A Private note to the chairman: or 6 reasons to quit.

Apr 22, 2013 | Change, Governance, Leadership

 

 future

It is always intriguing to get into a debate with one of my director peers about the way forward for an enterprise. Opinions vary, and the “chat” can become animated, as one did a few weeks ago. As a result, I jotted down a few points to email as a follow up, just for sport, (perhaps commercial suicide) but on re-reading, they seem to make sense. Following is a language edited version.

Bill, managing and promoting growth has a couple of dimensions:

The first is managing the customers, market dynamics, and value proposition that keeps the bills paid, the second in being able to look around the corner and see what is coming next. Not just in terms of the old “same/similar product/new customer/new market” matrix, but the genuinely new stuff, the revised business models, products that break the consumer usage mould, packaging of technology that genuinely changes the dynamics, i.e., the future.

This second part is really hard, but there are a few things that every success seems to have in common, that we need to consider:

  1.  We need to understand what it is that we deliver, our purpose, why are we here?. Steve jobs did this better than anyone when he defined Apples purpose when he returned in terms of design, not the hardware or software, but the way in which consumers interacted with the product, and the design of the way it worked, and without being too wanky, its soul.
  2.  See better than our competitors  what it is we need to know to be successful in the future, indeed, we need to anticipate who may become competitors as the technology underpinning our business evolves. Those who saw the impact of the net first in terms of behaviour and the disruption of markets that occurred did best. Again, Jobs saw the future, and put bits of existing technology together in different ways and came to the market with revolutionary and disruptive products. By contrast, Jeff Bezos saw the future, and built Amazon to leverage that vision. In our business 3-D printing seems to have the potential to be a significant disrupter, it may miss us, but will not go away, so shouldn’t we be learning about the technology?
  3. Learn to unlearn, as they way we do things today will not be sufficient to survive in the future. This I see as a significant failure of the existing management, and our own demands of them. Rarely, outside the public sector have I seen a management so risk averse, but really, whose fault is that?
  4. Pilot, experiment, and take a lot of small steps, some of which individually may seem  “flakey” but together provide the opportunity to learn. See comment above.
  5. Reward the behaviour you want, not just with money, as whilst money is important, far more important to our employees is recognition, and further  opportunities to stretch their minds and build experience. They may move on with that knowledge and experience, but that is the world we live in, but while they remain, they contribute at a high level, and when they leave, they do so thanking us, not turning to Twitter to dump on us.
  6. Learn to live with the discomfort of not really knowing what is next, the disruption of the status quo that is fundamental to finding tomorrows successes. The twin notions of managing a project portfolio, and being prepared to pivot any project as circumstances demand rather than being wedded to some artificial business plan and operating budget should be embraced.

Unless we can agree that this list has some relevance to the way we direct the business, one of us has to go, and I would prefer it be me, as I do not want to be branded as one of the directors who failed to see the “crappola”  coming, and when it hit, did not have the sense to turn off the fan. Besides, you are the chairman, and my peers like to be told what to do, so my departure can be seen as a “smoothing” of the board debates.

In short, it is my contention that we must manage the present, and invent the future, and to do this we need to develop a far higher degree of management ambidexterity, and sensitivity to our rapidly evolving marketplace.

I look forward to our next conversation.

A measure of brand maturity.

Apr 19, 2013 | Branding, Marketing, Strategy

 

coke

Ever noticed that people who seem to “really have it all together” are able to poke fun at themselves, take negative feedback as an opportunity to learn and improve, and surprise with their capacity to be absolutely, selflessly, honest?

It is often the same with brands, another example of the similarity of people and brands, of how brands take on human characteristics.

However, it is a revelation to see this astonishingly honest ad by Coke.

Is this the beginning of a trend, a measure of maturity of the Coca Cola brand that it is able to spend resources advertising the downside of consumption of the product, or just a mistake, like the appalling blunder with “New Coke”  in 1985. Perhaps, my cynical side asks, it is because they make more money out of their other beverage products, and want to switch consumption?

It seems to me that despite all, it really is just a measure of the security that Coke management feels in the strength of their brand. It is a recognition that if they do not talk about the cause and effect between sugar beverage consumption and obesity, and all its problems,  others will, and they better have a credibility and a stake in the conversation.

 

Brand ambiguity will be terminal

Apr 18, 2013 | Branding, Communication

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In a world of homogenisation, being different is both dangerous and necessary.

Standing for something of value  is absolutely essential, ambiguity is death.

C21 Moments of Truth.

Apr 16, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Social Media

SAS

Former CEO of Scandanavian Airlines, Jan Carlzon  write a book in the eighties called “Moments of Truth” which reflected the journey of SAS from its commercial deathbed to being the most admired airline in the world. It was a best seller, articulating the then revolutionary idea that each interaction an enterprise had with a customer was a “Moment of Truth” a point at which the consumers experience would shape their attitude and future relationships with a brand.

It occurs to me that it has changed now, and the moment of truth that now matters as much, if not more, is now the point at which a consumer posts, tweets, or other wise publicly records the interaction and their experience with it for others to see, hear, and feed into their memory banks for reference.

The 21st Century has opened up a number of opportunities to interact with consumers Carlzon never anticipated, the referral power of the devices we now routinely use has changed Carlzons Moment of Truth to just the first of many crucial moments.

Social square pegs and round holes

Apr 15, 2013 | Management, Small business, Social Media

round-hole-square-peg

Over the weekend just gone, I was a part of a strategy group setting out to build the marketing plan for an occasional client. There were several guest speakers, one an articulate and persuasive purveyor of what I regarded to be social media snake oil, and so a vigorous debate ensued.

His contention was that every business, particularly SME’s needed to be active on every major SM platform, and that a part of every employees job was to represent the interests of their employer on the various platforms.

Superficially that argument has some attraction, as an advocate of SM for SME’s, it is hard to argue against a proposition that SM is more available than traditional media, and that employees should be engaged and committed, or they ceased to be useful employees.

However, there are three very real arguments against the proposition, all of which I used.

  1. Not all social media platforms are equal, and they play vastly different roles, attracting users for different reasons, and in different situations. Individually, each platform is just a small piece of the SM pie, but if you try and consume the whole pie, all you get is indigestion. Much better to understand the pie, and go to where the goodies are hidden.
  2. Then I thought about the senior maintenance engineer who had worked in the business for many years. An enormously competent and committed bloke, and great in a group at the pub, but the owner of a left field sense of what is funny, sometimes even acceptable, and what is not. Encouraging him to be anywhere near the 140 characters of Twitter sends shivers down the spine, but I desperately want him to continue running maintenance
  3. The clincher, SM is not free, it consumes lots of the most valuable resource an SME has, time. The invoices may be lower than with traditional and paid media, but the commitment of time to do a good job is significant, and most often will attract consulting fees of some sort as SME’s fill the capability gap, which then offers the opportunity to be paying for snake oil, unless you are good at identifying the snakes.

The real management task is to have a very clear business purpose, supported by a few strategies that have evolved from understanding the business, its value proposition, customers,  competitors, and operating environment, and making the choices that drive the priorities and resource allocation decisions. Social Media is a part of the mix, an important part, but you need to be putting round pegs in round holes of the right size, and not getting confused about which is what.