Mar 10, 2011 | Change, Social Media
Organisations of all types and sizes are grappling with the impact of social media. It is simply a fact of life now that many if not most customers, employees, and value chain partners use it, the potential as a marketing and communication tool is only just starting to be leveraged, and the clash with the cultural norms of the 20th century organisation are profound.
The social media egg will not be unscrambled, and setting out to manage its implications on all the relationships that exist to make an organisation work by command and control mechanisms simply will not work. A new set of rules needs to apply, and we need to think differently about governance practices we employ, and look to what works elsewhere.
In addition to the governance issues, being effective in a hugely cluttered environment with no barriers to entry is remarkably difficult, so some simple marketing guidelines may be useful, irrespective of the delivery mechanism:
- Be relevant to those you wish to connect with, the #hashtag function in twitter enables others to search and filter posts for relevance.
- Concentrate on the important users/followers, having 25,000 followers may look impressive, but is useless for any sensible connection with the few who are important.
- Ask for input, help, comment, and it will come from a few of those who are engaged, clearly the ones you want to build a relationship, who share a connection.
- Build relationships first, sales may follow later, but without a relationship, there will be no sales. Consumers are a wary lot, rightly so, and looking like a pushy digital “used car salesman” will just turn people off.
Feb 15, 2011 | Change, Collaboration, Innovation, Social Media
Finding professionals to develop stuff for you is getting easier by the day. A whole range of services are evolving to meet short term needs, by matching the booming IT capabilities in emerging nations prepared to work for what in a developed economy is peanuts, to the needs of individual projects.
In addition, on line services like surveys can be done quickly, and simply to test hypotheses before significant expenditure is committed.
Agility does not equal poor planning, so long as it is in the context of an overall objective to be achieved, rather it reflects a humility necessary to recognise you do not have all the answers, and a willingness to adapt simply reflects the reality of complicated, fragmented, and rapidly changing circumstances combined with the edge of the envelope moving at increasing speed.
Feb 8, 2011 | Change, Innovation, Management, Strategy
When one of the giants of industry, in this case, General Electric, takes a position on a topic, and supports that position not just with money and commitment, but sets out to persuade anyone who will listen to adjust their own perspective for everyone’s good, we should all listen.
GE undertook a business transformation driven by the 6 sigma developments of Motorola, and made 6 sigma the management fad of the 90’s, and more recently has embraced an enterprise wide search for “eco-friendly” products and services, termed “ecomagination” which has spawned new business that turned over $US 5 Billion in 2010. They have now turned their attention to the innovation process, publicly embracing an open model across their business units, and have just published a credible survey they have termed the “Innovation Barometer” , which sets out to interpret the views of 1000 very senior executives across 12 countries about the way they see the innovation process evolving. There are some standout conclusions.
- Successful innovation will come from a whole of society benefit, not just a bottom line benefit for the innovator.
- The role of SME’s will increase substantially
- So called “green” innovation will play a pivotal role
- Collaboration across enterprise, geographic, scientific and cultural barriers will become pre-eminent.
Our Prime Minister prattled on last week picking up some of these themes, but failed in my view to provide what every innovation thinker knows is fundamental to success, an objective, (perhaps a BHAG) best exampled by JFK’s 1961 national BHAG of reaching the moon by 1969, providing a driving vision of the end point.
Feb 8, 2011 | Change, Collaboration, Lean, Operations
Typically, we see things in an “either/or” context, you can do one thing at the expense of another, take your choice!. You can have line efficiency, or line flexibility, not both, advertising reach or frequency against a narrow target, but not both in the advertising budget, covering inventory requirements of A, or B by the end of the week , but not both. Happens very day.
This trade-off is programmed into us, but has the unintended consequence of “allowing” shallow problem analysis, facilitating our “jump” to a conclusion, rather than going through the hard work of real problem articulation, consideration of many possible solution options, and the testing and recalibration of hypotheses that should occur and re-iterate to identify where more data is needed, more ambiguity dissolved, and more responsibility taken.
