Sep 4, 2014 | Governance, Innovation, Leadership, Small business, Strategy
The post on the 2 tools SME’s need in early August led to a comment that, whilst the headlines of focus and discipline made sense, the challenge is in implementation.
Fair comment.
So, how do you build the needed focus and discipline in the face of increasing complexity and competition?
Over 40 years of doing this stuff with SME;s, there have been 6 common factors that lead to successful implementation that have emerged.
- Ownership leads to commitment. In an increasingly complicated world, the hierarchical organisations that worked for us to date now fail, they are too rigid and process driven to be responsive to the chaotic input from a connected world. Leveraging what Clay Shirky calls “Cognitive surplus” becomes the competitive challenge to be won.
- Prioritisation and planning. There is a fine line between prioritising and planning a set of activities, and procrastination and doing the easy stuff that does not really matter. Two rules of thumb: 1. if it is easy, it probably does not matter, and 2. An extra minute spend planning will save an hour later on in the project.
- Accountability. It is one thing to “make” someone accountable in a top down organisation, it is easy for some boss to just say “you are accountable” but that does not make it so. It is really only when the person takes on the accountability as their own that the motivation kicks in, that they really care beyond the protection of an income or position.
- Outcome measurement. Do not measure the activities, just the outcomes. It is good to have the activities visible, so you can see what is being done, but only the outcomes really matter, activities do not contribute to success in any way other than they are just the means to the end, so measure for the end.
- Failure tolerance. The “scientific method” applies to management as well as science, it spawns a fact based decision making culture, rather than one based on ego, status and hubris.The story of the most successful inventor in history, Thomas Edison, on failing for the 999th time to create light from a bulb saying: “Now I know 999 things that do not work” is a lesson for us all. The 1,000th experiment was successful, and the world was changed.
- Persistence. Never giving up is crucial, with the proviso that you learn from your mistakes, and apply the learning.
These 6 are a great start, to which I would add “Sweat”. My dad used to reckon nothing worthwhile was achieved without some of it being shed, and I think he was right.
Aug 5, 2014 | Branding, Collaboration, Marketing, Strategy
www.strategyaudit.com.au
Design is often used as a noun, “I will do a design for you” is common. However, when you think about it, design is not just a thing, an end product, it is a process of moving from an idea, through iterations, to a final form.
It is a verb.
“To design” should be a verb to be valued. Steve Jobs knew that, and executed on it, and as a result Apple became for a while, the most valuable corporation in the world, starting from the position of basket case.
“Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works” Steve Jobs.
The “how it works” phrase implies not just that the product itself works in ways that deliver great value, but that the way it works is in sync with the mind of the customer.
Need to better define how your customers mind works?
Chances are the experience of the StrategyAudit team can help.
Jul 15, 2014 | Leadership, Small business, Strategy
The complexity of the world these days demands an approach to strategy that is counter intuitive, perhaps even a contrarian approach to the accepted best practice.
For decades managers have sweated and planned, and set out to execute, just to see the planning go to crap at the first hurdle, as things rarely happen as planned.
In the “MBA model”, you push on regardless, because it is planned, the resources gathered, prioritised and allocated, a “push” model of strategy development and deployment.
If the opposite were to happen with strategy, as it does with agile software development, how would it differ?
A continuous process of combining strategic hypothesis generation and A/B testing, going hand in hand with incremental resource allocation from a diverse pool of experts, rather than a from pool of available bodies? Seems to be a sensible alternative, so why don’t we do it?
Generally we people like certainty, clarity, and a minimum of ambiguity, and that comes with a detailed plan. Problem is, plans are only as good as our ability to read the future, which is generally pretty ordinary. The better way is to know the end point, and if we can manage the ambiguity and uncertainty, make our own away there based on the obstacles we encounter.
In this uncertain world, we need a compass, not a roadmap.
Maps tell us to move forward a defined distance, take a left, followed by a right, and so on, whereas a compass tells us the direction, not necessarily the detail of how to navigate the immediate terrain.
This counter intuitive approach to strategy is often what SME’s do, without really recognising it as such. They react to what is in front of them, rather than what they may have planned to do, often the plans do not even exist in a formal sense. Their challenge is to apply some focus on the longer term, not just the burning bridge they are standing on.
