Feb 12, 2013 | Change, Communication, Innovation
The next big wave of innovation just may be co-ordination services.
When you think about it, the web has given us huge amounts of data at our fingertips, but created the problem of dealing with all the options we have. Usually we want only a very few options from which to make a choice, the more tailored those options are to our needs, the better, but we are now being deluged.
Think about the co-ordination of travel needs of inner city residents and transport. Often they do not need a car much, but when they do, a standard rental is not always convenient. Enter Zipcar. Travel planning is made easier by the on line room booking systems, AirBnB co-ordinates those plans with the needs of owners of non hotel facilities that people may like, and a bit of extra cash. The list goes on.
The current “scandal” of horsemeat in Findus products in Europe, and the Jindi cheese Listeria recall in Australia highlight the frailties of food safety sensative supply chains. We have the cpability to make the whole chain absolutely transparent, every product traceable, and if we used it, the problems would be gone. The challenge is the collection, analysis and delivery of the data, co-ordinated with the need for the data.
Co-ordinating and organising all this data, seamlessly, instantly, across all your devices and locations should be a fertile field of innovation.
Feb 11, 2013 | Change, Governance, Leadership, Strategy
How often do we hear that we learn more from our failures than our successes, that if we do not fail sometimes, we have not done enough, and that an innovative, exciting culture embraces failure? Thomas Watson Senior, creator of IBM once said “the fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.”
So how is it that we rarely see failure really celebrated if it is so productive? Such celebration is very rare in my experience.
An Canadian NGO, Engineers Without Borders has broken the mould, and published their “Failure Report” and attracted considerable attention, this article in the Guardian outlines the background.
How brave is that?
NGO’s depend for their funding from groups that you would expect to be pretty risk averse, they would hate to see their donations seemingly wasted, and admitting failure is on the surface at least, admitting to waste and potentially putting their funding at risk.
I wonder what would happen if Australia’s public companies were publish their own failure reports?
Rio Tinto’s foray into Aluminum , Harvey Norman missing the on line shopping revolution, Woolworths finally admitting Dick Smith had turned feral, James Hardie and asbestosis, Eddie and the Labor party, the list goes on. We get outside analysis, sometimes the entrails of failure are exhumed by legal processes, but never do we get the honest, gut-felt, reactions of those involved in the decision making examining their behavior, and taking responsibility for the failures. All we hear is the spin of the successes, and the message that the protagonists are all seeing, all knowing, who only act in the interests of others. Ducking of responsibility has become a management core capability, “I cannot recall” the last refuge of the villain.
How much better if we did as we say we should do, and celebrated failure as a part of the learning process, and that intelligent analysis of the reasons for failure, and the resetting expectations makes for a healthy culture.
Feb 8, 2013 | Branding, Small business, Social Media
Like most bloggers, I watch how many people visit this site, how many pages they access, how long they stay, and how many “likes” the posts get, and it feels good when the numbers go up.
However, these superficial measures do not really mean much.
What make the real difference is how much I write gets amplified, by reposting, commenting, and the number of click-throughs to the links included that occurs.
“Likes” are generally just passers-by, casual visitors, or “like-counters” who want you to reciprocate and “like” their site, when what you want is engagement, people who are touched or motivated in some way by the posts.
I would rather have one of those engaged visitors than 10 who just visit and leave. In Australia, there is an old expression, ‘Wombat”. Calling somebody a “wombat” is rarely complimentary, as a wombat is a slow, sometimes destructive native animal that eats roots and leaves, not complimentary when you add comma’s. Most visitors to your site that just tick the “like” button without thinking about what you have written, often not even reading it, are just “wombats”
Feb 6, 2013 | Customers, Marketing, Sales
Modern life gives us an array of opportunities to go somewhere, physically or digitally, and have presented to us a huge range of choice in any category of interest we may have.
There is a paradox here.
Concentration of anything, attracts those who may be interested in purchasing to the location, whilst creating the hurdle for those hoping to make a sale of differentiating their offer from everyone else in the concentration.
This morning I was waiting for a meeting in a café in a local shopping strip that is little more than a concentration of cafes, bistros, and dining of all sorts. I was struck by the breadth of choice, and the resulting challenge of differentiation for the operators.
The café I was in is one of about 7 or 8 within 150 meters, all selling good coffee, a range of simple, tasty menu items, but all pretty much the same to a casual visitor. I wonder what would happen if one of them started roasting their own coffee, creating that intoxicating smell, and the opportunity to tell a story about the beans, why the tastes varied, where they came from, and how the skills of the barista influenced the outcome. They may also make a bit of extra margin.
The provision of a cup of coffee is pretty commoditised, buying roasted beans from one of the roaster/distributors is a transaction where the individual café has little leverage in the price negotiation, but there appears to be plenty of margin in the roasting business. Seems pretty obvious to me.
Feb 5, 2013 | Governance, Management, Marketing
This is definitely not referring to the pallet of old brochures gathering dust in the warehouse, although most businesses still seem to accumulate them.
I am referring to the sales leads, data bases, prospects, active conversations, existing customers and relationships, that together constitute the marketing inventory. When you think about these things as “Inventory”, an asset, you instinctively consider the means by which you generate a return, as that is what you do with assets.
The similarity of marketing inventory to physical inventory is that you can use the same sorts of measures for marketing inventory that you use for physical inventory, pretty much broken into the sorts of categories that Lean inventory management would require:
- “Flow” and Balance through the system of leads, prospects, active prospect, execute the sale, they are essentially “how many” questions.
- Conversion rates from one part of the system to another. Conversion trends are valuable pointers to both tactical success and emerging problems.
- Velocity through the system. As in physical inventory, the quicker the better, whilst maintaining flow and balance.
Considering the sales and marketing effort in this way encourages a sensible demarcation between the functions, and generally removes the argy-bargy that often happens. Importantly, it focuses attention on the cost and return analyses that enables resources to be used where they generate the best return. Having your expensive sales force out doing cold calls with a 1% hit rate now makes no sense, as the process has been completely disrupted by technology.
