How do we judge political performance?

This week we have had a budget, arguably the first half realistic assessment of the economy for some time, with some politically unpalatable pills swallowed. Not before time.

We have also had the budget reply, which was more an election speech than a roadmap for sensible governance, and government. We still know little about the priorities and relative weight the opposition gives to the many competing demands on the resources at their disposal via our tax payments, but we know a bit more now than before the speech.

Mr. Abbott put his finger on it when he recognised in his speech that if directors of a public company behaved like politicians, there would be some very serious questions asked by the regulatory authorities. We of the taxpaying classes have been saying that for years.

So, on the standards by which Directors are judged how has our government performed, on a scale of 1-5.

1. Formulation and execution of a strategic plan. 1/5. Comment. I see nothing that resembles a coherent plan that takes account of the short term bumps whilst assembling the capabilities and resources to deliver longer term prosperity in a volatile and commoditized world.  Long term planning to this lot is what they are doing after (taxpayer sponsored) lunch. There are a few exceptions, some good intentions that may never emerge from the policy cocoon, which gave them the 1 point.
2. Communication with, and alignment of, stakeholders to the strategic priorities outlined. 1/5. Comment. They get 1 because they did try, however ineffectively. The only stakeholders who appear to be aligned are the militant unions who have lined up to build back some of the rorts lost over the previous 15 years.  Non public sector union membership is now around 10% of the workforce, yet they exert a huge influence on this government, way out of proportion to the numbers they supposedly represent. The internal alignment of management is appallingly bad, and has resulted in not just a trashing of the brand, but in having some useful talent and experience being relegated to the bench for speaking their mind. Successful leaders recognise that the debate around differing views, and the “due process” that is a part of creative and sensible policy development is vital, shooting the messenger went out with Al Dunlap.
3. Development of sensible policy to deliver on the “vision” bits of the strategic plan. 3/5. Comment. The “policy” agenda of a government is equivalent to the components of the value proposition and business model of a commercial enterprise. Discussion of the current governments policy development performance could have a strong partisan element depending on your views. However, whatever your views on the individual components, I think it is fair to observe that they made considerable effort, carbon abatement via a tax regime, taxing mining profits beyond the existing tax rates, some substantial international initiatives, the disability scheme, the NBN, response to the initial impact of the GFC, and a few others.  You may not like the individual policies, the implementation may have been be buggared, but the policy thought was there.
4. Credibility. 0/5. Comment. Nobody I speak to believes anything coming out of the mouth of a pollie, of any persuasion.  The spectacle of politicians and their mates who do not just stick their snouts into the trough, but dive in and wallow around has utterly tarnished the credibility of the whole lot. You can thank Obeid and McDonald et al in NSW, Thompson in Canberra, the sound of cabinet ministers dumping on the Rudster, who then squibbs, and absolute undertakings (as distinct from “election promises”)  made and broken with monotonous regularity. The list goes on, and on. 
5. Performance compared to peers. 3/5. Comment. There is no doubt that Australia is in a far better position than most, if not all of economies that are reasonably comparable. The speed of Australia’s reaction to the GFC was commendable, and effective, although it can reasonably be argued that there was much waste involved. However, the financial flexability to make and implement decisions was a result of decisions taken by former governments, Hawke, Keating and Howard, and had little to do with the current regime. They just got lucky that there was money in the bank, and coal and iron ore prices went into a once in a generation spike. Discussion about how much better it could, perhaps should,  have been done while being interesting, is irrelevant except as a learning experience.
6.  Productivity of our tax dollars, the outcomes we get from the spending. 1/5. Comment. Having run an agency outsourced from a Federal Department, and lived in Canberra  for several years, I am particularly cynical about the manner of the expenditure that happens on our behalf. Everything costs many times what it should, and would under a different, more commercial performance and accountability culture. There is simply no bottom line culture of accountability, just spend what is allocated and fight like banshees for more, as size of budget and reporting numbers are the measures of seniority and therefore salary, and associated employment perks. Obviously this is a generality, there are many motivated, educated and engaged public servants around, trying to do a job, and being frustrated by the existing culture, and it is this culture that must change before any reasonable productivity progress can be made. It is in a word, a function of Leadership, a rare commodity it seems.
7. Governance, finally. 0/5. Comment. As Mr. Abbot recognised, any CEO whose leadership had failed as conspicuously as that of the current and former PM would not just be out of a job, and be responsible for a trashing of the share price, but would be fronting the ASIC and its investigators for breaches of more regulations than Ian McDonald has had long lunches. (It should be noted, the opposition would also have problems with the regulators, as making public pronouncements of fantasy as fact when you are trying to get someone to buy your product is illegal)

