Don’t believe everything you think

Don’t believe everything you think

Sep 22, 2017 | Change, Leadership

 

Leaders who are unable to see another point of view, listen to others, and absorb and engage with diversity are destined to make mistakes.

Good leaders have a point of view, but they allow others to put theirs, see when their ideas can be improved, and sometimes utter those amazingly strong leadership  words ‘I did not know that’

Your beliefs, powered by experiences are powerful barriers and filters to the way you see the world, they reinforce the status quo for you.

Have you ever made a mistake, seen a better way with the benefit of hindsight that should have been obvious with a little more information, thought, time and effort?

Yes, most of us have.

If you answered no, seek counselling, quickly, before you do  any more damage.

Cartoon Credit: Hugh McLeod at gapingvoid.com

 

11 growth strategies for small businesses

11 growth strategies for small businesses

Aug 23, 2017 | Leadership, Management, Small business

The last 23 years of working with, reconstructing, and observing small businesses in all sorts of situations has resulted in a pile of insights on many areas of business. A common fact or is the desire to grow, even when in the darkest times, almost all businesses aspire to grow. This is not ego, or self-delusion, it is simply a general acknowledgement that to stand still is to be overtaken.

Grow or get trampled.

The common factor of those that have successfully grown is that they do not follow any recipe, there is no guaranteed growth map, but it is clear that they have all combined some common elements in different ways to succeed.

Be different.

Every successful business I have seen has done something different to those around them, with whom they compete on a day to day basis. Being part of the crowd results at best, at being on the top of the ‘average’ range. Differentiation in the manner that they deliver value to their customers is perhaps  the most common element of success I have seen. It need not be a major thing at first glance, but combined with some of the following elements, differentiation becomes a powerful driver of growth.

Great product.

As the old advertising  saying goes, ‘The customer is not stupid, she is your wife’ . There is no situation where an average product can sustain above average performance. All the clichés and PR gloss in the world will not do any more than get a first sale, after that the product has to deliver value greater than available alternatives. It is the form of that value that differs dramatically, and value does not always mean technical quality, it means fit for purpose.

Growth is a relentless master.

Growth never happens in isolation of focus, effort and commitment. Every sustainable growth business I have seen, or read about, has somewhere in its DNA, a focus on growth, in a way that seizes opportunity, makes it work, learns from what does not work, and goes again. It can apply this focus while ensuring that the every-day operations, the ones that pay the bills today, are well taken care of.

Marketing is shaped by the need.

Too often marketing is seen as a formulaic process that just requires the appropriate level of investment and capability to be successful. Wrong. Every situation requires a differing mix of marketing elements, and there are no two situations where the template will just ‘work’. Just ‘doing marketing’ will not lead to growth, the marketing has to be connected to the intended customers viscerally or it just becomes another of the millions of messages to which we are all subjected every day.

Find a niche and own it.

Whether you are the corner store of Apple, you cannot be all things to all people, in one way or another, you need to focus on those to whom you can deliver superior value. The evaluation of your target niche, the motivations of those at the bottom of the niche who are likely to be your best, stickiest, long term customers, then delivering value to them, is a key to growth. Once you have consolidated your niche, widen it a bit, seek adjacencies, look for novel uses of your capabilities in other niches, but never forget the niche.

Growth is long term.

Nothing useful happens overnight. Growth happens as a result of patience, commitment, and an ability to remain focussed on the goals, even when the short term stuff looks dark, or there is some compelling distraction. While it is fine to experiment, sustainable growth comes from building smaller success over time, not from frequent changes in direction. When looked at in hindsight, successful growth always has some elements of compounding small success present. Remember the fable of  the wise adviser who wanted nothing but compounding grains of rice on his chessboard, each square having double the grains of rice of the previous.

Seek leverage.

Identifying the means by which you can apply leverage to the assets you can deploy always pays dividends. Often this means combining your marketing with the behaviour  drivers of those in your niche to deliver some unique value, bit just as often is means ensuring that the basic processes that deliver the cash every day are robust, and repeatable. Having Standard Operating Procedures that are a part of  the operational DNA saves huge amounts of time and energy better applied to activities outside the mundane . Successful growth engines always have their core processes working well, and those growth activities seeking the points of greatest leverage.

