Life is unpredictable. So, even when doing very well in life, you are never sure what the future holds for you or your beloved family. Perhaps nothing  provides more peace of mind than securing your family’s financial future for the day “when you are not there.” The question is: How? It takes more than just saving

• You will have a hard time securing your family’s future just by saving and cutting expenses.
• A life insurance policy can fulfill your family’s immediate cash flow requirements.
• Your family can face no, or minimum, disruption financially if something happens to you.

Getting the best of an insurance policy

• You need a well-thought-out insurance plan and must pay attention to various aspects of a policy.
• Remember: Insurance is a long-term investment, and it’s difficult to make changes in a policy’s terms later.

Here are 9 things to bear in mind before buying or upgrading an insurance policy: 1. Figure out your insurance needs

• Your insurance needs depend on whether you are single, married with children, married without children, a single parent, an empty nester or a retiree.
• The first thing you need to figure out is who and what needs to be covered under your life insurance policy -- mortgage, utilities, healthcare, education of any children, etc.
• Ideally, your family, home and the status of your career should be reflected in your insurance policy.

2. What type of insurance do you need?

• There are two types of life insurance policies: term insurance and cash value insurance.

Term insurance

• It has no investment component.
• It provides coverage for a specific period at fixed premiums.
• Compared with cash-value insurance, term insurance has lower premiums
• You need to decide the amount and period of coverage – 10, 15, 25 or 30 years.
• In the event of the insured’s death, beneficiaries get the face value of the policy tax free.

Cash-value or permanent life insurance

• It covers the lifetime of the insured.
• Permanent life insurance is of many types: whole life, universal life and variable life.
• Such policies have a cash value – you are paid back a portion of your premium.
• Tax is not charged on such policies until you withdraw the cash value or surrender your policy before your death.

3. Make sure premiums are affordable:

• Keep your financial limits in mind.
• Go for a policy whose initial, as well as future, premiums are within your range.

4. Read policy terms carefully

• It’s imperative to carefully review the terms, coverage premiums, benefits, renewals and termination clauses of the policy before buying it.
• Understand the time period for providing the insurance benefits to beneficiaries in case of untimely death.
• Your beneficiaries should also have information about your insurance policy and its terms and conditions.

5. Study before dropping or replacing a policy

• Weigh the pros and cons before dropping your current policy in favor of a new one.
• Insurance companies charge to drop or replace your current policy with a new one.

6. Keep track of renewal policies

• Even if your health status changes, most term insurance policies can be renewed for a term or more.
• The premiums for renewed term policies are higher.
• Ask about the amount of premiums to be paid if renewal is sought after a certain age.
• Ask for the age up to which you can renew your term insurance policy.

7. Review your policy every few years

• You can upgrade your existing policy if your requirements change.
• Take inflation, current economic status, changing family size and future plans into count while reviewing your insurance policy.

8. Be accurate on your application

• Hiding personal health information or filing wrong information to get lower premiums can later lead to the loss of coverage and benefits.
• Insurance companies can deny full benefits to beneficiaries if you die of an illness you had before signing the policy and did not reveal.

9. Avoid solely depending on your employer’s insurance

• Life insurance should be 10 to 12 times of your salary, but your employer may not offer that amount.
• You’ll lose your coverage if you change your job or your health declines.
• Employer-provided life insurance tends to get more expensive as you age.

