Jun 23, 2014 | Governance, Leadership, Management
http://tobytripp.github.io/meeting-ticker/
Meetings are supposed to be a place where work gets done, accountabilities exercised options articulated and examined, decisions made, and outcomes reported. However, often they become just a reason to have another meeting.
Whilst the public sector comes in for some pretty harsh criticism, they are not alone.
Last week I found myself in a meeting called by a prospective client so I felt it sensible to attend and contribute.
No agenda, minutes of the previous meeting were supplied as we walked into the room, no definitive objective, just another bloody meeting.
To amuse myself, I tried to calculate the cost of the thing, thousands, and found myself thinking about the waste, and how to fix it, and only came up with the same stuff I have written about before. Serendipitously, later in the day, my inbox “plinked” with a lovely little cartoon from Hugh MacLeod that does his usual great job of nailing the topic with a few words and lines, and links.
The infographic in one link is terrific, and the meeting clock is wonderful, I will use it regularly from here on in when I see wasted resources being directed towards massaging someone’s ego, or “busywork” being done by having another bloody meeting.
Jun 5, 2014 | Governance, Management
JSF F-35 Lightening
I am not a car nut, but as a young bloke, I used to fix my own cars. There was not much you could not do without a reasonable set of Sidchromes, a block and tackle, mechanical manual, and a jack.
No longer.
My kids would no more set out to fix their own cars as fly, it is simply too complex. On the other hand, they have mastered the art of managing complexity by just knowing how to use stuff, and call for expert help when things go wrong.
Life is becoming incredibly complex, almost everything we do has dimensions that we cannot hope to understand and interact with, so we outsource. We ask the experts, take advice, seek guidance from those with the domain expertise we do not have. This is a healthy process, except when having asked the experts, we disregard their advice because it is inconsistent with some pre determined position, or expressed opinion.
Ego getting in the way.
We see it all the time in politics, expert advice disregarded by those who sought it to inform their decision making.
Last week Liberal backbencher Dennis Jensen, with a Phd in materials science, and a background in applied research, and so with some credibility on matters scientific had the balls to criticise Government. In a very worthwhile speech made to an almost empty Parliament he reflected on the apparent lack of uderstanding of how science works and the management of R&D priorities using the JSF project as a case in point as he had intimate knowledge of the decision making processes applied.
Economies are complex, and the competing demands on a finite pool of funds challenging to manage, but is that not why we employ experts? Why then disregard their advice in such a wholesale fashion as appeared to happen here?
Better stop thinking and get back to where the real action is, whichever crappy reality show is currently topping the ratings.
May 28, 2014 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Leadership, Small business
Mojowire.net.au
Tonight is the first Origin game of 2014, and so I expect to hear lots of people using sporting analogies over the next few weeks, particularly football.
Sporting analogies abound in business, “A team of champions does not make a champion team”
How many time have you heard that?
As management layers are removed, and the management culture evolves rapidly towards recognising the value of teams in a commercial context, we often use the sporting team as the foundation of the commercial team .
Familiarity, known skills, interpersonal relationships, all that stuff gets considered as a team is put together. Sometimes of course, in the real world teams are put together with whoever is to hand, has some spare time, is at the water cooler too often.
We confuse this simplified sporting stuff, useful in its own context, with the key components of a commercial team faced with commercial challenges.
In that case, you need a range of technical and domain skills, a questioning mentality, and a willingness to try things, and usually some diversity, some new or unusual blood being injected to create a sense of discomfort that always precedes game changing ideas and insights.
Unlike sporting events, which last for a hour, more or less, commercial challenges are way longer term, when the micro interaction is important more as a learning event than a game breaker.
May 14, 2014 | Branding, Management, Sales
expertflyfishingand camping.com
Creating a lead is a whole world of work and pain for many business people, followed by another, converting the lead into a transaction.
Too often I see the process followed as an aggressive “close at all costs” mentality. That approach rarely ever worked well for anything beyond one off transactions, and is even less effective now that digital communication has revolutionised the way we create, conduct and nurture relationships.
People like to buy from those they like and trust, basic human nature.
It follows therefore, that to make sales, you need to demonstrate that you are both likable and trustworthy, as well as being in a position to address the customers need and deliver value at least as well as alternatives.
Following is a three stage process:
- Humanise you marketing, you are selling to people, not “organisations”, people!
- Track relationships. Have a metric, and visual device that articulates the existing relationships with people, such as the one following.
