Feb 11, 2010 | Change, Innovation, Strategy
We spend time and effort managing our way through legacy IT systems, recognizing the impact they have on performance, and the cost benefit of spending the capital to replace them.
However, we rarely think about strategy in a similar manner.
Instead we think about the status quo, the culture and the need to change them, and we craft sometimes elaborate re-engineering projects often at great expense, to change them, but rarely think about them as a “legacy” of the past, and therefore to be treated as an oddity to be removed as soon as practical.
Perhaps if we subjected legacy strategies to the same ridicule we heap on legacy IT systems, change would be a lot easier to make.
Feb 10, 2010 | Change, Leadership, Management
Engaging a consultant usually means you have a problem that is deemed to require outside expertise.
This begs the question, “why would you engage someone who knows less about your business and its problems than you, to assist solving a problem?
The answer is simple, because the consultant knows less than you about the specifics, he/she is not constrained by the automatic assumptions that frame the way someone internal considers a problem, and is therefore able to ask questions free of the constraints of process, practice, and culture that develop in any organization. They are able to distinguish the wood from the trees because they do not wear the organization blinkers that internal people automatically assume.
Notice the emphasis on asking questions rather than giving answers?
A consultant who comes in and gives you answers should be shown the door, as he has just jumped to a conclusion on flimsy data. However, one who comes in and asks the difficult questions, ones that require a profound rethiknk of the status quo, is to be treasured. Such questions come from a breadth of experience in similar situations, and can lead to a solution that suits your organization by assisting you to come to the conclusions yourself through a process of helping you identify the impediments to the required outcome.
No consultant can know as much abnout your business as you, they just see it through different eyes, and from a less contrained perspective.
Feb 9, 2010 | Change, Management, OE, Operations, Sales
For a long time as a consultant, who has done a fair but of sales training in a B2B environment, I have fallen back on a foundation proposition made up of three parts.
When planning a sales strategy to sell a product that is not a cheap disposable commodity (like paper clips)to a customer, you can only really do three things:
- Assist the customer increase his sales
- Assist the customer reduce his costs
- Assist the customer increase the productivity of his assets.
If the product you are selling does not address at least one of these three parameters, why would someone buy from you?
Recently, undertaking an improvement exercise for a manufacturing client, it became clear the same three questions can be applied to any improvement process, not just sales.
If any activity, policy, assumption, or behavioral norm does not contribute to at least one of these three outcomes for your organization why are you still doing it? “How does that contribute to…..?” becomes a very powerful question.
Feb 9, 2010 | Marketing
My Father always said, “you only get what you pay for” so he instinctively related price to value.
Now, the web has changed everything, and increasingly, “Free” is being used as a means to attract a target to trial, to deliver a generic service that leads into the other stuff, for which you can charge. However, much of the free stuff has a value, millions of Gmail users will vouch for that, and hosting this blogg, written on WordPress is free, but to customise it beyond a basic level costs.
Generic is getting very hard to charge for as the marginal cost of providing the service is approaching zero, so someone is going to offer it free in the expectation that 10% of those who sign up will move up to the paid model, where the product can be made specific to you, and so you become price insensitive, and the provider makes a dollar.
The more narrow and specific to an individual a product is, the greater the ability to charge.
Feb 7, 2010 | Branding, Management, Marketing
During the brand development process, to the extend that is it deliberate, most conversations are about the activities that supposedly drive the objective measures of success, sales, margins, market share, household penetration, and so on.
However, during qualitative research, brands take on human qualities, they are described using personal pronouns, they are young, old, male, female, a farmer, or a merchant banker, funny, quirky, reliable, and so on, but these responses are usually pushed aside, and minimised in order to give the spreadsheets some air.
Sitting in on many market and brand development conversations over the years, it is surprising how often we forget the human dimension, and the difference it makes to our activities, and priorities when we actively set out to describe the brand in human terms, and give the humanity of the brand a central place in our considerations.
