Apr 24, 2013 | Collaboration, Innovation, Operations
At a simple level, cognitive productivity is just using the brainpower at your disposal to deliver the optimum outcome, weather that brainpower be resident between your ears, or between the collective ears of many in a group.
However, it is also much deeper than that. The notion of cognitive overhead how much effort there is in understanding something comes from this post by David Demaree, a software engineer in Chicago, which was prompted by the early iterations of Google+. Cognitive Overhead — “how many logical connections or jumps your brain has to make in order to understand or contextualize the thing you’re looking at.”
As conceived, it applied to software engineering, and the resulting products, but it seems to me it has much wider application. All those remotes that run our “entertainment centers” are testament to that, what happened to the simple old TV remote, one device, did everything without a science degree?.
Clay Shirky talks about the notion of cognitive surplus. This idea proposes that people are motivated by the opportunity to create and share, no longer just by the command and control ideas of the hierarchical employer where money and power emanating from a position description are what counts. The real power in the new economy comes from individuals, and the power vested in them to create by the digital revolution. Even if that creation is just another silly cat picture posted on Instagram, it is nevertheless a creative action taken by someone who could not have done it just a few years ago
If you put the two notions of cognitive overhead and surplus together, you have a recipe for cognitive productivity. Leveraging the cognitive surplus in a manner that minimises cognitive overhead, to deliver greater and greater value to society.
That my friends, is the future!
Apr 11, 2013 | Collaboration, Customers, Sales
“Relationships” is just a word used to describe the web of give and take that binds people together over time.
A transaction can take place without a relationship of any sort. However, a series of transactions that require choices to be made will slowly build into some sort of relationship, with a brand, a store, a salesperson.
Successful selling in the long term relies on relationships, the transaction is just a score keeping mechanism.
So, next time you sell something to a customer you have not seen before, it would pay you to find out something about them. Ask some polite, human questions, positively reinforce the intelligence of their purchase decision, find out what else you may be able to do for them, and give yourself the opportunity to turn a transaction into the beginning of a relationship.
Feb 22, 2013 | Collaboration, Customers, Marketing, Social Media
David Ogilvy, fount of Intellectual Capital and the orginal “Madman”
Business is based on relationships, and generally the relationship comes before the business. As a result, you have to find a way to identify those with whom a commercially sustainable relationship is possible, then offer them sufficient value for them to buy from you.
Broadly there are four common ways to go about this:
Meet them in person
Meet them over the phone
Beat them over the head with advertising (primarily a consumer strategy rather than B2B)
Meet them via some sort of social media.
However, a fifth option is emerging rapidly:
Engage them via some sort of attractive e-content, that encourages them to come to you. If you can actually figure out how to achieve this outcome, the return on your investment in content will be huge.
So, the real question is what do you need to do to make the content compelling. Pretty simple, basic marketing stuff, perhaps so simple that most just gloss over it, offering insufficient thought, so here goes with a list:
- Define who your ideal customer is, and “e-talk” to them, in their language, looking at your offering from their perspective, not yours.
- Make sure the content interesting, informative, offers distinctive Intellectual Capital that conveys your proposition clearly.
- Be clear about the value they will derive from a relationship
- Ensure the post, blog, whatever it is, can be easily shared, and encourage that sharing
- Have a call to action, the Rule number 1 of direct marketing!
- Relentlessly monitor responses, and experiment with the message and they way it is packaged.
When you are doing all that, you are being smart at blogging, or social media, does not matter what you call it, you are using the power of the digital age to engage, and create the opportunity for a sale.
Feb 18, 2013 | Collaboration, Governance, Leadership, Personal Rant
It is wonderful to consider the impact the Prime Ministers “A Plan for Australian Jobs” announcement over the weekend has had, already, on Australian jobs.
-
- Multitudes of grateful bureaucrats have laboured mightily for months and months, crafting and re-crafting the words of the announcement to ensure it does not say anything that may attract any critical comment, and includes every existing program and hopeful announcement at least twice,
- Favoured consultants are rejoicing at the fees to date, and to come,
- Advertising and PR agencies wriggle to the bar to celebrate the coup of gaining “the account”,
- Engaged lawyers, consultants, bureaucrats, researchers, and grant trough dwellers, rejoice at the billion dollar bait now on the table.
But what about the rest of us, those who struggle to compete in the real world?
Lots of well meaning, multi-syllable words that ensure there is no accountability for anything, just continuous blather, platitudes and clichés. Oh, and the plan tells us they will spend a $billion of our money. It is after all, “our responsibility to assist in the structural adjustment process in the economy”. We, as obedient and loyal servants, should be grateful the Government has finally realised the parlous state of manufacturing in this country, and are doing something about it.
I read the plan, twice in fact because I thought I must have missed the important and insightful bit the first time through. You can save yourself a bit of time and read the summary, that is useful, but please consider the following whilst you do:
-
- Minister Combet says in his introduction that the plan is “Supporting Australian industry to increase exports and win more business abroad”. Call me pedantic, but I thought increasing exports and winning more business abroad were the same thing, and besides, what has Austrade been doing for the last 40 years?. Having run a real business on contract for a Federal department, set up with the express aim of increasing agricultural exports with a budget of 6 million over 3 years, which attracted the ire of the “You cannot subsidise exports” Nazi’s in Canberra, I can only wonder what a billion is doing for their collective blood pressure.
