Richard Nixon casts a long shadow

Richard Nixon casts a long shadow

May 22, 2017 | Governance, Leadership

 

In 1974 when Richard Nixon delivered his resignation speech, just before the inevitable impeachment, I was sitting in the home of Harvard Professor  Jim Hagler just outside Boston.

I was seeing first hand the implosion of a presidency from the perspective of a 22 year old Aussie who had by that time a pretty good education, but absolutely no experience beyond the surf, meat pies, beer  and university shenanigans that had been my life.

And yet, here I was seeing the anguish of Americans as they struggled with a presidency that had failed on the two counts that really mattered to them.

  • The personal qualities that it took an individual to be their President,
  • The  rule of law and order, let alone the constitution in which so many Americans are invested in a way alien to Australians.

The world has changed somewhat since 1974, but our expectations and hopes of leadership have not, despite the evidence of  the past 43 years, in both America and here in Australia.

However we still fervently hope and believe that our leaders are worthy, and when they prove not to be, we feel betrayed.

Trump has sowed the seeds of his own destruction via twitter.

He seems to think that behaviour that drives ratings as the host of a shock jock TV show is transferable to the office of the President.

Thankfully, it appears there is a difference after all.

Part of Trump’s appeal was I suspect that he was able to sell himself as a successful business leader and entrepreneur. Those skills that made him good at business would suit him to run the biggest enterprise in the country, the government, and bring some accountability to the bloated bureaucratic processes, without any of the baggage that comes with political and government experience .

Has not gone so well so far!.

If Congress was acting as a company board, as they should be, after all they are the representatives of the shareholders, they would be insisting on his resignation about now. The current rumblings of  an impeachment that will never happen because you need a 2/3 majority in the senate to ‘convict’  would be replaced in corporate life by one of those terminal conversations so loved on the ‘Apprentice’ TV show.

No CEO  of a competently run public company could survive the apparent conflicts of interest, loose mouth, inconsistent and shambolic behaviour, clear contradictions of positions taken almost in the same sentence, and outright lies that have characterised the first 4 months of the Trump white house.

We are better off here in Australia, but perhaps only just.

The spectacle during the week of various non entity politicians, along with several of some political status personally bagging Ken Henry as chairman of NAB when he dared to disagree with them, and articulate what any sensible person already knew, is a disgrace.

The treasurer a few weeks ago was encouraging political debate, encouraging the expression of views, and the first time it happens afterwards he and his colleagues go immediately for the language of personal vilification, ignoring the arguments.

On balance, I prefer it here, but what would we give for some genuine leadership without the shadow of self interest, power for its own sake, and sheer bloody-minded hubris?

3 great strategies to get good at anything

3 great strategies to get good at anything

May 15, 2017 | Management

Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘10,000 hours’ of practise to become expert has worked its way into the lexicon, for good reason. However, is it always so?

I watched my father practise golf after he took it up in his 30’s, endlessly, while never getting his handicap below 18. He had been a very good tennis player, and all round social athlete, so with the practise should have been a scratch golfer.

Why was he not?

On reflection, two reasons: He  simply did not have whatever natural talent it requires to be a scratch golfer, however many hours he practised, and the second and I think way more important reason, his practise was not real practise as would be required to be a scratch golfer.

He practised alone, without feedback beyond seeing where the ball he just hit went. Even the best golfers in the world have coaches, who give them feedback, look for the tiny places to improve, and polish the technique relentlessly. By contrast, Dad practised alone, because he enjoyed it.

He might have put in the hours, but I suggest the hours were not tough enough.

Thinking back on 40 years of managing, consulting and coaching, there are a number of things that I might have advised dad to do, were he still around.

