What do employees really want?

What do employees really want?

Jan 9, 2017 | Change, Governance, Leadership

 

If I asked that question of 50 randomly selected medium sized business owners, the first answer would be something like ‘More pay’.

That would be the wrong answer.

‘More pay’ is the default when other things more important to them are missing, and there is no other reason to go to work each day. This is in Australia of course, a place where the necessities of life are covered, nobody is going to starve.

Employees want to work for a successful business, one that offers them security and a chance to learn and develop their talents and interests, as well as supplying the means to  buy the necessities of life. Nobody likes turning up not knowing if the business will be open that day, or if the receivers will be waiting for them.

When was it ever a better feeling to be on a losing team, than it was to be a part of a winning team?

Giving employees this reassurance is more than telling them that the business is profitable, although that helps. It is about taking them into your confidence as you would a trusted friend. Funny thing about trust, it needs to be earned by performance, and once earned, it is returned.

Trust given begets trust received.

Creating the environment where that trust becomes automatic and mutual takes time and effort, but success will put ‘better pay’ way down the list of employee concerns.

Following is the pathway I advise those I work with to follow:

Articulate where we are going. It is difficult to get people to buy into a journey  without telling them the destination. Try getting your young kids in the car just by ordering ‘get in the car,’ but tell them they should jump in the car, we are going to Luna Park, and you will be killed in the rush.

Paint a picture of the destination. Your kids have a mental picture of Luna park, fun by the harbour,  but your employees have no such picture of what success looks like, so paint it for  them, recognising that it is not just about the success of the business, it is about what success means for them, their colleagues, friends, customers and families.

Show them the journey. The kids know the way to Luna park, sort of depending on age, but your employees have no real idea of the journey you will share on the way, so lay it out. What sort of operating targets there will be, describe the workplace, the type of customer necessary for the success, what skills and knowledge will need to be deployed , and which ones will need to be developed, Who are your competitors, what are the expected challenges that need to be overcome, and so on.

Describe why it is important to get there. This is  not about profits and personal success, it is about what difference you are making to the community and people’s lives, a description of  the higher purpose, or the ‘Why’ of the business. It can sound a bit ‘mushy’ and new age, but when there is something that people can relate to at a gut level, the power of that is immense. Profit is an outcome of a job well done, one of the many measures of success, it should not be the primary measure of success.

WIFM. (What’s in it for me) while the objective is to engage with a higher purpose, there will always be a time where this question needs to be answered. When you have succeeded in doing the above, the answer will be  about the satisfaction of doing something useful, being valued, having control over your workplace, being a part of a community, learning and growing, and when those are satisfied, they may ask how much will be in the pay packet.

Personalised feedback. All of the above points are general, things that a leader  could and should do for the whole group of employees. However, employees are also individuals, and managing direct reports one on one is a core responsibility of leadership.  A one on one conversation can be many things, feedback on performance both positive and pointing out areas for improvement, assistance with a problem being faced, collaboratively addressing difficult problems,  advice of a personal as well as commercial nature, professional development,  and an opportunity to build a relationship of trust and respect. The meetings can take many forms, but they should be regular and formal, which means agendas and meeting notes, as well as diarised meeting times.  As a general rule, you would have these meeting with your direct reports, and encourage them to have similar meetings with their reports, indeed, coach them to do so.

When you do all that, you will build a motivated and engaged workforce, and that is a competitive advantage that is really hard to replicate. I can help with all that, having done it several times, and so know how to avoid the most of the traps.

How did I do in 2016?

How did I do in 2016?

Jan 5, 2017 | Strategy

 

 

Following is a re-run of the post from January 2016 when I again rubbed my crystal balls and made some predictions for the year.

Let me know if you think  the scores I gave myself are reasonable.

 

7 trends driving business in 2016.

Like everyone else who sees themselves as having a useful view of the train coming at us, I have again tried to articulate the things I see as important to businesses, particularly the smaller ones that make up my client base.