Insights not data.

These days we run the risk of being overwhelmed with data, unlike when I started in business, when quality data was a rare beast, hard won. Today there is just so much data that the real skill is sorting it out and finding the hidden gems that offer insights you can leverage.  Data guru Avinash Kaushik calls it ‘data puking’ which is in my view a fine description. The metaphor I use is going into a library, without any idea what you might be looking for. You end up overwhelmed by the choice, with little chance of finding the right book.

Recognise your ecosystem.

What makes successful businesses successful is an ability to mix and match the best options for  their target customers, in ways that best deliver leverage for both parties. Growth is a two way street, no business can be sustainably successful unless their customers and suppliers are also successful. The task is to make the pie bigger so everyone benefits, not to take a bigger share of a static pie.

No silver bullets.

Growth comes from hard work, focus, determination, commitment, and not from luck or circumstances. My old dad used to say, the harder I work  the luckier I get. And that has been echoed by every successful person I have ever come across. It is never left to chance, it is a managed, deliberate process of making choices between alternative applications of limited available resources, being proved right more often than not, and learning from the times when you are wrong.

Clarity.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is clarity. We are in a world that is intensively competitive for the attention of those we may be able to serve. It does not matter if you are the corner store, or a multinational, your marketing challenge is to gain, then hold attention of those we can best serve, while we relate to them the reasons their best interests are best served, their challenges overcome, by working with you. The first test is to ask a few of your employees, close friends, and current customers what problem you solve, looking for a consistent and clear response. In its absence you have some work to do.

A lot of this is common sense, an increasingly rare thing in a complex world.

 

 

 

 

 

The real measure of marketing effectiveness, and how to deliver it.

The real measure of marketing effectiveness, and how to deliver it.

Aug 7, 2017 | Governance, Leadership, Marketing

Marketing is a functional silo on an organisation chart, as is Sales, Operations, Finance, HR, but unlike the others, marketing deals with unknowns, the future, whereas all the other functions deal with the past, or what is immediately in front of them.

Marketing is about the future, long term commercial sustainability, and its effectiveness is really hard to measure, other than in hindsight. There are lots of measures for things that have happened, which are the result of often many combinations of actions taken some time ago, so the measures are unable to change anything, just give insights to what worked and what did not.

As the senior marketing person in a very large business 30 years ago, I found myself often talking about advertising, segmentation, positioning, graphic design, and all the rest, around the board table, which either put others to sleep, or elicited opinions, usually uninformed, about the detail. However, when I talked revenue I had their attention.

Marketing is all about revenue, particularly future revenue. The other stuff is the paddling under the surface that enables the generation of the revenue, but the real measure of marketing effectiveness is revenue and margins over time.

In every business I have ever had anything to do with, marketing expenditure is treated as an item in the P&L. By definition, items in the P&L are expenses or past sales revenue. This is inconsistent with the notion of marketing being about building the foundations of future revenue.

The closest analogy is a piece of capital equipment, they are always purchased to fill one of two roles, sometimes both:

  • To increase the volumes too be sold, or,
  • Increase the productivity of the processes.

Those purchases are recorded in the cash flow statements, and the balance sheet, not the P&L. The greater irony is that capital items are depreciating assets, whereas marketing  investments, when done well are appreciating assets, unrecorded anywhere until the business is sold, then the accountants start talking about ‘Goodwill’ being the difference between the realisable value of the physical assets, and the liabilities on the books.

There is a structural paradox here. We treat a potentially appreciating asset differently to one that can only depreciate, just because it is hard to measure.

This challenge of measurement is the biggest one marketing people have to hurdle. The turnover of marketers in senior roles is the fastest amongst the functional heads in large corporations because we generally do not recognise the essential long term business building nature of marketing investments. We treat it as an expense to be cut at the slightest cloud on the profitability horizon, and the marketing people with it.