  • Identify what ‘expert’ really means. Any endeavour has boundaries, inhabited by the few who are just better than anyone else. Roger Federer comes to mind. Learn from what they do, break it down into the tiny items that add up to being a superior performance, and know what that performance looks like.
  • Seek out areas of weakness to fix. Performance is always uneven, some components are better than others. The tendency is to double down on what you do well, which is always my advice on strategy, but improving the poorer bits while polishing the peak bits gives a stronger base, and a more reliable standard of performance. It usually takes an outside view to identify these areas, a coach, which is why Federer has one, as does every athlete at the top of their game. A coach demands maximum effort in practise, and highlights areas for improvement. Dad did not have a coach, just Mum begging him to do stuff around the house instead of hitting a golf ball.
  • Practise to a program. Putting in the hours when you have them spare is different from exercising the discipline necessary to make the choice to practise instead of doing something else, and then to practise with intent. Having intent means there is an objective, clear steps towards the objective, and performance measures to ensure that the practise is in fact improving the performance, rather than embedding those tiny habits that tend to creep in and inhibit performance.

None of this is any different to what happens in the businesses to whom I consult.

Generally they are small to medium sized manufacturing businesses whose bread and butter is in doing a range of things really well, and then being sufficiently confident to chip their way out of the rough when they find themselves in it, indeed being prepared to risk the rough in order to have a shot at that corporate birdie.

9 steps to making cold calling work for you

9 steps to making cold calling work for you

May 11, 2017 | Communication, Customers, Sales

I find cold calling really difficult, while recognising the potential effectiveness when the inertia is overcome.

For me,  it takes time and emotional energy far greater than the return I have ever got from cold calling, except when I have run  out of options, then it seems to work. When the instinctive fear of failure is overcome by the necessity to take a step, when the fear of failure, or rejection is beaten by the fear of not being able to feed the kids or pay the bill on the fridge, the fear of rejection by a stranger seems trivial.

What does it really matter if you are rejected by a complete stranger anyway?

A friend of mine treats cold calling as a game, she does it for a living, and is very good at it.

Recently I sat down with her to try and extract from her routine a scalable cold calling template, and realised two things:

  1. The fear of failure was crippling
  2. Cold calling is pretty much the same as sending a cold email , which I am OK at.

Her advice was to get over the fear, and she referred me to this terrific TED talk, and to treat cold calling with just the same set of disciplines I used for cold emailing.

I have a process for developing email success that I use as a coaching outline for those I work with, and it almost always gets great results when applied sensibly. However, adding Jia jiang’s Ted talk will add greatly to the effectiveness of the following pretty standard management process to increase your effectiveness.

Segment your list.  The better you know the prospect who answers the phone, the more likely you will have a successful call. The more defined your call list, with unique messaging and value propositions developed for each segment, the better. This is as different from the completely random call you get as you are sitting down to dinner in the evening, from someone in a call centre flogging home insulation, insurance or a holiday, as it can be.

Headline. The first sentence in a phone call, or headline in an email carry the same responsibility: to pique the interest of the receiver. Fail in the first glance of a headline, or 5 seconds of a call, and it is a long hard road back. There are plenty of headline generating tools around, but the best lesson in my experience is to go to the local newsagent, and just think about the headlines on the cover of the magazines you see. They are aimed to grab attention, and direct the reader to the following sub  head, which leads into the magazine article.

Them not you. Make the message about them, and the things that interest them, not about you, as generally they will not be interested, and you will have lost them. You need to  be able to spell out exactly how you can help them.

Be a peer. Speak and write like a peer, not a supplicant sales person. There are few worse sales turn-offs than a “needy” caller. Much better to be a busy peer, making a little time in a crazy schedule because you have discovered something that you think will be of value to them.

Credibility. Be credible by providing social proof, or better yet, a referral from someone the receiver knows and respects.

Personalise. Ensure everything is personalised, anything less than a highly personalised call will almost always fail. It is necessary for you to have done the research, to know a fair bit about the receiver, the problems they face in their role, and the value of a solution you may be able to provide. Making a call to the switch of a target company and asking to be transferred to the “person responsible for XXX” is a waste of everybody’s time.

