures tested by the BAM survey, only a few were rejected by a significant number of respondents (Table E). The common aspect of all of these metrics can together is that it is questionable whether any company should be responsible for the associated activities or if the activities are even appropriate in a business context.

• Research indicates that 22 percent of respondents “Very Familiar” with Business as Mission disagree that Regular worship at work is an effective measure.
• Similarly, Number of partnerships with social service agencies is not considered an effective measure.
• Over 10 percent of respondents disagree with the effectiveness of three environmental indicators: Existence of recycling programs, Zero waste operating measures, and Reduced consumption of energy and non-renewables.

Implication: questions of the situational appropriateness of worship at work transcend any consideration of its contribution to the company’s spiritual goals. Additionally, partnership with social service agencies and preserving environmental resources do not directly complement BAM objectives.

^[1] that many members of the missional community openly reject.

However, it does not mean that an individual BAM leader will not respond to a personal conviction to support a particular external ministry or outreach. Additionally, BAM leaders may define their business such that it intentionally incorporates elements like evangelism or worship. However, these situations will be driven by the leaders of the BAM company. In general, it can not be assumed that all BAM leaders should prioritize external needs and causes.

Business as missional?

Frequently, BAM practitioners are called to account for not doing more to reach out to the underprivileged in a community; their internal focus is often viewed as selfish. This imposition of values upon Christian businesspeople occurs when the efforts of the company do not align with the church’s definition of “doing good.”

However, this criticism may carry with it a number of assumptions from the missional church model that are (inappropriately) applied to BAM companies:

• Internal constituents are less in need than external (assumes majority of employees are Christian).
• Transplanting of Western resources and culture (assumes leadership is Western and therefore has been “sent” to serve host peoples).
• Internal functions diminish missional impact by consuming valuable resources (assumes business activities do not have ministry impact).
• Financial support from external (usually Western) sources (therefore local environment does not need to be able to wholly support business activities).

This issue must be addressed in a way that does not diminish the value of BAM companies’ impact in blessing developing countries. How can these constraints shape the BAM movement’s identity so that it is clear how Business as Mission creates true kingdom impact? The survey results begin to shed light on how the Business as Mission movement approaches measuring the impact of their efforts.

Related posts:

1. Business as Mission Metrics – Measuring Effectiveness (part 1)
2. Who are the Business as Mission leaders? (part 2)
3. Business as Mission Methodology – Business Organization and Resource Coordination (part 2)

We’ve covered how strategic segmentation can help you develop effective strategies for appealing to specific customer groups in a way that is both profitable and sustainable. At this point you’ve identified key audience characteristics that allow you to both classify subgroups of your audience and inform ways that you can relate to those groups with your products and services.

The next step in the strategic segmentation process is to understand the different motivations that lie behind their decisions and behaviors.

Understanding Customer Motivations

In Strategic Market Management (affliliate link), David Aaker suggests there are four basic steps for analyzing customer segments’ motivations:

1. Identify Motivations
2. Group Motivations
3. Assess Importance
4. Assign Strategic Roles

Identify Motivations

The first step is to think critically about the factors that influence a customer segment’s behaviors and decisions in relationship to your offering. You (and your co-leaders) can probably generate a pretty thorough list of customer motivations based on your experiences. However, it is better to engage customers directly through research to systematically identify their motivations.

The goal is to understand why a customer uses a product? What is their motivation? What determines a good or bad experience for them? Through the effort you should identify a whole gamut of motivations: strategic, tactical and in between.

Group Motivations

The process of identifying motivations will probably generate a long list of motivations. The next step is to group the motivations together in order to assess relationships between them. This process will help you to organize the motivations to see commonalities and linkages between motivations that might contribute to the importance of the different categories of motivations.

There are a number of way to categorize the customer motivations. A simple one is to write each motivation on a card and systematically go though assigning each one to a pile of similar motivations. After that the piles can be arranged in a way that shows their strategic relationship to each other.

Assess Importance

Once you’ve identified and categorized the customer’s motivations, the next step is determine the relative importance of each one to the customer. This exercise involves determining the prioritization of different motivations. You can do this on your own, drawing upon your own experiences and insight to make a determination. However, it is often more effective to ask the customers to assess the importance of motivations.

