Aug 26, 2009 | Leadership, Management, Strategy
Management activity often seems to be telling people what to do, then fighting the fires when it is not done, or not done to a standard you deem acceptable, or not done on time.
A simple human reaction: “tell me what to do, and I will do it, but if you do not tell me what to do, how do I know I have to do it”?
A simple solution, hard to implement because you need to change first: stop telling people what to do which takes away their responsibly and ownership, and start encouraging them to take ownership of problems and propose solutions they then become responsible for implementing.
Management starts with helping people see problems, and making sure they have the skills, resources and motivation to fix them, and then it becomes leadership.
Taking the easy way out and doing it yourself sometimes appears the easiest solution, but it is rarely one that is the best solution, it is just a short term band-aid on a symptom, rarely a solution.
Aug 25, 2009 | Management, Strategy
Having a good strategy scores 1/10 on the useful meter, the other 9/10 are allocated for implementation, adjustment, and learning.
That is not to down-play the difficulty of developing a good strategy, and the crucial value of such an investment of resources, it is time consuming, demanding, and usually highly iterative, combining both data and judgment in ways that deliver a competitive advantage.
However, no matter how smart the strategy, the key to success is the implementation. I wonder how many great strategies have been developed, bound, and presented, only to grace the shelf, pristine in its pride of place.
There are many tools to assist the development process, SWOT, Porters 5 forces, Balanced Scorecard, and many others, but the number of tools available has had little impact on the quality of the implementation process in most businesses.
However, the key to strategic success is to be determined to implement and measure the effectiveness of the implementation of strategic decisions taken, and being prepared to make alterations as new information emerges, or competitive conditions change.
Aug 24, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Sales
At an industry round table a short time ago, a general conversation was bouncing around amongst a bunch of relatively senior executives about the uses their businesses had made of the internet as a marketing and communication tool.
Few were vocal advocates of the web, several had examples of fancy programs that yielded little for their businesses.
It became clear after a while that they largely saw the net as a way of avoiding the mailing costs, printing, envelope stuffing, and stamps, associated with “direct mail” and were grateful, but it did not work very well.
Memo:
The net is not just free stamps, it is a whole new way of engaging your market, of attracting and engaging a new bunch of people, probably who were never going to be on a mailing list, because they engage each other, they network with like minded people. The power is taken from you, and given to them.
Seeing this as a version of a snail mail direct mail program is really missing the point completely. The net is nothing like a free mailing service, it is a new way of working with your “tribe” rather than directing them.
Aug 20, 2009 | Management, Strategy
It has become pretty obvious over the last 9 months (if it was not there for all to see before), that those businesses with conservative financial management, irrespective of size, are the ones that have the opportunity to prosper during the downturn, taking advantage of the distress of their competitors to leverage their relatively strong financial position. When the dust settles, they will be lauded for their efforts.
This is a change from 2 years ago, when the same companies were being castigated for failing to take advantage of obvious opportunities to build shareholder wealth.
The lesson is best illustrated by the fable we all heard as kids, the tortoise and the hare, the tortoise has won again, we all know it will eventually, so why do we continue to act like hares?
We cannot hope to control, the environment we are in, but the best companies learn to evolve and accommodate the changes that occur beyond their control without succumbing to their transient attractions.
Aug 19, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Sales
What happens when you meet someone…? “where do you work” is a common conversation starter.
Someone who responds enthusiastically, extolling the virtues of their employer and the products they produce, will have a positive impact on those they meet, and the “word of mouth” that originates with that conversation can be substantial.
Conversely, an employee who expresses no confidence in their employer and products will create a negative impact, which has the potential to multiply with the telling, and after all, who is in a better position to know the real quality of a product than one who participates in the production process?
Thinking about employee satisfaction in this way puts a new perspective onto now almost standard annual employee satisfaction survey.
Customers are cautious, advertising savvy, and cynical, so getting a message to them is very difficult.
In a networked world, it now requires measures to develop employees as advocates for your business, as the advocacy of one person will have more impact than a 1000 TARP points in a TV advertising schedule.
Aug 18, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Sales, Strategy
The aim of brand builders is to engage with consumers to the point where they become apostles for the brand, an much effort has gone into developing measures that use this notion as a measure of brand strength.
On the other side of the coin are the detractors of your brand, and the damage they can do.
The development of a brand therefore also has the two dimensions. Powerful brands encourage powerful emotions, and some of those are very likely to be negative, it almost goes with the territory, anything capable of arousing powerful positive emotions is just as capable of arousing negative ones. An overlooked, but key challenge is how you manage the detractors, and the things they use as hooks for adverse comment.
Recently a measure “net promoter score” has become the favorite or marketers, as it appears to offer a methodology of collecting quantitative data on the behavior of your customers. Introduced in a 2003 HBR article by Fred Reicheld it has quickly become accepted as almost gospel.
However, experience suggests we should be pretty careful when someone has all the answers to all our previously intractable questions, and it is no different here. NPS is a great start to measure those who use, or have used your product, but relying on it solely to save the day is a big ask.
