Oct 29, 2012 | Change, Management, Marketing, Social Media
One of the many paradoxes of our on-line social life is that to engage, we give up a part of our personal life, we become available to anyone else who cares to look for us, within the boundaries of increasingly better privacy hurdles in social media tools.
In the past, our personal lives were almost all we had, simply because of the inconvenience, inefficiency, indeed, impossibility, of telling everybody, anything much about ourselves.
The earlier incarnations of social media removed those barriers, and suddenly we realised that we had created a monster, a perfect environment for stalkers. All sorts of unsavory and undesirable people, and those we had no desire to know suddenly had access to our details, and so we started designing out the access, but it is a binary process, a filter is “on”, or it is “off”, no “maybe”.
So, how do we design it out? We design back in some of the elements of the inefficiency we had until a decade ago, put in hurdles that need to be crossed before you get to the personal stuff. Clay Shirky, one of the great minds thinking about this stuff does it again in this Zeitgeist presentation from 2008. I only just found it, but the message is as relevant now as 4 years ago, perhaps more so.
Oct 24, 2012 | Leadership, Management, Operations
Culture is elastic, it is the hardest thing to change in any organization, the ‘way people do things around here” to quote Michael Porter, is a powerful organiser of behavior.
Changing culture by decree from the corner office simply does not work, all it does is depreciate the credibility of the person issuing the decree.
Often the decree is associated with some mandated behavior changes, they can be imposed, but once the pressure comes off, and in the absence of the changed behavior being well bedded in, it reverts to the old models as soon as the mandate is not aggressively enforced, just like taking away the stretching device in a length of elastic.
The only way to eliminate the ‘elastic effect” is to cut it, by encouraging employees to change their behavior because they see the sense in it, and the change is consistent with their own best interests.
Four ways to make it a bit easier:
- Don’t try and change everything at once by decree. Instead, pick a few critical behaviors, and demonstrate a determination to change them, and articulate the reasons why they must change.
- Recognise that not all the behaviors of an existing system will be bad, there will be good elements that warrant retention, even prominence, so highlight them.
- Ensure that the behaviors you are seeking are consistent with the behavior demonstrated by the senior management
- Ensure that the behaviors required are consistent with the strategy, business model selected to deliver it, and the metrics by with performance of the business and individuals is measured.
If this seems simple, don’t be fooled. Changing culture is the hardest task any leader has, Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s list of the 10 reasons people resist change is a great one. Most “leaders” are not up to the task, and then they are called Managers.
Oct 22, 2012 | Change, Management
Problems need a better PR agency, everybody hates them. The bigger the problem, the greater the angst, the higher up the enterprise the problem has currency, the more important it seems to become.
However, when you think about it, problems are the catalyst for creative thinking, questioning of the status quo, seeking alternatives, considering the unconsiderable, and looking into the dark “corners” of behavior.
All good stuff, all potentially leading to new and better practice, evolved business models, and new products, so why do problems get such bad press when they stimulate all this good stuff?
Clearly, they just need better PR.
Oct 18, 2012 | Lean, Management, Operations
Of all the resources we have, time is truly the only one where there is no chance of technology making it replaceable or renewable. We all know that, so why do we continue to waste it so indiscriminately?
Seems to me the answer is that we cannot see it messing up the floor, count it as it comes back as rework, or feel as engaged as when something tangible disappears before our eyes. The passing of time is usually only noted in the past tense.
It makes sense therefore to manage time obsessively, simply because it is so hard to do so, and if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. This simple observation implies that time management may be the source of real advantage.
If you just take inventory for instance.
Inventory and WIP is a tangible measure of the time you have to pay somebody for the failure in your demand forecasting, and extended process times. If there is any truth at all in the cliché, “if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it” then the greatest opportunity for improvement in most operations I have seen is in measuring, and as a result improving, the productivity of time that has already been paid for.
Oct 15, 2012 | Leadership, Management, Strategy
To stay in business we all need to make money today, and we also need to understand where the money will be tomorrow, invest in these future cash generating activities, and sometimes make adjustments to the business model.
These adjustments are not just another re-organisation, but evolution in the way the enterprise interacts with and responds to changes in their competitive, technological and regulatory environment.
To a degree this is crystal-balling, predicting the intersection of your capabilities and customer needs, but it is more about being sufficiently agile to enable experimentation to occur in the manner in which you do business.
If you encourage and support such experimentation with the business model and customer offer in a framework that responds to the question “where will the money be in 5 years?” you will be in pretty good shape.
The old quote from ice hockey great Wayne Gretsky when asked what made him great, “I do not skate to where the puck is, but where it will be” is just as valid in business as it is in hockey.
Oct 1, 2012 | Management, Marketing, Social Media
Just because two things correlate, does not necessarily mean that there is cause and effect at work.
Imagine you have just launched a new product backed by a great TV ad, and sales exceed forecast by a factor of 5. Obviously the ad agency is going to be delirious, putting your ad on all their show reels, but did the advertising cause the sales, or were there other success factors working for you?
Emergence of digital media has complicated the lives of communication agencies and marketers enormously. By offering real ROI measurement opportunities, web-tools have made marketers accountable for results as never before. This does not mean it is easy, just possible.
Google analytics offers a range of tools by which to generate a host of metrics, but two challenges remain:
- Which are the few metrics that really get to the heart of marketing ROI
- What is the cause of something, and what is the effect.
Avinash Kaushik’s great blog addresses these issues, in this one, examining the complications of the ROI of Facebook advertising, something that has stumped lesser minds for a while now, and cost early facebook investors a heap in the IPO.
Reading the post, I was reminded of Seth Godins musing about the relationship between rain and umbrellas. Every time it rained, he saw umbrellas everywhere, so did the presence of umbrellas cause rain, or did rain cause the presence of umbrellas?