The process I employ when doing customer analysis incorporates three approaches:

• ask the customer directly to identify how important a motivation is;
• ask the customer trade off questions that force them to judge the relative importance;
• observing actual purchase decision to validate their actual behavior matches what they’ve identified as important.

The end result is knowledge of the strategic importance of the customer’s motivations.

Assign Strategic Roles

The final step in analyzing customer motivations is to identify which customer motivations should be incorporated into your business strategy. This steps will give you a complete picture of how to proceed given the different factors related to the strategically important motivations. It takes into account not only the strategic importance of different things that motivate your customers but also what the rest of your market is doing to capitalize on those things as well as your own ability to capitalize on them.

Conclusion

The result is of these steps is a comprehensive understanding of the different factors that motivate your customers, the level of influence that each has on your customers’ behavior, and a prioritization based on the value of and your ability to respond to each motivation.

The final step in the strategic segmentation process is to identify any unmet needs within your customer segments that represent an opportunity for your business. I will cover that in a future post.

If your organization needs help understanding your customers’ motivations, I offer a number of strategic customer research and analysis services that can help. Feel free to contact me here.

Question: Is your business or ministry oriented towards your audience and do you feel like you do a good job in understanding what motivates them? Why or why not?

Related posts:

1. How To Do Strategic Segmentation – Step 1: Segment The Market
2. Strategy Principles – Segmentation
3. Motivations for BAM as a strategy (part 1)

Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.

–Winston Churchill

Related posts:

1. Strategy Quote #001
2. Kingdom Quote #001
3. What Is Your Person Strategy?

He said that the main thing they are trying to figure out is “How do we mover our people to be passionate about the kingdom of God?” Not just who they are as individuals in Christ but about getting involved in what the church is doing as a whole.

Within that Keith sees a number of things they as church leaders could be doing better: helping people to understand their own gifts and how they could be used; communicating about existing ministry opportunities; identifying and going after new ministry opportunities.

To Keith, the challenge isn’t that there aren’t enough people in their church participating in ministry. They have plenty of volunteers.

He wonders, though, if people look around don’t see opportunities to step in to help, so they don’t get involved. It made me think of how a new member to my church described a previous church they had been members at:

The church met in borrowed space and even in the sanctuary you could see boxes and stacks of things that hadn’t found a home yet. Everywhere you looked you could see something that needed to be done and as a result it was easy to roll my sleeves up and dive right in.

Keith’s desire resonates with me. At our last Elder meeting I expressed my frustration that it didn’t seem like we were doing anything to try and set the people, who are currently comfortable or indifferent about their faith, on fire with a passion for what it truly means to be a child of God. To me, the urgency of this is made obvious when you hear Jesus’s warning to the church in Laodicea in Revelation 3:15-16:

¹⁵“‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! ¹⁶So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.

Keith and I are going to find a time to talk again soon to discuss this further. I’d love to hear from you what your experiences have been. Is this an issue your church has faced? What do you believe can be done?

Related posts:

1. Tony Steward’s Thoughts on Kingdom
2. Online Excellence Conversations – DJ Turner of Denver Seminary
3. National Church Goer Conference ‘09

But like all strategic tools, the compounding phenomenon can work both to the benefit and detriment of your organization. A lesson that most companies (and people) learn the hard way.

A quick analogy.

Right now, there is infection in five of my toes. I’ll spare you the details but know this: IT HURTS. I’m a pitiful sight right now, wincing and grimacing as I hobble around. But it didn’t start out like this. It started with my winter boots which, though functioning correctly, have a narrow “toe box” which caused my toes to rub against the inside of the boot.

Now add to that the fact that it’s winter and I wear the boots for extended period, the rubbing starts to become intense. Add to that the fact that (as a diabetic) I have poor circulation to my feet. Now my toes are being irritated and don’t receive a sufficient supply of “clean” blood to keep them healthy. What happens? Infection sets in and then spreads to the toes that have been weakened by the compounding effect of my constricting boots and lazy pancreas.