One of the challenges here is that to achieve these long term outcomes, marketing requires the co-operation and  collaboration of all the other functions, without the organisational authority to direct. The CMO has to be a leader across functions. He/she has to build the respect and co-operation of other functional leaders, often at odds with their short term function specific performance measures.

25 years ago, I and my marketing team, failed to convince the board of the then Dairy Farmers Co-Operative to invest the required capital in new equipment to launch a new brand of flavoured milk. It was to be packaged in plastic bottles, with a screw cap, to be sold at a very considerable premium to the products then only available in the gable top cartons, and we proposed to sell it to different consumers. Nobody had done this before, we were banking on tapping into a market completely under-serviced by existing packaging and branding. The Operations Manager at the time believed in the project, and put his neck on the line by committing  his R&M budget to refurbish some older gear in the absence of capital approval, and I ‘stole’ the required advertising funds from another brand.  We launched Dare Flavoured milk, and it delivered the fastest return on investment I have ever seen, and 25 years later, it is still going strong, delivering revenue and margins to the now overseas owners of the business.

If marketers started talking about revenue generation, rather than the more common ‘marketing-speak’ like positioning, segmentation, and all the insider jargon generated by digital, they will be taken much more seriously around the board table. Building support amongst other functions to acknowledge the long term impacts of intelligent marketing, is necessary for long term prosperity, and the only real measure of marketing effectiveness.

 

Why Operational improvement and change initiatives usually fail.

Why Operational improvement and change initiatives usually fail.

Aug 2, 2017 | Change, Leadership, Lean, Operations

How do you make short term operational and process improvements ‘stick’ for the long term?

Most change initiatives fail to deliver on their early promise. You get some short term improvement, some changes made, but the effectiveness of the process dwindles with time.

I often see failed improvement initiatives, usually labelled ‘Lean” or ‘6 Sigma’ by those involved, that leave a pile of paper, some awareness and knowledge, and from time to time some useful results, but nothing like the promises of the expensive consultants as they signed you up.

Why is that?

Nobody goes into a change process expecting it to fail

In my observation, the single most common reason these initiatives fail is because they ignore one of the basic tenets of Lean: respect for people.

Lean gets a start because management sees problems they have failed to solve, or do not know how to solve. So they bring in some Lean consultants who reach into the tool box and come out with some of the common tools, go through an education process, implement, and get some quick and sometimes impressive wins, and victory is declared. After that declaration, the focus moves elsewhere,  and the process slowly deteriorates.

Why is that?

Everyone was so committed, excited at the early results, the consultants were paid a shedload, so it should have worked.

In 30 years of doing this stuff, there is always one dominant reason they fail.

The initiative is top down, not bottom up.

Those at the top see problems manifest in the P&L. Their motivations are financial, operational and strategic. They talk about alignment, and people being the most valuable asset, then ignore them.

By contrast, building initiative from the bottom, asking those doing the work how to improve it, then giving them the tools to improve, and rewarding them with acknowledgement as well as a more secure job and maybe a pay rise, is where the action is.

However, for managers, they are trained to see their job as managing. Having some stuff bubbling up from the factory that has not gone through the formal approval processes and subjected to the discipline of  the accountants mandatory NPV  and ROI analysis is uncomfortable and challenging to their authority as managers.

This is where the distinction between managers and leaders comes in.

Managers, usually unwittingly, kill off the grass roots enthusiasm to make their workplace safer, more interesting, and more productive because it makes them uncomfortable, less in control.  By imposing rules, they interrupt the productive flow evident in successful initiatives. By contrast,  leaders encourage and promote the ambiguity that sometimes results, and works with it.

Which are you, Manager or Leader?

 

 

4 essential questions for the new leader to ask

4 essential questions for the new leader to ask

Jul 17, 2017 | Governance, Leadership

Taking the top job in a new organisation is a stressful experience. No amount of planning and research can properly inform you of the cultural  DNA of the organisation you will be taking over. That knowledge will only come over time, and only if you go actively looking for it.