 

  • The density of digital content is becoming overwhelming.

Businesses  have always generated and distributed ‘content’, but it was called ‘advertising’ or ‘collateral material’. Since we all became publishers, and the marginal  costs of access to markets approached zero, there has been a content explosion, and we are now being overwhelmed. It has become pretty clear that video will take over as the primary vehicle of messaging, and I expect that trend to consolidate over the coming year, and see a bunfight for eyeballs between social media and search platforms

Ad blockers will change the way the so called pay walls work, as well as ensuring that the density of content is replaced by less but better stuff. Ad blockers may be come discriminatory, allowing through stuff that the algorithms know you have been searching for.

The focus on content will be on the sales funnel and conversion metrics, much more than just pumping the stuff out, which will be a good thing for those who manage their inboxes.

Commentary Jan 2017

I think I got this fairly right, although video has not surpassed everything else as I expected, and I have not seen ad blockers becoming discriminatory as yet. Still might happen in 2017, but it is a bit like sticking a finger in the dam wall if you think it will stop the flow. 3/5.

 

  • Existing digital platforms will extend themselves competitively to attract new users, increase the usage and ‘stickiness’ of their platforms. Linkedin’s successful extension of their blogging platform and purchase of Slideshare are one, Facebook is aggressively setting out to attract new users by making themselves attractive to developers and others, with the launch of FB techwire in an attempt to attract the really technically oriented including those writing about tech, Twitter appears to be trying to find ways of monetising their users and will probably apply controls to the currently uncontrolled  stream in your feed, but there again, I thought that last year and they did not do it.

Also, platforms will recognise the huge potential of the B2B advertising market, and find ways to exploit it. Many B2B businesses are reluctant to use social advertising as they see the platforms as essentially B2C and therefore  not appropriate for their products and services. This is a huge potential market for business, and the social platforms will be cashing it.

Commentary Jan 2017.

Again, not bad. Microsoft bought LinkedIn during the year for 26 billion, which proves the point of the potential for B2B of social platforms. Microsoft will want a return pretty quickly, so expect the free version of LinkedIn to be stripped back, with features being transferred to the paid versions. Got it wrong, again, about the monetisation of Twitter. 3/5

 

  • Rate of Technology adoption is still increasing. Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 TED talk on the rate of technology adoption is resonating louder now than a decade ago. Some of his observations such as the rate of cost decline of solar technology and battery technology efficiency are coming to pass. However, it is his basic thesis of the logarithmic rate of technology adoption that will engulf us over the coming short term. Think about the confluence of big data and machine learning.  When you wipe away all the tech-talk and hyperbole, it comes down to a simple notion: the “friction” of information that has always existed is being removed at logarithmic rates, progressively revealing more stuff to see, and to do with the stuff we have. As we go online, and use technology throughout  the value and marketing chain, technology is reducing costs, speeding cycle time, and opening opportunities for innovation.

Commentary Jan 2017.

Chances of getting that wrong were pretty slim, so a fair score is warranted, although the specifics of a prediction were not what I would expect of a soothsayer, way too general. 4/5

 

  • Evolution of the “marketing technology stack”. For most small businesses this can be as simple as a good website with a series if resources available to collect email addresses, and an autoresponder series on the back.

For large businesses it can be a hugely complicated stack of software running CRM, customer service and scheduling, marketing messages, and the integration of social channels.

Commentary Jan 2017.

If anything I underestimated the speed of Martech adoption, and the rapidly increasing options. Scott Brinker continues to be the thought leader in this space, and I look forward to his 2017 Martech landscape graphic.  4/5

 

  • Big data to little data. The opportunities presented by big data are mindboggling, but even the big companies are having trouble  hooking their data together in meaningful ways let alone introducing the third dimension of big data.

