How to make a workshop work for you.

How to make a workshop work for you.

Jun 13, 2016 | Collaboration, Leadership, Marketing, Strategy

Last week I ran a workshop that was designed to wrinkle out the options facing a community organisation. It has been successful for many years, but now faces the challenge of significantly changed competitive and social environments since its formation,  and the loss of a key person whose mission in life had become intimately tied up with the organisations success.

How was that volunteer passion to be replaced?

What did the future hold for this organisation?

How are they going to continue to win?

There was limited time available, certainly no time for chasing rabbits,  so the structure had to be pretty simple and lead to useful outcomes.  In reality is was bog standard ‘workshopping’

  • What is the current situation?
  • Assuming success for the next five years, what would the organisation look like? (I call this hindsight planning)
  • What had been the strategies, both  successful and unsuccessful that had been tried over the 5 years, leading to the success?
  • What resources and capabilities were now evidently required for the ‘success’ to be replicated in real time?

In starting to write up the workshop over the weekend, and necessarily reviewing my own performance as the exercise leader, I thought about the factors that in the past have made for a successful  workshop beyond the necessary structural elements.

Domain knowledge.

Workshops and so called ‘brainstorm’ efforts commonly fail because there is insufficient  domain knowledge and  expertise available that addresses the key questions central to the purpose of the workshop. Success in any activity requires the presence of some sort of plan, with objectives and metrics, combined with a factual assessment of the circumstances that led to the discussion. Without this level of immersion, the workshop will just be a conversation. ‘Think outside the box’ is often the instruction, but if that leads to random thoughts outside the relevant postcode, it will not add any value, and will be enormously distracting. Domain knowledge, and knowledge related to the domain in some relevant manner is essential.

Roadmap.

As the Mad hatter said to Alice ‘If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there’  you need a map of some sort that includes your starting point and an end point. Without these, you  will go around in aimless, unconnected circles. No workshop of any kind ever works without some sort of map or guidelines understood by everybody involved.

Inspiration.

Inspiration and ideas come from the friction created by differing and often opposing views presented by intelligent and informed people. Rarely is an idea complete at first blush, rarely can an idea not be improved by some level of refinement, and rarely does informed and creative debate not lead to creative solutions and ideas. It takes people prepared to accept that their idea is merely a contributor to a more complete picture, that it is a point in the road that contributes to a better outcome that leads to true inspiration.

Action plan

As with a workshop roadmap, any plan that evolves out of the workshop needs to have a plan, no different to the one that drove the workshop in its structure. As George Patton said on his drive towards berlin in 1945, ‘without a plan you are just a tourist‘.

Implementation.

An imperfect plan today, well implemented is better than a perfect plan tomorrow. Anther of the wise sayings of my old dad, ‘you get 1/10 for a plan, the other 9/10 are kept for the implementation’.

I have seen many workshops that come up with very useful stuff that is just lost or put aside once the participants get back to what they see as their ‘real jobs’ facing the urgency if the daily grind. It takes a good dose of leadership, and often outside  coaching to make the implementation part of a workshop actually part of the daily business of the enterprise.

The greatest failure of marketing management.

The greatest failure of marketing management.

Jun 2, 2016 | Change, Leadership, Lean, Marketing

 

The headline is a big call, competing as it does with some real doozies.

Remember “New Coke” or the Ford ‘Edsel‘ or perhaps Thomas Watsons declaration that there was a world market of no more than 5 for computers?

This one is a general observation on the nature of marketing people generally and their project management skills, at least in my experience.

They tend to spend too little time really defining a problem, but then jump effortlessly to a conclusion, leaving a pile of crap in their wake for others to clean up, and sub optimal outcomes from projects.

The explosion of marketing technology is not just making the shortcomings more obvious, it is delivering the means to measure it.

Holy cow Batman: Accountability!

The smoke and mirrors are being removed, leaving many self declared marketing gurus naked.

Leaving aside the question of individual capability, the root cause of this can usually be pinned down to a failure of project planning.

Specifically the failure to recognise the nature of critical activities that are sequential, building on the one before. For example, only a fool would lock into a creative approach and copy before the persona of the target market was absolutely crystal clear.

This notion is entirely different to the usual ‘critical path’ which can be a moveable feast as timetables move around.

Critical activities are just that, and they do not move around, at all. Project planning should always acknowledge the time necessary to complete each critical activity, and the specific sequence that is necessary.