“Data makes all the difference.” This is according to a white paper published by LexisNexis, titled, “More Data, Earlier: The Value of Incorporating Data and Analytics in Claims Handling,” which states that carriers can reduce severity payments by as much as 25%. This is true for P&C carriers but especially true for workers’ compensation payers, where medical costs have steadily increased for decades. In workers’ compensation, medical services are not limited by plan design. The costs for medical now amount to more than 60% of claim cost, and they continue to climb. Nevertheless, data managed correctly can make all the difference and save real dollars. Everyone is talking about big data as a panacea. The notion is that organizing and analyzing copious amounts of data will produce new and improved insights. But it needs to be complete, consistent and accurate, and purity is rare, regardless of the size of the data set. Duplicate records must be cleansed and merged, for starters. More importantly, bad input processes must be altered upstream, where data is created. Standards for quality must be set and enforced. Automated imaging systems must be regularly calibrated to ensure accuracy while individuals who input data along with their managers must be held responsible for the quality of the data. In workers’ compensation, as with all insurance lines, comprehensive data is a fete accompli. Data has been collected digitally for decades, driven by claims payment requirements. In workers’ compensation, the claim is set up in the payer’s system and continually fed by incoming data. Mandatory reports of injury are submitted by employers and treating physicians. Bills from medical providers and others are streamed through bill review systems, then to claims systems throughout the course of the claim. Events such as litigation, court dates and bills paid are documented in the claims system. The PBM (pharmacy benefit manager) sets up an additional database related to the claim. Most payers also collect medical utilization review and medical case management data. The question is not the amount of data, but its quality and what can done with it. How is it applied? Unfortunately, in workers’ compensation much of the data remains in separate silos. The focus has been on collecting the data. Now the question is how to make data an operational tool that achieves the kind of savings results reported in the LexisNexis study. A different approach is needed. Making data a useful work-in-progress tool is a matter of first integrating the data across multiple data sets relating to claims. This is sometimes a tedious process but is invaluable. The request and funding must come from the business units, where anything related to data is not usually a priority. Business managers must begin to value the process of collecting good data and converting it to action. Once the data is collected and integrated, analyzing it to gain the business knowledge is the task. Business managers can learn to articulate for IT what they want and need for decision support and other initiatives. IT has a role in assisting business managers in understanding how to ask more effectively for what they need. Cost drivers and trends can be uncovered in the analyzed data. The power of data is best exploited when it is analyzed and made available to the business units as concurrently as possible. Intervention is far more effective when it is mobilized early. The data must be analyzed and presented to the business units in ways that can be easily accessed, understood and applied. Through analytics, the data is transformed to knowledge: knowledge about conditions in claims, events, costs and performance of vendors. Individuals can be prompted by the system to take specific initiatives based on the knowledge, thereby creating a structured and powerfully enhanced approach to medical management with measurably positive results.

In the book Trust Agents, authors Chris Brogan and Julien Smith chronicle the emerging power of employees who become the manifestation of brands, especially in the online and social media worlds. Scott Monty, who until recently was the global head of social media for Ford, is one example of an employee whose social media aptitude and thought leadership created a halo effect for his employer. I am living proof of the impact of this concept, as I purchased a Ford Flex in 2011 only after being given a ride in one by Monty at the SXSW interactive festival two years prior. The car (and, frankly, the brand) weren’t even in my consideration set before then. I recently traded in the Flex for a Lincoln MKT, so Scott Monty indirectly and unofficially has sold me two cars on behalf of Ford. The same dynamics exist in the insurance industry. Dynamic professionals who publish on InsuranceThoughtLeadership.com and elsewhere, who are active in social media and at conferences, who are associated with specific expertise, become (at least in part) the flesh and blood embodiment of their employers' brands. Despite some notions to the contrary, this is nothing but good news for those brands. Here's why: 1. Thought Leadership Is Owned by People, Not Logos Brands are not "thought leaders," because brands are solely a collection of the attitudes human beings have about a company. That's why I cringe when consulting clients sometimes tell me they "want the company to be known as a thought leader." In reality, the company can only be known as an organization that attracts and retains thought leaders. The actual expertise and leadership is possessed by the individuals and loaned to the company during the period of employment. 2. All Exposure Is Good Exposure I sometimes feel like companies are jealous of their thought leaders, believing that notoriety for their individual experts somehow comes at the EXPENSE of notoriety for the brand. In reality, it works in the opposite direction: Individual thought leadership provides awareness and credibility to the employer of the expert...always. 100% of the people who know Scott Monty know he worked for Ford, and it markedly changed how some of those people (including me) thought about that company and its products. 3. You Can Build a Bench I often hear from companies that they are concerned about encouraging their employees to grow personal brands and become thought leaders because at some point (the companies fear) the expert will depart, and all that work will have been for naught. At some level, companies are right to think this way. Very few employees are in it for life these days. However, thought leaders benefit from the power of the brands they represent the same way those brands benefit from the thought leaders' activities, and I believe this symbiosis causes many thought leaders to stay in their roles for a longer (not shorter) time than average. But, assuming that the thought leader will depart at some point, brands would be wise to not put all their expertise eggs in a single basket, and instead work actively to build multiple thought leaders in each division of the company. (This is why I encourage companies to have multiple/many contributors to ITL.) If you have several thought leaders representing your division or your brand, the departure of one becomes a mere wobble. 4. It Works for LeBron James Lastly, companies must think about this as the LeBron James effect. James went to Miami and became the best (and best-known) basketball player on the planet. His personal brand grew, and simultaneously shined a spotlight on the Miami Heat organization. Harmony. Then he left and took his hoops thought leadership back to Cleveland. Does Miami take a temporary step back in notoriety? They do, but they are still relevant, still in the playoffs, and are building new stars. But the most important questions are these: Does Miami wish they still had LeBron? Of course. But did they benefit from having him temporarily, and would they do it all again the same way? 100% yes. Find the LeBrons in your company and use ITL and other opportunities to build their expertise, notoriety and thought leadership. You may not benefit forever, but you'll definitely benefit.