All in all, a pretty sad state of affairs that no board would tolerate. A responsible board would have identified and eliminated the causes of such hubris well before it got to the stage on show in our various parliaments around the country.

The truly scary thing to consider is how much better the current opposition will perform when they, as it is almost assumed, take over the keys to the lolly cabinet in September. I fear they will be overcome by the same stuff that has sunk the current lot, and will just govern for themselves whilst mouthing platitudes.

None of this is to deny the difficulties of government, the competing agendas and political realities of the 24 hour news cycle, and our seeming intoxication with the banal, irrelevant, and superficial. However, it is our money that is being spent, we have a right, indeed obligation, to have our say.

How would you mark these parameters, and what other strategic considerations should be made that I have missed?.

 

The “Twitter Pitch”

 

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) famously opened a letter to his wife whilst ”exploring” Australia with the words ”I do not have time to write you a short letter, so I have written you a long one”.

This statement is a pitch for twitter 100 years before it was conceived, as the sentiment of clarity through brevity is the same. Writing to convey an idea is a challenge, writing to convey an idea in a few words requires a discipline of thought that can be extremely hard.

The restriction of Twitter to 140 characters does seem to encourage a written shorthand that I find excruciating, but at its best, also adds a discipline to constructing an idea that squeezes out the superfluous, the hyperbole, the distractions,  and forces clarity by brevity.

It seems that the “Twitter Pitch” is replacing the “Elevator Pitch” first made popular by Dale Carnegie, but the idea is the same.

 

Failure of commission, or omission.

On this Budget “morning after” where public spending is at 33.5% of GDP and rising, all the debate is about the detail, weather or not the  “baby bonus” should be retained, the validity of the forward estimates given recent history, and increase in the personal tax rate of 0.5%  tearily described by the PM as just a small increase in the Medicare levy.

To my mind, we have missed the point.

It seems to me that a real problem in this country of ours is that we have allowed a culture to evolve that punishes errors of commission, those errant outcomes from someone actually taking some initiative, doing something, but getting it wrong. Sometimes they are the result of circumstances beyond their control, sometimes they just misjudge, and yes, sometimes, are just plain stupid, but at least they got off their arses and did something.

By contrast, we seem to just put up with those who do nothing but follow the party line, do as they are told, accept the status quo no matter how dumb they think it is, and just park their brains at the door.

Not the image we hold of ourselves.

The reality is about as far away from the bronzed Aussie gazing into the sunset somewhere harsh, taking all life can deliver with a grin and a stoic resolution to persist.

Perhaps it is about time we started focusing some light on those who did nothing, took  no responsibility for their actions, and just sucked at the teat delivered on a platter.

Our public sector consumes well over 33% of GNP, yet produces nothing. Much of the money is necessary if we are to be a civilised society, but not all of it. The lack of productivity in the public sector is a national disgrace. Layers upon layers of paper shuffling, process management with little  regard to outcomes, and meaningless KPI’s chased by intelligent, educated people, many of whom would love the opportunity to make change, but are prevented from doing so by the inertia of the system and prevailing culture.  

The greater error should be the one of omission, not commission. How do we empower the bronzed Aussie of our collective imagination?. We should be seeking better outcomes for the money spent, not just arguing about the amount spent.

Engaging sales people.

I found myself in a heated debate last week with a headhunter about the value, and challenges of SME’s outsourcing the hiring of employees, particularly salespeople.

Her view: SME owners are so time constrained that anything not “core” to success should be outsourced, and left to professionals.