Small companies will have to start to use little data better, or die. Data already available to them is becoming easier to use every day, to turn into insights about their niche, local market,  and competitive claims. Simple things like pivot tables in excel will be used, and tools like Tableau which brings a structure to  data from differing sources including big data, will  become more widely recognised by small business for the value it can deliver.

Big data will have machine learning applied, and the data revolution will get another shove along. From a non technologists perspective, industrial strength  data systems such as IBM’s “Watson” must drive some sort of further revolution, but my crystal ball is too cloudy for me to have much of an idea of the impact beyond making what we currently see as advanced systems look a bit like a pencil and paper look to us today.

Commentary Jan 2017.

Small and medium companies still have a huge and increasing capability gap when it comes to the management of data. While it is powering ahead in large enterprises with the resources and energy to pursue digital, SME’s are floundering. Over the course of the year several clients I started working with did not even use the most basic data analysis capabilities of their own data with  simple excel tools. 3/5

 

  • Technology hardware explosion becomes over-hyped. The volume and type of hardware that has become available is as overwhelming as the access to and availability of information.  Driverless, wearables, AI, 3D, blah,blah. Each of the developments has its place, and may change our lives at some point, but there is just so much of it that we are becoming immune to the hype. Who needs a tweeting washing machine anyway?

So, what is next?

Seems to me that we are on the cusp of an energy disruption driven by the combination of hardware and advanced materials science . The technology surrounding renewables is in the early stages of an explosion that will change the face of everything. Highly regulated and costly energy infrastructure distributing energy will start to be replaced with decentralised renewable power generation, much the same as PC’s replaced mainframe computers 30 years ago. The catalyst to this metamorphous will be the combination of governments that are broke and no longer able to fund the institutionalised energy systems and the development of a reliable “battery” system. Elon Musk has made a huge bet on his “Powerwall” battery system and manufacturing plant currently under construction, and it would be a brave person that bet against him. However, looking well ahead, it seems probable that it is the beginning of the logarithmic adoption curve of renewable power following the path of Ray Kurzweil and Gordon Moore.

Commentary Jan 2017.

The action has replaced the hype in several areas, with the IOT dropping down the list, and VR and Augmented VR rapidly becoming a reality.

I expected to see Musk’s Power Wall  start a huge adoption curve which appears not to have happened, although his Tesla cars have proved to be a smash hit. However, Governments around the world, and certainly in Australia are profoundly gun shy when it comes to actually doing what they say they will do about the digital and power infrastructures we rely on. Their inability to move beyond the simplistic populist bullshit, self- interest, nonsensical press releases, and  immediate electoral cycle is profoundly disturbing. 3/5

 

  • Marketing has always been about stories. However, somehow ‘content’ got in the way of those stories, and marketing became a different beast in the last 10 years. We will go back to marketing, and start to tell stories that resonate with  individual targets. Storytelling will become again the core, and we will be looking for storytellers in all mediums, written, pictorial, video, as we all absorb and recount stories in different ways.

All the good journos displaced by the disruption of traditional publishing can find great places in this new world of marketing storytelling, if they are any good. The competition is strong, and the results immediate and transparent so no longer can you get away with rubbish. Organisations will change to accommodate the fact that everyone is in marketing

We will become more aware of the permanent nature of the internet, and the manner in which our brand properties need to be managed.

In a commoditised world, where the transparency of price makes competition really aggressive, the value of a brand is increasingly important, and fragile.

These 5 extraordinarily stupid examples of how not to do it  should be a wake-up to the CEO’s who leave marketing to the junior marketers, often a transient bunch who have no investment in the business or brand, they are just there for a good time, and usually a short time.

One day I will do a study that compares the realisable value of the tangible assets of businesses compared to their value as calculated by the market. My instinct tells me that in many stock market categories  the biggest item as calculated  by the difference between those two numbers represented as  goodwill and inflated realisable values, will be the biggest item on  the asset side. In short, the value of their brands and customer relationships. Managers and boards need to deeply consider the nature of the people they have managing their brands, or risk losing them, often before breakfast, as the speed of disruption and change continues to increase.

