The 8 most viewed StrategyAudit blog posts of 2018.

The 8 most viewed StrategyAudit blog posts of 2018.

Jan 5, 2019 | Leadership, Management, Marketing

 

Over 2018, the StrategyAudit blog attracted 19,948 page views from 10,568 individual visitors, about 65% of whom are repeat visitors. To me this repeat visitation is a vital number. I would rather have 1 person who demonstrates that the musings I publish are of value by returning, than  10 casual visitors who read and leave, never to return. Also important is the simple fact that on average, each visitor visited almost 2 posts. Averages are misleading, many visitors leave quickly, others engage with 2,3,sometimes 4 posts, and sign up to the feed so they do not miss further posts. It is this engagement that delivers the value to them, and is the reason I persist.

To some, 20,000 page views across a year would constitute a disaster, they get that in a week, but to others, it is a significant number. I am just pleased that the number is well up on 2017, despite the increased ‘noise’ from so called content that now infests the web.  

These numbers are in addition to  the thousands of views that occur from second party platforms, most often LinkedIn. These are valuable, but long term digital marketing success is dependent on the quality of your own digital ‘homebase’ where you control the rules. For example, back in August, LinkedIn changed their algorithm, and the visitors from LinkedIn halved overnight, and the geography changed from 75% Australia, where there is some potential return for me from the effort of writing the posts, to 75% from the US, from where I will not be able to leverage any benefit. I do  not mind helping the Americans, they need all the help they can get, but it is nice to have some hope of receiving a benefit in return, which Linkedin, and their colleague ‘Social’ platforms are making increasingly difficult unless you pay for it.

Organic reach from third party platforms is almost a thing of the past, something  to think about as you plan for 2019.   

To the most viewed posts of the year.

The 4 dimensions of project planning. Published July 2016

It looks like this will become one of the most viewed posts over an extended period, as the numbers keep climbing every month, 2018 being 40% higher than 2017. It is only a short post, 300 words, but summarises the challenges faced by every team planning a project, from a tactical initiative to a major enterprise changing implementation.

7 tips on how not to be boring while presenting. Published March 2018.

This post garnered may views in the days after it was posted, but attracted little attention thereafter. This is  not an uncommon pattern amongst those posts that have a ‘long tail’. They start slowly after an initial  flurry, then build over time. I am hopeful this happens with this post, as several readers have let me know that the tips have helped them enormously.

3 essential pieces of the supermarket business model. Published November 2014

This post would be on this list for every year since 2014, clearly it struck a chord.  Although 2018 was below 2017, it delivers readers to the blog every day. Along with Loose/Tight management further down this list, it is the most viewed post I have written. On several occasions, this post has been the basis of a successful keynote to various gatherings.

11 trends that will influence success in 2018. Published January 2018

January and  February were big months, presumably as people planned for the year, with little since. However, the trends noted for 2018 are all still present as we face 2019, so I would expect (hope for)a revival.

How do you measure culture?. Published May 2018

May and June were heavy, with modest numbers subsequently, but this post is building momentum slowly, as we come to realise the vital role enterprise culture plays in success, and failure. Perhaps I should send it to some of the senior executives in the financial services industry, as they contemplate their navels and bonuses in the wake of the royal commission.

Loose/tight management. Published October 2010

This is the most surprising post, delivering pretty consistent numbers month in month out since posting, in the early days of this blog. it is short, and specific, must be the headline that catches ‘googlers’. However, I note a recurring flurry of readers in April/May every year, so assume that somewhere an academic has cited the post in course material.

What is the number 1 job of the CEO? Published July 2018.

Published at the end of July this post was seen mostly in August, with few views since then. A short post that concludes that the number one job of the CEO is to create the environment in which employees can flourish, thereby delivering the strategic and financial outcomes required for sustainable economic success. In a word, the number 1 job of the CEO is ‘Culture’

10 considerations to make better pricing decisions. Published July 2018.

Significant readership in the days around posting, then almost nothing. Perhaps it is a lousy headline, a good one is vital to attracting readers. This is unfortunate, as I consider it to be one of the posts that can deliver  immediate and meaningful outcomes to readers after consideration of the issues noted. It has also been the basis of several seemingly well recieved keynotes.

These top 8 posts are only 15% of the total post views over the year, a strong indication of the longevity of posts that add value to someone, somewhere.

Now, on to 2019. Thanks for reading, your feedback and good wishes during 2018.

 

The ‘Collaboration trap’

The ‘Collaboration trap’

Dec 3, 2018 | Collaboration, Leadership

 

Collaboration has become a standard mantra, ‘do it or die’.

I see all sorts of collaboration being put in place, most of it leads to wasted time, energy, lost opportunity, and suboptimal outcomes.