When was the last time you acted too soon, and laid all your bets on a single obvious solution being the right one, only to find the siren song of “easy and obvious” led you astray?
I first came across this phenomena in the late 80’s (to my younger readers, some of us were working then) when my then employer was running “Ski” yoghurt down a new form/fill/seal machine designed for long runs to meet the demand in France, where the machinery was made. Run raspberry yoghurt for a few days, and it worked wonderfully, great in France, but for us it would have been a years stock, so we had to change flavors after little more than what would have been a changeover run in France, in many cases, less than an hour, with the attendant changeover times and start-up/finish-run inefficiencies, which the French engineers assured us were “absolutement” unavoidable.
Over a period of time, in a structured and progressive way, our fitters and operators who ran this piece of French engineering revenge on the rest of the world, using what would now be described as a PDCA continuous improvement cycle, made that machine do what its makers said was impossible, and we got both efficiency and flexibility out of it.
Either/or was not good enough, progressively, with many small steps, a great deal of experimentation, and recognition that the operators often had a better view of the intricacies than an engineer working off a plan, it evolved it into a “both/and” machine.
As a result, we made pots of money, because we had very low inventory levels, almost 100% order fulfillment , and an increasing market share because our customer service to big retailers was better than our opposition, and the consumers loved the product. Truly a lean virtuous circle!
Jan 27, 2011 | Change, Collaboration, Customers, Lean, OE, Operations
Lean is at its core a management system, a holistic way of looking at the way an enterprise manages itself through a culture tuned to improvement, group and personal responsability, while six sigma is a quantitative process of managing in quality by getting it right first time.
Six sigma quality requires 99.997% perfect, or 3.4 defects/million. When you are manufacturing and supplying to customers even simple products, this is a very high bar indeed.
Motorola was the first US company to recognise and articulate the challenge in the face of Japanese competition in the 80’s, and they boomed, becoming the gold standard for western manufacturing, and inspiring thousands of others to lift their performance, from which we have all benefited. The article that first bought Motorola to public attention is this Fortune article from 1989, and it started a revolution.
Now the revolution appears to be over as Motorola is broken up into two separate listed companies after almost 2 decades of failing to build on the foundations built in the eighties. The leadership that followed those that built the foundation did not recognise the importance of the management systems necessary to support the continued improvement and Motorola fell back into the trap of conventional management accounting where inventory is an asset, cycle time and flow ignored as core metrics, functional management over-rides bottom up innovation, and all the other stuff that makes a lean environment work, got squeezed out.
As I work with clients on improvement initiatives that usually start with marketing and strategy, my patch, the necessity to improve operational processes to support those that engage with the customer is always a major driver, and the failure of Motorola after being the icon it was simply drives home the difficulty of not just improving current performance, but in the process, building the management and leadership processes that make the performance improvement process self sustaining.
Jan 16, 2011 | Change, Marketing, Social Media
Social media to many “50 something’s” who run most of our large businesses, is just code for wasting time that should be spent productively, but the reality is that social media is rapidly evolving into a potent business tool in several pretty fundamental ways.
- As we can see what is needed, and where far more quickly, the old resource allocation processes have become totally redundant. Allocating resources based on a plan now 12 months old is, as my kids would say “so 20th century”, it needs to be done in response to things happening NOW, and requiring response. This has huge implications on the way organisations democratise decision making at the front lines of market contact.
- As social media becomes more dense, it opens opportunities for collaboration not possible before. This is particularly potent in its ability to immediately mobilise numbers around a cause, location, or combination of both.
- Geographic barriers are no longer relevant as an organising principal. Most multinational businesses face this fundamental change in the dynamics of their organisational structures, but so to do social organisations such as the church.
- The power of social media as a marketing tool is only just starting to be recognised. We have long understood that personal recommendation is the best endorsement you can have, and the web can now offer an electronic version of the recommendation qualified by numbers and independence. Amazons system of recommendations shows the way.
And now, Hollywood has made a film about the beginnings of Facebook, and the motivation and foibles of its founder, surely, that is a sign that social media is now of age.