The insurance marketplace is transforming, creating openings for some and challenges for others. According to the PwC Global CEO Survey of insurance industry CEOs, 59% of insurance CEOs believe there are more opportunities than there were three years ago, but 61% see more threats. The fact that people are living longer and have more wealth to protect presents insurers with an opportunity. The threats to insurers include mounting commoditization, the squeeze on margins and increase in self-insurance. These threats reflect both intensifying price competition and difficulties in conveying the true value of the coverage that insurers sell. Regulation is creating upheaval and more costs on the one side and diverting attention from other strategic challenges on the other. Disruption on multiple fronts Insurance CEOs believe that new regulation, increasing competition, technological developments and changes in distribution will have more of a disruptive impact over the next five years than CEOs in almost all other industries. Realizing the digital potential Insurance CEOs recognize how digital technology can help them sharpen data analytics (90%), strengthen operational efficiency (88%) and enhance customer experience (81%). Yet are they making the most of digital’s potential? Most insurers are still primarily focused on e-commerce -- doing what they already do just via a different channel. Leaders are using digital to engage more closely with customers, fine-tune underwriting and develop customized risk and financial solutions. They’re also pushing back frontiers in areas like real-time risk monitoring, more active risk prevention and lowering the cost of life and pensions options for younger and less wealthy consumers. Questions to ponder:

• Can you meet the challenge of a changing business environment, including from technology and other financial services (FS) companies?
• Is change a threat or an opportunity?

Seeking out complementary capabilities Nearly half of insurance CEOs plan to enter into a joint venture or strategic alliance over the next 12 months. Two-thirds see these tie-ups as an opportunity to gain access to new customers (much more than in other FS sectors). Business networks, customers and suppliers are seen as the most important focus for strategic collaborations. Examples could include affinity groups or manufacturers. A further possibility is that one of the telecoms or Internet giants will want a tie-up with an insurer to help it move into the market. More than 30% of insurance CEOs see alliances as an opportunity to strengthen innovation and gain access to new and emerging technologies. Yet two-thirds currently do not have plans to partner with start-ups, even though such alliances could provide valuable access to the new ideas and technologies they need. Attracting fresh ideas and skills A rapidly changing market requires a more diverse workforce with new talents. 80% of insurance CEOs now look for a much broader range of skills than before. At the same time, they recognize the challenges; 71% -- even more than last year -- seeing the limited availability of key skills as a threat to growth. Diversity is now recognized as a key way to enhance business performance, innovation and customer satisfaction. Nearly three-quarters of insurance CEOs have a strategy to promote talent diversity and inclusiveness or plan to adopt one. But nearly 40% have no plans to seek out talent in different geographies, industries or demographic segments. Questions to ponder:

• How could collaboration help you reach new markets and sharpen innovation?
• Is your definition of diversity broad enough to identify and hire tomorrow’s workforce?

Last week, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) released its data for FY 2014 for enforcement litigation related to employment practices liability (EPL). Continuing a recent trend, the EEOC reported that the percentage of charges that contained retaliation claims rose to a record 43% in 2014. This is significant for EPL because the elements that an employee must establish with respect to a retaliation claim are quite different than the elements in a discrimination or harassment claim. Specifically, an employee does not need to establish that the employer discriminated against or harassed him to prevail on a retaliation claim. Rather, the employee only needs to prove that the employer took action against him in response to an internal or external complaint of discrimination or harassment that may deter the employee or others from lodging similar complaints in the future. The EEOC report highlights that, for EPL, preventing retaliation is just as important as promptly addressing workplace complaints of discrimination or harassment. A breakdown of all charges filed with the EEOC is as follows:

• Retaliation -- 43% of all claims
• Race (including racial harassment) -- 35%
• Sex (including pregnancy and sexual harassment) -- 29%
• Disability -- 29%
• Age -- 23%
• Religion -- 4%
• Color -- 3.1%
• Equal Pay Act -- 1.1% (but note that sex-based wage discrimination can also be charged under Title VII's sex discrimination provision)
• Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act -- 0.4%

In fiscal year 2014, the EEOC obtained $296.1 million in total monetary relief through its enforcement program for cases that were settled before the filing of litigation. Monetary relief from cases litigated, including settlements, totaled $22.5 million. Takeaway: From a risk management perspective, the aggressive investigations and litigation filed by the EEOC only emphasize the need for employers to faithfully obey what we kindly refer to as Socius’ “Three Cardinal Rules of Employment Practices Risk Management”:

1. Continually update employment practices (i.e., adapt personnel policies to always be current with the EEOC’s strategic initiatives, litigation trends and new statutes).
2. Keep all management and supervisory personnel thoroughly and continually trained (this ensures a smooth implementation of procedures and education of management’s agreed strategies to respond to retaliation, harassment and other employment-related allegations), and
3. Further mitigate this risk through the purchase of a robust EPL insurance policy.

One of the biggest challenges faced by the U.S. homeowners insurance industry are the losses driven by hazardous conditions or poor maintenance. Field inspections help carriers learn more about the many unknowns about a structure and a property before they underwrite the risk. But the inspection report, which costs between $30 and $100, then gets archived and is never touched again. If the homeowner moves to a new carrier, it either has to conduct a new inspection or underwrite the risk without having all the required information. This scenario got me thinking about applying a "Netflix approach" to home inspections. You can buy movies that you want to watch, or, under the Netflix approach, you can, in essence, share the initial investment by renting them from Netflix. With a centralized investment, you gain a higher level of value than your individual investment would provide. Here are a couple of questions to consider:

1. A significant percentage of most U.S. homeowners insurance carriers’ books never get inspected because of limited budgets and underwriting resource constraints. Is there a cheaper and more effective way to learn more about the true condition of every property risk that is being underwritten?
2. Should the industry continue to look at inspection dollars as an expense and continue to operate in silos? Or would it be possible to monetize a carrier’s historical investment in its inspection program for the greater good?

The Inspection Data Exchange Network Those two questions provide a compelling reason for U.S. homeowners carriers to come together and consider an Inspection Data Exchange Network. In an imaginary world, this central data exchange platform would allow carriers to share address-specific historical inspection reports with participating carriers for underwriting purposes. In a majority of risks, the condition hazard profile of a given address is unlikely to change drastically within 12 to 18 months from the date of the original inspection. Depending on a carrier’s risk tolerance and inspection budget, the carrier could either order a new report or decide to use historical inspections. The carrier that would rent the historical inspection report would pay a fraction of the full price back to the carrier that contributed the original report. Proper measures would need to be implemented to ensure everyone gains appropriately from participating in the network and to avoid scenarios where a small group of participants subsidize the inspection investment for others. This Inspection Data Exchange Platform should ensure the "content creators/artists" -- in this case, the inspection vendors -- also benefit from this solution. Even carriers that order inspections based on predictive model-based solutions should be able to benefit from the reduced spending by renting a section of the inspection reports from the network. Imagine the benefit of monetizing something that was considered a sunk cost, while having the ability to get valuable insight on the true condition of all the policies on your book? Every $7,000 condition hazard-related claim that can be avoided goes straight to the carrier’s bottom line. The Inspection Data Exchange Network could be an additional lever that can help drive profitability in the homeowners line of business. Are we ready as an industry to do this?