Commentary Jan 2017.

Marketing is still about stories, always will be, the challenge increasingly is getting the stories seen. There will continue to be money wasted on stupid, irrelevant and sometimes offensive marketing, nothing to be done about that, the gene pool is still pretty shallow when it comes to marketing decision making.

 

As we go into 2016, the 3 questions every board and management should be asking themselves are:

“If  I was starting in this business today, what would I be doing to deliver value?”, and

“If a leveraged buyout happened, what would the new management be doing to unlock the value in the business?” and

“What do I need to do to implement the answers to the two above?”

 

Have a great 2016, and thanks for engaging with me.

 

Addendum Jan 2017.

These three are still great questions, and I suspect will be in another 50 years irrespective of technology and all the other distractions. People will still be people, and we will still behave in ways dictated by hundreds of thousands of years of behavioural evolution, not the tech of the last 20.

Have a great 2017, and thanks for engaging over the course of the year.

 

Allen Roberts

 

Are we coming to the end of the great Australian FMCG Duopoly?

Are we coming to the end of the great Australian FMCG Duopoly?

Jan 3, 2017 | Marketing, Sales

Supermarkets in Australia have had it good for some years, having the protection of a duopoly, which is almost a licence to print money in most circumstances. Woolworths certainly did for quite a while, and the fact that Coles did not is a reflection of poor management rather than a competitive market.

Perhaps I am being overly conspiratorial, but why you should ask, did Woolworths not at least, stick a toe into the burgeoning markets to our immediate north when they were so awash with cash a few years ago? They left it to the European retailers, so presumably they did the numbers and determined that  the margins were not up to their standards, the competitive nature of those markets was beyond their ability to survive. Interestingly and perhaps tellingly, the 4 major Australian banks, now a very comfortable oligopoly have made forays into foreign markets, with a stunning 100% failure rate, and are now hunkering back down to squeeze more margin from the domestic mulch cow.  Perhaps Woolies came to the same conclusion, so opted instead for a skirmish into domestic hardware.

Look how well that worked.

Business models evolve, sometimes quickly and we appear to be in a period of extreme evolution. It may not be obvious on a day to day basis,  but I bet you will be able to look back in 5 years, and see that the changes will have been significant.  I predict that general wholesalers will be almost a museum piece, as business is done directly, enabled by digital technology. The choke hold they have held on the supply chains for the last 75 years is about to end.

Added competition has further complicated the happy duopoly. Aldi has taken a big chunk of share, and in the process changed the dominating retail model, increasing the focus on price to the detriment of proprietary brands and margin extraction by the ‘rental’ of  retail shelf space to suppliers. By another means, Cosco has also made a dent, although nowhere as marked as Aldi, and there are pointers that Aldi’s German rival Lidl, owned by Kaufland is eying an entry to the Australian market. In addition, AFN,  reporting on the Woolworths AGM is highlighting the rumoured entry of Amazon Fresh into the Australian market.

Changing consumer habits. The trip into the supermarket is just one point in the process of urban dwellers feeding themselves.  Not only are there many alternate sources of products they can cook themselves now available, but eating food prepared for you is increasing, from a high priced restaurant to the lunch van that turns up in the area at 12.30 every day and sells you a sandwich.

Fragmenting consumer lives. Eating together as families has been a part of the human DNA since we came out of the trees. It plays a social role as well as one that delivers safety and acts as a medium to pass on the knowledge and experience  gathered that day, and from a lifetime, but that habit is fragmenting rapidly, along with all other aspects of our work and social lives.

Technology is the enabler and often cause of all that is going on above, and the one thing we know for sure about tech, is that the pace of development is always  accelerating, and that if for no other reason is the reason that the FMCG landscape will be very different in 5 years. For evidence, look no further than the Amazon Go  test in Seattle, just one store, accessible by Amazon staff only at this stage, but perhaps the way of the future.

