Topic: Enterprise Management

Reference: Steve Tobak..(January 23, 2012).“10 dumb mistakes companies make over and over.” CBSNews.com, http://cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162_57363139/10-dumb-mistakes-companies-make-over-and-over. Cited January 24, 2012.

With the start of a new calendar year everyone is focused on getting off to a roaring start. Usually, there are new opportunities to evaluate new projects  and new budgets allocated to resource new projects. There is generally a focus on getting things done and securing promising new achievements before the year gets away from you. I like this time of year because people return your calls, reach out to you, and express a positivity that wanes during the last quarter of the year. That is why it is important to think about avoiding past mistakes;  wasting resources on ill-conceived projects, and falling into a familiar pattern of sub-optimal behavior. I try to avoid this by planning corporate development projects, networking functions, and project submissions to take place by the middle of January. That gives the organization realistic targets to hit, and near term goals to accomplish.  This forces a re-look at risk profiles, innovation, and new opportunities.  New opportunities drive new energy and new energy drives the acquisition of new success. It is also important in this process to be mindful of things that don’t work, have gone wrong, or paid little dividends in the past. Can they be tweaked, reworked, or updated for higher value? If not, then it is prudent to move beyond these items and add portfolio items that may make a significant contribution to your operation. I look for positive opportunities, collaborations, and outcomes. In the referenced article the commentator takes a different approach and looks at the dumb things that organizations do that hold organizations back and that should be avoided. This is a different approach but drives you to the same place – correct your missteps and create new value. Some of the mistakes that the commentator references includes: (1) killing promising new businesses to maintain old ones; (2) lack of objectivity; (3) failure to articulate strategy; (4) not challenging the status quo; (5) poor risk management; and (6) ignoring hot new trends. As I have often commented, #4 not challenging the status quo is one of my favorites. #6 ignoring hot new trends is also critical. Often new trends are a leading indicator of  new opportunity.  This is a good time to analyze those for your industry and outline how your organization can take advantage of them. No matter how you evaluate it, now is the time to get active and create new value.  Checking your industry trends may be the answer that you are searching for.

Topic: Innovation Management

Reference: Paul Schoemaker. (January 5, 2012). “You need to Make More Mistakes.”Inc.Com. Http://www.inc.com/paul-schoemaker/make-more-mistakes.html

The fear of making mistakes can be debilitating. The fear of mistakes can lead to analysis paralysis which can lead to missed opportunities, failed business plans and the failure to innovate. There is more and more data available, but seemingly less and less information. Increasingly leadership means taking action not with too little information, but sometimes too much. The availability of information does not ensure that mistakes will not happen, but rather that the best decision to be made at the time can in fact made.  Good leaders now know that is all that you have to go on and it is usually a judgment call. All mistakes are not created equally – some mistakes are in fact valuable. The problem is that you can’t be sure which mistakes are the good ones. The key is that the aggressive mindset that causes you to take action and that can lead to mistakes is the difference between being on the positive side of the mistake ledger and staying on the negative side of the ledger. You have to have the mindset to take calculated risks. That means not accepting the status quo and challenging the underlying assumptions related to key decisions. In the referenced article the commentator asserts the same thesis.  “Successful people tend to have a different view about mistakes than most ordinary people. Not only are they more tolerant of them…but they often embrace them.” For example the commentator mentions that Albert Einstein had numerous mistakes in his published works, but still achieved monumental insights in theory. Mistakes led to the creation of post-it notes, different medical treatments, and different payment policies. All have led to positive outcomes. “The only hope to escape from your self-imposed mental box is to test beyond the scope of what you deem worth testing.” I agree with this thought process and a mentality that focuses on learning from your mistakes rather than completely eliminating them. Failing forward and taking aggressive action is required to overcome the challenges that we face in business, government, and in our communities.  It is the place where innovation starts.

Topic:  Employee Management

Reference: Karlee Weinman (December 13, 2011). “Hiring With Your Gut Is The Worst Thing You Can Possibly Do.” BusinessInsider.com: http://www.businessinsider.com/hiring-tips-geoff-smart-2011-12.

