Sep 12, 2012 | Change, Management
We have access to huge amounts of data, “Big Data” in current parlance, but wading through it all, and finding the few insights that will make a difference is a task our fathers really did not have, it is the tail side of the coin, the head being the value of the insights, and definition of opportunity that can be extracted.
What we think about the huge amount of data available is a bit conflicted, we understand we need it all to be competitive, but the task of aligning organisations to extract and leverage the potential in the data is a real challenge, one that often our organisations are not up to.
“Competing on Analytics” is one of the emerging bank of literature that highlights the challenges and opportunities of not just crunching the numbers, but using them to win.
William (W.) Edwards Deeming, father of the continuous improvement revolution, had a wonderful saying ‘In god we trust, all others bring data”. It says most of it, but just does not address the challenge of gaining insight from the tsunami of data being produced by the digital revolution, something he did not have to take into account.
Sep 11, 2012 | Management, Small business
The two “F’s” of life scare us all, Failure, and caused by the fear of failure; Finishing.
Because we do not want to fail, most of us avoid finishing. We procrastinate, take on “busy-work” or “easy-work” to avoid the necessity to finish the important things, and risk the failure that goes with it.
The net has given us a host on new reasons not to finish things, all those emails, the face-book and Linked-in contacts that need attention, and now even twitter takes on importance in the fight against finishing.
We all need to get “un-busy” finish stuff, get it out the door, risk that failure, then get on and potentially fail again, before we can really finish something that makes a difference.
Sep 7, 2012 | Management, Strategy
Most enterprises are pretty familiar with project portfolio management, which always include a risk rating attached to each project. What happens if we turn the notion around, and consider the portfolio from the perspective of the risk profile of the whole portfolio, not just by the risk rating of the individual projects that happen to inhabit it.
Depending on many factors, everybody reacts to risk differently, most however, accept that a portfolio of projects is better than a one-at-a-time approach.
Why not a portfolio of risk whose profile is aligned with the strategic priorities?
The question that therefore needs to be asked is how that portfolio will be structured.
At one end you have a portfolio of incremental projects, essentially short term, low risk adaptations of existing technology or market positions. At the other, there is a portfolio of longer term, more challenging projects that seek to disrupt markets, and redefine the existing mind. In the middle can be a whole range of projects with differing risk profiles that together create a risk portfolio.
In my experience, little long term value is created by low risk projects, the real value comes when the status quo is overturned in some way, and having a balanced portfolio the captures the strategic priorities of the enterprise seems to make sense.
Aug 29, 2012 | Innovation, Management
Innovation is not a marketing term, it is much wider than that, it is a mind-set.
It remains however, an eternal question, often used to open another boring workshop, “What is innovation?”
Usually those who ponder this question are the marketing bods, and the very senior management of an enterprise, but they do not usually do the work of innovation, their task is to create the environment where it can flourish. The work is done by hands on people, leveraging the resources made available to make change, and often working in quiet corners away from the scrutiny of the accountants.
So, again, What is innovation?
- Product, obviously, we change products all the time, occasionally it can be classed as innovation, but not often. The first iPod was an innovation, the second just a range extension.
- Business model. Ebay was a business model innovation that broke the mould for single item sales by individuals, as is the current move to cloud services from desktop applications.
- Business process. Old Henry made the best known process innovation when he adapted the production line from earlier examples, and applied it to automobiles.
- Perception of value to a user, demonstrated again by Apple, whose retail outlets are now the most successful retailers on a sales/sq meter basis in the world. Suddenly, bricks and mortar retailing has a place? Or is it a remake of the notion of how value is delivered that all retailers need to absorb.
Aug 28, 2012 | Customers, Management, Marketing, Sales
Most of the best ideas are simple, as is the Net promoter Score (NPS) the brainchild of Bain & Co executive Fred Reichheld.
As it gained currency, its simplicity became blurred by unnecessarily imposed complexity, often added it seems, just to make a consulting job seem more complicated.
NPS is really just one simple question:
“How likely are you, on a 1-10 scale to recommend this product/service to a friend or colleague”?
What Reichheld termed “detractors” answer 0-6, “Passives” answer 7 or 8, and “promoters” answer 9 & 10.
A company’s NPS is the percentage of Promoters minus the percentage of detractors. Simple.
The complexity comes often from the sample to whom you direct the question, and it is pretty easy to see how it can be “gamed” by those selections, which happens most often when some senior person reads about NPS, decides it makes sense, and just decrees to the sales force to go ask your customers, and that is exactly what they do, selectively. After all, their bonuses may depend on it.
Aug 21, 2012 | Customers, Management, retail, Sales
Without sales, all the rest of the stuff that goes on in an enterprise is irrelevant. All the lofty strategies, policies, and well intentioned platitudes are dependent on the delivery of sales for their oxygen.
As a senior manager in a large enterprise, I used to annoy, sometimes terminally, marketing personnel by insisting they all spend periods of time, particularly during the annual peak sales periods, out in the field, carrying a bag, talking to the retail personnel of our customers, and interacting with consumers in the retail space.
Most came back energised, engaged and motivated, some did not, and they usually found their career prospects better elsewhere pretty quickly.
Often other functional management also benefitted greatly from seeing how the product they made, counted, delivered, or engineered lived in the sales environment.
50 interactions with intelligent customers and consumers, and those who preferred our competitor products may not be a statistically significant sample, but you will learn more from those interactions than you will from reading expensive research reports behind a desk.