My conclusion to the opening question therefore is ‘Yes’ we are coming to  the end of the duopoly, and not just in FMCG.

 

Reflections of a dinosaur on 2017

Reflections of a dinosaur on 2017

Jan 1, 2017 | Change

Never have JM Keynes’s words been more relevant: “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones”

He said this in relation to economics, but it seems to me that it is now ubiquitous across everything we do personally and as communities and countries.

Working as I do with medium sized businesses, particularly those who actually manufacture stuff rather than flogging intangibles,  all are hugely challenged to compete in a globalised and commoditised world. Some common themes that underpin,  define, and are redefining the path to commercial sustainability appear to be largely ignored.

 

What is old is not new again. It seems to me that this old truism is now redundant, as the pace and scale of change is so vast that the old stuff no longer gets recycled, and while by not understanding history we are doomed to repeat it remains true, the new versions are radically different to the old ones.

The ‘old’ ways of doing things are not  being changed, which implies that there is a progression of some sort, they are being disrupted, by which I mean thrown out the window. Uber and Airbnb are the poster boys, but look at what is happening with artificial intelligence, machine learning, virtual and augmented reality, and it is hard to conclude anything other than the old is dead, and the most relevant question has become ‘how will we cope with the new?

 

The fight for attention.  The tsunami of stuff coming at us in a myriad of ways, increasingly mobile, is overwhelming, and most are seeking ways to aggressively filter out the stuff they do not  want, but there are industries out there finding ways around the filters. The old notions of privacy are out the window, and so the tsunami just grows geometrically. So called digital helpers, might claim to make life easier by anticipating what you might need and want based on previous behaviour, but they are really just ways of gaining and holding attention in order to create a transaction favourable to them. Mobility is an absolute requirement of attention. Not just do we require our data to be immediate on demand and mobile, we do our searching and thinking while mobile.

 

Immediacy is currency. The world is immediate, we want it now, on demand, and will not be satisfied with less. However, it is hard to get immediacy from legacy systems. Why should it take Telstra a week to connect a new mobile phone, interspersed with bullshit from an off shore call centre, when obviously it takes a few seconds on a keyboard. Not good  enough anymore. With the immediacy is mobility, a sort of coinage from the currency of immediacy. Everything in life is on demand, from cabs to grocery deliveries, and not meeting the demand has become a harbinger of failure. If you are  not mobile you will be missing out

 

Creativity delivers attention. Amongst the tsunami of stuff, the few that stand out will be different, and in some way strike a chord in an individual. It is ironic that the notion of ‘big data’ is really geared to ‘little data,’ picking through the masses of data-garbage to find the few bits that are focussed on the individual.  The customer journey, so easy to map over the past few years, has had its day in the sun. No longer can we rely on the standardised generic journey from which, while we know there will be deviation, remains in general sufficiently true to use as a base for decision-making. No longer. There are simply so many ways to travel the road, that the only way to get them to stop is too be creative, arresting, or as Steve Martin says, ‘so good they cannot ignore you’

 

Business is personal. Peter Drucker is famous for observing amongst other things that the sole purpose of a business was to create customers, and never has that been so right. However, in order to create a customer, being different is essential, which requires continuous innovation and more importantly the ability to deploy innovation almost in real time. Marketing is now all about the personal, therefore the ability to create  automated personalisation , or perhaps personalised automation, will define the parameters of success.

 

Success is dependent on attention. This is getting harder and harder as the access to organic social feeds is increasingly limited by those with their feet on the choke point, the digital platforms through which this all flows. In order to be successful the need to own your own digital platform is getting greater by the day, just as it is getting harder to achieve it, simply because the task of gaining attention has become geometrically harder.