With the end of the year fast approaching it is time to turn towards planning for next fiscal year. Many are finally looking at expanding hiring at some point in 2012 and finding new employees with the knowledge, skills and abilities to add to the substance of the business is finally rising on the list of priorities. If you are like most, it has been awhile since any meaningful hiring has taken place. Old sources of candidate flow have gone out of existence and potentially new ones have replaced them. Hiring boards and job sites are showing signs of renewed activity and passive candidate search through social media and the like is all the rage. Still most candidates are sourced through private networks and recommendations. Only about 25% of positions are even listed on the job boards. Despite this, there is at least a 50% failure rate for job candidates and it is like a coin toss to find career candidates that work well for your organization. All hiring managers have missed on hiring for critical positions in their firm. As the business cycle starts to ramp up again, do you really want to reinvest in candidate processing that has a high rate of failure attached to it? If you could do things differently what would and should you do? As I contemplate these issues at least three things come to mind: 1) cast a wide net to get a good set of candidates; 2) start early so that time pressure does not enter into the equation; and 3) look beyond personalities to find the skills sets that function well in your organization and that match what you plan to have the person really do in the short-run and grow into in the future. In the referenced article, the commentator really sheds some additional light into this whole area. There she breaks the hiring process into 4 phases a) Scorecard (what person is supposed to do); b) Source (locating candidates); c) Select (right choice based on fit); and d) Sell (getting the best candidates to commit). Each phase is very important, but the place where the most mistakes are made is in selection and in selling the candidate on accepting the position. “The average manager has a profile of the candidate they’re hiring, and that’s a no-no, you’re not supposed to do that. Instead what you’re supposed to do is say, “I’m going to hire this person to be editor of my next book. I need her to do these five things and achieve these outcomes.” The selling portion is interesting and critical. After you have spent significant effort finding a great person, do what you must to close the deal. The best advice is to avoid relying solely on a gut feel in the absence of data. “Facts, data, reality. These are your friends when hiring, not just gut feel and falling in love with candidates’ personalities.” Wise counsel for reloading the talent in your organization.

Topic: Sales Management

Reference: Madhu Gulati. (November 21, 2011) . “5 Ways to Get Started With Closed Loop Marketing.” Modern B2B marketing – Marketo Best Practices Blog, http://blog.marketo.com.

With this business environment continuing to slowly churn along, it has become an imperative to squeeze more value out of existing resources. Many people look to expense management as the key to creating a safe harbor and indeed that is one part of the story. The other part of the story is the need to generate more sales and sales prospects. Because the cost of acquiring new customers can be fairly expensive, it is important to manage your existing customers extremely well. While new media applications and social media can assist in the cost management process of prospecting for new customers, these tools must still be integrated into an overall campaign and require time on task. That time, no matter how it is deployed, has an associated opportunity cost. Like everything else, this opportunity cost has to be managed properly in order to produce the best results. One way to do this to make sure that your marketing is more effective at producing sales and that the sales process is well coordinated with the marketing effort. In the referenced article the commentator supports this strategy with the concept of Closed Loop Marketing. “In a nutshell, with Closed Loop Marketing…marketers are responsible for more than branding and product updates, and need to watch customer reaction to marketing, to ensure their sales funnel doesn’t have any leaks.” As a result, the commentator advocates tightening up 5 critical areas in the sales process to secure the best results. They include making sure that data is properly managed, accurate and standardized; lead scoring is handled in an effective and iterative fashion; lead nurturing happens on a timely basis and that lead movement occurs at regular intervals; that there is a feedback loop that is monitored and maintained between sales and marketing; and finally that ROI on these activities is being tracked. “Reporting should be able to measure the effectiveness and ROI of marketing investment.” This is really on point and creates a roadmap for getting more value of new as well as existing relationships.  If your sales process is out of balance, now is the time to check it for leaking value.

Topic: Social Media Management

Reference: Maria Pergolino. (October 24, 2011). “B2B Social Media Myths-My Favorite lessons from Jay Baer at Marketing Sherpa’s B2B Summit.” Marketo B2B Marketing and Sales Blogs.  http://sn128w.snt128.mail.live.com/mail/Printmessage.aspx.

