Jun 25, 2014 | Customers, Leadership, Strategy
courtesy Tom Fishburne. http://tomfishburne.com/2009/04/the-value-proposition.html
Customer Value has almost become a cliché, often trotted out to cover the lack of real marketing insight.
Effective articulation of customer value, and the business model and processes to deliver it remains at the core of those businesses that find success. It is particularly relevant to SME’s as they must ensure their very limited resources are focussed where they can best deliver outcomes, they do not have the benefit of scale to absorb mistakes.
Following is a list of questions frequently asked in strategy sessions that seek to identify, and give form to this most elusive notion of “Value”.
- Why do customers come to us rather than go to the competition?
- What customer needs are currently unmet or under met?
- How have customer needs changed in the last few years?
- If we project forward two years and look back, how have their needs changed now?
- What could our competitors do for our customers that we would like to be able to do?
- Where are new customers coming from, and why?
- Are there new competitors emerging that offer value different to ours?
- To what degree does our concerns for customers welfare really drive our =decision making
- What else could we do for customers?
- What could we do to attract new customers?
Each of these questions can and should generate a great deal of discussion, the quality of that discussion is a measure in itself of how well you understand “Why” you do what you do, rather than just What and How you do it.
The really successful companies do not wait for strategy session, they ask themselves these question every day, and the answers drive how they behave and interact with customers and prospects.
Jun 23, 2014 | Governance, Leadership, Management
http://tobytripp.github.io/meeting-ticker/
Meetings are supposed to be a place where work gets done, accountabilities exercised options articulated and examined, decisions made, and outcomes reported. However, often they become just a reason to have another meeting.
Whilst the public sector comes in for some pretty harsh criticism, they are not alone.
Last week I found myself in a meeting called by a prospective client so I felt it sensible to attend and contribute.
No agenda, minutes of the previous meeting were supplied as we walked into the room, no definitive objective, just another bloody meeting.
To amuse myself, I tried to calculate the cost of the thing, thousands, and found myself thinking about the waste, and how to fix it, and only came up with the same stuff I have written about before. Serendipitously, later in the day, my inbox “plinked” with a lovely little cartoon from Hugh MacLeod that does his usual great job of nailing the topic with a few words and lines, and links.
The infographic in one link is terrific, and the meeting clock is wonderful, I will use it regularly from here on in when I see wasted resources being directed towards massaging someone’s ego, or “busywork” being done by having another bloody meeting.
Jun 4, 2014 | Branding, Collaboration, Leadership, Marketing
Debate and argument fills a vital role in all parts of our lives, it is what makes us human, this capacity to be able to think and communicate, rather than just react.
For an extended period with two different employers, I reported as marketing manager to a bloke with whom over time I developed a rapport that enabled us to achieve some great things, creative and commercial. We won awards, opened some new markets and redefined others, and importantly, delivered market share, brand credibility and profits to the employers.
Reflecting on the experience, now a long time ago, it seemed to me that there were 7 factors at work:
- Play devils advocate. We seemed to just fall into this habit of taking the opposite view of the one expressed, to debate the point by seeking the holes in the data, logic, and assumptions, irrespective of our own starting point. We usually ended up somewhere other than either of our respective starting points.
- Never allow authority to override or diminish the views of others. At no time during a debate was my view overridden by his organisational authority. From time to time after the debate was over, with some level of disagreement still present, he had to make a decision contrary to my expressed position. However, when those occasions arose, I was happy to go along, and execute he decision, as the process we had gone through was thorough, and my views had been listed to, and taken into account prior to the decision. Some form of “due process” had occurred.
- Recognise when you are wrong, and be very open about it. What more needs to be said? Very few things build respect quicker than someone being able to concede that they were wrong, and respect is vital for an open, non personal debate.
- Encourage absolutely open communication. This requires lots of trust, and goes with the point above, as respect is a vial element in trust. It is behaviour that engenders trust, not words. People watch the behaviour of others, and over time make a judgement about the level of trust they are prepared to offer. Trust is hard won, but easily lost.
- Openly question the foundations and logic of your own position. Being prepared to not just have others question your position, but being prepared to shoot your own scared cows, and we all have them, enables others to do the same thing with confidence that the commentary is never personal, and is welcome.
- Be prepared to enable, more than just allow, projects and ideas you disagree with to proceed. From time to time, when a project is allowed to proceed that may fail, and the “boss” thinks failure is likely, but gets behind it the impact on the creative energy is enormous. I recall one project that would completely disrupt the category the launch was aimed at, was allowed to proceed on the basis of my instinct. We had done lots of research, tested to the wahzoo, but this was a genuine innovation, something consumers had not seen, so asking them what they thought was encouraging but inconclusive, as they had no actual context against which the idea could be judged. There was considerable capital investment involved, and the “boss” went in aggressively to bat for the project, whist quietly being less than convinced. For an organisational subordinate to have that level of support is enormously empowering. Luckily, the launch was an enormous strategic and financial success.
