May 20, 2014 | Change, Communication, Leadership, Marketing, Small business
“Serendipity” . Luck that takes the form of finding valuable or pleasant things that are not looked for. Websters Dictionary.
My old Dad used to say “Son, the harder I work, the luckier I get” and it has usually worked out that way.
It follows then that if you combine the definition of Serendipity and Dads old chestnut, Serendipity can be managed.
How you ask!
- Recognise that Serendipity is a state of mind rather than a quantitative outcome, and should be managed that way.
- It requires a management culture that has everyone working together, “alignment of strategy and activity” as a popular management article would probably purr. A utopian notion, but doable.
- Ensure there is “spare” time allocated to staff to pursue ideas, contribute to collaborative activities, and look for improvements. Personnel whose performance measures are quantitative box ticking exercises are unlikely to risk compromising their KPI’s by allocating time to potentially serendipitous pursuits.
- Provide the forums for casual and social interaction. This can be done in all sorts of ways from the way the offices are designed to organising staff picnics.
- Encourage the behaviours you are seeking by publicly recognising it when it happens. Financial and organisational rewards are of little value, but is the social rewards that really count.
- Trust and respect are critical components of productive collaboration. Neither can allocated, both need to be earned. “Ideo“, the creative agency has it nailed, one of their core values is “Make others successful”. When everyone works to make others successful, trust and respect follow, and the culture tends to expel anyone who does not work with that culture and its behaviours.
The great benefit if success in these endeavours is that it will make your place a great place to work, and that ends up attracting the best talent, attracting interesting, challenging and rewarding customers, and making good money. A virtuous circle.
That’s how.
May 10, 2014 | Governance, Leadership, Personal Rant
Courtesy http://mockingwords.blogspot.com.au
As great an advocate of analytics as I am, it remains a truth that data without a context is useless.
It is in the articulation of the context that data is given meaning, and it is at this point that the context can be articulated to change the meaning of the data.
“Spin” is so common we almost do not mind any more, it is so woven into our daily media consumption, that it is normal, and each person applies their own cogitative filtering system to what they are bombarded with every day.
Spin is no more than selecting a combination of data and context to deliver an argument that suits a predetermined outcome. Question is when does the modest spin with perhaps the best of intentions become a lie based on manipulation of data and context.
I cannot wait for Tuesday nights budget, if nothing else it should be a lesson in context management.
PS. A week post budget.
Well it seems they really blew this one!
We thought the previous residents of the Lodge were too smart by half, trying to manage both the data and the context, and failing at both, but the current Prime Minister and his Treasurer have set new standards.
Irrespective of your political inclinations, and view of the logic of the budget, it is hard to argue that the sell job has been just crap, the only thing worse has been the packaging of the product.
Mr Shorten cannot believe his luck, and how quickly we forget. Perhaps our limited memory is what the PM is relying on, I wish him luck, but where is the bookie when you need him.
Apr 17, 2014 | Change, Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing
The most successful people I have seen over 40 years of business share one crucial characteristic.
Curiosity.
The successful are insatiably curious, it spans all aspects of their lives, not just the parts that are spent working at what pays the mortgage, but across all aspects of their private and social lives as well as their commercial ones.
Curiosity also in independent of the size of the enterprise, and often happens in clusters, as one curious person infect those around them. The Medici effect.
Supporting the curiosity are a number of specific behaviours I have observed, that to a greater of lesser extend are exhibited by all, they are in effect the enabling behaviours of their curiosity.
- They are always asking questions, some whilst knowing that the receiver has no idea of the answer, or even if one exists.
- They seek alternative views everywhere, encouraging others to play devils advocate
- They network relentlessly, seeking a diversity of views, not just on their areas of specific interest, but across the span of human activity
- They read widely, then test what they have read against their own experience
- They are curious about advances and ideas outside their area of immediate focus
- They observe, play “fly on the wall” looking for “jobs to be done” by all the products being used in the environment they are observing.