The interface between social media and mobile is growing at a rapid rate and it is getting more difficult to keep up with some of the most important developments. However, it is imperative at this time to keep abreast of the best information out there on social media management and the various deployment strategies that companies are using to generate significant marketing impact.  I subscribe to a number of RSS feeds, email list articles, and regularly scan old and new media sources for new information. This process is helpful in building a deeper understanding of what the limits of social media are. To date I am not sure that I have seen any limits, except as limited by the creative mind. In the referenced article the commentator adds to this dialogue by chronicling a recent keynote address by  Jay Baer a leading commentator in the social media space. Some of the observations include: social media is being used by B2B customers and if you are not interacting with them you are missing an opportunity; B2C and B2B social media are similar but use different tactics; make content free don’t hide it behind forms; leverage your content everywhere possible; and social media is not about lead generation but rather customer nurturing.  This nurturing makes social media different than “marketing”, and is one of the reasons that just having a page is insufficient.  It also means that even if people are not tweeting about you, you still need to be in the game.  “You can’t measure social media marketing success by website visits.” The bottom line is that customer kinship is the new driver of purchases from new and existing customers and you have to work at maintaining and building kinship.  I believe that this level of insight is helpful and I get the value proposition. Do you get it?

Topic: Innovation Management

Reference: Donald Sull.(August 23, 2011). “10 Clues to Opportunity.” Strategy+Business, Http://www.strategy-business.com/article/11304?gko

Cited September 9, 2011.

 Topic: Selling Management

Reference: Geoffrey James (September 2, 2011). “9 Strategies for Selling Smarter”.  360Solutions Announcements & Sales Bulletin. Cited September 9, 2011.

The end of summer brings a renewed focus on sales and filling up the sales pipeline as the push starts for the closing of year-end activity.  Sales are always a priority, but that seems to be especially true after the vacation season. Have you monitored your sales activity closely over the past sixty days? If so and you are like many of my clients, sales have generally tapered off over the summer.  Some of this is probably seasonal, but a portion could be attributed to a resetting downward of the market, as well as a loss of focus on selling to core customers. Are you aware of the difference? It might be the appropriate time to really analyze your sales system, cycle and closing process. In the above referenced article, the commentator lays out the right way to think about improving your sales results. Several of the commentator’s recommendations I really like. They include: (1) increasing the percentage of time that you spend selling; (4) disqualify more prospects; (6) increasing the average quality of your leads; and (8) increasing your average dollar value. This is a really good list of suggestions. I particularly like #4 because some prospects are not ready to be sold or offer significantly less value to the process. “Rather then doggedly trying to sell to a prospect, make it clear that you’re absolutely not going to sell the customer anything that the customer really doesn’t need. If it turns out that the customer really doesn’t need what you got, leave and consider the sales call a major victory, because you’ve helped the customer avoid an unnecessary expense.” I had never thought of that outcome previously, but this sheds positive light on a non-sale. #8 increasing your average dollar value also is timely and on point. It takes the same amount of effort to sell to a $10,000 account as it does a $1M account, so the larger account strategy makes sense. The caveat that I will add is that the timing of closing the same may also be unequal, so make sure that you have a good mix of prospective targets. No matter what you are currently evaluating, it is a good time to review your sales horizon.

Topic: Knowledge Management

Reference: Alan. Norton (August 10, 2011). "10 immutuable laws of mistakes.

"http://techrepublic.com/blog/10things/10-immutable-laws-of-mistakes.

