Jul 17, 2013 | Governance, Management, Marketing, Small business
Small business owners work harder, and often take home less than their employed peers. I see this all the time, again and again, in all sorts of contexts.
Ever wondered why?
In my experience, most go into business because they have great skill, contacts, and experience in the domain of their choice, which makes them great engineers, plumbers, food scientists, but does not necessarily suit them to be CEO.
The flip side is, do you need specific domain knowledge to be the CEO of an enterprise in that domain?, the answer clearly is no.
Most get confused about the purpose of their activity. Competent chefs try to run restaurants, simply because as a chef they can pay themselves only chef rates and remain solvent, but being a restaurant owner, perhaps a string of them, is where the money is.
Get your priorities right.
Want to be a rich chef, but love to be “cheffing” ? Probably can’t do both.
So many exchange the cooking for shuffling paper, suppliers, lease contracts, worrying about staffing, and doing the marketing, then wonder why the restaurant fails.
Fire yourself as the CEO, and hire a professional manager, while you do the cooking. After all, you would not even consider hiring an apprentice to replace you in the kitchen as you try to run the business, would you?
You can still own the business, and eap the benefits, you just do not have to run it day to day.
Jul 15, 2013 | Innovation, Management, Marketing
Public programs are great, they redistribute the largess of success to the less successful or fortunate via taxes. Every civilised society has some, of varying value, but necessary none the less.
Public entrepreneurial programs are a bit different, despite the best efforts of well meaning public servants everywhere, they just never work.
Entrepreneurs simply do not show up at public show and tells, they keep their ideas to themselves and those who are able to add some skin to the game, and feel the loss if this skin gets scraped off.
That is part of the reason we Aussie tax-payers pump millions into innovation via the various well meaning agencies, but get stuff all back. The vast majority of this well meaning but misdirected assistance ends up in the pockets of consultants (thank you) snake oil salesmen, and those with institutional ties, not with the people doing the real work of innovation.
In saying this you must consider R&D and innovation to be different, one is the development of the science, the other is using it. Public funding of the infrastructure of science is essential, although subject to political whim and manipulation, the leveraging of the science should not be the domain of the public sector beyond harvesting royalties to fund the continuing effort.
The only way to engage with entrepreneurs is one on one, with the absolute trust that what gets discussed, stays with those in the discussion, and is not spread around for some ephemeral notion of equity and greater good.
Real entrepreneurs find new spaces to inhabit, places others have not seen, all others then follow them in.
Jun 25, 2013 | Change, Governance, Management, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Governments and their regulation centric thought processes always lag the digital developments that are accelerating in our world. Typically, they are regulating to close the barn door well after the horse is across the paddock, and failing to consult those who understand the processes, so do a lousy job. Just look at the failed supermarket and petrol price “initiatives”, web site filtering, and utter failure to communicate the case supporting the NBN in anything other than clichés, amongst other failures.
Well, there is another revolution on our doorsteps, one that governments must be salivating about, if they recognise the opportunity to rope us in, as the Prism revelations in the US have demonstrated.
It is pretty obvious that recognition software is about to be a general reality, as it gets rolled out in various forms on mobile platforms. Voice, face, and biometric recognition are all technologies that are in existence, and when Apple, or Samsung stick it on a mobile platform, whooppee, off it will go, and with it, the opportunity to collect huge amounts of personal data beyond that which is collectable now. Facial recognition and digital trickery combined will enable every face (just double click anywhere in the linked photo) in a photo to be identified, by simply tying to a social media database.
Bingo!
What will be done with this capability?
The old “I have nothing to hide” argument is looking limp in the face of such absolute ability to identify the where, who, who with and when capabilities being delivered to just about anyone with a camera and computer. Where are the new barriers of “personal information”?
Clearly commercial uses abound, as do those for the administrative and legal tracking of individuals, but it is the nefarious uses this degree of identification can be put to that are scary.
Jun 5, 2013 | Innovation, Leadership, Management, Strategy
I was struck by a line in a terrific blog post by Ian Leslie I read that said ” Google can answer almost anything you ask it, but it cannot tell you what to ask”
It is totally counter-intuitive to consider that the power of the web is now narrowing our horizons, and that by succumbing to the lure of the algorithm, we are dismissing the beauty of serendipity, that unexpected discovery, the thing we would never have seen were it not for “right time, right place”. It does not seem to matter if it is a scientific discovery, Fleming recognising that the growth on his slide was killing all the bacteria around it, or just finding a book in a bookstore that is “right” somehow, these thing s cannot happen on Amazon, or in isolation.
The question then becomes how do you create serendipity?
You need to be messy, cross- functional, collaborative, iterative, and work with an open mind, as well as applying discipline to the scientific method of process improvement, practicing what I call Loose-tight , or ambidextrous management.
This ambidexterity is not easy. It takes leadership, an enabling culture, and a deft hand, but the results speak for themselves. Combining the ability to mine the accumulated knowledge of all of us, with the creativity inherent in human nature when it is open-minded and free to make non linear connections will eventually lead you to ask the right questions, and reveal what you do not know.
Once you see the question, serendipity has a chance.
May 14, 2013 | Governance, Management, Operations, Uncategorized
I found myself in a heated debate last week with a headhunter about the value, and challenges of SME’s outsourcing the hiring of employees, particularly salespeople.
Her view: SME owners are so time constrained that anything not “core” to success should be outsourced, and left to professionals.
My view: If sales, or as I like to call it, Revenue generation, is not core to every SME, I do not know what is. Whilst it may be the product offering, that delivers the value, it is sales that delivers the opportunity to deliver that value, and therefore is the key role, and should warrant substantial attention. Picking those who will represent you with current and potential customers is much too important to be outsourced to “professionals” who get paid by delivering a body to a seat.
While there are exceptions at either end of the employee scale, casual factory workers are perhaps best outsourced, and it is probably sensible to have a headhunter exercise their skills and networks to find a group of people who fill demanding profile when seeking a new CEO, from which a board can make a choice.
However, this is not how it usually evolves. The usual is a harried, busy executive whose KPI’s have little to do with the quality of the team, and the individuals who make it up does not give adequate thought to the personal dynamics and capability requirements of the role, they just want a warm body that appears able to do the job in the seat ASAP.
Good salespeople make or break a business, the challenges in finding, keeping, and maximising their productivity are substantial, but are central to the success of the enterprise.
May 8, 2013 | Change, Management, Strategy
Success is the result of hard work, smarts, good teams, focus, with a hit of “right place, right time” thrown in, etc, etc, right? Right.
At least that is what I always believed, knocked into me by my Dad who believed, and lived by the credo that “the harder I work, the luckier I get”
Increasingly however, I am seeing success being a relative thing, significantly dependent on a whole host of factors outside our control, many that have perhaps only come into play since the net made our world so bloody complicated, immediate and transparent.
Bill Gates did well, right time and place with an idea that was new, but when he pitched it to IBM, the defining moment of his career, he was not to know that internally IBM had reached some strategic conclusions about how they would approach the emerging world of personal computing.
Contingency.
Ron Jones got fired three weeks ago from JC Penny, where he lasted 17 months after being hired to “Appelise” the aging department store retailer. The retail guru who saved Target, created the retail megastar that is Apple stores, failed to do anything but annoy JC Penny’s existing management who rebelled, and customers who went elsewhere.
Wrong strategy perhaps, but it had certainly worked before, demonstrating again the sensitivity of context, and that success is a fragile, elusive thing, dependent on all sorts of contingencies, making continuous experimentation a “must”.