What started as a minor irritation quickly became a near-debilitating condition.

How small problems can compound in an organization.

Now imagine a similar situation in your organization.

One member of your team (let’s call him ‘Tony’) is being slightly but continually irritated by a tool that isn’t quite what he needs. Annoying but no big deal, he’s team player and times are tight so he’s making due with the best he can.

Now imagine that some other part of your organization, say Human Resources, starts having problems. It doesn’t have to completely fail to function, like my pancreas has; it could be as minor as falling behind or forgetting to complete something on time. But as a result, Tony doesn’t get his pay check when he’s supposed to.

Now Tony is being worn down by a minor inconvenience and the flow of resources that he needs has been disrupted. As anyone who has ever had to deal with a missing pay check will tell you, Tony’s condition has just gotten a lot worse. The stress of his inefficient work environment is now compounded by the disruption that flows from another part of the organization. Tony’s pissed. Infection has set in.

Let unchecked, Tony will now start to have a detriment effect on those around him, compounding any difficulties they’re enduring. This is how the infection spreads. Suddenly, what started as a minor problem has compounded to a critical issue that will take a lot of attention to heal.

Don’t sweat the small stuff.

As entrepreneurs, leaders, and managers, you’re accustomed to working in less that perfect conditions. And in many regards inefficiency will always hinder our efforts. In order to accomplish our strategic goals we’ve learned not to sweat the small stuff.

But that doesn’t mean that we can ignore the small stuff completely. You need to pay attention to what’s happening around you. And it is especially important to keep a pulse on the “health” of your team and make sure that you are creating the right conditions for them to succeed in their positions. Because if you don’t, something minor can quickly compound into something major and hobble your efforts.

Don’t sweat the small stuff. But don’t ignore it either.

No related posts.

A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.

–Albert Einstein

Related posts:

1. Kingdom Quote #001
2. Strategy Quote #002
3. What Is Your Person Strategy?

So how do you go about strategic segmentation?

Like all things strategy, you can do a little or you can do a lot depending on your needs, sophistication and available resources. What I’m going to present is a general outline for performing a segmentation, you can do as much or as little in each step as is appropriate for your needs.

Strategic segmentation assumes that you already have a good understanding of why you’re trying to reach a market and what it is you can/can’t do in service and relating to that market.

If you don’t have a realistic understanding of your own capabilities and intentions, the best segmentation will fail. Unrealistic self-assessment will mean you won’t be able to follow through and deliver value to the customers. That doesn’t mean that if you can’t do something or if you don’t have the capacity to serve the market in the way segmentation suggests, you’ve wasted your time. In that case, segmentation shows you the highest potential for appealing to a customer group. If you’ve determined that reaching that group is valuable, then segmentation will show you what capacities you need to develop to do so. Armed with this information you will be able to strategically invest in improving the necessary capabilities. Whew, that was quite a caveat. On to the good stuff…

In his book, Strategic Market Management (affliliate link), David Aaker proposes three steps for better understanding your market through strategic segmentation.

1. Segment the Market;
2. Understand Customer Motivations;
3. Identify Unmet Needs;

I’ll cover each in a different blog post. Right now, I’ll focus on the first step: segmenting the market.

Segmenting the market

Here’s how you do it:
The goal here is to identify key variables that describe sub-groups in your market and inform how those groups will relate to your offering. A good process for strategically dividing your market is to start with a wide range of general characteristics and iterate to variables that are related to your specific product/service.

Step 1. Think  about general characteristics of your market.

What are the people like?

Focusing on demographics (age, gender, ethnicity) can be valuable because you make inferences about how a person’s life stage affects their interests, values, and behaviors. (of course, don’t hold on too tightly to these heuristics… at the end of the day every person is unique and your strategy must leave room for the exceptions to the rules). Geographic variables may be valuable if your offering has limited reach or regional/cultural appeal.

How are trends changing the market?

Think about trends that will make segmentation variables more or less valuable. For example, in the US the Hispanic population continues to grow. One obvious implication is that there will be more Hispanic consumers? But it is important to also think about less obvious affects. How will this create societal shifts that affect what it is that you do?