- They experiment relentlessly, often in very small ways, and explicitly set out to understand what worked, what did not, and why.
- They record everything, by making notes, using a Dictaphone, and more recently using the plethora of mobile devices to great benefit.
Perhaps you can add some more, but at least ask yourself how many of these you display, and are they displayed by those around you.
Apr 16, 2014 | Branding, Leadership
Personal branding seems to be a popular topic around the pub, even the brickie who lives a few streets away, and is not known for his new age sensitivities, has got a hold of it.
It is not new, Julius Caesar had a personal brand well before Bill Shakespeare wrote a play about him, and they killed him for it.
Tom Peters, who was really “hot” in the nineties wrote a prescient Fast Company article about personal branding, but missed the point, at least to my mind. This Roger Duncan e-book does it much better, listing 8 behaviors that build a personal brand, and if you followed the list, no doubt you would make a mark.
However, I think it can be summarised better, in a few words.
“Always deliver greater value than is expected”. Simple, but complicated at the same time.
A mate of mine was offered a bundle, just to meet with someone he knew vaguely for a coffee. If asked nicely, he probably would have made the 20 minutes, but being offered money????. He did not have the coffee, and it turned out that the supplicant did want something from him, and had my friend taken the money, it would have set up an obligation to deliver something he may rather not have.
There is never something for nothing in business, when it seems too good to be true, it usually is.
Doing something unexpected for others, over delivering in the parlance, builds a bank of goodwill that at some point will be repaid.
Perhaps not today, or tomorrow, but it will come back to you. That is the way you build a persona brand, based on honesty, transparency, and over-delivery.
Apr 8, 2014 | Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
Often I find myself engaged in conversations with those running small businesses who believe they have discovered the next big thing, the idea that will change the world, or at least their business.
It can be as simple as a tweak to an existing product that enables it to be used in an adjacent market, to a patented idea that they believe will change the world, the 3 questions I always ask remain the same:
- To whom will it add value?
- How will it add value?
- By what means can you unlock that value and make a return as a result?
Whilst answering those questions can be time consuming, and sometimes confronting, and is often an evolutionary process, they constitute the core of strategy development,
So often I see a solution in search of a problem posing as strategy that it makes me shake my head in frustration, when a bit of discipline in the way tasks are identified and managed can go such a long way. These are 11 tasks you can set yourself to help the process of answering the “big three” along.
Mar 25, 2014 | Customers, Leadership, Sales, Small business
Many years ago, pre-digital, I gave time to a sales rep who rang up and promised to bring in some samples of brand new products from Europe that had changed the dynamics of the market segments they were in. I presumed that all contained the stuff he sold, but the pitch was persuasive.
The upshot was that he brought in some examples that were at best mundane, that I had seen before, were not innovative in any way, and that I was not interested in hearing about. Then I had to be rude to get rid of him and his lying pitch, but was further subjected to a stream calls, letters, offers, and promises from him and his superiors that “spoke ” to me as if I was a red hot prospect, desperate to throw myself at their shitty product.
He wasted my time, misled me, and then continued to irritate by trying to waste more of my time and presumed a relationship that did not exist, and that I would not have, and I have never forgotten the lesson.
Don’t waste peoples time!
The older I get, the more intolerant I seem to get when someone consumes that most valuable of all our resources, time, and I was pretty “bolshie” 25 years ago when this happened.
Whilst today everything moves so much faster than before, our time is if anything more valuable, but the presumption of those who want our attention seems to be that we all have plenty to share and usually waste.
One of the most effective sales people I have ever seen made appointments for 10 minutes each. He promised not to take more than the 10, and to deliver something of value while he was there, and he always did. No coffee, no chat about last nights football, straight to the point in 10 minutes or less, and any more time spent was entirely at the discretion of the appointee, he was always ready to leave, having delivered his pitch.
He valued peoples time and attention, so he got more of it.
Are you asking your people to waste not just their time, but that of those with whom they are paid to interact?