My view: If sales, or as I like to call it, Revenue generation, is not core to every SME, I do not know what is. Whilst it may be the product offering, that delivers the value, it is sales that delivers the opportunity to deliver that value, and therefore is the key role, and should warrant substantial attention. Picking those who will represent you with current and potential customers is much too important to be outsourced to “professionals” who get paid by delivering a body to a seat.

While there are exceptions at either end of the employee scale, casual factory workers are perhaps best outsourced, and  it is probably sensible to have a headhunter exercise their skills and networks to find a group of people who fill demanding profile when seeking a new CEO, from which a board can make a choice.

 However, this is not how it usually evolves. The usual is a harried, busy executive whose KPI’s have little to do with the quality of the team, and the individuals who make it up does not give adequate thought to the personal dynamics and capability requirements of the role, they just want a warm body that appears able to do the job in the seat ASAP.

Good salespeople make or break a business, the challenges in finding, keeping, and maximising their productivity are substantial, but are central to the success of the enterprise.

 

 

Is content the chicken to SEO’s egg?

 

Creating content, the stuff that engages people, preferably customers, potential customers, and influencers of these two groups people (otherwise why are you doing it?) is a real challenge, but one that successful use of social media demands is addressed. There are plenty of resources out there offering tips and templates, but they do not get the job done.

When you have addressed the challenges, and have great content, if nobody reads and shares it, why bother?

SEO tools also abound, just behind the seeming hordes of people offering to lift your Google ranking, for a fee. It seems to me that SEO has spawned a host of shysters matched only by the easy money opportunities emanating from Nigeria. 

So where do you go in all this? How do you make the tough choices about  how to allocate scarce resources?  SEO or Content?

A couple of general thoughts that I have offered to  clients over a while now, and which seem to work.

1. Be very clear about the objectives of your investment in social media. Setting out to get to the top of Google requires a different set of activities to engaging existing customers, building a position as an industry expert, or creating a sales pipeline, and whilst they are not mutually exclusive, using just SEO strategies when you are looking for specific outcomes is like taking the family car to a competitive hill-climb.
2. Use analytics as the basis for decision-making. Marketing for the first time in its history as a profession can be held accountable to metrics that accurately measure outcomes, rather than just activity.  It can be daunting, data usually is to many, but there are free resources and tools available that offer  an unprecedented accountability and transparency of marketing investments. A Google analytics dashboard at the very least should be compulsory. If you need a resource to assist your thinking, the very very, best is the Occum’s Razor blog written by Avinash Kaushik.  A really good strategy is to take your device on holidays, and spend the week reading and understanding the stuff that Avinash writes. It is gold!
3. Be prepared to experiment. Social media is a bit like the finches in the Galapagos, many may look the same at a fleeting and uninformed glance, but the detail of the evolution, the way individual groups have evolved to maximise their effectiveness in a specific environment is extraordinarily different. This has happened to the Galapagos finches over millennia, but is happening as we speak to social media tools and strategies, and the only way to leverage the specific circumstances you find yourself in, is to be completely agile, and committed to responding positively to changes in the environment and new information.
4. Remove the rules and barriers to engagement by those at the “customer edge”. It is confronting for many (particularly older, and dictatorial managers) to consider allowing personnel who actually interact face to face with your marketplace to have the authority to make decisions and respond on the spot to needs and opportunities as they emerge. Whilst there needs to be some general rules of engagement, that reflect the business model and values of the organisation, empowering employees can be remarkably effective.
5. Remember that social media is a two way beast, whilst there is enormous value potential, the flip side is that the risks of social media becoming a problem are very real. The immediacy of the potential negative impact of social media needs to be recognised, and there needs to be very clearly understood strategies to deal with any such outbreak of negativity. If you cock up, social media can destroy you, particularly if you try and cover up the cock-up, and there is also the opportunity for malicious and competitive attack. This risk aslo needs to be acknowledged, and ideally “war-gamed” even if in a small way.
6. The final thing to remember is that Social media will not go away. We have seen it before, when Guttenberg got his press working, the world of the printed message changed forever, and it has happened again. Hoping it will go away, that the impact will not reach you is fantasy land, so get with the program, with all its challenges.

