30 July 2010

iPhones aren’t the best thing since sliced bread, so why am I in love with it?

I’ve just been issued with an iPhone 4. To be honest I didn’t think it would be such a big deal, except for showing off I have an iPhone 4.

I’m not going to pour over how marvellous it is as I’m sure you don’t need another review. I'm not going to comment on the hullaballo about how to hold just now either. So I’m just going to say this, it's good. It doesn’t do things the latest BlackBerry does, but the latest BlackBerry doesn’t do things the iPhone does. It’s fast, intuitive and I have found myself explaining away the missing functionality. It is truly a digital assistant.
Over all, it’s a worthwhile piece of kit; so why a blog about the iPhone?
I have had a wakeup call in just 2 days that the true experience requires all the kit. Which is not a normal reaction for me, since I bought my first golf clubs 15 years ago. After just a few days I have decided my next laptop has to be a MacBook Pro. Why? Because now I’ve tasted the world of Apple, I want to replicate the experience across all my technology needs.

The iPhone is clearly designed for maximum revenue generation based on the best possible user experience. Now be honest with yourself. Does your organisation build whatever you produce, a phone, an audit, a pension fund, a wind turbine based on the same principal I am experiencing?

Have you ever stepped back and said let’s completely redesign what we do with the only metric for success being the user’s experience? And when we’ve done that, let’s make sure every interaction our customers have with us offers the same experience so that they want more.

Why don’t we design our user experience so well that our clients will pay for all the extra bits along the way that we currently give away for free and call ‘value ad?’ And then let’s change the rules completely by creating a market place for other organisations to make money from our platform.

I think the guys at Apple are geniuses of the highest order. I’ve got to get me some of that.

27 July 2010

Was strategy ever alive?

I was going entitle today’s drivel ‘is strategy dead?’ But as that’s the kind of headline you would find in so called management magazines. More importantly, I’m not convinced strategy is a thing anyway. It may be in the corridors of real power where they have shag pile carpet and real PAs, but down the line between these heady heights and the trenches was strategy ever real.

Aren’t most strategies we talk about in cuff linked shirts in meetings with white boards far from our customer’s experience really about setting plans, establishing policies and sharing our perception of reality?

I think we spend too much time putting activities into a strategic perspective and even worse, use strategy development as a reason not to do something. “Let’s wait until we know where the strategy wants to go before we do this.”

Strategy is great in public sector, when you want some money to do something you ensure the project description ticks as many strategic intents as possible. Firstly, this broadens the number of potential funding sources. Secondly, it ensures that the sponsors of each of these strategies will not block your project as it may be the only one that delivers something resembling whatever it was they committed to delivering.

Wouldn’t we use our time better by systematically:

  • breaking through barriers to our success with small focused initiatives that take us in a general sense of direction;
  • scanning our environment, qualifying what we see and sharing it with those around us that add to the view;
  • understanding our clients (did you know Intel has over 30 anthropologists working for them?);
  • defining the rules of the game rather than following our competitors;
  • innovating a little everyday.

21 July 2010

The future of the office

Please indulge me; I want to combine two thoughts and ask for some input.

Firstly, let’s look at this story from the BBC (http://bit.ly/adss1pl). In summary, Mike Faith couldn’t find any headsets for is California based business. While on the journey to source them he has ended up being one of the leading suppliers in the US through his site headsets.com. On the face of it a fairly typical tale of a US entrepreneur that Tony Robbins would point to the happy ending.

Mike’s advice is “look for those things in your life or business that annoy you, where you can’t get the satisfaction that you want; if you can’t find what you want in the market place, and you try hard, it’s probably likely there’s a business opportunity there.”

See, all very law of attraction.

Now let’s consider what I simultaneously love and hate, the office. Now I’m a pretty social guy, always up for a work night out, love to engage people in the lift and around the coffee machine in how their day is going and pretty effective at dropping by people’s desks to get quick decisions to move things forward. I’d go mad at home all day; stir crazy could have been coined just to describe me working at home.

However, I hate the commute, and resent having to be so far from my home all day. I hate lugging a laptop or tapping away at emails on my PDA. Let’s face it; very few of us get to live close to our office production lines do we?

I like the idea of local working hubs that I first saw floated 15 years ago. Open plan offices with break out areas, meeting rooms and a canteen. A space with my own desk where I can dress for the office and virtually be there while being virtually at home. Where I could cycle to in 10 minutes. Where I could have random conversations in the lift or waiting for some warm brown liquid to be released into a paper cup.

But who would pay for it. I have no idea what real estate costs, but let’s say my company pays £500 sq metre for my desk in London, with overheads, why would they pay for a desk for me where only a couple of my colleagues work? What about travelling in for meetings, who pays for that? Could we conference effectively from our laptops?

Is there a solution here, or am I just in need of a summer holiday?So let’s put some crowd sourcing into place, what do you think the solution is?

19 July 2010

Away day time of the year

Certain times of the year are big for ‘off sites.’ Those meetings where you are invited to a nice hotel or small conference centre in the middle of nowhere and told to wear business casual, but not jeans. Wearing jeans can be the highlight of these events. What are they going to do, send me home to change or give me lines to write in detention?

Mainly held around the end/beginning of financial years; we go to review how and what we did and to plan to do different things to get an even better outcome. For some reason there is a resurgence of off sites in July. Maybe it’s a pat on the back as the summer holidays approach, or simply because we are half way through the year and its a good time to check progress.

Cynics love to hate away days. Optimists hate to love away days, but they do.

I’m actually a fan of micro off sites. Take a small group of managers that can influence their own destinies and mix the day with some downtime and light touch objective setting they can really help to make progress.

