What is the most challenging goal you could set?

Oct 14, 2019 | Branding, Management, Strategy

 

 

Simplicity.

We live in an ever more complicated world, and our instinctive response to external complication leads to internal complication in order to be able to manage the external.

Having ‘Simplicity’ as a driving goal, something to be strived for, has the potential to offer rewards from internal savings made by the reduction in ‘friction. It also delivers benefits to customers, making it easier, and more exciting to do business with you than an alternative.

These benefits translate into cost savings and revenue increases for the business, and added value for customers, a virtuous cycle.

It does not matter if you run the corner sandwich shop, or a multinational corporation, the challenge is the same, just the size of it varies.

Apple under Steve Jobs made Simplicity more than just a goal, it was the glue that held the culture together. Simplicity became, as Jobs said, the ultimate sophistication.

Mark Twain in writing a letter to his wife wrote ‘I have written you a long letter, because I did not have the time to write a short one.‘ This captures the essence of simplicity: it is hard, even for experts to achieve.

The power, as well as the challenge, is in the simplicity

 

Header Photo: courtesy Flikr and Jeannie Tseng.

 

 

 

Do you need a Digital Strategy?

Sep 27, 2019 | Change, Governance, Strategy

 

 

‘Digital Transformation’ and its sibling ‘Digital Strategy’  have become clichés, unfortunately, as it distorts the management and leadership challenges involved.

However you choose to label the evolution from the analogue world of last century, to the digital ecosystems we now see evolving, it is a process, starting with the simplest things, and moving progressively along to the more complicated.

‘Digital’ is no longer a choice,  it simply is!

How many of you have a ‘Telephone Strategy’? Nobody, it is simply a necessary tool, used better by some than others.

The failure of many ‘digital transformations’ I have seen has little to do with the digital tools, and a whole lot to do with the way people are managed, led, and the manner in which the enterprise leadership enables the evolution to digital to occur.

As with any process, in any transformation, including ‘digital’, there are some pretty simple to say, but hard to execute steps to be taken,

  • Define the business outcomes you are seeking.
  • Start with the simple, test, learn, and move progressively to the more complex, building as you go.
  • Recognise and accommodate the wider impacts. In any digital evolution, your business model should evolve in sympathy. As you progressively digitise, the friction  between the old and the new will become more intense, and potentially disruptive to operations if not managed well. This seems to frequently lead to some expensive consultant recommending you devise a ‘Digital Strategy’.
  • Define the new capabilities required. Inevitably new capabilities will replace the ones that made you successful last century. This part of the evolution can be very confronting and painful, but is inevitable. It can also chew up lots of cash, which is often hard to justify using the short term quantitative measures we favour over taking a longer term, but more qualitative view of what the future might look like.

Nothing about a digital transformation is easy, but if it was, anyone could do it successfully, and we know from observation that is not true.

 

Header credit. Another stinging but insightful cartoon by Tom Fishburne at www.marketoonist.com

The 7 principals of business success.

The 7 principals of business success.

Sep 4, 2019 | Leadership, Strategy

 

Over a long career, I have seen many successes, and just as many, if not more, failures. In both cases, there are a small number of common factors. The successes all have most, if not all, of the factors below, and the failures are typified by their absence.

Be constantly learning.

All business skills are learnable, so be constantly learning. Business skills are  not rocket science, business is in principal simple, and the skills are there to be learnt. This is not to say you will be the best in the world at it, but you will be good enough to make a huge difference. How many people do not understand how their accounts work, the basics of marketing, how to be a leader rather than just a manager? All these things are easy in principal, and those skills can be learned, with time and commitment.

New things rarely work first time.

You might try a Facebook add campaign, or different sales pitch, and it does not work, but nothing works entirely as expected first time.  Aim for the top 10% in your field, experiment, be different, and learn as you go. The alternative is to aim low, and you might just get there.

Leverage.