McDonald’s is in free fall, in the U.S. and abroad. Sales in the U.S. were down 4% in February, continuing a slide that cost Don Thompson his job as CEO at the beginning of 2015. The McDonald’s promise of a uniform food and dining experience wherever you see the Golden Arches across the globe has quickly become a liability. Consumers are demanding choice, freshness and more transparency about the ingredients that go into what they’re eating -- all things McDonald’s has in short supply. Those videos on how McNuggets are made aren't helping much, either. How did McDonald’s miss the boat? The slow-moving car wreck of a declining McDonald’s is déjà vu for marketers who have watched other industry-leading brands squander their equity by failing to adapt to changes in tastes. Blockbuster and RadioShack are just two of the many examples of companies that stood fast, or made only cosmetic changes, as their industries were innovating and shifting below their feet. Whether the products were comfort food, videos or cheap electronics, each company took too long to realize that people weren’t buying what they’re selling any more. Chipotle, Panera and other fast casual restaurants have quickly grown over the last 10 years, but, even though McDonald’s used to own part of Chipotle, it still stopped innovating and missed the looming threat. Define dying. Even with the recent sales declines, McDonald’s still generates nearly $100 billion of revenue a year, so reports of its actually going out of business won’t be coming anytime soon. But the company is squarely on the wrong side of current eating trends. After expanding the menu to try and provide “something for everyone,” the company is now shrinking the menu again to focus on traditional core offerings. It will all be to no effect if the company isn't able to re-imagine and re-invigorate the dining experience. Simply having salads on the menu isn’t enough. Nobody really wants to get a Caesar salad from McDonald’s to start with, especially not when it has more calories than the iconic burgers. And the rise of gourmet casual burger chains like Shake Shack and Wahlburger’s has made even McDonald's core burgers look much less appealing than they did in the past. The patient is still breathing, but there are few signs of improvement. It could have been different. The McDonald’s brand used to stand for tasty (if not necessarily healthy) food, a fun environment and a little piece of Americana. When I was a kid, I remember that rare times we got to go the McDonald’s down the block on 96th and Broadway as a real treat, complete with a Happy Meal and a toy. By comparison, last year I was spending a Saturday with my boys and wound up in a neighborhood where a McDonald’s was the only option for us to grab lunch. Instead of being excited, my four-year-old solemnly told me, “You know this food isn’t good for you, Daddy,” as he picked at the burger and fries in front of him. And he loves burgers. Times have changed, but McDonald’s really hasn’t. Instead of window dressing changes like substituting apple slices for fries in Happy Meals, the company needs to rethink the menu and value proposition, especially for families. How can McDonald’s be put back together again? The best companies don’t shy away from market changes. They face changes head-on. It’s hard to remember now, but Netflix was once completely focused on renting DVDs by email. Instead of fighting the streaming revolution, Netflix embraced it wholeheartedly and now makes much more from that part of the business (though the company still has 6 million DVD subscribers in the U.S.). Demands change, and even the most entrenched market leaders can see it all slip away quickly; just ask Blackberry. McDonald’s needs to change its strategy, food and even the look of the stores if it wants to keep up. It won’t be the same old McDonald’s any more, but it might just help turn the business around.

