Jim Collins, an American business consultant and author of management writing, whose book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Breakthrough and Others Don't have been translated into 35 languages, talked about how to use the information you have.
Modern man lives in the information age, in which the one who has more and better information has an advantage. However, if you look at the chronicle of ups and downs, you will not find companies affected by the lack of information. The key, therefore, is not the availability of information, but the ability to transform the available information into facts that cannot be neglected.
One of the most effective ways to achieve this is the red flag method. Let me give you a personal example to illustrate. When I taught the Case Method course at Stanford Business School, I gave MBA students bright red 24x45 cm sheets of paper and the following instructions: “This is your red flag for the quarter. If you raise it, I will stop the lecture and give you the floor. There are no restrictions on when or how to raise the red flag, it is entirely your decision. You can use this to share an observation, disagree with the teacher, ask the head of the company who was invited to give a lecture, respond to a fellow student, make an offer, and so on. But the "flag" can only be used once a quarter. You cannot pass the 'red flag' to another student."
With these flags, I never knew what would happen in the classroom the next day. One student once raised a red flag to say, “Professor Collins, I don't think you read very well today. You are leading the discussion by asking too many questions and that stifles our creativity. Let us think for ourselves. The “red flag” presented me with an unpleasant fact - my way of asking questions prevents students from thinking. A student survey at the end of the semester confirmed this. The “red flag” at that moment, in full view of the entire group, turned the key to success - not in the availability of information (many have it), but in the ability to turn it into facts that cannot be neglected, criticism of my lectures, into information that was ignored. just impossible.
I borrowed the idea of red flags from Bruce Wolpert, who invented a powerful technique called underpayment at his company Graniterock. “Underpayment” gives the client the right to decide how much to pay and whether to pay at all: based on satisfaction with the product or service. “Underpayment” is not a product return system. The customer does not need to return the item, nor does he need to ask Graniterock for permission. He simply counts the item that doesn’t satisfy him, subtracts its value from the total, and writes a check for the remaining amount.
When I asked Wolpert why he came up with “underpayment,” he said, “You can learn a lot by interviewing consumers, but information can be interpreted in different ways. With underpayment, you cannot ignore the facts. You often don’t know that a customer is unhappy until you lose them. "Underpayment" is an early warning system that forces action to be taken long before the threat of losing a customer arises."
The red flag technique can be a useful tool for turning mere information into information that cannot be ignored. This will create a climate in which the truth is heard.