R&D portfolio metaphor

Yesterday, watching a bee that had snuck in my office window trying to get out, I was reminded of a simple fact that to my mind is a great metaphor.

Put a few bees in a bottle, and point the bottom towards a light source, and the bees will all belt themselves against the bottle bottom, never finding the open end. Flies by contrast buzz around at random, and eventually will, by luck, find their way out the open end.

Running a portfolio of R&D projects is a bit like having a lineup of bottles full of bees.

For some bottles you need to have light very focussed at one point, in order to concentrate the effort at that point, others you need a wider light source to enable a wider scope of activity, and others, you need light all around, with one small exit, so that eventually the disciplined bees will find the opening, and escape.

If all you have in the bottles are flies, exercising discipline is a pointless exercise, as flies just buzz at random irrespective of external motivation. You need bees, and multiple potential light sources.

Getting the right mix of disciplined process and the connection of the apparently random dots  that make the “wow” moment is the core task of those running a portfolio of projects.

  

Success is a contingency

Success is the result of hard work, smarts, good teams, focus, with a hit of “right place, right time” thrown in, etc, etc, right? Right.

At least that is what I always believed, knocked into me by my Dad who believed, and lived by the credo that “the harder  I work, the luckier I get”

Increasingly however, I am seeing success being a relative thing, significantly dependent on a whole host of factors outside our control, many that have perhaps only come into play since the net made our world so bloody complicated, immediate and transparent.

Bill Gates did well, right time and place with an idea that was new, but when he pitched it to IBM, the defining moment of his career, he was not to know that internally IBM had reached some strategic conclusions about how they would approach the emerging world of personal computing.

Contingency.

Ron Jones got fired three weeks ago from JC Penny, where he lasted 17 months after being hired to “Appelise” the aging department store retailer. The retail guru who saved Target, created the retail megastar that is Apple stores, failed to do anything but annoy JC Penny’s existing management who rebelled, and customers who went elsewhere.

Wrong strategy perhaps, but it had certainly worked before, demonstrating again the sensitivity of context, and that success is a fragile, elusive thing, dependent on all sorts of contingencies, making continuous experimentation a “must”.

 

Social media explained

You choose

Lets talk about social media for a moment, it is on the mind of most running SME’s. and it is the object of lots of “hype” by snake-oil salesmen.

There is a huge amount of very useful verbiage, and mountains of plain crap out there, as well as the “idiots guide” type stuff, but it at its core is really simple.

Remember what it was like as a kid in a new playground, you didn’t know anybody, it was lonely amongst a horde of other kids.

Slowly, one short sentence at a time, you got to know some, some you liked, others you did not want to get to know better.

The “liking” evolves over a series of small, at first disconnected interactions, slowly, the interactions become connected, and slowly, the network widens, as you start the interactgion process with others.

At some point, you ask another kid to come home and play, great if he can, but sometimes they can’t, you ask again, if they cannot a second time, with no apparent reason, you probably will not ask again, This is the “law of reciprocracy” at work. Relationships of any type are reciprocal, otherwise they are not relationship.

Just the same in social media, you need to give something before yuy can expect anything back, but get something back, and you reciproicate again, and you have the beginning of something, maybe. It takes work. You need to spend time at the other persons house, want to spend more time with them, be comfortable with what they do, think, and say.

No different in social media. All are different, are able to deliver you an outcome that varies from each other, you just need to understand clearly what you want, otherwise you will spend your limited time poorly. None of nthem, despite the hype are all things to all people. You choose who you like. 

The competitive advantage of SME’s.

Yesterday I did a presentation to a group of owners of small businesses, people who seemingly compete against the odds from a point of weakness, as almost everybody is bigger, better resourced, has better technology, and are more connected, than them. 

As a basis for the presentation I used Simon Sineks great TED talk, that articulated the ” Why How What”   model, one I have been able to use quite often as a means to assist SME’s sort out what is really important, and what just seems to be important, as they try to navigate the competitive challenges they face.

Just after I had delivered my thoughts,  a great post from Seth Godin popped into my feed, and it added a further perspective to the challenges. For these small business people, working as hard as they can, trying to be “picked” by their potential customers, from amongst the baying crowd of potential suppliers is confronting and often disillusioning. How do they stand out from the crowd?

