May 8, 2013 | Change, Management, Strategy
Success is the result of hard work, smarts, good teams, focus, with a hit of “right place, right time” thrown in, etc, etc, right? Right.
At least that is what I always believed, knocked into me by my Dad who believed, and lived by the credo that “the harder I work, the luckier I get”
Increasingly however, I am seeing success being a relative thing, significantly dependent on a whole host of factors outside our control, many that have perhaps only come into play since the net made our world so bloody complicated, immediate and transparent.
Bill Gates did well, right time and place with an idea that was new, but when he pitched it to IBM, the defining moment of his career, he was not to know that internally IBM had reached some strategic conclusions about how they would approach the emerging world of personal computing.
Contingency.
Ron Jones got fired three weeks ago from JC Penny, where he lasted 17 months after being hired to “Appelise” the aging department store retailer. The retail guru who saved Target, created the retail megastar that is Apple stores, failed to do anything but annoy JC Penny’s existing management who rebelled, and customers who went elsewhere.
Wrong strategy perhaps, but it had certainly worked before, demonstrating again the sensitivity of context, and that success is a fragile, elusive thing, dependent on all sorts of contingencies, making continuous experimentation a “must”.
Apr 15, 2013 | Management, Small business, Social Media
Over the weekend just gone, I was a part of a strategy group setting out to build the marketing plan for an occasional client. There were several guest speakers, one an articulate and persuasive purveyor of what I regarded to be social media snake oil, and so a vigorous debate ensued.
His contention was that every business, particularly SME’s needed to be active on every major SM platform, and that a part of every employees job was to represent the interests of their employer on the various platforms.
Superficially that argument has some attraction, as an advocate of SM for SME’s, it is hard to argue against a proposition that SM is more available than traditional media, and that employees should be engaged and committed, or they ceased to be useful employees.
However, there are three very real arguments against the proposition, all of which I used.
- Not all social media platforms are equal, and they play vastly different roles, attracting users for different reasons, and in different situations. Individually, each platform is just a small piece of the SM pie, but if you try and consume the whole pie, all you get is indigestion. Much better to understand the pie, and go to where the goodies are hidden.
- Then I thought about the senior maintenance engineer who had worked in the business for many years. An enormously competent and committed bloke, and great in a group at the pub, but the owner of a left field sense of what is funny, sometimes even acceptable, and what is not. Encouraging him to be anywhere near the 140 characters of Twitter sends shivers down the spine, but I desperately want him to continue running maintenance
- The clincher, SM is not free, it consumes lots of the most valuable resource an SME has, time. The invoices may be lower than with traditional and paid media, but the commitment of time to do a good job is significant, and most often will attract consulting fees of some sort as SME’s fill the capability gap, which then offers the opportunity to be paying for snake oil, unless you are good at identifying the snakes.
The real management task is to have a very clear business purpose, supported by a few strategies that have evolved from understanding the business, its value proposition, customers, competitors, and operating environment, and making the choices that drive the priorities and resource allocation decisions. Social Media is a part of the mix, an important part, but you need to be putting round pegs in round holes of the right size, and not getting confused about which is what.
Mar 18, 2013 | Innovation, Leadership, Management, Strategy
Well, they can’t, not without people. It is the people who think, then act to get stuff done via organisational processes. It does not matter if you are BHP, or a two person consultancy, it works the same way. Indeed, if you are a one man business, find others against whom you can test your individual thinking, and it will improve.
The essence of “thinking,” really teasing out the guts of a problem or situation is to make use of all the available data and opinions, not just those that agree with yours, not just those that rise from a similar set of assumptions, and certainly not those that lead to a semi-predetermined outcome.
People avoid conflict, it is uncomfortable, they avoid being on the outside of the crowd, but guess where all the really new stuff comes from, so the challenge in enabling organisations to think is to encourage conflict of the mind, to welcome ideas that challenge ours, and embrace the conflict.
The worst thing I have seen in 20 years of consulting on strategy, marketing and improvement is silence. It is always a strong indicator that the organisation is not thinking, but looking to the bosses to make the decisions, because they know best.
Bullshit I say, give me the friendly, heartfelt noise of active debate any time.