Doing more with less. Leverage risks becoming a cliché of the business coaching set, but it is not a new idea, just a recycled one. Organisations of any type have at the core of their existence rarely stated, the recognition that together we get more done than alone, and to work together takes some form of organisation. That organisation offers the benefit of leverage.

Work on, not just in, your business.

Every  business, whatever the size has two dimensions. The first is transactional, the things that have to be done in order to deliver a product or service for which someone is prepared to pay. The second is to determine what I call the ‘which’. Which customer, which product, which capability, which market segment, which advertising channel, you get the idea. It is all about the choices that need to be made that have no direct impact on any individual transaction as it occurs. A disturbingly common factor in small business failure I see is the functional focus of the person who started the business. They may be a great  electrician, architect, retailer, or whatever, and their time is spent in the functional area where they are comfortable, the ‘in your business’ things at the expense of  the wider questions of ‘Which,’ that are all about ‘on your business’ issues.

Have goals.

Short term medium term, long term. All change starts with a change in your mental models, and to grow and prosper, change is essential. Another cliché, if you are not running hard, you are being left behind. See in your mind what things could be like, that leads to a change in actions as a result. If the mindset does not change, it does not matter how many tools and techniques you see and learn, if the mind set does not change, it will be all for nothing.

Why.

Understanding your ‘Why’  your business purpose creates the potential for synergy and alignment of people and resources, that is needed to enable you to jump the hurdles that will emerge.

People. Nothing happens without them. A business is not a business until it engages with people, employees, stakeholders, funders, and customers. Never forget the customer is really king, they are peope too, not numbers on a spreadsheet, and never forget the people who make it all happen.

How many of these factors can you identify in your business? Winning is not an accident, it takes long, hard work, physically, intellectually and emotionally, and you cannot do it alone. Give me a call when you need some independent and experienced input.

Header photo courtesy of Hugh McLeod at gapingvoid.com

The sad and entirely avoidable death of a great old FMCG brand.

The sad and entirely avoidable death of a great old FMCG brand.

Aug 26, 2019 | Branding, Innovation, Marketing, Strategy

Currently in my cupboard almost gone, is a bottle of detergent, a well known and trusted brand, formerly the market leader, been around for ages.

It will not be bought again by anyone in my household.

Here is what I suspect happened.

Sales of the brand were eroding as cheaper, usually house branded product ate into the volumes. Somewhere in the multinational that owns the brand there was a bright young thing charged with resurrecting volumes, a project to ‘test their metal,’ requiring a 20% increase for success to be declared.

He, or more likely these days, she, did the corporate rounds seeking inspiration.

The R&D people believed they could improve the performance of the product by utilising a new emerging technology, but it required an extensive  R&D program to clarify some of the technical issues. No budget available.

The Engineering people reckoned they could speed up the line, reducing costs by updating, at considerable capital cost, the existing machinery, making production cheaper and more flexible. This would  reduce the systemic out of stock problem caused by the long runs required to generate factory efficiencies. These factory KPI’s are completely disconnected to the increasing difficulty of forecasting sales as volumes erode and become more erratic. No capital budget available.

The accountants are arguing for a price increase as well as a reduction in retailer promotional spend, as the gross margins fall below their target rates. Neither tactic seems well suited to the problem at hand.

The advertising agency strongly recommended a multi million dollar integrated TV, Magazine and digital marketing campaign, designed to bring back lapsed users to the brand, while intriguing new users to give it a try. No budget available.

The marketing he/she concerned reckoned it would be easier and cheaper to make the hole in the top bigger, make the product flow faster, encouraging a quicker usage cycle and therefore increasing replacement sales.

On a spreadsheet it looks logical, sensible, and with a great ROI. Everybody was happy, especially the product manager, who could see the trappings of corporate success coming his/her way by Christmas.

