Aug 22, 2024 | Collaboration, Communication, Governance
Throughout history, humans have existed in small groups, tribes, and clans. We have worked together for the common good of the small tribe, and often, perhaps most often, been at odds with the tribe across the river.
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar introduced his theory that humans can maintain stable social relationships with no more than 150 people. This is a theory now so well accepted that ‘Dunbar’s number‘ has almost become a cliché.
The phrase ‘Stable Social Relationships’ has particular relevance in the age of social media platforms. How many friends do you have on Facebook, connections on LinkedIn, followers on Instagram?? For many, it is way beyond 150, often into the many hundreds, and often thousands.
How do you maintain Stable Social Relationships’ with that number of people?
Answer: you cannot.
Social media gets the blame for all sorts of things, rightly so, but it is not the fault of the platforms, it is the fault of evolution.
Our application of technology has run way ahead of our evolutionary capacity to manage it and retain the relationships that made us the most successful species ever.
It seems to me that the growth of private messaging, reversion to personalised even hand written notes, and emotional engagement of ‘Local’ things is a response to the ‘platformisation’ of our social relationships.
I think it is a trend that will continue and grow.
The power of social media platforms will slowly erode as more one to one enablers incrementally retake the ground lost. In the process, we humans will build up ‘evolutionary resistance’ to their power.
I do however see some hurdles in the way, the dark side of social media is as powerful as ever, and Dr Dunbar has little advice on that score.
Header cartoon credit. Lynch. (I have no idea where I found it)
Aug 14, 2024 | Analytics, Marketing, Sales
There is lots of talk, often sales-hype from digital urgers, about Lifetime Customer Value. When applied correctly, it is a vital measure, but when you look closely, it often means lifetime customer revenue.
Revenue is of little commercial value in the absence of margin, so the discussion can be completely misleading.
Understanding the margin generated by customer segments, or in some cases, individual customers is an immensely valuable metric that enables you to focus resources where there is the most benefit to the enterprise. You can make informed tactical choices with a great level of confidence based on the margin delivered.
Customer margin is also an enormously useful metric elsewhere.
Sales people are often rewarded on revenue, which can be gamed. Margin over time is much harder to game, and a far better measure of the effectiveness of a salesperson in delivering value to the enterprise while serving customers.
Similarly, calculating the cost of acquisition of a customer gains traction when measured against margin rather than revenue.
One of my clients businesses relies on referrals as a source of business. Increasingly they are moving towards margin on converted referrals as the single metric that best measures the impact of their marketing and product delivery efforts.
You cannot generate margin in the absence of revenue, but you are easily able to generate revenue without margin. Not a good idea!!
As an aside, also beware of the difference between margin and mark-up. They are similarly often used to mislead the unwary.
Jun 14, 2024 | Communication, Governance
You cannot expect the right answer to come from the wrong question.
Too often we spend inordinate amounts of time trying to answer those questions before we understand the context or the ‘frame’ from which the answer will come.
Before anything else, to ensure the best answer possible, consider all the ‘frames’ through which the situation in front of you could be seen. Hypothesise what alternatives to the immediately obvious could be possible that might drive the situation you are examining.
Several months ago, early on a summer Saturday evening, I was walking my dog. As I passed the church at the end of my street, I saw a vague acquaintance crying.
There were a few other people milling around, so I just made an assumption without realising that is what I had done, and offered to help if I could. Her response was that she was Ok, crying for joy, her first grandchild had just been baptised.
Clearly the question that popped into my head led to an entirely to the wrong conclusion that her crying was from distress.
The frame through which I observed the woman crying led to making an automatic, but incorrect conclusion.
How often in our commercial lives do we ask questions which just assume the presence of some factor, when in fact that assumption is wrong?
The lesson here is make sure you have the context right before you start coming up with answers.
Header credit: Tom Gauld at www.tomgauld.com
Apr 10, 2024 | Analytics, Communication
It seems that ‘the truth’ is a malleable concept.
We are overwhelmed by opinion masquerading as fact, economic and social models designed to deliver a predetermined outcome, managed correlation equated to causation, and market research that asks the wrong questions of the wrong people.
What is truth to one person is nonsense to another.
We should be able to see ‘the truth’ about what has passed, there is data that should distinguish fact from fiction. However, we still fail to discern the truth from amongst the data available for analysis.
Who is winning the war in the Ukraine?
Depends on who you ask, and both sides have data that shows conclusively that they are winning.
Remember Vietnam? I do.
The Americans had an overwhelming advantage in material, technology, and logistics. How could a little country with few resources and no technology of their own, face and win against the mightiest war machine the world has ever seen?
Impossible but it happened.
Until the Tet offensive commenced in January 1968, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind, apart from the North Vietnamese, that it was only a matter of time until the might of the Americans became overwhelming.
