Aug 13, 2012 | Innovation, Leadership
Being different is the guts of innovation, no matter how good, how big (or small) how effective, how cheap, if it is not different, none of the rest will matter a whit.
Why is it then, that we have processes and disciplines that weed out the deviances from the norm?
Who is to say the norm is right?
The bloke who always disagrees, has an odd view of the world, irritates, and creates discord is usually the first to go when times are tough, and when the boss needs to demonstrate his machismo, but sometimes, just sometimes, the deviate is right.
Those who see the world differently to most are usually those who have the potential to come up with something new, something that disrupts the status quo, they may also just be a pain in the arse, so the management task is to balance the odds, moderating the risk while cultivating the environment in which the whackos will flourish.
As George Bernard Shaw said, “all great things start as blasphemies”
Aug 10, 2012 | Management
An old mate of mine has only one rule of negotiation “he who mentions price first, loses”
Whilst there are other things that contribute to a successful outcome, he is right about the price. Once an expectation of price has been mentioned, it becomes the point from which other conversation evolves.
Typically: “I want $1,000 for it” “well, I would be willing to pay you $500”
This will evolve to a final price of $750, but had the initial price been $1,200, the end price may have been around $900.
Perhaps the most public example of this anchoring phenomenon I have seen is Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve, the acknowledged expert on the economy, who completely missed the GFC, simply did not see it coming despite many warnings. The preconceptions he had of the way the economy worked simply blinded him to alternatives. Later, after it became obvious that he was wrong, to the detriment of the US and ultimately world economy, he felt obliged to acknowledge his error before a congressional committee.
When negotiating anything, do not forget my mates rule 1, but recognise that it works across a wider field than just price. Any firm preconception will blind you to alternatives in a negotiation, particularly when there is an emotional investment in the result.
Aug 8, 2012 | Management, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Whilst I hesitate to add to the plethora of words dedicated to the saga of Fairfax, from the stupidity of “Young Warwick” onwards, it seems to me that there are a couple of points that nobody has made.
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- Consumers of media have not changed. They still want to see the news, sports, political analysis, and the latest fashions and foibles of the rich and stupid, and they still want it delivered, and are prepared to pay for it, but they now have options about the delivery not available 15 years ago. Your $60 a month broadband costs are just a different means of delivery of content, the stuff newspapers used to deliver exclusively, for about the same price.
- Newspapers revenue comes from advertising, the literal “Rivers of Gold” that flowed from the classifieds, not from consumers. The price paid at the newsagent (another anachronism of an older world) would not cover the costs of printing and delivering the paper, then disposing of the excess. Newspapers disengaged from the primary source of their revenue and profits, advertisers, whilst their consumers still want, and obtain their news fix, it is just that they can get it elsewhere.
The disruption in the newspaper industry is from the new competition for advertising dollars coming from new channels of content distribution, not from consumers of content turning away.
In all the fluff written about the Fairfax share price, the stalking by Gina, the so called “code of journalistic conduct” and the failure of the Chairman to come to terms with the competing views around the board table, I have seen nothing that points out the basic failure to recognise who is your customer, and who pays the bills and why, outlined above.
The real reason Fairfax is stuffed is that it deserves to be.
P.S. (after 5 years)
It is now April 2017, and Fairfax is saving another 30 million by chopping costs, which means journalists. There is still no recognition of the simple fact that the distribution channels may have changed, but the consumers ares still out there, still consuming media, the challenge is articulating a value proposition that makes it worth their while to part with some money.
Aug 7, 2012 | Management, Marketing
I was recently the recipient of one of the slickest presentations I have seen for some time, as the Marketing Manager of a business on whose board I sit employed the full range of his presentation skills on us. It was a truly impressive performance, at least at a superficial level.
The business is successful, and its marketing programs are seen as a key component of that success, but the reality is that we really do not know in quantitative terms the value delivered by the marketing investment.
Marketers, and the boards to which they report need to be recognise that the days of hype are over, and what is needed now is a solid, quantitative foundation linked to the outcomes so that intelligent, informed assessments of the marketing investments can be made.
Boards are used to numbers, and generally have to date tolerated the marketing hype delivered to us because:
- They do not understand the marketing jargon
- They had no idea how to measure it, so as it appeared to work, why change.
Those gravy-days of marketing are now ended, and no marketing function or person should be able to avoid the scrutiny and opportunity for productivity gains in marketing investments that have been delivered by intelligent metrics available in the digital world.
Aug 6, 2012 | Management, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
The term exponential is routinely used in engineering, maths, and the sciences, meaning, in lay terms, that the rate of increase in the derivative of a factor increases faster than the increase in the factor itself. “Gobbldy Gook” to most marketers.
Moore’s law is perhaps the most widely known use of this equation, but is only one of many.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil cited many others in a fascinating TED talk a few years ago, in which he points out that exponential growth is a common feature of technological growth, we just have to recognise it when we see it.
Mitch Joels great blog got me thinking.
The growth of complexity in the practice of marketing; new channels, social media, blogs enabling anyone to be a published writer, 100 TV channels at the end of a remote, new industries, the emerging models of collaboration, and all the rest are not linear growth, they are growing by leveraging the principals of exponential maths. The first one is hard, and takes years, the next is much easier and doesn’t take much time, then there is an explosion.
The way we generally think about marketing, and certainly the way the senior management of most large corporations think about it, is still in the linear mode, when the explosion in the opportunities presented by marketing to communicate and connect is an exponential change.
Competitive advantage will accrue to those enterprises that are capable of recognising that marketing into the future will operate in a different dimension if you like, to the C20 notion of accountability dominated by financial measures. Measuring performance by a P&L and Balance sheet mentality that counts what has happened, rather than assessing what will happen, and recognising the opportunities presented by exponential marketing will be leaving huge opportunities on the table.
