7 things business leaders can learn from this election campaign

7 things business leaders can learn from this election campaign

Jun 27, 2016 | Governance, Leadership, Personal Rant

Over the weekend I was talking to my 32 year old son about the coming election.

I thought I was  the quintessential cynical old buggar, while being politically engaged, but I had nothing on my formerly optimistic son.

He is not just a cynical young buggar, he is so disengaged that in the long term, it can only be bad for our economic and social life if he is any way representative of his demographic cohort, and I fear he is.

As he said ‘Problem is that the gap between what the pollies say, and what they do is so wide, they have lost any sort of credibility and moral authority’.

Sadly I agree with his analysis, but the core of the problem seems to me that they claim control over things they cannot control, while ignoring, misrepresenting or pork-barrelling the things they can.

It is the same in business.

Those that promise the world do not have any credibility at all, while those that demonstrate the performance and value of what they can control earn our loyalty and respect.

There is a lot those in businesses can control, and should strive to improve.

You can control the way you spend your time. Every job, even those on a manufacturing line has some level of flexibility in the way the time is spent. In management roles of any type, the discretion is significant. You can choose to do what may be apparently urgent, but is unimportant, or those things that may  not be urgent, but are important. It is those who elect the latter route that will prosper in the long run.

You control the way you  behave. Those who say one thing and do another, or worse, demand behaviour of others  they are unwilling to demand of themselves will be judged failed leaders.

You control your attitude. An optimistic person has an effect on those around them, infecting them with your optimism and enthusiasm

You control your leadership style. Dictatorial, aggressively demanding results without consideration of the personal toll that may take, or you can be a coach and mentor, seeking to improve the results by improving those around you.

You control the way you see opportunities. Often opportunities are in the problems being faced, but if all you see are the problems, the opportunities will pass on by.

You can choose where credit/recriminations are levelled. The best leaders I have seen have a common characteristic: they give credit to others, even when the credit is largely due to themselves, and they take absolute responsibility for the performance within their span of control, never seeking to allocate blame elsewhere.

You can choose to have a clear and unambiguous moral compass, or purpose in your life. Having a purpose, and living to that purpose is empowering for individuals and the groups they interact with. Even when others disagree with you the simple presence of a foundation of beliefs that drive your behaviour will get you considerable credit, loyalty and an ability to get things done.

When you think about it, politicians have exactly the same choices we in business have.

Perhaps it is their collective failure to adhere to the basic tenets of leadership that has us so disillusioned with them all.

I predict that come next Sunday, there will be a narrow Coalition win, but the outstanding feature will be the percentage of the first preference votes that go to other than the two major parties, particularly amongst those under 30 whose expectations have been shaped by different factors to those that shaped their parents. This group will also exercise their compulsory obligation to vote by deliberately voting informal. This will not be a ‘donkey’ vote, it will be a vote against what these youngsters see as the irrelevance, hubris and self interest of the political class. It will be fascinating to watch the spin  the major parties put on this disaffection, assuming that both, somebody does the analysis and I am right.

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.