The Americans had data that proved to them they were winning, despite the secret conclusions contained in the Pentagon Papers. It was not until the spring offensive in 1974 that it was obvious to all that the American ‘Facts’ that were being analysed were irrelevant, and the conclusions drawn were terminally wrong.
The clear answer to the question in the header is: ‘only when you analyse the right data.’
Header credit: Hugh McLeod at Gapingvoid.com
Mar 21, 2024 | Collaboration, Governance, Marketing, retail, Strategy
Collaboration between competitors is illegal, but tough to prove. It is also the natural state of affairs in an oligopoly.
When a competitive market evolves over time into an oligopoly, the focus of management attention of the remaining oligopolists moves from the customer to the competitor. With the resources available to an oligopolist in any decent sized market, they will know in considerable detail the strategies, internal processes, pricing, and resource allocation choices made by their competitors almost as quickly as they happen.
Supermarket competition in Australia has evolved in this manner. It has turned from ruthless competition for customers 40 years ago, to ruthless collaboration between the two major players now.
Collaboration is illegal, and I am sure that the leaders of the two supermarket gorillas are not setting prices together, or collaborating in other ways that would be contrary to the competition laws in this country. However, given there are only two of them, and they have the resources to watch the other very carefully, there is a sort of quasi co-operation that emerges.
It is driven by the commonality of their activities: The need for shareholder returns, driven by market share acquisition costs, both fixed and variable. They work aggressively on both, and if they did not, the senior management would be fired. In addition, directors have legislated fiduciary responsibilities under the Corporations act in relation to shareholder interests and importantly, returns.
We must also remember that via our superannuation funds, we are all shareholders in Coles and Woolworths.
Once again, just like the ‘housing crisis’, we have short term populist press release driven band-aids being suggested. They are touted as the remedy for long term strategic choices made in the past that to some, have turned sour.
The time for institutional concern about the increasing power of supermarket chains was when they were assembling the scale they now have. All of the take-overs and mergers that have happened have been waved through by the ACCC. This is despite commentary at the time about the impact of the lessening of competition for the consumers dollar.
Now it is too late, other remedies must be found, which do not include a forced break-up. Apart from the immorality of retrospectively applying new rules to the conduct of business, there is no logical or practical way to break apart either of the supermarket chains.
We should stop bleating, and get on with life, while ensuring we do not make the same mistake again.
Header credit: Gapinvoid.com. The cartoon put a huge amount of meaning into a simple graphical form. Thanks Hugh!!
Mar 19, 2024 | Governance, Marketing
Recently at a meeting of SME’s, I found myself in a conversation about accessing government grants, initiated by a guest speaker. She was a very impressive woman with significant experience delivering grants from the Department of Industry.
The notable omission was, in my opinion, a view that reflected the experience of someone contemplating investing the time and energy into an application should consider.
Full disclosure: I ran a small grant funding business called Agri Chain Solutions as a contractor for almost 3 years from 1999 to 2002. It was a company limited by Guarantee, with a commercial board, and ranks as the only time I am aware of that a task has been outsourced by the federal Bureaucracy in this manner. The department concerned, then called Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries Australia (AFFA) was implacably opposed to the exercise, and only complied after express instruction from John Howard, as the then new PM.
Following is a list of the irritations you can expect.
- Ambiguous guidelines, and sometimes they appear to be on roller-skates as you seek clarification.
- Unusable templates, seemingly designed to frustrate applicants.
- Bureaucratic time and commercial time do not match. The process will always take longer and consume more resources than you think would be possible as you initiate the process.
- The revolving door of ‘officials’ who will manage your application, through to the approval and then implementation. You will constantly be covering the same ground, again, and again, as departmental personnel rotate.
- Commercial in confidence: it does not exist.
- Rounds and the money has run out. For ease of management, most grant programs operate in ’rounds’, and when the money for that round has been allocated, bad luck. You could reapply in the next round. This system disregards overall merit, replacing it with merit in a particular round. The result is weak projects in less competitive rounds are sometimes approved, when in later more competitive rounds, highly meritorious projects miss out.
- The effect of influence of competitive rent seekers. Who you know is always important.
- The time taken to prepare without any indication of the probability of success usually challenges resources of SME’s. This leaves the field open to larger companies with the staff, who probably need the grants less.
- Having inexperienced young bureaucrats believing they’re important, and can dictate to you particularly in grant implementation.
- Recognise at the outset that an application will take a long time, consume significant resources, and you may not be successful. When you are not successful, the reasons for the failure may never be clear.
- Grants are taken into account as revenue, and therefore if you make a profit, you pay tax on it.
- Finally, what is important to you is usually absolutely irrelevant to those responsible for assessing and progressing your application for ‘their’ money. They are just people with their own baggage, ideas, perceptions, ambitions, and worries. Your application amongst all the others in the pile hardly rates on their radar.
Header credit: Cartoon by Tom Gauld from New Scientist magazine.