Why

The collaboration teams are thrown together from a pool in an enterprise where everyone thinks in a similar manner. There is little diversity of thought, and often those co-opted are the ones who appear to have the time to do a bit more, or alternatively they are really effective, so they get given more to do.

You know  the old saying, ‘to get something done, give it to a busy person‘.

Utter nonsense.

We are collaborating too much, but rather than real collaboration, we have groups of people  in close proximity who are not adding value.

What we need is ‘Disciplined Collaboration’.

Collaborating teams that are constructed for diversity in skills and thinking styles, such they  can all add value, and the scope of the collaboration is set by a planned outcome of some sort.

To get a useful result from a collaboration, you need people  who have the capability to contribute to that outcome, not just someone who happens to be walking past at the time a seat needs to be filled.

You need a focus of activity, a problem to be solved, and intent, not a series of meetings of individuals who are not really sure why they are there.

 

 

Which 5 capabilities enable a leader to successfully scale

Which 5 capabilities enable a leader to successfully scale

Nov 23, 2018 | Change, Leadership

Virtually every business I come across wants to grow.

A few I come across want to, and are able to scale.

Scaling is different from just growing, it requires much more than being better at what you currently do. It requires significant change, invites risk, and for many is very unsettling personally.

The few that have scaled successfully all have in place a leadership that seems to have a few common characteristics, always in an individual, who is able to shape the organisation in ways that reflect the hunger to be different in ways that adds serious value to customers, and to scale as a result.

They create a vision that excites and engages those around them.

They are able to translate that vision into a clear strategy that provides a transparent framework for decision making, ensuring what not to do is as important as what to do.

They build the capabilities of those around them to enable the execution of the strategy.

They focus relentlessly on one thing at a time, and measure results that connect the outcomes to the strategy, daily, weekly, quarterly, bi-annually, and longer term.

They are good people. This seems counter to the public persona of the driving successful business person who scales a business successfully, but most I have seen who are the genuine leaders of a successful scaling, are also successful people in other ways.

When you want to see if your business has what it takes, give me a call.

Photo credit: Roberto Robitz via Flikr

 

 

 

A retrospective on personal values.

A retrospective on personal values.

Nov 15, 2018 | Leadership

Years ago as a young product manager, I made two related mistakes.

Nothing huge, or threatening, just a stupid mistake that would have been avoided by a bit of due diligence, thought, and experience.

All three were missing, but what was there was the overconfidence of youth, an action for the sake of action mindset, a level of intoxication with the first trappings of corporate power, and perhaps a (big) touch of arrogance.

Second mistake I made was to try and dodge when the error was called out.

That second mistake created, in the space of 5 minutes, what has become the bedrock of my personal credo ever since.

  • Always take absolute responsibility when it is yours, or that of your team if you are the leader. We all make mistakes, those who do not are not doing enough, but only a fool makes the same mistake twice.
  • When you make a blue, if you are the first to recognise it, stick your hand up, tell everyone of the error, explain why it happened, and what you have learnt. This can be very uncomfortable, but when you point out your own blues, it leaves those who would hang you with very little rope.
  • When it is necessary to administer an arse-kicking, as it sometimes is, always, always, do it in private. Administering the kick in public adds humiliation to the mix, demeans you, and ensures that the kickee will never respect you again, and if they are any good, will leave quickly.

That incident was now 40 years ago, a lifetime, but I remember it as if it were yesterday, and have diligently lived by the three simple rules for all that time.

The 5 ‘Literacies’ required for superior performance

The 5 ‘Literacies’ required for superior performance

Sep 5, 2018 | Leadership, Management

Over the 23 years of working with medium sized businesses to improve their performance, the activities have all come from 5 common buckets.

  • Financial Literacy
  • Strategic Literacy
  • Operational Literacy
  • Business model Literacy
  • Revenue generation Literacy

 

Every action, strategy, and tactic employed comes from one of  them, but importantly has flow on effects on all the others, sometimes in unanticipated ways. In those cases, having the performance measures in place that show up the outcomes early enables you to double down on those that work, and back off those that do not.

Business improvement is an iterative process, ideally a tightly managed one, but iterative none the less. It also needs to provide the opportunity to incorporate ideas, insights, and new information that comes to light. What I call ‘Loose Tight’ management.

Similarly, each bucket has a hierarchy supporting it, and the more you go  into the weeds with the detail, the greater the apparent interdependence they all have.

However, thinking of them as buckets that require a series of decisions or actions helps to organise all the disparate things that get in the way of performance. You are able to sort out at each level in the supporting hierarchy which actions are important and which are not, which deserve the focus of resources over the others, recognising that you simply cannot do all the things that may seem sensible and important, no matter how big you may be. It also enables project management, timelines, cascading KPI’s and individual and group accountability to be clear.

You have to make  choices, and the choices in one arena inevitably impacts on those in others.

Add them together and you get superior performance as an outcome. The whole is always greater than the sum of the parts when done well.