Step 2. Think about segmentation variables related to how the market relates to your product service.

These variables describe how a customer might relate to your offering. There are a number of dimensions that can be considered. For a business, six common ones are:

• User type – based on the context for using the product (e.g. a computer buyer might be a student or a business professional)
• Usage – based on amount of product/service use (e.g. a sports team serves season-ticket holders versus occasional fans differently)
• Benefits – based on users perception of why a product is valuable (e.g. a fast-food patron might go through the drive-through for convenience while another will dine in the restaurant for the experience)
• Price sensitivity – based on the trade-off between price and quality (e.g. an airline partitions sears into first class, business class and economy/coach)
• Application – based on the intended type of usage (e.g. a truck may be used by one segment for hauling and by another for recreation)
• Loyalty – based on commitment to the organization providing the product/service (e.g. buying a certain clothing brand versus buying for price)

It is worthwhile to think about what equivalent dimensions might be for a church or ministry, again focusing on how the user relates to the church’s offerings. Here’s a quick list of things I’ve thought of. I’d love to hear what you think and maybe discuss the merits of different dimensions in the comments:

• Need for spiritual healing (i.e. those who have been seriously hurt by their own and others’ sin and need the healing power of Jesus)
• Poverty level (i.e. lacking some resource that the church community can provide. [I think of poverty as different than just lacking financial resources. I discuss it further in this post from my family blog if you'd like to learn more])
• Worldview (i.e. the beliefs, values, and experiences that shape a person’s views on things)
• Triperspectival hermeneutics (i.e. based on an understanding of which perspective a particular person tends to. Check out David Fairchild’s great post on triperspectival hermeneutics on his blog.)
• Passion for the supremacy of Christ (i.e how much of a person’s life has been given over to Christ as their Lord and Savior)

Please add to this list, I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.

Step 3. Categorize your target audience based on the most appropriate segmentation variables.

Once you’ve brainstormed different variables that describe your customer groups, select the ones that are going to be the most useful to you. Note that you don’t have to neatly assign customers into specific customers. There will probably be overlap between characteristics. There will also be customers that don’t fit nicely into any category. That’s okay. Our goal is to develop categories that help us define unique ways to reach the customers in that category.

Conclusion

You now should have a better understanding of who your customers/audience are and the characteristics that will and won’t help you to relate to them.

The next step in the strategic segmentation process will be to understand your customers’ motivations. I’ll cover that in the next post.

Of course, I do strategy work for a living. I’d love to work with you to see how strategic segmentation or other strategy techniques could improve your ability to serve your customers. If that is something you need, feel free to contact me.

For now, I’ll leave you with some general questions that David Aaker asks that will help orient you toward an useful segmentation.

Who are your biggest customers?
Who are your most profitable customers?
Who Your most attractive potential customers?
Do the customers fall into logical groups based on needs, motivations, characteristics?

Related posts:

1. How To Do Strategic Segmentation – Step 2: Understand Customer Motivations
2. Strategy Principles – Segmentation
3. Infographic: Strategic Priorities For Our National Agenda

Since then I’ve had various pokes (ouch), prods (errr), and scans (breath in…. hold it…. hold it…. exhale), but nothing really since 2005 (the five year mark).

So today at my regular diabetes check up (Yes, I am a diabetic and cancer survivor. No I don’t recommend it.) I asked my doctor if there was anything I needed to do. He didn’t seem to think so but said he’d consult with their oncologist. So, assuming they don’t say anything (which I don’t think they will), since it is March 2010…

I declare myself to be cancer-free for 10 years! Woo woo!

Those in the cancer circles will tell you that 10 years is kind of a big deal.

Stupid body.

So I’d just like to take this opportunity to say to myself:

“Great job body. Ten years without letting cancer grow inside of you. I’m proud of you… Still kind of miffed about the whole ‘destroying your own pancreas‘-thing… but great job nonetheless. Have a cookie cake! What? You shouldn’t eat cookie cake? Because your pancreas doesn’t produce insulin? D’oh!”

Related posts:

1. 9/11, 8 years and 1 week later