Aug 18, 2012 | Collaboration, Management
Management lessons abound in the great win by Australia’s K4 crew in London.
- Co-ordination maximises the effect of input. For 1000 meters, the crew was absolutely co-ordinated, any minor deviation by any individual would have had a profound impact on the performance of the whole.
- Focus. Just watch the faces during the race, (if you can find a video, I can’t) focused is an apt description.
- The power of a team is greater than the individual power of its participants. The four here are no doubt amongst the best, and fittest of athletes in the competition, but it is highly unlikely they are the four fittest and best individually, they have combined beautifully to make the best team.
- Visualising the result. Each of the individuals trained enormously hard when not together, and they trained as a team very hard, but each time they did a training run over the Olympic distance, according to one of the interviews I heard, they did it as if it was the Olympic final, so when it came to the real thing, they had already done it thousands of times.
- When faced with disappointment, as several were in Beijing, instead of throwing in the towel, they analysed what went wrong, and set about fixing the problems.
- Control what you can control, and do not stress about what you cannot. The Aussies had a race plan that they executed, knowing what they had to do to win, but during the race, their focus was on their own performance, not that of their opposition. It was only after the line was crossed that they were sure the gold was theirs.
- Planning a support processes are vital. The four in the boat were only a part of the team that made the win possible. The short race was the culmination of years of planning, training, and refining, a classic continuous improvement case study.
Aug 16, 2012 | Branding, Innovation, Management, Marketing
The decades of growth up till a couple of years ago, and the recognition of the key nature of a robust marketing input to corporate success has left many organisations, particularly brand heavy consumer organisations with a marketing overhead problem as times change.
They have a structure that is often 5 layers from the CMO to the assistant brand manager, organised along brand lines, and recently supplemented with category analysts, social media experts, and other service roles. All this at a time when consumer brands are under huge threat from retailer owned brands, global marketing, fragile demand, the erosion of the ability to differentiate by the ubiquity of information, and agile low cost competitors.
Just getting rid of every third head makes little sense, all you do is lose corporate memory, so you need to reorganise to deliver productivity from the investment in marketing overhead, although inevitably there will be personnel losses. Three questions to consider:
- Is marketing activity aligned to corporate priorities?. Many times I have seen lower levels in marketing departments beavering away at projects that bear little resemblance to the strategic priorities held in the corner office.
- Are project portfolios run alongside brand initiatives to ensure that the silos that evolve when brand groups are relatively autonomous are removed?.
- Have you made the hard choices about what projects will proceed, and which will be relegated to the car-park?. This is sometimes very hard, but is a crucial circuit breaker for innovation, with the caveat that those projects left are appropriately resourced.
This is not easy stuff, and most fail the test, which results in sub-optimal resource allocation decisions.
Aug 14, 2012 | Innovation, Management
Just as we manufacture antibodies in our blood to combat infection, so do enterprises construct antibodies in their cultures to combat risk, change, and therefore innovation.
This antibody construction normally happens by default, after all, why change things that have given us what we have? (This resistance to change when all is well is why the best time to change anything is when the poo poo has really hit the fan).
The management task is to administer the innovation drug to enterprises in order to change the culture that exists to enable innovation to occur.
Here is a list of innovation antibodies I have seen at their deadly work, in no particular order:
Ego
Hubris
Disciplined processes replacing thought
Old habits
“NIH”
Not listening
Concentration on narrow data sets
Happy to be a follower
Group-think
Believing managers are innovators
Weeding out the deviates, outliers and heretics
Ambition trumping capability
Rampant self interest
Believing the old adage that information is power, and holding it all close
Ignoring what is happening on the fringes of a market and technology
Not understanding who the customer is
Not listening to demanding customers
Not understanding why you are losing customers
Believing doing something well is good enough, instead of it being the price of entry
Failing to make intuitive connections
Believing the financial statements tell you all you need to know
Autocracy and fear as a management tool
Non investment in the intangible assets of a business
The list just seems to go on and on…………….
Aug 10, 2012 | Management
An old mate of mine has only one rule of negotiation “he who mentions price first, loses”
Whilst there are other things that contribute to a successful outcome, he is right about the price. Once an expectation of price has been mentioned, it becomes the point from which other conversation evolves.
Typically: “I want $1,000 for it” “well, I would be willing to pay you $500”
This will evolve to a final price of $750, but had the initial price been $1,200, the end price may have been around $900.
Perhaps the most public example of this anchoring phenomenon I have seen is Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve, the acknowledged expert on the economy, who completely missed the GFC, simply did not see it coming despite many warnings. The preconceptions he had of the way the economy worked simply blinded him to alternatives. Later, after it became obvious that he was wrong, to the detriment of the US and ultimately world economy, he felt obliged to acknowledge his error before a congressional committee.
When negotiating anything, do not forget my mates rule 1, but recognise that it works across a wider field than just price. Any firm preconception will blind you to alternatives in a negotiation, particularly when there is an emotional investment in the result.
Aug 8, 2012 | Management, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Whilst I hesitate to add to the plethora of words dedicated to the saga of Fairfax, from the stupidity of “Young Warwick” onwards, it seems to me that there are a couple of points that nobody has made.
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- Consumers of media have not changed. They still want to see the news, sports, political analysis, and the latest fashions and foibles of the rich and stupid, and they still want it delivered, and are prepared to pay for it, but they now have options about the delivery not available 15 years ago. Your $60 a month broadband costs are just a different means of delivery of content, the stuff newspapers used to deliver exclusively, for about the same price.
- Newspapers revenue comes from advertising, the literal “Rivers of Gold” that flowed from the classifieds, not from consumers. The price paid at the newsagent (another anachronism of an older world) would not cover the costs of printing and delivering the paper, then disposing of the excess. Newspapers disengaged from the primary source of their revenue and profits, advertisers, whilst their consumers still want, and obtain their news fix, it is just that they can get it elsewhere.
The disruption in the newspaper industry is from the new competition for advertising dollars coming from new channels of content distribution, not from consumers of content turning away.
In all the fluff written about the Fairfax share price, the stalking by Gina, the so called “code of journalistic conduct” and the failure of the Chairman to come to terms with the competing views around the board table, I have seen nothing that points out the basic failure to recognise who is your customer, and who pays the bills and why, outlined above.
The real reason Fairfax is stuffed is that it deserves to be.
P.S. (after 5 years)
It is now April 2017, and Fairfax is saving another 30 million by chopping costs, which means journalists. There is still no recognition of the simple fact that the distribution channels may have changed, but the consumers ares still out there, still consuming media, the challenge is articulating a value proposition that makes it worth their while to part with some money.
Aug 7, 2012 | Management, Marketing
I was recently the recipient of one of the slickest presentations I have seen for some time, as the Marketing Manager of a business on whose board I sit employed the full range of his presentation skills on us. It was a truly impressive performance, at least at a superficial level.
The business is successful, and its marketing programs are seen as a key component of that success, but the reality is that we really do not know in quantitative terms the value delivered by the marketing investment.
Marketers, and the boards to which they report need to be recognise that the days of hype are over, and what is needed now is a solid, quantitative foundation linked to the outcomes so that intelligent, informed assessments of the marketing investments can be made.
Boards are used to numbers, and generally have to date tolerated the marketing hype delivered to us because:
- They do not understand the marketing jargon
- They had no idea how to measure it, so as it appeared to work, why change.
Those gravy-days of marketing are now ended, and no marketing function or person should be able to avoid the scrutiny and opportunity for productivity gains in marketing investments that have been delivered by intelligent metrics available in the digital world.