In evaluating situations, personnel and deliverables it occurs to me that everyone makes mistakes, but the impact of the mistakes is not uniform. A lot of the impact is situational and depends a great deal on the underlying relationships and facts associated with the mistake. A typo can be deadly in a contract, but irrelevant in a letter. A bad driving direction is not nearly as troublesome as a bad coordinate insailing. However, there are some absolutes as it relates to mistakes. You can't tell someone that they are fired, when they have not been. You can't steal someone else's sale and claim it for your own. Mistakes cannot be intentional. In the referenced article the commentator takes this concept to another level by establishing that there are 10 immutable laws of mistakes. They are as follows: (1) Everyone makes mistakes; (2) Not all mistakes are bad mistakes; (3) Mistakes not seen by others are not mistakes;(4) Ignorance does not excuse your mistakes; (5) Mistakes occur at the very worst time; (6) Mistakes beget mistakes; (7) Mistakes made with computers propagate faster and cause more damage; (8) Mistakes of inaction are mistakes nonetheless; (9) Failing to own up to your mistakes is a mistake; (10) Failing to learnfrom your mistakes is a mistake. This is a very good list and really helps to put mistakes into the right perspective. #9 is particularly true as failing to take responsibility is often worse than the original mistake (see e.g., Michael Vick). "If you can't quickly fix your mistake, hiding it is almost always a bad idea. Finding the humility to admit your error ASAP will allow others to come to your aid." At the very least it will assure that your error does not kill your credibility for future action. People pay more attention to this one than all of the others combined. If you find yourself not owning your mistakes, you will shortly find yourself owning a large amount of distrust. It is that distrust that causes authority to lapse. Now is a good time to start owning your mistakes the same way that you own your successes.

Topic: Employee Management

Reference: Penelope Trunk. (August 8, 2011). “How to Land Rockstar Employees By Buying Companies For Free. “ American Express Open Forum: managing. http://www.openforum.com/articles/how-to-land-rockstar-employeesby-buying-companies-for-free.

Just when you thought that the nightmare of the recession was fading, part of the Congress worked overtime to drag the economy back into the danger zone.  Money and credit remain tight and many companies continue to have a lid on discretionary spending. Still innovation and new project expansion demands new talent and skills that your organization may not have. If you can’t afford to pay for that talent, to use consultants, or to outsource these critical requirements what else can you do besides sit on the sidelines?  I thought first about job sharing or partnering as viable alternatives to achieve this business objective.  However, the referenced article opens up an entirely different channel.  In the article the commentator mentions acquiring talent through no cost business purchases.  The rationale is straight forward: entrepreneurs tire of running certain businesses and need a financial exit to keep their credibility up for the next business idea. As a result, they may be willing to sell the business to you for little or nothing and work for you for up to a year.  “The best kind of people to hire for a small business are self-starters. The type who are curious, motivated, don’t do anything halfway.” These are the kinds of people who start companies.  Potentially this is a terrific solution for several reasons. It may allow you to acquire the skills that you need until the crunch passes. It allows you to tie into some new network connections and bond into future transactions. It also provides real value to the exiting business owner. This is a win-win scenario. Still my caution meter says that you have to be careful about such transactions because the talented but exiting former owner may not want to continue to work on your behalf or exercise the effort necessary to justify the transaction. That is why it is imperative to do thorough due diligence and have a well-drafted service contract with sufficient incentives to make the project work.  Otherwise a well intended acquisition strategy might get mired in significant legal fees.  In short make sure that your Rockstar is for real and not an impostor.

Topic: Marketing Management

Reference: Dailey, Walter. (July 20, 2011). “What Marketing Looks Like.” FOXBusiness, http://smallbusiness.foxbusiness.com/marketing-sales/2011/07/2011.

Managing marketing is never easy task. The creative side is always subject to interpretation. What makes sense from a messaging point of view is not always in synch with what makes sense visually.  The cost of production and the relationship to customer acquisition is never a completely clear transaction. Although marketing has made major strides in understanding and valuing margin contribution there are still some leaps of faith that managers still have to take. The science of what is in harmony, affordable and timely is never exact. In the referenced text the commentator provides guidance in this area by positing the correct way to view marketing. In it the commentator argues that marketing has to have synergy, flow, and simplicity in order to be effective. “Be sure all pieces in your design are working as a team.” The commentator also argues for avoiding visual clutter and being concise. These points all make since but they offer little guidance in what really creates a piece that far exceeds it extrinsic cost. I know that customers value information that they can use or that satisfies a need. As a result, I continue to believe that the marketing communication has to communicate that value proposition.  Even if your marketing is simple and flows well, if the value proposition is not strong you could be missing your market.  Value is definitely worth adding to your evaluation criteria.