Seth’s point is do not be a part of the crowd of supplicants, do not wait for others to pick you, pick yourself by being different, useful, and interesting.

This is as true for the SME around the corner as it is to the huge multinational, but when you think about it a bit, the elephant is pretty hard to persuade to change direction, to be sufficiently agile to respond quickly,  whilst the little bloke is far more able to turn on a sixpence.

 It just takes the will, vision and balls to be different.

 

Big Bang day.

20 years ago yesterday, April 30 1993, CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear research, the developer of what has become the W.W.W. announced that they would open it up, making it free to all by posting the codes on what became the worlds first website.

A computer based communication system had existed since 1985, when the first “domain” name had been registered, but it was the private property of individual universities and research organisations.

To my mind, this single action by CERN management in 1993 was the catalyst for the revolution we have undergone in the last 20 years, and which is still continuing, and this revolution (I am looking for a stronger word than just “revolution”) is at least as significant as the realisation that steam could be used to drive machines, and you could set up a system to mass produce the printed word.

In a number of TED talks over the years, there has been some extraordinary contributions to our understanding of the impact this decision has had.

Clay Shirky has mused about the brainpower released, the cogitative surplus, by the web, Kevin Kelly makes observations and predictions about the development of the web, and Ray Kurzweil wonders at the continuously accelerating pace of innovation that is occurring. All have made the point that the world has changed.

Tim Berners-Lee, now Sir Tim, was the man. He wrote the protocols that underpin the web HTML, et al, while working as a software engineer at CERN. The project was a part time indulgence, a side project, but then it went public.

To my mind, this is almost equivalent to the Big Bang, the day the world started, anew.

Shouting doesn’t work

 

You can no longer win by shouting, there is always someone who can should louder, longer, and more effectively.

You win today by being genuinely useful.

Those on the receiving end will tell others, who will tell others, and so it goes.

My kids call it social media marketing, I call it common sense marketing.

 

Business half-life.

The speed at which things can happen is halving, and halving again, the wider implications of Moore’s Law at work. In such an environment, where is the value in static annual planning cycles, bi-annual sales meetings, 3 and 5 year plans when we cannot forecast what will hit us next week?

The premium on flexibility, and agility is continuing to increase, and to survive and prosper, it seems to me that there are three strategies that need to be implemented:

1. Work cross boundary, function, geography, technology type, customers profile, all of the above, and all at the same time. The tools to do this are now readily available, what we lack is the understanding and leadership required to implement and leverage their capabilities.
2. Redesign processes, to automate, outsource, or crowdsource, the regular and definable actions, the ones that have become “commoditised” and focus attention on the things that add value, the unusual, and difficult. It is usually the case that the ideas that lead to those insights are between the ears of your stakeholders employees, customers, suppliers, leaders in other industries, so ask them
3. Do both of the above quickly: very, very quickly, your time just halved again.

 

 

Pitching an idea

The most powerful way to get someone to agree with your idea is to ask them the leading question, and have them tell you.

Ronald Regan used this technique a lot. He did not tell the American people “your economic situation has deteriorated over the last 48 months”, instead  he asked the famous question during his election campaign: “Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?”. The answer was a resounding “NO” and he was elected.

Asking the right question can prompt a favourable, almost pre-deternmined response, but the formulation of the words to convey that response provokes a deeper, more intensive processing of the question. This leaves less room for ambiguity and uncertainty in the way the receiver responds to the question, and considerable committment to the answer. 

I have also found it a great way to generate engagement at the opening of a presentation.

Lest we forget

Today is ANZAC day, 2013, a day Australia stops, and remembers. We remember  those who fell and amongst the detritus of hyperbole that seems to multiply every year, there are tales of courage, endurance and perseverance that should not be forgotten, along with hard lessons from which we should have learned.

Alas, it seems we have not.

We still have troops in Afghanistan, and the rhetoric is similar to that which I heard as some of my mates did not come back from Vietnam, a war that divided us to the point that the Vietnam Vets were not welcome in Anzac Day marches until 1987.

Disgraceful. A blight on our country.