Marketing project planning is no different to planning any other context, although the questions to be answered are usually less black and white, which simply means that the planning process needs to be rigorous and scientific if it is to be any good.

Marketers have a lot to learn from the manufacturing end of the lean movement.

The most misused management quote ever

The most misused management quote ever

May 30, 2016 | Leadership, Management

Benjamin Franklin said many worthwhile things, and a few bits on nonsense. However, amongst the best known, and perhaps most quoted is:

“If you want something done, give it to a busy person”

Absolute bollocks!!

Acting on that advice is in my view a failure of leadership.

You are in effect saying that it is OK to load up somebody who is already at or near capacity while other ‘resources’ remain idle, or at less than capacity.

People are not machines,  but like machines, everyone has a different capacity. Exceed that capacity and you just get inefficiency, poor quality and even breakdown.

We do not do it to our equipment, at least not deliberately, so why on earth would it be OK to do it to our people, and perhaps even worse, our best, most dedicated and productive people?

This little rant was instigated by a business owner I met and with whom I was exchanging views on management and leadership. Needless to say, he will in all probability (now) never be a client.

Is the supermarket model being disrupted, and nobody is noticing?

Is the supermarket model being disrupted, and nobody is noticing?

May 11, 2016 | Branding, Governance, Leadership, retail, Small business

Business models are being disrupted all over the place.

The new centre of business models has become the customer, and the way they perceive and receive value. It was supposed to be this way in the pre-digital days, but really  was not, because the sellers held all the cards. Now however, the power has really reverted to where it should be, to those who drive the value chain by their purchase choices.

AirBnB has become the biggest single retailer of short term lodging on the planet, and they do not own a room, Uber is the biggest taxi service on the planet, and does not own a car, newspapers have been replaced as sources of news. There are many examples, and all are of business models that have arrived in the last few years with a common theme.

They have replaced the linear, sequential business models of the past, where there was always a choke point dependent on physical infrastructure that exerted control, with a model where the physical  infrastructure is simply a logistical resource to be deployed to deliver a service, the real product is information.

Information on availability, product provenance, performance, and many other factors of value to customers, including, you guessed it, price.

It is a two sided model, enabled by technology that is making the logistical control of the infrastructure redundant in the face of consumers having information at their fingertips. The competitive advantage has moved from the physical infrastructure to between the ears of employees and consumers equally.

Employees create and deliver the information that enables consumers to make decisions, which then dictate the physical logistics driven by those decisions.

Meanwhile,  the supermarket  retailer model has not changed  much.

They have huge amounts of capital invested in real estate and physical assets, it has made them  really successful, so the tendency is naturally to do more of the same, just try and do it a bit better.

They have chased, very successfully, productivity of  the assets, a financial measure of success not a sustainable measure of success with customers. As a result they are losing their customers to discounters, specialist retailers, and various direct models that offer an alternative value proposition.

It seems to me that Woolies have walked away from, or simply not understood this evolution of their business model.

Their Everyday rewards loyalty card was gathering momentum, building a picture of their customer base and their individual behaviour, critical information that would over time deliver a capacity to engage on a highly individualised basis. However, it was clearly costing a bit, so they took the short term route, and reduced the cost to them, and therefore value to their customers, gave it a new name and sat back thinking consumers would not notice.

They did, and nobody came.

Woolworths took a short term financial decision that has apparently bitten them in the bum. A bit like the ones they took that killed off Thomas Dux, and led them to misunderstand the market when they bet the back paddock on Masters. Pretty clearly someone in the top floor of the majestic head office out in the hills, can read a spreadsheet, but probably does not know what goes on inside customers heads when they are contemplating a purchase, and making a choice about the manner in which that purchase will be made.

Perhaps new CEO Brad Banducci will claw back some of the customer centric culture that gave Woolworths the wood on Coles for so long, but he better move quickly, as the momentum has shifted against them, and it will be hard to regain.

 

Train dogs, educate people.

Train dogs, educate people.

Apr 26, 2016 | Governance, Leadership

That phrase, ‘you train dogs,  but you educate people’ was used to me years ago by Harvard professor Jim Hagler, making the point that education involves nurturing the ability to think and question while training is simply  enforcing a repeatable routine.

Both have their place, but getting the two mixed up and expecting training to take the place of educating leads to failure.