- Be prepared for failure, but be determined to learn from it. We learn more from than we do from or success, so being prepared to experiment, adjust assumptions and try again is fundamental to learning. As part of the preparation for the launch referred to above, I had a range of plans prepared that would ensure that in the event of failure, the financial losses would be outweighed by the organisational learning that occurred. This was just good prudential management practise, and fortunately those plans were not necessary.
An unusually long post this morning, glad you go this far. It was triggered by a post I read earlier in which Ed Catmull, CEO of Pixar reflected on the reasons for his creative success. Many were reminiscent of mine, and his notion of a “brainstrust” is extremely attractive.
Such is the source of blog post ideas, a spark, combined with personal experience. This answers one of the questions I am often asked as I continue to find stuff sufficiently interesting to me, and hopefully to a few others, to post.
May 28, 2014 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Leadership, Small business
Mojowire.net.au
Tonight is the first Origin game of 2014, and so I expect to hear lots of people using sporting analogies over the next few weeks, particularly football.
Sporting analogies abound in business, “A team of champions does not make a champion team”
How many time have you heard that?
As management layers are removed, and the management culture evolves rapidly towards recognising the value of teams in a commercial context, we often use the sporting team as the foundation of the commercial team .
Familiarity, known skills, interpersonal relationships, all that stuff gets considered as a team is put together. Sometimes of course, in the real world teams are put together with whoever is to hand, has some spare time, is at the water cooler too often.
We confuse this simplified sporting stuff, useful in its own context, with the key components of a commercial team faced with commercial challenges.
In that case, you need a range of technical and domain skills, a questioning mentality, and a willingness to try things, and usually some diversity, some new or unusual blood being injected to create a sense of discomfort that always precedes game changing ideas and insights.
Unlike sporting events, which last for a hour, more or less, commercial challenges are way longer term, when the micro interaction is important more as a learning event than a game breaker.
May 25, 2014 | Governance, Leadership
SMH.com.au
The photo of Joe Hockey and Mathias Cormann smoking a cigar just before the budget has raised temperatures in all sorts of places.
I wonder why? After all, it is just a cigar.
Some are annoyed that they seem to be promoting a nasty habit
Some say that it shows the inherent sense of elitist attitude in the government party
Some are just aghast at what seems to be a self satisfied indulgence.
Parts of all these reasons may be right, but I see it a bit differently.
To my mind we the led are pissed that our “leaders” appear to have forgotten why they are there. They volunteered to put us, the electorate before themselves, to do the right thing by us, to act in our interests, not their own.
That self sacrifice is the essence of leadership, and by this photo, a moment of time, two blokes who have worked hard together to deliver a project that has an impact on our lives, seem to be saying it was for them that they did the work, not us.
That is why we are pissed, or at least some of us, most are more realistic and recognise it is just a moment. Nevertheless, we rather it had not happened as it feeds our insecurity about the motives of those who volunteered to lead, and in whom we placed trust.
May 21, 2014 | Change, Governance, Leadership, Strategy
Courtesy www.theage.com.au
Years ago I worked as a junior marketing bloke for Allied Mills, which became Meadow Lea Foods, then Goodman Fielder. I returned 25 years later as a contractor running a specialist unit of the ingredients division in a pre-sale “polish-up” as they struggled to manage their assets and generate a sustainable profit.
Finally, it seems GF, the last really significant Australian FMCG business has dropped the last hospital pass, and is being sold overseas.
What a shambles, a litany of strategic bumbles and crap management over a long period. It is also a report card on the whole Australian food processing industry. The sale reflects the result of the challenges that have finally led to the demise of large, Australian owned enterprises in the food industry. One day a Phd student will document all this, and perhaps the mistakes many of us saw evolving over a long period will be articulated in the hope we learn something.
I have written about this progressive failure to retain domestic ownership a fair bit over the last few years, the fiddling, the missteps, stupid stuff by both management and regulators, and now just feel sad rather than angry as I have been before.
The undoubted opportunities for Australia to become the food basket of Asia will not go away, we will still get some of the benefits, but just those bits that multinational conglomerates give us, almost none will be because we can make the decisions that have a long term impact on the shape and nature of the enterprises. Those decisions will all be made overseas in someone else’s best interests.
Vale Australian value added food processing.
PS. May 28.
It has been announced that, as expected, Peters ice cream has been sold. to UK based R&R icecream, funded by a French private equity group. Despite a checkered ownership history in the last 25 years, Peters is a brand of my (long ago) childhood.
Sigh.