Whoops: forgot the value conscious consumer, to whom the integrity of the brand had remained, until now,  an important consideration, and who is not stupid. She is my wife, (who still does the bulk of the shopping) and believe me,  she is absolutely unforgiving.

Being captured by the interaction of functional KPI’s, status quo management processes, and resistance to any change, is a common corporate problem. It is unsolvable by anyone other than the Boss, who is mostly too busy contemplating the forest next door (or their navels) to see the trees in the forest they currently occupy, and take some decisive action.

When your brand, marketing, and innovation processes need a reality check, call me to tap into the ‘experience bank’ in my possession. 

A pox on their houses!

A pox on their houses!

Aug 14, 2019 | Marketing, rant, Strategy

 

It seems that ‘Influencers’ are chasing me everywhere.

I have been receiving messages from one who needs me to be rescued by using the product she flogs. Perhaps it will make me look younger, but I doubt it, and I certainly would not pony up the absurd amount of money to buy it from her special friend, at the special once off price, only available to her followers.

I am not a follower, nor am I a 24 year old female millennial, and I have been around way too long for the nonsense about scarcity to have any effect at all on me.

All I would like to know is who the hell sold her my mobile phone number, and why does she think I am interested?

There is nothing wrong with using a celebrity, someone with real influence, to provide a spokesperson for your product. It has been a valuable element in the marketing armoury since the advent of advertising.

However, it is dumb to use a celebrity in the absence of a creative idea, born of a strategy.  A way of communicating the value your product can deliver to those who may buy and use it.

I am perhaps old and cranky, but the hugely increasing use of so called ‘influencers’ self styled gurus of nothing important, gives me the Tom Tits. 

If you want to demonstrate the paucity of your strategic marketing chops, go pay some silly Instagram influencer a pile of money to post your rubbish on their site, so the bots can like it and they can charge you piles of money that could be put to better use.

It is lazy, lazy, and no substitute for doing the hard work of diagnosis of the problem or opportunity, followed by the development of an appropriate strategy. This necessitates hard work,  making difficult choices, accepting risks, and implementing, learning, and going again.

Too often I see silly marketing people convincing themselves that an influencer campaign, whatever the hell that may be, is the solution to, well,  whatever, which is normally all about being seen to be doing something.

Do the work instead.

 

Cartoon credit: Courtesy Tom Fishburne at marketoonist.com

 

 

 

Processes are not goals, but goals are daydreams without processes.

Processes are not goals, but goals are daydreams without processes.

Aug 2, 2019 | Change, Strategy

 

Life is so very complicated.

We are always being told that to be successful requires that we set goals, and stick to them, work for them, focus, focus.

However, in my observation, a goal without a process to achieve that goal is useless, nothing more than a fantasy.

On the other hand, all the work I do with those who run  factories are about continuous improvement. Finding often tiny ways to deliver incremental productivity by removing the items, actions, and complications that hinder the ‘flow’ through a system delivers sustainable improvement.

Over time, the compounding impact is huge.

This has nothing to do with goals, but everything to do with mindset.

Can you achieve a goal without a systemic way of delivery that requires change?

Yes, but that goal will not be sustaining.

I observe those around me in this obese community setting out regularly to lose weight. Often they do, by a combination of exercise and ‘starving’ themselves, but immediately the goal weight has been reached, they relax, and the weight goes back on. They achieved the goal, but failed to have a process in place that made the weight loss sustainable.

If those same people just did some regular exercise, cut out sugar and fast foods, and ate less more often, then, over time, they would lose weight. In effect, they have adopted a process without necessarily having a goal.

My kids were all elite athletes, and they had goals, the big long term ones, but way more important, the ‘micro goals,’ the things they were working on every day to improve an element just a fraction, and a fraction a day, over time makes a huge difference. They were given an improvement process by their coaches, and while the long term goal was always there, it was never the focus, the day by day process was the focus.

Do the work, stick to the process, and the results will come.

Header cartoon is more visual advice from Dilbert via Scott Adms.