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?
Sep 17, 2012 | Management, Marketing, Sales
The web has disrupted the sales process, as well as just about everything else in our world.
Just think about differences between how the process works now, and how it used to work.
It now starts with a web search by a prospective buyer, after a team has identified the opportunity, scoped it, and developed specifications that need to be met, usually well before a salesman even knows that the prospect is in the market. The specs are then sent to a range of potential suppliers with a “request for quote” or some such phrase which really means give us your best price.
This all used to be the function of the sales person, to shake the trees, identify prospects, qualify and develop them through to a sale and ongoing supply relationship.
No longer.
Now it is the function of marketing to digitally “shake the trees” for prospects, then find ways to use the communication and marketing tools of the web to engage and qualify them, before turning them over to sales at the point at which they are about to become customers.
Many enterprises I see have not made the internal structural and cultural changes that acknowledge this disruption, and are failing to extract the maximum productivity out of their communicationand sales investments as a result.
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.
