Mar 2, 2010 | Leadership, Management, Personal Rant
“Training” has become the default position in many circumstances where employees are required to learn a new skill, revise an existing one, or become familiar with a new product or process. At the end of the process, most will retain little of the training.
By contrast, education is a process of developing the ability to think, ask questions, be critical without being personal, reflect on outcomes and find flaws in the hypothesis, or just join the dots differently.
It follows that education takes longer, is more challenging to the educator, is far more engaging for the “educatee”, and will pay greater dividends in the long run.
As Confucious is reported to have said;
“Tell me and I will forget,
Show me and I may remember,
Involve me and I will understand”
After all, you train dogs, you educate people.
Feb 28, 2010 | Change, Management, Sales, Strategy
How many times have we heard this as a smart front line operator expresses frustration with the attitudes of the executive suite, the redundancy of the business model, or the strategy being pursued, as again, the “bosses” appear to fail to understand the coal face drivers of success.
The most common cause of this cry is becoming the rapid commoditisation of many markets, and those that see it first are usually on the front lines. Suddenly, long term customers are turning away, a new competitor emerges, and the only tool the troops have left is price, and they are pushed to do more with less.
Short term responses to a fundamental change in the business model necessary to be commercially sustainable won’t get you far, at best it will put off the inevitable. You need to ask yourself a couple of key questions:
- How can I differentiate my commodity product to a smaller market, instead of being all things to all people?
- How can I solve a problem someone has with the existing commodity product and service?
- How do I deploy my resources to make it happen, recognising , often this will mean adding a different type of resource.
Feb 21, 2010 | Branding, Management, Marketing
Many brands over time have been built by using “mystique” as an ingredient, generally in the form of information withheld, scarcity, price, and the stories that surround the product.
In this connected world, we are bombarded with information, almost everything we could think of to ask is there, a few clicks away, and so it has become counter-intuitive to build a brand based on a lack of information.
Could we build Coca Cola from scratch today, its “secret” recipe held in a bank vault? Would that story hold, or would an employee be on a blog giving us the recipe, and dismembering the bank vault story.
There is a marketing trade-off to be made, mystique against a real, quantifiable product benefit, but how do you demonstrate a benefit that is essentially qualitative. Pepsi tried it with its “Taste Test” marketing, and came unstuck.
In the end it comes back to making the brand stand for something specific, and hard to copy, so it says something about those who choose to use it.
Feb 18, 2010 | Change, Management, Marketing, Sales
As publishing goes electronic, and the hype about the Ipad, Kindle, and other reader technologies, evolves, and drives behavior changes, publishers need to consider how they are going to market, as most consumption of books is still generated by seeing it, physically in the bookstore. This is particularly true in the case of gifts, which is a very large part of the book market. As stores go out of business, how do publishers replace the awareness of a new book, the “feel” of it from the shelf, the pleasure of the interaction at point of purchase?
Amazons Kindle generally allows the first chapter to be downloaded before purchase, but will that be enough?
As in most other retail categories, the probable answer is that the generalist, mass market shops will decline radically in numbers, partly replaced by both specialist retailers who carry a depth of range of a particular genre, huge mega stores in cheap locations, and perhaps hole in the wall retailers with a printer/binder where you can order and print off the book, or part of the book wanted on the spot.
Whatever happens, the status quo has been busted wide open.
Feb 17, 2010 | Management, Operations, Sales
The gate keeper role is progressively becoming redundant as web tools evolve to offer many other avenues to get “inside” a prospective customer.
The most aggressive commercial gatekeepers have traditionally been in the acquisition roles, and finding ways to butter them up, or get around them consumes huge resources in many organsations selling B2B, and using the model successful last century, getting to know the purchasing manager, taking him to lunch, sending his kids a birthday card to show you care, and so on.
Nowadays, these people are almost redundant, the most they usually do is fill in the purchase order, and ensure delivery, they rarely now make the decision to buy yours, or the others.
The task now is to identify the decision maker, and market your product benefits to him/her, building the value of the benefits, by identifying what your product delivers in terms of three parameters:
- The sales benefit delivered.
- The cost benefit delivered
- The productivity benefit delivered.
If you are not delivering at least one of these three, preferably two, why would they waste their money buying from you.
Feb 14, 2010 | Change, Innovation, Management, Strategy
Much of what we read encourages us to experiment, test, and adopt and adapt the better ideas as they survive, and evolve. I am a great advocate of this approach, but the downside is that an apparent ad hoc mindset, a lack of planning discipline, may allow the basic performance measurement disciplines of to fall away.
It is another management paradox, you have to be flexible and agile or “loose” to succeed, but to succeed you must have “tight” management to ensure the choices made have the backing a data, and strategic fit, not just the result of somebody’s good idea when they woke up that morning.