In many cases, new leaders do  not go looking, and as a result usually do not know what it is they are changing by their presence, and often do not care, to their cost.

Nothing is as resilient as a culture that perceives itself to be under threat from a new leader who ignores it.

In the course of coaching leaders, I encourage them to be absolutely transparent, to never shy away from those often difficult but clarifying conversations that are the daily menu of leadership. For the new leader taking a role in a new organisation, I encourage them to act like a sponge in the first few weeks, and understand the nuances of what they are really getting into.

Four simple questions can be very useful, and I encourage you to ask them of every senior employee you can in that very first familiarisation encounter, and if possible to communicate the questions beforehand, to allow them to think about the answers.

  • What three things do you think we should change.
  • What three things should we leave absolutely alone
  • What three things do you most want me to do
  • What three things would you encourage me not to do.

After you have asked as many of the existing employees as practical the same four questions, you will have a pretty good picture of the way things are around the place, and what the pressing issues are.

It is a bit like learning to swim.

You cannot do it from a book, you have to get into the water to experience it for yourself, and in this case the four questions are similar to learning to dog paddle, and to stick your face under water for the first time.

Cartoon credit: Hugh McLeod @ Gaping Void.

Sustained Marketing success requires managed mindset change

Sustained Marketing success requires managed mindset change

Jul 12, 2017 | Change, Leadership, Marketing

We marketers, and usually sales people talk endlessly about putting ourselves in the shoes of those to whom we are communicating, and seeking to serve. It is absolutely right that we do, but then we stuff it up.

We do that by the way we define the industry we are in.

Go to any network meeting, and I (almost) guarantee nobody will define the industry they inhabit from the perspective of those they are seeking to serve.

They are lawyers, or Architects, or Insurance brokers, and so on. None will define what they do by the outcome for their customers.

Examples of the great miss-definitions abound, but two stand out.

Kodak was in the late nineties one of the great successful companies sitting on a mountain of cash, dominating an industry they defined as ‘Film’. They were so successful their advertising slogan persists to this day, we all know what a ‘Kodak moment’ is, well all over 40 do anyway. In 1975 Kodak engineer Steven Sasson invented the first digital camera, which Kodak patented, and later collected billions on the royalties until expiry in 2007. They even commercialised the technology for Apple under the brand ‘Apple QuickTake’, and even then failed to see the writing on the wall. In 2012 Kodak was made bankrupt, although it has since emerged as a different company.

Blockbuster, what a Lulu of failed strategic sight that is, although it is always easy with the benefit of hindsight. At their height, Blockbuster had 50 million members worldwide, thousands of stores, and were a critical link in the movie money making chain. In 2001, the fledgling  Netflix approached Blockbuster, seeking to sell their business into them, and run the online part of Blockbuster, for just $50 million. CEO John Antico had been looking at ways to experiment with on line delivery, and supported the idea. He had made some changes to blockbuster,  like removing the profitable late fees that penalised customers, but failed to get the deal with Netflix through his board, and it ultimately cost him his job. His successor led the business into oblivion by bowing to  the board, reintroducing the hated late fees,  and allowing the power of incumbency, and the aversion to change, to prevail.

You do not have to be a huge business to be caught by this definitional challenge that pervades the way you think, unconsciously driving the decisions you make. A client of mine is a printer, a modest sized family business that has been around for 60 years. They see themselves in an industry that has been significantly disrupted by digital, and while there is still plenty of printing being done, the volumes are modest compared to those of a decade ago, and  the prices and margins are very slim. They acknowledge they are printers playing a role in the communication industry, but they still think and act like commodity printers. At least however, they have made a start in the mindset change which drives behaviour, and which eluded Blockbuster and Kodak.

Blockbuster saw themselves in the video rental industry, not as a part of the entertainment industry to the end, and Kodak was in the film industry, not the memories industry, until they weren’t.

Marketing Myopia, a term coined in 1960 by Theodore Levitt in his seminal HBR article of the same name remains alive and well, just harder to recognise.