In the mid- to late 1990s, the insurance industry was struggling with “the Y2K crisis,” not only in connection with its own systems but, more importantly, with the systems of all its policyholders. As the chief underwriting officer of one of the largest subsidiaries of one of the largest insurance companies in the world, AIG, I had to determine our potential exposure if the computer systems of our policyholders failed. My conclusion: hundreds of millions of dollars of potential liability payouts. Y2K -- a problem that threatened to confuse computers about chronology beginning on Jan. 1, 2000, because years had historically been represented in software with just two digits, meaning that the year 2000 (represented as "00") was indistinguishable from 1900 (also "00") -- was the insurance industry’s introduction to the hazards of insuring technology. To reduce that exposure, we had to figure out a way to motivate our corporate policyholders to take reasonable steps to manage their Y2K problem. Because one of the central purposes of an insurance policy is to motivate specific risk-reducing behavior, such as wearing a seat beat, the question became how to motivate risk reduction in connection with the impending problem. So we created “Y2K insurance” and made it available only to those companies that took the right steps. Well, the Y2K crisis came and went, and the insurance industry was relatively unscathed. Whether the introduction of a new insurance product helped, we will never know. What we do know is that the Y2K experience inspired the insurance industry to contemplate other technology risks we might insure. In the year 2000, the answer was immediately clear: yhe Internet. Many of us realized that the Internet presented a permanent change in the sociological and economic system; that life would never be the same. But how does one insure a new technology and a completely new way of conducting business? It was scary thing to contemplate. Fundamental to the insurance business is an analysis of historical actuarial information about frequency and severity of loss. We have decades of data on automobile accidents, broken down in every way imaginable. But how do you determine the right premium for a risk that has never existed? For most carriers, the answer was, “You don’t.” But for a few, a different response emerged. A response that arose from a different culture—a risk-taking culture. A culture of innovation. “Cyber insurance” was born. It took a while, but eventually we became comfortable with underwriting the frequency and severity of potential cyber attacks against our policyholders’ computer systems. Today, 15 years later, cyber insurance is a robust $1.3 billion industry, with more than 45 carriers providing some type of cyber insurance. And, despite the almost daily reports of cyber attacks, the industry is somehow making enough money to stick around. Bitcoins  Once again, the insurance industry is faced with a new risk in the technology space. Once again, the global economy is being transformed with a new way of conducting transactions. Once again, the insurance industry is faced with a dilemma: Do we ignore this new risk or face it head on? There are more than 8 million Bitcoin “wallets” in existence today, and this is expected increase to 12 million by the end of the year. The total value of Bitcoins worldwide is around $4 billion. There are more than 100,000 Bitcoin transactions happening every day. More than 80,000 companies, from Microsoft to Dell to Expedia.com, accept Bitcoins as payment. But how do you insure Bitcoins? More specifically, how do you insure the theft of the electronic private keys that are used to access Bitcoins? A smart insurer realizes that such a task is an exercise in both the familiar and the foreign. A private key is, after all, an electronic file. In many ways, the policies and procedures used in the network security space to protect any computer system holding any file are the same as those used to protect an electronic private key file. Equally true is that a good portion of private keys are stored in “cold storage,” meaning that they are not held in a computer that has access to the Internet. Some are actually stored in a bank vault. Storing valuables in a bank vault is also a well-understood risk and insurable. Finally, many companies that would be interested in purchasing Bitcoin theft insurance are themselves technology providers. Insurance for technology companies has existed for some time. However, that’s where the analogy ends, and things begin to become difficult. First, the “cyber” insurance policies provided today actually do not insure the intrinsic value of the electronic file stolen. The policies do not cover the “value” of a Social Security number, for example. Furthermore, best practices in the securing of private keys in “hot storage” (computers connected to the Internet) rely upon the multisig, or multiple signature, technology, something with which insurance underwriters are generally unfamiliar. At best, underwriting the theft of Bitcoins requires coordination of multiple underwriting departments within an insurance company. More likely, it means creating new underwriting techniques and protocols. Will the insurance industry be able to respond to the call? The insurance industry historically has not been known for innovation. So, how will we respond when we are faced with a new and potentially important risk, for which there is no historical actuarial data? Do we run away, or do we embrace a new need and a new opportunity as we did 15 years ago? In February 2015, one company successfully designed the first true Bitcoin theft insurance policy along with a global “A”-rated insurance carrier for the benefit of BitGo, a leader of multi-sig technology. Will this policy be the only of its kind? Or, as with cyber insurance 15 years ago, will that be only the first of hundreds of thousands of “Bitcoin theft” policies. Only time will tell.

Important things in life are not easily reduced to 10 easy steps. Nevertheless, this series provides a list of 10 building blocks to achieving long-term success in risk management from someone who has spent more than 25 years striving to carve out the most satisfying career possible, while never losing sight of the attributes attached to the bigger picture. Part 1 is here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here. This is Part 4 in the series. 7. Developing the Bench While all managers are expected to develop their employees, this aspect of management is harder in risk management than in many other disciplines or functions, if only because of the often smaller teams. But getting the right bench strength established is essential to getting the risk management fortified for the hard times that will inevitably arise. The right bench will also improve the chances of sustained success. Just finding great people is hard enough. In the risk management world, keeping them can be more challenging for a variety of reasons, including limited upward mobility because of the small team size. However, there are ways to deal with this limitation. For example, GE is well-known for running talented managers though the audit function, where managers have opportunities to gain a broader and deeper understanding of what makes the business tick.

