6 Ways to Improve Any Career

Here are 6 ways you might work with others to drive innovation, in the process creating stunning new opportunities for yourself:

1. Eliminate your industry’s persistent customer pain points.
Each industry has practices that drive customers crazy.
Think: can we turn our process or perspective around, to look through the customer’s eyes as though they were the company and we were the customers?
2. Dramatically reduce complexity.
3. Make stupid objects smart; add a sensor
The race is on to make everything smart, and the dumber your products were to begin with, the greater the opportunity to make them smart.
4. Teach your company to talk.
Apple's Siri personal assistant allows you to have a conversation with your phone. It's far from perfect, but the idea of having corporate databases talk directly to customers is here to stay.
5. Be utterly transparent.
Think: no spin. Social media and pervasive technology will make it increasingly difficult for companies to hide from dissatisfied customers, negative reviews, and faulty products.
6. Make loyalty dramatically easier than disloyalty.
By definition, when companies act smart they are personalizing the way they interact with and serve customers. Once you start delivering personalization, you create immense opportunities to make loyalty more convenient than disloyalty:

• You can store customer preferences, and act on them.
• You can save the customer time, money, or effort - especially by eliminating repetitive tasks.
• You can provide auto-replenishment of needed supplies.
• You can monitor products remotely, and service them before they break instead of afterwards.

Think about every major purchase decision customers face in your industry. How can you make it easier for customers to remain with your firm? Now, think even bigger. Can it be five or ten times easier?