Jul 11, 2014 | Customers, Demand chains, Marketing, Strategy
Water will become the frontier of conflict and innovation in the C21
Few things are more important than how we feed ourselves, and get access to clean water. Without these, our species will not survive, our numbers are increasing rapidly, as the resources of the planet, particularly available water, are being consumed faster than replacement rates.
According to the UN, 6-8 million people die every year due to water related disease or disaster, 2.5 billion do not have access to sanitation, and nearly a billion do not have clean drinking water. I suspect water will be the root cause of much of the international power plays over the next 50 years.
During this last week, there was an international Peri Urban conference in Sydney. Much earnest discussion amongst the disappointingly low number of attendees went on, but there were some lessons that need to be learned beyond the gravity of the emerging crisis on water management:
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- For the message to get out beyond those in the room, the facts need to be told as stories to which the public can relate, and engage, creating pressure on decision makers to allocate some priority to the questions raised. Dry academic papers read by Professors with limited story-telling skills, accompanied by PowerPoint slides as comprehensible as the Rosetta stone will not cut the mustard. The presentations I saw reminded of Sir Ken Robinsons classic line that “the only purpose of academic bodies is to get their heads to meetings”.
- Marketing is not just useful, but required. Twitter is now routinely used by conference organisers to get their message out, and there was a handle for the conference, #periurban14, which attracted 1 tweet. Enough said.
- For Peri Urban agriculture to be a reality, it is required to be economically sustainable, as well as ecologically sustainable. Discussion of the barriers and challenges to economic sustainability would appear to me to be of vital interest to the topic, but beyond some minor consideration of the evolving organic market, little was said, the vital role of consumer demand ignored.
I presented at a workshop breakout session. A short presentation that set out to make the point that whatever happens in the growing part of the agricultural process, you still need a customer to make the whole thing commercially sustainable. There were so few people there that clearly the issue of commercial sustainability being a vital foundation of change has not yet resonated.
Conferences are a vital part of the process of creating and disseminating Intellectual capital. The presentations are just a small part of the mix, the relationships built with other conference attendees, and the opportunity to leverage the messages to wider audiences via social media are the real reasons conferences are worth the time and expense.
Jul 4, 2014 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Strategy
Have you created the best content you can, original, insightful, and engaging, that demonstrates your domain knowledge, but it goes nowhere?
No impact, no interest, even your friends do not read it.
It is a bit like throwing a party and having nobody turn up.
Maybe you forgot to send invitations, after all, psychics are pretty rare, so people need to know the party is on.
Creating the content is just the same, the creation is only a part of the process, you also need to market the content, and having done that successfully, then the content can be judged by the response you get.
So, following are four simple, common sense marketing rules to apply to your precious content.
- Have a strategy that promises to deliver the objectives, creating the content is not enough.
- Use data, not just your gut. The data is freely available, and enormously valuable, use it.
- Learn by doing. The oldest and still the best game in town is to experiment and learn.
- Remember always that creating the content just gets you a ticket to the game, not the automatic right to play, that comes from elsewhere.
Jun 25, 2014 | Customers, Leadership, Strategy
courtesy Tom Fishburne. http://tomfishburne.com/2009/04/the-value-proposition.html
Customer Value has almost become a cliché, often trotted out to cover the lack of real marketing insight.
Effective articulation of customer value, and the business model and processes to deliver it remains at the core of those businesses that find success. It is particularly relevant to SME’s as they must ensure their very limited resources are focussed where they can best deliver outcomes, they do not have the benefit of scale to absorb mistakes.
Following is a list of questions frequently asked in strategy sessions that seek to identify, and give form to this most elusive notion of “Value”.
- Why do customers come to us rather than go to the competition?
- What customer needs are currently unmet or under met?
- How have customer needs changed in the last few years?
- If we project forward two years and look back, how have their needs changed now?
- What could our competitors do for our customers that we would like to be able to do?
- Where are new customers coming from, and why?
- Are there new competitors emerging that offer value different to ours?
- To what degree does our concerns for customers welfare really drive our =decision making
- What else could we do for customers?
- What could we do to attract new customers?
Each of these questions can and should generate a great deal of discussion, the quality of that discussion is a measure in itself of how well you understand “Why” you do what you do, rather than just What and How you do it.
The really successful companies do not wait for strategy session, they ask themselves these question every day, and the answers drive how they behave and interact with customers and prospects.