More than a decade of creating and leading insight teams has taught me that two aspects of culture are critical for customer insight teams to make a real difference to the wider business. One is collaboration between the different technical disciplines (to deliver holistic customer insights). The other is action-orientation, galvanizing the team behind a vision of driving change in the real world. This goes beyond delivery of technical analysis or Powerpoint, to focus on the decision and action needed to deliver commercial results and improved experiences as judged by your customers. As with most cultural challenges, this one takes time, determination and consistency in leadership. Mostly through getting it wrong first, which seems to be how I’ve learned most of my leadership lessons, I have discovered a few tips that help embed this action-oriented culture. None is a panacea, and each needs to be practiced consistently and equitably, so they become assumed and just embedded in the “the way we do things around here.” Anyway, enough soap-boxing from me: here are those four tips from the trenches for building a culture of action: 1. Filter out requests that won’t drive action. The most sensible place to start with culture change is at the start of new work processes. It’s important to train and support your analysts in challenging new requests for work and, importantly, using incisive questioning to drill down to the real need. By focusing on what the internal stakeholder really needs, not just what he wants, it should be possible to uncover the real motivation. An analyst should make clear that the reason for this questioning is two-fold: (a) to better understand the real need so as to identify the most appropriate solution (across a number of potential technical approaches) or identify that existing work could meet that need; (b) to check what action will be taken as a result of answering the question. The latter is what is critical to this culture change. If such questioning reveals that it’s really just of academic interest to another leader and that there is no commitment to take action on the results, then you should back your analyst in declining. Customer insight work only adds value if it is acted upon, and you cannot afford for costly technical resource to be tied up satisfying someone else’s intellectual curiosity or desire to appear smart. 2. All output must include recommendations. Once the technical work has been completed, the important work of writing up the results and telling a compelling story to engage the business begins. Any customer insight leader should make clear to the team that this output (often in PowerPoint) must include clear recommendations for action. Wherever possible, this should include decisions or actions that the business can take promptly, even if they are only interim steps before a final solution. Even if the insight work has simply identified the need for more data or further work, that must be drawn out as a clear recommendation, alongside any investment or change needed in the wider business to avoid being in this situation again. Consistently requiring clear recommendations that force the business to take decisions, including sending work back to analysts as unacceptable, will drive change. 3. Refocus your progress updates on action taken. Regular update meetings or calls are a feature of most insight teams. Depending on your organizational culture and personal management style, you may do these weekly, fortnightly or monthly and may favor “morning prayers,” mid-day meeting or end-of-the-day “wrap ups.” However you do it, as a leader what you choose to focus on in these meetings often conveys more in terms of culture than your words. Requiring updates to be structured in terms of the action they are aimed to drive (i.e. improvement in commercial metric or improvement in customer experience scores) and protecting time to check in on progress with the required business decisions and actions needed to achieve these, will speak volumes to your managers and team. It is key to make clear that, in assessing everyone’s performance, you want the acid test to be what change they have driven in the “real world,” not just the efficiency of the process following or delivery of great-looking slides. This does raise the bar and require your team to influence stakeholders in other teams, attend key meetings and even “walk the floor” -- but getting out there is great for showing to the wider business and your team that you care about the difference being made. 4. Communicate to the top table with final outcomes. I’ve shared previously some tips for influencing once in the boardroom or executive committee. A key part of engaging these directors is communicating in terms of what matters to them. Here, leveraging the regular updates you receive in terms of action being taken and communicating in terms of the outcomes being driven (improved incremental income/profit or improved net promoter score (NPS), et al.) can make a huge difference to how customer insight is perceived. I have seen many a director over the years turn from skepticism to passionate support once she experienced that the customer insight leader doesn’t just want to bore with jargon but rather is actively engaged with how insight is improving the key commercial numbers and ensuring better customer experience. Coupled with visible cooperation with marketing and operations, to ensure that the insight “baton” is safely passed to those teams owning taking action and that you continue to run with them to ensure things work in practice, can build positive impressions that deliver support in the boardroom . I hope those tips help. None is rocket science and I’m sure only serve as a reminder of best practices you know already, but I hope that’s a good thing, too. As a final comment, just let me say that an orientation toward action also has benefits for your customer insight team members. Almost every analyst/researcher that I’ve employed over the years wants to make a difference. They want all those hours in the office to count for something -- to result in an improvement they are proud of. So, although it can seem like more work for them to start with, I have seen delivering the above culture also be welcomed by a team who start to sit up straighter and believe in themselves more. The sense of pride they experience in being a key part of your business and not just being good at what they do but delivering insights that really matter, is a huge benefit. In these days of so many businesses struggling to recruit and retain analytical talent, the difference can also be a real source of competitive advantage. In fact, working on your customer insight team culture could be a far better investment than the latest shiny software or more external data. It might just be your only sustainable competitive advantage in the coming talent wars.