I wonder at the long term  impact on Afgan vets, will they be as screwed up as those from Vietnam, and WW11? My father to his deathbed did not talk about his experiences, the few comments over the years would lead to a conclusion that his time in the islands was boring, with just the occasional excitement, but that grossly understates what happened, even if it was nothing like the horrible, inhuman experiences of many. 

By remembering, we hopefully do not repeat the mistakes, but human nature is that we seem not to take sufficient notice, and repeat them.

Just like in business, we should contemplate the motivations that led to our actions in the past, and learn enough not to repeat the bad ones.

Business however, is pretty benign compared to war, irrespective of how brutal we may believe it is. I am reminded of the quip by Keith Miller, our best-ever all round cricketer, spitfire pilot, and archetypal Australian larrikan who when asked during the invinvibles tour how he handled the pressure of a tight test, said “Pressure, this is not pressure, pressure is having an ME 109 up your arse at 400 miles an hour, this is just a game of cricket.”

Oh, the other reason I feel Anzac day is special, it is my beautiful daughters 28th birthday.

Happy birthday Jenn.

Lest we forget.

 

Cognitive productivity.

At a simple level, cognitive productivity is just using the brainpower at your disposal to deliver the optimum outcome, weather that brainpower be resident between your ears, or between the collective ears of many in a group.

However, it is also much deeper than that. The notion of cognitive overhead how much effort there is in understanding something comes from this post  by David Demaree, a software engineer in Chicago, which was prompted by the early iterations of Google+. Cognitive Overhead — “how many logical connections or jumps your brain has to make in order to understand or contextualize the thing you’re looking at.”

As conceived, it applied to software engineering, and the resulting products, but it seems to me it has much wider application.  All those remotes that run our “entertainment centers” are testament to that, what happened to the simple old TV remote, one device, did everything without a science degree?.

Clay Shirky talks about the notion  of cognitive surplus.  This idea proposes that people are motivated by the opportunity to create and share, no longer just by the command and control ideas of the hierarchical employer where money and power emanating from a position description are what counts. The real power in the new economy comes from individuals, and the power vested in them to create by the digital revolution. Even if that creation is just another silly cat picture posted on Instagram, it is nevertheless a creative action taken by someone who could not have done it just a few years ago

If you put the two notions of cognitive overhead and surplus together, you have a recipe for cognitive productivity. Leveraging the cognitive surplus in a manner that minimises cognitive overhead, to deliver greater and greater value to society.

That my friends, is the future!

The “Twitter Pitch”

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) famously said “I do not have time to write you a short letter, so I have written you a long one”.

This statement is a pitch for twitter 100 years before it was conceived, as the sentiment of clarity through brevity is the same. Writing to convey an idea is a challenge, writing to convey an idea in a few words requires a discipline of thought that can be extremely hard.

The restriction of Twitter to 140 characters does seem to encourage a written shorthand that I find excruciating, but at its best, also adds a discipline to constructing an idea that squeezes out the superfluous, the hyperbole, the distractions,  and forces clarity by brevity.

It seems that the “Twitter Pitch” is replacing the “Elevator Pitch” first made popular by Dale Carnegie, but the idea is the same.

A Private note to the chairman: or 6 reasons to quit.

 

 

It is always intriguing to get into a debate with one of my director peers about the way forward for an enterprise. Opinions vary, and the “chat” can become animated, as one did a few weeks ago. As a result, I jotted down a few points to email as a follow up, just for sport, (perhaps commercial suicide) but on re-reading, they seem to make sense. Following is a language edited version.

Bill, managing and promoting growth has a couple of dimensions:

The first is managing the customers, market dynamics, and value proposition that keeps the bills paid, the second in being able to look around the corner and see what is coming next. Not just in terms of the old “same/similar product/new customer/new market” matrix, but the genuinely new stuff, the revised business models, products that break the consumer usage mould, packaging of technology that genuinely changes the dynamics, i.e., the future.