 

Trust requires transparency, and transparency requires trust. The world is a way less trusting place than ever, nobody leaves their front doors open any more, and we are wary of public gatherings. Even in a place like Sydney, where last night’s New Years fireworks on Sydney harbour brought an unprecedented level of security, which really serves mainly to get in the way of most, as the really determined would simply plan their way around the cops on the beat. The most concerning danger is the one we do not see and understand, and by over-reacting we are just making things worse for most while offering solace to those who trade in mistrust.

 

Are we educating for the future, or reflecting the past? I am no expert in education, but between my 4 grown kids there is 6 undergraduate degrees and a masters, so I claim to have rubbed up against the system a bit. My education goes back a long time, but  the best teacher I ever had was an old Harvard professor, Jim Hagler who was somewhat ostracised even by that august institution because of his ideas about the value of rote learning Vs creative thinking. That was in the 70’s, and I do not see much progress, he would still be outside the mainstream of bureaucratic education implementation. It seems to me that we are setting about the process of education by reflecting the past, and assuming the future will be pretty much the same,  when even the most blinkered thinker will concede this is not  the case. Our universities need to be funded, but the economic rationalists seem to be in control, and are screwing the pooch. The environment of thought, learning and education in its broadest sense is bastardised by the requirement to flog bits of paper to whomever is willing and able to pay for them. Somehow It seems to be a road to perdition, a place where a degree can be bought, and is therefore worth little as a mark of true education. At the same time we have been telling our kids that they are second rate if they do not have a degree. The trades have become dirty, and the skills that built cathedrals, bridges, machines, and the water systems that enable us to be civilised are rapidly being lost to generations who think that manipulating digital currency is useful work.

 

I am 65 in a few days, so perhaps I am just a dinosaur, but from the perch of all those years in and around businesses, education and the public sector, I am becoming seriously concerned with the world my grandchildren will inherit.

Anyway, I hope that 2017 turns out to be a great year, one that marks a turning point in our capacity to see ourselves as others see us, and understand that as communities we simply have to live and work together, as the alternative is pretty ugly.

Happy 2017 to you all.

How to make your website really work for you

How to make your website really work for you

Dec 7, 2016 | Communication, Small business, Social Media

A friend of mine recently drafted a website for a product he is launching, and asked me to have a look before publishing it. Not a great thing to be doing, as by the time I had finished commenting, he had tuned out. There was just too much bad news.

There are millions of websites out there, so the question  now is not just how to get your website seen by those to whom it is targeted, but how do you then get them to take some sort of action, without which, it all has little point.

A few simple rules

Clarity of purpose. Ensure it is crystal clear what you do, in essence why the site exists. The simpler the better, remove all the detail, all the jargon and fancy words, opting instead for simple statements and graphics that illustrate why you are there.

What problem do you solve. Customers buy solutions to problems, not products. The purchase of everything from the groceries to expensive luxuries are in some way connected to a problem, real or perceived that the customer has. Tell them which one you are solving, how, and why they should buy from you.

They are not interested in you. Almost every site has an ‘About us’ page. It is useful to give some background, demonstration of expertise, and how you care deeply about the ‘bilbies’, but less is more. People are interested in you only to the extent that it confirms their decision to purchase from you. The fact that your grandfather who founded the business was apprentice of the year in 1935 is supremely irrelevant, as are the awards you may have won in 2000.

Demonstrate that your solution works. This can take many forms from testimonials to statistics and demonstrations, but is an important component of building trust and credibility.

Have a designer design. The look of a site says a lot about you, and it is a designers job to interpret the important things visually. The choice of images, layout, use of white space, location of icons of various types are all done better by a pro. It does not have to cost a lot, and most of those who design websites who may be good technically are not necessarily good at visual and creative design. The bit of extra investment is almost always well worth it.

Tell them what to do now. Ask for the action you want a visitor to your site to take. Download something, watch a video, follow a link, whatever it may be, make it clear, easy to do, and ask.

My friend was sorry he asked, but a week or so later, showed me a way better version that will now be published as a part of his product launch in a few months.