Oct 28, 2013 | Alliance management, Communication, Management
A story on myself.
I am in the middle of a small project that requires considerable collaboration amongst people not used to collaborating. Always challenging.
In a conversation over the weekend with an old mate, wise in the ways of start-ups, he offered me a gentle shove by saying:
“Sometimes people spend huge amounts of time and energy getting their ducks in a row. Pity it does not really matter what they look like, it is what you do with the ducks that counts”.
Ouch.
What are you doing with your ducks?
Oct 21, 2013 | Communication, Governance, Lean, Operations
I had a post prepared for this morning, relating to the evolution of “local” agriculture, specifically around Sydney.
However, the events of the weekend, the burning of Sydney’s surrounding bushland, including several of the farms of those I have been talking to, seems to make everything else trivial by comparison. Getting your head around the scale of the fire disaster facing us is difficult, for most of us, most of the time, as it is no-one close to us who is affected, so can be pushed aside as we go about our business.
This morning is different.
Walk outside your comfy suburban home, and look at the sky, smell the smoke, observe the odd orange light, and you just know this is different, it is not just another Sydney summer bushfire. Hurts to wonder what may happen when summer actually gets here.
As we watch and listen to the news reports, there is a huge application of technology and human effort to managing the logistics of the fire-fighting effort, but one shot on a news report caught my attention. Behind all the activity of the control centre, the people on phones and computers, handling reports and updates, stood a big whiteboard, what appeared to be a visual record of the fires, their relative risk, resources deployed, resources expected and in reserve.
It always happens, people relate to visual material, when under pressure, a picture can immediately summarise a situation that words alone cannot, so they tend to gravitate to pictures, or a whiteboard in a large group situation, something that can be kept up to date in real time, that all people who need to see it, can see it as it evolves. The whiteboard is perhaps the best collaboration tool ever invented.
When the fires are out, the cleanup someone elses problem, and the inevitable wrangling with insurance is the news topic of the day, the lessons of visual should remain with all of us as we go about improving the way we go about achieving goals.
Our thoughts go to all those who have been impacted by the fires, ands will be over the next few days as the fires continue to ravage Sydney’s bush outskirts. Our grateful thanks for the courage, and committment of the “fireies”
Sep 2, 2013 | Communication, Management, Small business, Social Media
Digital technology has offered all of us an astounding range of opportunities to challenge and interact with our social environment, creating as we go. Gary Hamel has summarised them into a “5 C” list,:
Contribution
Connection
Creation
Choice
Challenge.
You read them, you just know the truth of it, but the next step, the really hard one, is how to harness the potential energy unleashed by these revolutions.
As a consultant to small businesses, I find no lack of energy, determination, and intelligent, informed risk taking, but I do find that the digital revolution has marched past the capabilities of many of the established businesses, and as time passes, the gap just becomes wider.
Recognising the presence of the capability gap, and finding a way to bridge it is rapidly becoming the most significant challenge faced by SME’s. Until that bridging has happened, digital is a millstone rather than a freedom, and freedom feels great!.
Go for it.
Aug 27, 2013 | Communication, Lean, Marketing, Social Media
Lean thinking is well established in manufacturing and office operations, but social media?
Hardly?
Lean thinking is all about the removal of anything that does not add value to the customer. So, if we extend this a bit to potential customers as well, given that Social media is now being extensively used in marketing programs, and ask ourselves weather that post, tweet, or message of some sort is adding value, or just clogging up the recipients feed.
For most of us, time is our most valuable resource. Therefore, it should be incumbent on us as responsible marketers, setting out to gain the interest, and trust of customers, not to waste their time with trivia, irrelevance, and what amounts to directed SPAM.
Most people reading this blog are still working out their menu of Social media usage. Each platform has differing characteristics of usage and ecosystem of users, and like most software, most users leverage a small percentage of the capability. Once you spend a bit of time and recognise which platform suits the way you want to interact, be ruthless about removing the “waste” by saying goodbye to those that are not worth the investment of your time.
However, the advent of automated marketing is adding another dimension. Once a marketer has your email address and christian name, it can be hard to recognise a robot from a real person, and often the “Unsubscribe” button is hard to find.
Not a good way to engage a potential customer.
We should be asking ourselves a few questions before we send out anything:
- How does this communication add to the sum of knowledge “recipient” has?
- What value is that knowledge to “recipient” , or are we just filling a quota?
- Where is the humanity of the message communicated?
Tough questions, which will both increase the response rate, because to answer them takes time, research, and sensitivity, and annoy less recipients, simply because the message will add value by addressing their needs.
Jul 31, 2013 | Communication, Social Media
“We just clicked”
It’s an old expression to describe the situation where you meet someone, and find a lot to talk about, mutual interests, and an immediate comfort in each others company for some reason.
In the digital world, it means something entirely different, implying a “friending” of someone on a social site, or a “click-through” on an e-vertisement or link on a site.
The key difference is the presence or otherwise of a real person, not an avatar, not a site, or a blog, a real person, whose hand you can shake, eyes you can smile into.
The value of a real relationship, one with a person, should never be confused with the number of “friends” on a social media site.
Humans are social animals, and while we might call this thing taking over our lives “Social media” it perhaps could be better called “Anti-Social media”
Jul 3, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Sales
Price is always a sticky subject.
In most cases, sales people have been trained to slide over answering the inevitable, and often first question about price, until the value of the sales proposition has been established with the potential buyer.
That is the way it was.
Now, we all seek information on specification, availability, options and list price using the net, all information that in an earlier time, the salesperson could dole out as the sales process evolved. Therefore the decision is often almost made before a salesman has the opportunity to become engaged in the process.
When your sales prospect types “Widget prices” into Google, because that is their last question, the top 10 results, which is all most of us look at, are the ones that have “widgets from $100” or “Worlds cheapest widgets” in the headline.
You have just lost control of the conversation if you are not there.
Web sites are different to face to face, the emotion, the human interaction and the potential that humanity brings to the process has been removed, and you need to replace it with something that creates the opportunity for a conversation.
If you are on the web to sell, and the product is such that potential customers will ask the price early in the game, don’t be afraid, be proud, and put your pricing up front, along with your value proposition, so at least you might get a chance to talk about it.