Respect. Time is our most valuable resource, so respect the receivers time by keeping it short, but to the point, ending with some sort of call to action by you or them. However, the CTA needs to be consistent with the context of the conversation. Early stages may lead to a further conversation, or the inclusion of someone else, but rarely to a sale on first contact. Generally the objective is to get some sort of positive response, a step towards a sale, but not a sale, yet.

Differentiate yourself. If you are just the same as everybody else, why should the person you are trying to engage bother with you? While the call has to be about them, and not you, it is also about articulating the way that you can help  them in ways others cannot. The necessity here is that you have done some homework, at least enough to have a shot at articulating the solution you may have to a problem they face, or opportunity they may be unaware of. Differentiation early in the conversation offers a reason why they should continue to give you their time, and builds the status you have in the conversation, you are not just another cold caller.

Follow up. And follow up again, and again, politely and with respect. Generally sales people give up at about 3, whereas all the research indicates that 5-7 follow  ups are the point at which the ability to convert increases significantly. It reflects the old advice about advertising frequency, at about the time you are getting sick of the ad, if it is worth anything, the target audience is just building awareness of your proposition.

 

So, what is stopping you, pick up the bloody phone!

 

Photo courtesy Nancy Rose via Flikr.

 

How to make the hardest sale there is…..Yourself.

How to make the hardest sale there is…..Yourself.

May 10, 2017 | Change, Communication

There are too many older people, men and women, but mostly men, who find themselves on the scrapheap somewhere north of 45.

20 years of working life left, and they struggle to find jobs that use their knowledge and experience, and end up mowing lawns or delivering packages.

What a waste of a deep resource, as well as being a social blight on us all.

The jobs these people are looking for no longer exist, they have gone, and are unlikely to come back. Not only do we as a community not value the lessons of experience, we positively discriminate against those with the experience by exclusion.
Subtle, on paper illegal but evident everywhere, exclusion.

We will have to get used to it, as the changes wrought by the industrial revolution and the social disruption colloquialised as ‘Luddites” is coming back at us very, very, fast.

AI, VR,  Augmented VR, and a host of technologies to automate every repetitive task, almost no matter how challenging it may be, is coming at us like a train.  In the coming few years accountants, lawyers, architects, doctors, and many others insulated so far, will all feel the heat of change.

So what should the people displaced by these technologies do?

Learn to sell.

Sales is not just about a product, it is about selling themselves, but the rules are identical.

When someone seeks to buy a product with a significant price tag, they generally have some outcome in mind that they require. The art of selling is to identify that outcome and develop the path that makes you the only option.

Let’s look at it from another angle: how do you sell yourself into a job, which is entirely different to how do you get a job.

Sales is all about the process. Selling yourself is similarly all about the process, from identifying targets, making the introduction, warming up the prospect, to closing the deal. Absolutely no different, except that we are personally involved, failure to get a job means that the kids do not get fed, so the pressure is on, and most buckle and revert to the supplicant mode. Understandable, but absolutely the wrong thing to do. Nobody will hire a supplicant to sell their products, therefore when selling yourself, never be the supplicant.

Know your prospect as well as possible. This is sales 101, why would it be any different selling yourself? Knowing a lot about the businesses you might like to work for is about the most basic piece of information you could have. As a senior manager, I hired a lot of people, and never once did I hire anyone who had not taken the trouble to learn a bit about the business I worked for at  the time. Now, with the net it is even easier to have detailed information about all sorts of things on which to base a few intelligent and engaging questions.

Ask questions. That way you get answers, and can ask the next question, and that is the best way to engage with anyone, ask them about the things they are interested in. Most successful bloke I ever saw with girls was a pretty ordinary looking bloke, smart, but nondescript. He never talked about himself, in fact, did not seem to speak much at all beyond a few questions, as he was flooded by girls who thought he was the bees knees. I only understood this when it was too late for me.

