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

3 words summarising the challenges of maximising productivity

Sep 25, 2019 | Leadership, Management

 

‘Rhythm’, ‘Flow’ and ‘Balance’.

These three simple words reflect the ideal state for a process, big or small, in any enterprise. That state where the process is optimised for both efficiency and productivity, which are very different beasts. I have seen highly optimised processes that are still way short of being  productive, simply because there has been too little time spent considering the most productive use of the range of resources consumed by the process.  For example, US car companies used to  be highly efficient at driving the assembly of a car through a production process, but the cars they produced were terrible.

Rhythm.

Everything happens in an orderly and predictable manner, the ebbs and flows of volume have a cadence to them that enables the appropriate level of resource to be planned and allocated. No surprises!

Flow

The product being produced, or the process being followed proceeds in an uninterrupted manner, without obstacles, and complications. Achieving ‘Flow’  should be a core objective of anyone charged with the responsibility of managing a complete process, or participating in any part of a process, which is all of us. In most cases creating flow is like fitting a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle together. Complex at the beginning, but when completed, the picture is obvious, with no irregularities.

Balance

There are always forces acting against both rhythm and flow, forces that tend to distort the process. Seeking to balance all these forces is a job of leadership, and when efficient processes are optimised, all these forces are kept in ‘Balance. It is a  bit like trying to balance a top heavy piece of wood on the palm of your hand, you have to keep all the forces acting on the wood in balance in order to keep it vertical.

When you need some assistance in herding all the cats involved in this crucial but often easily pushed aside exercise, let the experience I have gathered over 40 years help you.

 

Content marketing or Marketing content?

Sep 23, 2019 | Communication, Marketing

These two things are different, absolutely different.

Content marketing means different things to different people. Last week I attended a presentation of a self-styled content marketing expert. He was pontificating from the stage about the value of content, and content marketing, but when I asked his definition of content marketing, all I got was clichés.

To me this is pretty typical, disappointing, but perhaps forgivable, as we are just in the early stages of really understanding how best to use this new(ish) medium.

To me, the best definition is that of Joe Pulizzi who runs the Content Marketing Institute.

‘Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action’.

This definition does not at any time mention selling. It focusses on delivering information of value to an audience, which may, in time, result in a transaction.

This implies there is a strategy in place, an organised, strategically focussed process that generates content for publication, that reports to someone who carries the accountability for the process and its management.

Without a process, and someone accountable, it becomes chaos.

Trouble is, much of the so called content pushed out is just rubbish. Chaotic gibberish that rehashes what others have said, not an original thought amongst them. Any good stuff in that maelstrom of rubbish is likely to be lost.

Whenever I hear the words ‘Content marketing campaign,’ which is often, usually from agencies of various types, I cringe. Content marketing is not a campaign, at its best, it is a consistent, ongoing  flow of information that may be of value. It is a journey, not a campaign!

Marketing your content is different again, it is simply the management of the challenge of getting your content, good, bad or indifferent in front of those who might be interested, gaining their attention, and extracting an action.

It is largely an exercise in channel management. In the ‘good old days, you had a few options, radio, TV, magazines, letterbox drops and direct mail. Not so now, when there are multitudes of channels all fighting for the attention of potential customers.

You can do a good job of marketing your content, but if your content is crap, it will not do you much good, indeed, it will work against you. Poor content is toxic to the receiver, as it has consumed some of their valuable time, but delivered no value in return.  

 

Header cartoon courtesy of Tom Fishburne www.marketoonist.com

The cost of preventing errors

The cost of preventing errors

Sep 18, 2019 | Change, Lean, Management

 

Prevention of waste is a core tenet of lean thinking, and has been systematically used to optimise processes of all types.

However, it is not universally useful.

Prevention of errors in an existing process is one thing, you have the process established, and can map the manner in which the process is applied, and the outcomes achieved. However, when dealing with a new product, or process, things are a little different.

There is no known path towards an outcome, you are in effect telling the future, and that is an occupation with a high failure rate.

In order to tell the future with anything approaching an acceptable level of certainty, you need to experiment, try things, see what works, ask customers, deploy the ‘Lean start-up’ type mentality to the development of the process.

This means there will be many false starts, errors, failures, or more accurately, opportunities to learn.

Established businesses often do not accept errors. Promotion, salary reviews, and all the other trappings of corporate success are usually based on not making mistakes, so guess what, nobody tries anything new that just might not work, just in case.

An effort to remove these errors will end up costing more, as the implication is that the product or process will be developed until it is seen as ‘Completed’ before launching. As we know, not all new products work, so the losses involved in such an exercise can be huge

Remember ‘New Coke,’ the new improved taste of new coke that nearly destroyed the brand? With the benefit of hindsight, it was obviously a dumb idea, but at the time, I am sure Coke management had market research coming out their ears that confirmed this was a great idea. Pity they did  not pick a small test area, and put the change into the market, similar to a Minimum Viable Product, (MVP) to see what Coke consumers in real life rather than is some contrived market research environment said. Such a ‘waste’ would have saved them many millions of dollars, and being head of the queue in the greatest marketing blunder of all time list.

The lesson here is to encourage experimentation, each being an opportunity to learn, and improve your fortune telling skills, substituting small errors that do not compromise the business, for the big blunders that will.

 

 

 

How to get really big, important stuff done, and win!

How to get really big, important stuff done, and win!

Sep 16, 2019 | Lean, Operations

40 years of observing business and life, success and failure, has led me back to a conclusion that smarter people than me reached thousands of years ago, and winners in all sorts of fields keep using today.

Follow the process.

Achieving big goals is what we are all pushed to do, but often it is overwhelming, simply too big to contemplate, so mostly we hide, in our own particular way. We watch in wonder while others achieve their big goals, and put that success down to luck, circumstances, or a dozen other things.

We would be wrong.

Whenever you see someone achieve a big goal, they have done so by applying discipline, and following a process. They have broken the big goal progressively into smaller more manageable chunks, until they are concentrating just on what is in front of them, right now. Get that right, embed it into the ‘muscle memory’ and then move to the next one, which is an incremental and cumulative movement towards the big goal.

Several of my children were successful elite level athletes. While the big goal was always there, in the background, providing a reason why they were working so hard, what they concentrated on, every day, was what was in front of them.

Another set of reps of a specific move that provided another brick in the foundation of their performance, as they cumulatively built the wall.

The chaos that exists in all our lives, the big things we face can similarly be broken down into simple, progressive steps to be taken. Simple is not easy, simple is in fact very hard, but necessary.  Break down the difficult big thing into its component  parts, and tackle each one in turn, succeed at it, and move on to the next one.

Improving productivity of a factory process is no different.

Break down every job into its component parts, and get done the one in front of you.

As I work with factory management, one of the best ways to improve without trying to make the big changes all at once which leaves people out, is to have a daily ‘WOT’ meeting, (What’s On Today). Depending on the factory, it may be the whole staff, or it may be individual work cells, the process is the same. Agree the priorities for today, ensure the resources needed are available, and do it, knowing the other parts of the process are doing the same thing, and they all feed into each other.

Excellence is just a matter of steps, excelling at, and continuously improving each one along the way before moving on to the next.

When it comes to getting stuff done, distraction, disorder, and uncertainty leads to failure.

A process is something that goes from A to Z, we lose the game when we focus on Z, forgetting the B to Y steps in the middle.

Play what is in front of you, without losing sight of the wider context, the next step, and overall objective.