- There is a fair bit of verbiage about “fostering clusters” in the report. There is no doubt that clusters can become innovation hotbeds. Everyone with a pig in the race points to the tech miracle of Silicon Valley, and the medical cluster centered on Boston, amongst a few others, but forgets that they took decades to evolve, (a bit longer than the average election cycle in the first world) and the evolution of successful clusters has had nothing to do with public investment beyond the provision of high quality public infrastructure, schools, universities, transport, and power. Every investment (to my knowledge)by a Government in an overt effort to build a “cluster” around the world has failed, or is failing in the absence of a long term investment in infrastructure.
- Oh the joy of a good acronym! The plan is full of them, some new, some recycled, but the gold standard is a beauty: G.O.L.D. standing for “Growth Opportunities and Leadership Development”. Wonderful isn’t it, must have come from an orgasmic Eureka moment for someone. Clearly, I am just being petty.
- A headline objective of this plan is “Creating a stronger, fairer, and simpler tax and transfer system and reducing red tape” Great sentiment, but all through the plan is articulated the need for more legislation, regulation, and creation of various advisory and oversight bodies. When I was at school, these sorts of additions would consume added resources, add complication, and create demarcation squabbles amongst agencies. Not a lot of “simpler, fairer” in this lot that I can see.
- This is the last whinge, perhaps the best, so congratulations if you have got this far. There is a graph 5.1 on page 23 of the report that shows collaboration across a number of economies, which is presumably there to demonstrate the value of collaboration, which the government wants to (correctly in my view) foster. The figures show Australia at about 18% (of what is not really clear to me) next door to Germany, held up as a poster child of manufacturing excellence, at 19%, and China, at 19.5%. The field is lead by a Black Caviar like stretch by Britain at 69%, but the last time I looked, the British economy was a basket case. Perhaps the graph is a mistake, showing the opposite of the Governments argument, or perhaps the situation has changed because the data is so bloody old, or perhaps my simple old brain has been scrambled by the clichés and acronyms.
Australian manufacturing is in a hole, and rule 1 of my rules of holes says that “once you realise you are in a hole, stop digging”. There is little in this plan that actually throws away the shovel, it just burnishes it for more use. The real challenge is the endless duplication, commercial naivety, turf wars, lack of gumption, and the assumption that all problems can be legislated away that infests our elected bodies and their bureaucrats that is the greatest hurdle Australian manufacturing has to jump.
Header cartoon courtesy TomGauld.com
Jan 14, 2013 | Collaboration, Social Media
Perhaps the most profound effect of the now almost ubiquitous availability of connectivity is the move from a communication landscape that is controlled by the few who have the capital to buy the gear and produce stuff with it, to everybody with a mobile phone being a producer.
The old world, where there were two options, one to many, as in the case of a publisher of any media, or one to one, as in the case the telephone and letter, is dead. Now we have many to many, and the old way has been swamped.
It happened in the London bombings in July 2005. The news of the bombings was broken by commuters with phones, and for a while those caught inside the security cordons set up were the only source of information. The news of the earthquake in China in 2008 exploded onto the net before the US Geological service posted news that an earthquake had happened onto its information site. It now happens every day, the NSW bushfires were first reported by passersby, and the alert mechanisms for places in danger now rely on social media.
On a similar, but far more personal vein, I heard of the death of Arran Swartz over the weekend via various blog sites I follow, but did not see the first news story until about 5 minutes ago. Vale a true activist innovator, gone way too young.
Marketers who wish to remain relevant need to adjust their thinking to accommodate and leverage this revolution in the velocity of information. Indeed, the only organisations unaffected are those that contain only one person. Hermits are pretty rare these days, and they probably have a phone anyway.
Jan 9, 2013 | Collaboration, Operations, Small business
We all negotiate every day, from the small mundane things in our lives to once in a decade decisions.
Two simple considerations play a key role in the outcome:
1. Controlling the environment in which the negotiation takes place, and
2. Constructing the conversation such that the other party nominates their expected outcome first.
A successful negotiation is one that has all parties leave the table happy and prepared to execute on the agreement, but consider the impact at something like location can have on the behavior.
Imagine you are negotiating a major deal, and the other party nominates a 5 star location as the venue, compared to going to their plant and conducting the negotiation in the factory lunch-room. It is likely that the differing locations will impact on your expectations?.
Anchoring is the psychological process underlying the point from which a negotiation starts, and generally dictates the region in which it finishes.
Research by Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist with a Nobel laureate in economics, displays this anchoring behaviour in experiments using a roulette wheel. He asked subjects to guess the percentage of African nations in the UN after spinning the wheel. Was the number greater or less than the number on the wheel?. Subjects who saw a low number on the wheel consistently guessed the percentage of African membership lower than those who saw a high number.
Clearly the roulette wheel has no impact on the number of African UN members, but the number at which the wheel stopped played a significant role in anchoring responses to the question.