Mar 13, 2013 | Change, Lean, Management, Small business
Manufacturing SME’s in this country (Australia) are under severe pressure, particularly in heavily trade exposed industries like food manufacturing.
Yesterday, Windsor Farms was put into administration, a month ago, Rosella went the same way and is currently being liquidated in a fire sale, Heinz ceased to manufacture here a year ago, Goodman Fielder is a shadow of its former self, the list goes on.
To some extent, most of the failed, and failing businesses have adopted some of the elements of “Lean” often just seeing it as a way to cut costs, rather than recognising the wider implications for enterprise culture.
However, almost always, the accounting function is the last to make any substantive changes. Partly this is due to the conservative nature of the profession and its training, and partly the fault is accounting convention and regulation.
To survive, SME’s need to remove waste in all its forms. The stuff on the factory floor is easy to see, what is harder to see is the waste in time, effort, and morale that occurs in offices. The core service function in any enterprise is accounting, so change here can have substantial impact elsewhere. It is my view that setting about changing the focus of the accounting function from compliance and the traditional view of the published accounts to one focused on waste in all its forms, can pay huge dividends.
There are some great resources around, even though the thinking is still emerging. The take-up is remarkably slow given the dire circumstances of much of the manufacturing sector, so there is the scent of competitive advantage as well as just survival in the air.
This interview with Lean guru Bill Waddell is a terrific explanation, Brian Maskell has a range of material available free on his great site that offers some real thought starters. A recent blog post by Brian also led to this front page piece in “Strategic Finance” magazine, finally the profession starting to recognise the implications of lean accounting.
PS. March 13, 2013. Another established SME, Spring Gully, a 70year old family company goes to the wall. There is simply nothing left in the fabric of food manufacturing in this country, and in the long run, we will pay a very high price for that generational mismanagement of a pretty fundamental manufacturing sector.
Mar 12, 2013 | Lean, Management, Marketing, Operations
It is often said that for successful innovation to occur, you must be prepared to” fail often, fail cheap”.
Early testing and prototyping speeds up innovation cycle times, the longer a project proceeds with issues unnoticed or unfixed, the harder they become to fix, and the remediation is more costly and complicated.
Early failure enables hypothesis testing and idea generation, which can only increase the productivity of assets, human and otherwise that are applied to a development project.
The similarity to Lean Manufacturing methodology is extreme, where small batches matched to demand lead to smaller inventory of raw materials, finished goods and WIP.
Feb 26, 2013 | Change, Management, Sales
Sales, or as I prefer to call it, “Revenue generation” is the core of every business. No sales, no business. However, the thinking around performance assessment and management of sales is generally pretty superficial.
The demarcation of sales and marketing has also changed enormously with the collaboration and automation marketing tools that have emerged over the last few years. Cold calling is dead, replaced by an array of digital tools and techniques which are generally managed by marketing personnel.
Sales performance is under the microscope, and rightly so as it consumes significant resources, and provides the cash upon which survival depends. Why is it then that the measurement of sales has not evolved to the level of sophistication displayed in other functions.?
My thesis is that the obvious measures have been pretty effective to date, and are simple to use, so little thought has gone into it.
However, for the future, the old tools are not enough, so here is a shot at a framework with 3 axes that seek to acknowledge the huge changes that have occurred in the last 10 years
1. Management of the sales pipeline. There are three basic measures of the pipeline,
- The number and type of opportunities
- Value of those opportunities
- Progress through the pipeline, including the drop-out/re-introduction rates, velocity, closure times, resource consumption rates, and most importantly, conversion rates.
2. Where do the dollars go, and what are the returns. The granularity of the management here is simply a function of where the value is. In large businesses with a widely spread sales force, the detail can be extraordinarily useful as a management and motivational tool of both the way people spend their time, and what they spend their time doing.
3. Sales force optimisation. have the right people doing the right things, in priority order. Pretty simple, except that:
- we are dealing with people, and each one should be managed individually. I have never seen a salesforce that is not a mix of personality and work styles, matching the job to be done to the person is an art that comes only with experience.
- Ensuring execution of strategy at the coal face, where the fancy words, clichés and metaphors hold no water, and what counts are the real personal interactions that occur.