Hustle, at least a bit. Nobody ever failed to be hired for not following up enough. While I dislike the term ‘follow up’ in a generic sense as it is a red sales flag, finding another way to say the same thing, such as ‘just thought I would seek some feedback on our meeting last week’. People want to hire others who will not give up, who will persist, get back up after being knocked over, so why would it be any different when selling yourself.

Know when to walk. As in any sale, there is a point beyond which you will not go. Determine in your own mind what that point is, and be prepared to walk away.  This clearly signals you are other than a supplicant, and does the self-image a lot of good.

Sales collateral. You need sales collateral, even if it is just for credibility. Selling for a business it is the website, product information, deals, and so on. Selling yourself it is your LinkedIn profile, presence on industry platforms and forums, lack of party photos on Facebook, and finally a resume that is short, clearly identifies how the skills you have will solve their problems and be without the usual spelling and grammatical failures. Core to this is the visual elements. We are visual animals,  good photos are  essential.

So, polish up the pitch, do the research, and get out there.

 

How will grocery retailers leverage algorithmic pricing? 

How will grocery retailers leverage algorithmic pricing? 

May 8, 2017 | Marketing, retail

Economics 101 tells us that price is the point at which supply matches demand, a simple but infinitely variable graph. Throughout history, that equation has reflected the reality of a face to face negotiation, apart from the recent glitch created in the name of efficiency by mass retailing which fixes prices. We all know somewhere in our psyche that price is what someone is prepared to pay at a given point in time for an item.

Look at any housing auction in Sydney at the moment, all sorts of factors are at play that make an auction the best way to determine the ‘right price’ at which to strike a deal. The notion of a fixed price is almost dead in the face of this level of uncertainty about what people are prepared to pay. Uber has disrupted the taxi industry with the same idea. Couple of weeks ago, caught in the rain in mid-afternoon, Taxi’s were an extinct species, so I called up Uber, and needed a second mortgage to pay the Uber-Price, driven up by the time of day, and immediate demand generated by the fact that it was raining cats and dogs.

Price is far more than just  simple intersection on an economists graph.

Chain retailers have semi fixed prices. They have a shelf price, and a set of promotional and deal prices as wide as the imagination and pocket depth of their suppliers who fund the discounts. However, while they are variable, over the shorter time frames they are fixed at some level. This process of centralised control and a physical selling face enables the efficiency of mass merchandising to be leveraged, but loses the flexibility of being able to respond to individual demand at a particular moment in time. .

Imagine the chaos if each store manager could set his/her own prices, then negotiate at the checkout!

Category management evolved as a means to maximise the revenues and margins from a fixed retail space. It is a numbers driven game of great sophistication requiring deep pockets, analytical resources and scale to play effectively. It nevertheless relies on fixed prices, varied over a week or so, and across varieties, brands and shelf placement, but nevertheless, fixed.

On line retailers by contrast are able to vary prices not just day to day, but minute to minute, and increasingly person to person.  It is the digital equivalent to haggling, each party setting out to maximise the return they get from the transaction, by using the whole gamut of trading and negotiation tools.

Amazon is the master, their algorithmically driven pricing is hugely sensitive to hundreds, probably thousands of factors from the weather to your browsing and purchase history, and the time of day.

How would a bricks and mortar retailer combine the margin maximisation flexibility of algorithm driven pricing with the physical constraints of a retail space?

It is a logical question, one that has prompted a lot of thought by a lot of smart people, and mostly the answer is that you can’t.

However, do not tell Amazon who are always prepared, indeed, live by disruption. Their experiment in Seattle with Amazon Go may not succeed in the short term, but the logic of managing price by algorithm to maximise returns will not go away, and Amazon is a long view retailer, unencumbered by demanding quarterly driven stock markets. I do not think  this will be the end of the Australian retail duopoly any time soon, there is still plenty of areas for  them to continue to squeeze the lemon to make profits, but it is certainly a portent of things to come.