The 7 foundations of a successful enterprise

The 7 foundations of a successful enterprise

Aug 31, 2018 | Governance, Leadership, Strategy

 

I was asked the question ‘what makes a truly successful enterprise’ at a workshop that had strategy development as its purpose. It is a regular question that I get in various forms, and a question that I ask myself from time to time.

The easy answer is the marketing responses:  know your customer, understand your markets, select the market niche in which  you compete in and dominate it in some way, all of which are correct, but are not the full answer.

The full answer lies in having the right foundations for the enterprise, foundations upon which everything else is built.

Like the foundations of a house, they are rarely visible, and almost never all visible at the same time.

It seems to me that they also create a virtuous circle, and the lack of one impacts on the others in a manner greater that you would expect.

None have anything to do with the tools that are used, particularly all the new digital tools and platforms.

Have a clear, well communicated strategy.

Strategy provides the framework within which enterprises make decisions at all levels that add to the value of the activities being undertaken. It is as much about what you will not do, always a harder choice than what you will do, as it requires the killing of someone’s ‘baby’ idea.

A strategy that is held in the c-suite, no matter how good it is, will be compromised by not being communicated throughout the business as the decision making foundation. Whether you set out to be the low cost supplier, supply only those  who fit a certain profile, deliver continuous innovations, whatever it is, make sure everyone understands it.

Execution.

No plan is of any real use until it is used. Execution of the plan is 9 tenths of the game. Relentless focus on the strategy, and execution with the appropriate feedback loops that enable tactical adjustments to be made as new information emerges makes a strategy successful. Without execution, strategy is just a set of potentially good ideas and vague promises.

Business model.

Many managers spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about the structures of their businesses, often missing the key component of the manner in which it delivers value to the key group of customers articulated in the strategy.

20 years ago, the number of potential business models was limited by the physical limits of communication and logistics. While this still applies, the flow of information facilitated by the net has changed the face of business, and has spawned a pile of new business models  and ways to reach customers and deliver value. It also seems that business models have trouble cohabiting. Therefore  choices need to be made that should be dictated by the strategic priorities.

Talent.

Businesses are just places where people gather to do the work, so the better the people the better the work. You need talented people to get the work done, a business is nothing without people. Taking this one step further, it is really the networks of people that deliver value.  ‘Joys law‘ named for Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy holds that ‘no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work somewhere else’. The self-evidence of this statement should encourage management to find ways to include some of these people into their commercial ‘eco-systems’. In a small way, many Australian businesses are doing this already,  outsourcing increasingly complex tasks offshore. The initial push is usually cost, but many are finding that quality can be as good as or better than is available locally.

Behaviour.

The way people behave, collectively,  becomes labelled ‘culture’. Culture is usually described in the terms first used  by Michael Porter 30 years ago, as ‘The way we do things around here‘ which is also a description of the behaviour that prevails. Is it collaborative, congenial, non-discriminatory, a meritocracy? Again, the sort of behaviour you nurture is a key determinant of the culture that evolves, and should make up a key component of individual and group KPI’s.

Leadership.

The behaviour of people is driven by the leadership style of the ‘boss’ and senior group. Together they dictate the terms of the culture, select the appropriate talent for the tight reasons, select and deploy the KPI’s based on the behaviour required to execute the strategy. Falling back on the wisdom of Peter Drucker, again, who said ‘Management is doing things right, leadership is doing the right things‘. It is the leadership that extracts performance from an enterprise beyond the average, the willingness to be held accountable, inspire, and explore.

Timing.

The value of getting the timing right is a wildly underestimated contributor to success. From simple internal matters like making that key presentation to the directors when they have had a series of good results, to major external factors such as recognising the point at which a technology that may have lain dormant for years suddenly has a place. Penicillin, the computer mouse, digital camera, Wireless LAN, touch screen, and thousands of other innovations lay dormant, unused until something changed, creating an impetus for the innovation to be commercialised, often in ways unforeseen by the developers. They are in effect a solution to a problem not  yet identified, or sitting outside the sight of incumbents, or simply the wrong time wrong place in some trivial way. A personal example. In the very early eighties I worked for Cerebos in Australia, as a product manager for a number of their brands, Fountain amongst them. I saw an opportunity for a pasta sauce to complement the then very small, but expanding dry pasta market. Fortunately there was an Italian food technologist in the development team who developed a range of very good pasta sauces, which we launched in test market  in Victoria. The test failed, for a number of reasons, that had nothing to do with the quality of the products, or the strategic thinking that was behind them. Eighteen months later, Masterfoods launched ‘Alora’ pasta sauces and  built a category. In blind tests, when considering a second try, the failed Fountain sauces significantly outperformed the successful Alora products, but their timing was way better than ours.

 

When you need to inject the wisdom of ‘been there done that‘, give me a call.