This second part is really hard, but there are a few things that every success seems to have in common, that we need to consider:

1.  We need to understand what it is that we deliver, our purpose, why are we here?. Steve jobs did this better than anyone when he defined Apples purpose when he returned in terms of design, not the hardware or software, but the way in which consumers interacted with the product, and the design of the way it worked, and without being too wanky, its soul.
2.  See better than our competitors  what it is we need to know to be successful in the future, indeed, we need to anticipate who may become competitors as the technology underpinning our business evolves. Those who saw the impact of the net first in terms of behavior and the disruption of markets that occurred did best. Again, Jobs saw the future, and put bits of existing technology together in different ways and came to the market with revolutionary and disruptive products. By contrast, Jeff Bezos saw the future, and built Amazon to levereage that vision. In our business 3-D printing seems to have the potential to be a significant disrupter, it may miss us, but will not go away, so shouldn’t we be learning about the technology?
3. Learn to unlearn, as they way we do things today will not be sufficient to survive in the future. This I see as a significant failure of the existing management, and our own demands of them. Rarely, outside the public sector have I seen a management so risk averse, but really, whose fault is that?
4. Pilot, experiment, and take a lot of small steps, some of which individually may seem  “flakey” but together provide the opportunity to learn. See comment above.
5. Reward the behavior you want, not just with money, as whilst money is important, far more important to our employees is recognition, and further  opportunities to stretch their minds and build experience. They may move on with that knowledge and experience, but that is the world we live in, but while they remain, they contribute at a high level, and when they leave, they do so thanking us, not turning to Twitter to dump on us.
6. Learn to live with the discomfort of not really knowing what is next, the disruption of the status quo that is fundamental to finding tomorrows successes. The twin notions of managing a project portfolio, and being prepared to pivot any project as circumstances demand rather than being wedded to some artificial business plan and operating budget should be embraced.

Unless we can agree that this list has some relevance to the way we direct the business, one of us has to go, and I would prefer it be me, as I do not want to be branded as one of the directors who failed to see the “crappola”  coming, and when it hit, did not have the sense to turn off the fan. Besides, you are the chairman, and my peers like to be told what to do, so my departure can be seen as a “smoothing” of the board debates.   

In short, it is my contention that we must manage the present, and invent the future, and to do this we need to develop a far higher degree of management ambidexterity, and sensitivity to our rapidly evolving marketplace.

I look forward to our next conversation.

 

 

A measure of brand maturity.

 

Ever noticed that people who seem to “really have it all together” are able to poke fun at themselves, take negative feedback as an opportunity to learn and improve, and surprise with their capacity to be absolutely, selflessly, honest?

It is often the same with brands, another example of the similarity of people and brands, of how brands take on human characteristics.

However, it is a revelation to see this astonishingly honest ad by Coke.

Is this the beginning of a trend, a measure of maturity of the Coca Cola brand that it is able to spend resources advertising the downside of consumption of the product, or just a mistake, like the appalling blunder with “New Coke“  in 1985. Perhaps, my cynical side asks, it is because they make more money out of their other beverage products, and want to switch consumption?

It seems to me that despite all, it really is just a measure of the security that Coke management feels in the strength of their brand. It is a recognition that if they do not talk about the cause and effect between sugar beverage consumption and obesity, and all its problems,  others will, and they better have a credibility and a stake in the conversation.

 

Brand ambiguity will be terminal

In a world of homogenisation, being different is both dangerous and necessary.

Standing for something of value  is absolutely essential, ambiguity is death.

C21 Moments of Truth.

Former CEO of Scandanavian Airlines, Jan Carlzon  write a book in the eighties called “Moments of Truth” which reflected the journey of SAS from its commercial deathbed to being the most admired airline in the world. It was a best seller, articulating the then revolutionary idea that each interaction an enterprise had with a customer was a “Moment of Truth” a point at which the consumers experience would shape their attitude and future relationships with a brand.

It occurs to me that it has changed now, and the moment of truth that now matters as much, if not more, is now the point at which a consumer posts, tweets, or other wise publicly records the interaction and their experience with it for others to see, hear, and feed into their memory banks for reference.

The 21st Century has opened up a number of opportunities to interact with consumers Carlzon never anticipated, the referral power of the devices we now routinely use has changed Carlzons Moment of Truth to just the first of many crucial moments.