There are thousands of information products out there, courses of many types that promise to deliver a learning outcome, which is usually passive income so you can sit on a beach and make money while sipping G&T’s

You  have seen them.

They offer training, and often use that term. They are the digital equivalent of buying a book, on a topic, and once you walk out of the bookstore (are there  any left?) the author, publisher and bookstore owner have no further obligation to you, the responsibility is all yours.

By contrast, getting an education takes time, and effort, and there is a responsibility of the institution to teach you, and ensure that you not just know the topic, but can think creatively and critically about both the topic and related material. You cannot walk into the university office and buy a degree (although recent revelations might just make that assertion obsolete)

Education is a two way street, shared by both parties, as distinct from information provision, which is a once only transaction.

Key difference is when you need help, is it there? Most on-line courses are just information, with no help beyond technical assistance to download the stuff, if you are lucky.

There is a big cost to education, not just money, but time and effort, the cost of training is often low.

I would rather spend $2000 on education, really learning a topic,  than $200 on a training course.

This rant was set off by another of those very well crafted pieces of sales copywriting that landed in my email last week promising to give me a passive income of ‘at least 5,000/month’ for life. All I had to do was part with $779 now, or an easy $150/month for 6 months, and it would be mine. Easy, great ROI if it actually worked.

Utter bullshit aimed at deluding the easily deluded.

Marketing’s lean future

Marketing’s lean future

Mar 23, 2016 | Governance, Leadership, Lean, Marketing

The best marketers I employed in days past as a honcho in a corporate environment were pretty much always from a professional background of some type. Those with engineering, science, architecture training, and with a bit of sales thrown in were almost always better marketers than those with marketing degrees.

Having just a 40 year old (had anybody heard of marketing 40 years ago) marketing degree, this both intrigued and disturbed me, and it took a while to understand “why” it was so. It became clear that those trained in the professions had an instinctive approach to problem solving, commonly called the ‘scientific method’. By contrast, those with just marketing degrees tended to jump from problem definition straight to a final solution, missing all the nuances and understanding to be gained from the interim steps, and often getting it horribly wrong as a result.

“Lean thinking” 35 years ago was just a babe, an approach to operational improvement that has transformed the way manufacturing operations around the world are run, and delivered huge benefits to our way of life. It is absolutely based on the scientific method.

More recently however, it has been realised that lean thinking has applications far wider than just operations, and office work flows are rapidly transforming as a result. The next obvious cab off the rank is marketing, traditionally a qualitative, smoke and mirrors part of a business, and marketers have been their own worst enemy.

It often seems marketers sit around, drink coffee, and go to lunch a lot, and as a result of allowing that perception to survive, (and it has been true in an unfortunate number of cases) , we get what we deserve.

If people do not understand the role of marketing, particularly those who allocate resources and measure performance, no wonder there are problems, but there are some pretty simple solutions taken from lean thinking.

Have an objective

Map the processes

Form hypothesis

Test and measure

Rinse and repeat.

From the perspective of managing this process, it is essential that two criteria be met:

  1. There is great transparency of the whole process across functions, everyone these days is “in marketing”. Leveraging the resources available by the collaboration enabled by technology will evolve as standard practice, for which transparency is essential.
  2. It is OK to be wrong, you can learn more for your mistakes than from what works well, but to learn  there must be understanding of the flaws in the tested hypothesis coming from the failure. In addition, there needs to be a robust process of due diligence both before and after the experiments are done. Saying it is OK to be wrong is not a license to be sloppy, as I have seen from time to time.

Marketing has been very late to the technology table, and as a result the size of the gap between the ‘leading edge’ and what most small and medium businesses are doing is huge, and getting progressively ‘huger’. There is a real danger of just leaving it in the too hard basket, but that would be a mistake.

Marketing technology offers the opportunity to leverage resources and widen the impact, the core principals of marketing remain unchanged, indeed become more important as we increase the leverage that can be applied. For small and medium businesses these technologies are the competitive tool-box they have been seeking.

It is my prediction that inside a decade technology decisions will be driven by marketing. If you cannot locate, understand, engage, and deliver value to your customers in a digital world, you will not survive. This post from the ‘Martech’ guru Scott Brinker detailing the 2016 marketing technology landscape says it all.

Lets see how that goes as the technology landscape continues to evolve.