3. Explicitly set out to build relationships, recognising that sales will follow, rather than the other way around. Having a visual representation of the state of a relationship, and an objective of moving up the pyramid, by understanding and acting on the drivers of a relationship will deliver mutual benefit, and a return on effort.
Each relationship, whatever its status, is an individual thing. It will have a range of parameters that will direct its development. How we met, what we look like, how we conduct ourselves, the mutual stories we have, how authentic we are, how consistent as are in the engagement and interaction, and the degree to which we are proactive, and generous in that engagement, and so on.
Managing the inputs to those parameters is a foundation of marketing success that was not possible just 20 years ago because we did not have the tools, but now we have, so there is no excuse.
May 12, 2014 | Change, Management, Social Media
Courtesy Geoff Roberts. http://timelessimagelab.com.au/
When my kids were young, stuff always headed towards the floor. If it happened to be a piece of bread, it always landed buttered side down, so we had the “3 second test”
Story to the kids was that it took the bugs 3 seconds to move from the floor onto their piece of bread, so if we picked it up within the 3 seconds, the bread was OK.
Seemed to work.
These days, the 3 second test applies elsewhere, to websites.
I have watched many people log onto a site, either directly, or via a search list, and it seems that if their attention is not grabbed within 3 seconds, they have not been engaged, they are gone.
This is really no different to skimming a newspaper, remember those?.
A headline, a great photo, and layout made our eye stop, and we spent an extra bit of time absorbing the “gist” and perhaps engaging more deeply in the story, reading the detail, feeling something, and perhaps taking an action.
As a relevant aside, Fairfax chopped 30 photographers last week.
A great photo is an eye stopper, one of the ways that they can be differentiated from the drab piccies done with by amateurs with phones that inhabit websites and social media particularly. Just when it is becoming increasingly obvious that visual is taking over, a medium struggling to stay relevant cuts a key source of relevance.
Use good photos in your communication, particularly on your website. The modest investment will pay you back in spades.
May 6, 2014 | Change, Management, Marketing, retail, Small business
Courtesy High McLeod @ Gaping Void
Retail has changed, very quickly and in a fundamental way, but not for everyone.
Retailers, the blokes with the bricks and mortar still hold sway in most markets, but to varying degrees, and can continue to do so if they are as smart as they have been in the past.
Consumers no longer have to go down to the store to buy much of their stuff, their store increasingly is in the palm of their hand. That is fine for cameras, refrigerators, and perhaps baked beans in a can, but not so good for fresh produce, meat, fruit & veg, and dairy, categories that are driving the profitability of supermarket retailers.
If we know anything, we know new models will come to light.
In the past, producers needed retailers to break down their bulk product, whether it be jeans, baked beans or refrigerators, and sell to consumers, but now consumers can go direct. So, it is not just the retailers who face change, it is the producers.
Held to ransom for years by retail that in effect sold them retail real estate while selling to the consumers, suppliers have some leverage back, and a few of them are game enough to love it.
The question both needs to answer is how they can best meet the needs of the newly empowered by information, consumer, who does not really care who supplies them the product, it is just about the convenience, choice, delivery and price of a transaction.
Looked at from this perspective, the retailer has a role to play in the relationships consumers have with brands, and suppliers, but they must make their money from a different model, one that relies on the manner in which they “touch” the sales process, rather than being the one solely in charge.
Sales leads that come from social media and the web are still just as likely to generate a sale in a physical retailer as they are on the web, and given that web sales are still a small proportion of total sales, using the web should be a seen as an opportunity, a bonus, not a threat, as Tesco in Korea has demonstrated.
It is perhaps telling of the times that the ACCC is mounting a case against Coles for beating up on its suppliers to improve its earnings. Nothing new there, but Coles management has an obligation to maximise earnings for shareholders.
The horse has bolted.
SME’s in the Australian food supply chain are now a rare breed, killed off my the high $A, retailer housebrand strategies, the scale of multinational competition, and poor management. The two retailers seem to have realised that without local supply, their long term options are limited, and so seem to be softening their short term demands in recognition that the sustainability of the food production value chain is in their interests.
PS Earlier today, after the initial publication of this post, I became aware that Big Sister Foods had been put in the hands of the administrators. While Big Sister is an Aussie company, part of that small club of natives, it spent 20 years as a part of Reckitt & Coleman in the 70’s and 80’s. Sadly I am not surprised, as their current website is about the worst I have ever seen, perhaps indicative of the declining state of the business.
