Dec 17, 2012 | Communication, Marketing, Sales
Everybody, well almost everybody, uses Powerpoint. Some use it well, many use it poorly, and some are just appalling.
We have all sat through that presentation by somebody we thought had something to say, and they said it all on packed, almost illegible slides, which they then read to us!
Sigh!
So here are three simple, practical steps to take to make a boring presentation engaging, assuming of course that what is to be said has merit in the first place. No way to make a silk purse…………
- Use big fonts, the bigger the better. You therefore cannot get much on a slide, so need to distill the information down to the idea you are trying to convey. If you cannot distill the verbiage down to a few words that is the core of the message, work on your message, not the presentation.
- Use photos, drawings and graphics that convey a message, one per slide. As above, plus it gives you a visual hook onto which to hang a story. There are millions of images on the net, there will be many that convey the core message in a memorable way, you just have to find it.
- Do things in threes. For some reason my psychological friends can probably recite, our brains work in threes, we can remember three, and sequences of three, using this innate ability helps to organise your thoughts and presentation, and creates a flow for the audience.
If Powerpoint no longer does it for you at all, eventually the world does move on, then something like Prezi evolves, and simply makes the old stuff look, well, old.
Dec 13, 2012 | Lean, Operations, Small business
How often do we get sidetracked by several possible causes of an adverse or unexpected outcome?
In the course of doing a fair bit of process improvement work over the years, one of the really successful strategies I have used is to get people to distinguish between the real cause of an unwanted outcome, and something that has no impact. Put like that it seems pretty simple, but it is almost always more complicated, and serves as a core of the “5 Why” lean tool, always requiring hands on knowledge of the way things work, and usually some data. Ask yourself “Why” successively, up to 5 times, as in this lovely story of the Lincoln memorial and pigeons.
Is the intermittent crushing of boxes by the box erector in the factory caused by a marginal variation in the dimensions of the carton flat (prior to erection) or by the wearing of the bearings in the box erector itself, leading to sloppy operation in one of the clamps? Pretty easy to mistake which of these is the real cause of the stoppages, and waste time trying to fix something that perhaps does not need fixing, while the boxes continue to be crushed.
This is of course different from the confusion about which is cause, and which is effect. I was in the Sydney CBD last week, and saw several blind people with Labrador dogs. Does having a Labrador cause blindness?
Dec 11, 2012 | Change, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing
Web based A/B testing goes a long way towards eliminating dumb mistakes, making the best choice, creating a discipline around innovative activity, and encouraging change, and has been made far easier in a whole range of areas by the data collection capabilities of the net.
But what happens when you cannot test, when you are doing something so completely new that the frame of reference necessary for good test results does not exist?
Try testing the Model T in 1890, only a few would have seen the possibilities because the horse was the frame of reference, the early cubic paintings of Picasso, art that so broke the rules as to be outrageous, or the calculations of Copernicus demonstrating the earth was not the centre of the universe, something catholic church felt pretty strongly about.
At some point testing becomes a redundant tool, you simply cannot test everything, and you have to rely on the guts, instinct, and insight of the few outliers who see things differently to make meaningful change
Dec 9, 2012 | Branding, Change, Lean, Operations
Tim Cook, the Apple CEO has just come out and announced that Apple will restart manufacturing in the US, starting with an unnamed Mac computer model, some time in the near future.
The driver of “offshoring” to sources of cheap labour to escape the high manufacturing labour costs in developed countries, has been a convenient excuse for a lack of ideas by the management of many companies. Virtually all the manufacturing businesses I interact with have an operational labour cost of substantially less that 20% of total BOM and operational logistics costs, so why not work on the other 80%? Often I suspect because it is easier to join the herd charging towards China than do the hard yards on their own business model.
“Outsource the manufacturing, and let the capacity utilisation be someone else’s problem”. Clearly this happened in Apple’s case, as the business tanked in the late eighties, cost cutting led to the closure of factories, and outsourcing of manufacturing and key parts of the technical design, remained the model through the revival led by the ipod, iphone, ipad, and siblings.
However, the competition has now caught up, and volumes are not growing the way they were. Apple may be hugely profitable, but as they no longer ship the volumes, capacity utilisation in their supply chain must now have swung away from over utilised to underutilised in a very short space of time. Android is rapidly becoming the OS of choice in both phones and tablets as Apples share drops, so the Apple profit bubble must be getting a bit fragile.
It is significant (I think) that Samsung is a major supplier to Apple, what a competitive advantage they have been handed by foreknowledge of component specifications, and delivery dates, and now the supplier has become the major competitor, competing on the ground they are in a position to choose.
This boom/bust cycle of manufacturing volumes imposes huge costs on the supply chain. Having too much capacity and carrying the unrecovered overheads is as bad having too little, and chasing output targets that end up in carrying high logistics and operational costs while compromising quality. Weather this is owned capacity, or outsourced, it remains a part of the supply chain, and somebody is paying for it, generally the consumer who has little motivation to pay for stuff that does not add value.
Perhaps I am a cynic, certainly I have no insight into the workings of Apple, but the move to announce the re-opening of manufacturing in the US without any detail at all sounds a bit “iffy” to me, perhaps a PR gesture to deflect some of the odium from the ongoing saga of Foxconn. Just put the word Foxconn into the search engine of a media outlet, this one Huffington Post, and you get over 6000 articles in response, and not one is doing the Apple brand any good at all.
Too little too late, or the beginning of another swing in the cycle?
Dec 7, 2012 | Governance, Sales
We are all pretty familiar with the typical sales funnel, wide at the beginning, narrowing progressively as you get closer to the “business end”. It is a simple, descriptive metaphor for other than an impulse or regular consumer purchase, but like most models, rarely reflects reality.
Prospects come into, and leave the sales process at all points, and then often come back, for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the efforts of a sales/marketing program.
Given that is the reality, it follows then that the relationships that evolve are far more valuable than the position of any prospect in the sales funnel, as it is the relationships that evolve that enable lead nurturing and recycling through the irregular, stuttering, and often unpredictable sales cycle.
A much better metaphor in many cases may be a game of snakes and ladders, but that is nowhere near as neat and tidy in a board paper.
