Oct 26, 2010 | Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
The thing about market research is that it can only elicit responses to the questions that are asked from within the context of what they already know and understand.
Innovative solutions are rarely a result of asking a group, or committee, about what they would like. Henry Ford once quipped that if he has asked customers what they wanted before he developed the model T, they would have responded, “a faster horse” and this is proven true time after time.
Similarly, leadership is not about agreement, and gaining consensus all the time, it is about someone having the moral courage to stand by him/her self and say, that is wrong, or I disagree, here is what I think, this is what I am going to do!
When was the last time you saw a statue recognising the contribution of a committee?.
Oct 25, 2010 | Collaboration, Communication, Social Media
Why is it that in the face of plummeting communication costs, and remarkable availability of new tools to make it easy, that business travel continues to grow?
On first glance, we should be travelling less, not more, but on further consideration, perhaps it is the richness of the face to face engagement and the potential to develop “social capital” with customers, geographically spread colleagues and suppliers that is keeping us on the planes, and the communication tools let us keep on top of the necessary crap in the office without having to be there.
Travel may be complementary to other communication costs, rather than the new tools being a substitute for travel as we all assumed to now.
The depth of personal, face to face communication cannot be substituted by the width possible with social tools, as looking someone physically in the eye involves having some “skin in the game”, putting yourself out there in a way not equalled by electronic means. The evolution of communities and the social capital that keeps them glued to gather, will see roles changing, but the physical handshake cannot be substituted by exchanged electrons.
Oct 21, 2010 | Collaboration, Communication, Leadership, Strategy
Achieving transparency is at the core of a lot of what I do in the fields of demand chain development, strategic alignment, and mentoring leaders. Transparency enables emerging problems and issues to be identified, and addressed quickly, efficiently, and with a minimum of waste in the process, and for opportunities to be grabbed.
However, the downside that sometimes evolves, particularly in closely defined cultures, is that it also enables blame to be pinned on an individual or team, and this is hugely counter productive.
Once transparency is used as a finger pointing exercise, it will not get a second chance, as people learn quickly that it will be counter productive to bring problems to the notice of others, when they run a risk of being the messenger that gets shot.
Oct 19, 2010 | Customers, Leadership, Management, Marketing
The scary thing about competition is that someone always loses, even if it is only an opportunity. Many would like to believe that we should all be friends together to save the pain, but outside the public sector, it does not happen like that.
Successfully competing is down to delivering superior value to customers at a cost less than the customers best alternative. To do that in this connected world where transaction costs are disappearing the whole enterprise needs to be focused on what it is that the customer values.
Sounds pretty simple, but how rarely I see it
Oct 14, 2010 | Customers, Innovation, Marketing
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it is the driver of everything that contributes to improvement. Doesn’t matter if it is improvement in a factory, using the “5 why” tool, or some question, the answer to which advances our knowledge of space. The driver is curiosity, and the result, the potential to be better, to know more, to deliver benefit.
For a marketer, being curious should be second nature, but how long since you sat one-on-one with a customer and sought direct feedback on how your product performs Vs the competition?, why they bought it?, how could it be improved?, what job was it really doing? And so on.
It is one thing to absorb research reports, dig through the numbers, engage in esoteric conversations about innovation, and understand at a macro level the things that contribute to success, but it is something entirely different to get down in the weeds with your customers.
Oct 11, 2010 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
That democratic cliché “freedom of the press” is a bit misleading, because to be able to exercise it, you needed to own or control the capital equipment and distribution channel to get your message out, so clearly this freedom was limited to a very few.
However, freedom of the press has an entirely new dimension, as now anyone can publish, you just need a computer and a weblog account. Of course, you still have to get people to engage with what is written, but you can put it out there easily and cheaply.
This change in the balance of power is the most compelling change in the nature of news gathering and dissemination process since the invention of the printing press, and it is pretty clear that the “old” press is struggling with commercial sustainability, whilst on the flip side, the views on the web need a greater level of skepticism than the Financial Review.
Freedom of the press, and freedom of speech are now pretty much the same thing in most places around the world, we just need to be careful about believing what we read.