So having said all that, why do we groan at the prospect. I know I do, my friends do, and some of my colleagues do. Certainly the couple on the train as I write this do. In fact they are discussing tips on faking enthusiasm for the event.
The truth is they are necessary. From time to time we must stop what we are doing, pop our heads out of the trench and take a look around at where our colleagues are at. After all, you don’t want to find yourself the only person jeans and in the wrong trench.

12 July 2010

Why is social media so difficult? #2

Further to my previous blog, I have been chatting with a colleague that works at a charity. Their business is about engaging one group of people to help another.

Social media is the perfect tool. It enables everyone in the organisation to transparently capture a broad network outside the organisation. But that applies to any P2P business; especially professional services. Doesn’t it make sense that every person in the business has a social media contact list that anyone in the business can leverage?
Yet still many executives wear their absence from social media as a badge of pride.

The information available through my network puts the power of production in my hands. Karl Marx would be spinning in his grave.

I have used my online community to find a client’s son a job in a mine in Australia, find accommodation for overseas friends of friends visiting London, find lodgers, raise a £1,000 in sponsorship, introduce clients to other clients, source more than one lawyer, share complex process maps globally, find clients, source corporate video content, introduce a friend’s start up to VC, arrange social events, keep in touch with MBA classmates in live in Jakarta, Sacramento, Kiev, Lima, La Paz, Accra and East Grinstead and find work.

Wouldn’t I be a fool not to maintain those links?

Wouldn’t anyone be a fool not to maintain a link to every person that has touched their life positively, not matter how diverse the relationship?

09 July 2010

Why is social media so difficult?

I have spent a lot of my time over the last few months looking for volunteers to participate in a social media experiment.

My colleagues objections and hesitance is based on some their lizard brain talking to them:
· I’m not sure I’m interesting
· Other people are better writers than me
· What would I talk about?

I’m sure, like me, you’ve heard this before. Normally from reluctant friends we have invited to join us at social engagement where they won’t know anyone. I remember taking a junior account manager to his first industry networking event at the TMA in Brighton having the same concerns. Unsurprisingly he shone that night, just as my colleagues will excel on mallowstreet.com

Operating in forums and blog sites is no different from attending a professional networking event.

I know it’s a cliché, but business to business is people to people. You wouldn’t show up to network in a corporate t-shirt carrying brochures looking for someone to broadcast to. Online, just as with any networking event, requires the simplest of approaches to be successful:

Go along, listen, chat, learn a little, share a little, be yourself and enjoy.


07 July 2010

The illusion of corporate love ins

A friend of mine has been working for a large business services firm for nearly a year. A couple of months ago he attended their annual sales and marketing management love in at a top venue near Dublin.

Not usually as cynical as me, he didn’t really see the point this time. Although the business’ profits have fared well through the recession, this had been achieved through cutting investment in change projects. The spending freeze had become an excuse for doing nothing. Low cost and even zero cost projects had failed to get traction in a culture of inertia in middle management


However, he came back from Dublin a changed man. He insisted on telling me how the most intransigent of managers had committed to start change initiatives and agile project teams.

So what’s the big deal? Well, it all ground to halt within weeks. Everything’s back to business as usual. Every project has more reasons to abandon than continue.

Clearly the facilitators did the job that was asked of them. So how do we overcome the challenge of change blockers transforming off site into creators, just to return to their default state back at their desks?
I know the concept of establishing breakthrough itiatives isn’t new. There are lots of books by people far cleverer than me to tell us it makes sense; but I just haven’t seen it work.

I think we need more incrementalism.

Why not create the environment, platform processes, and culture for change to happen all the time. It’s not like we need to artificially create change is it. Change is happening to us all the time. Economic cycles, competition, disruptive technologies, game changing competition; major environmental occurrences aren’t breakthroughs we can plan for. So let’s get used to dealing with them. Let’s develop the ability of our organisations to be agile, and enable our teams to cope with every change, not just those imagined off site.


05 July 2010

Fee fodder versus emotional labour

I attended a focus group last week to help one of the top five global consultancy firms develop their "Employment Value Proposition."

No matter how engaging their proposition, it is unlikely to attract me to work for them. But I was curious about the process, and as I’m naturally a bit gobby; it didn’t seem like a bad way to spend a couple of hours.

Most of the group were about to become second jobbers. A group of bright young things recruited during the milk round at their universities that have cut their teeth over the last 3 years on a graduate training programme with a large firm. A smaller group were well on their way to their third or fourth firm. They had over 10 years experience of time sheets, 60 hour weeks, utilisation targets and budget hotels in provincial towns.

Two distinct views on consultancy clients evolved.

The younger group of my fellow ‘focusers’ were passionate about the act of consulting. They described clients as the ‘key data source’ that should get out of the way when the consulting team are developing their solution. They put consultants on a par with investment bankers based on the importance of their decision making and superior knowledge, and without any sense of irony. (Sub-prime anybody?)

The ‘experienced’ group described their genuine interest in client’s domains and about building an emotional link with clients. They advocated empathy for the client’s desired outcomes and personal agendas

Very little differentiates the big consulting firms, hence the research. Each has had their public success and failures. They are derided by politicians, despite the public sector not being able to function without them. They fight for the same work in what is largly a zero sum gain market.

So why do they persist in recruiting graduates on the promise of becoming a master of the universe?

Consultants bring some subject matter expertise, but mostly they bring their own flavour of problem solving process. Both of which can be copied. Veteran ‘fee fodder’ consultants understand the emotional value of their work that adds real value to this. They are therefore personally successful, employable and more content on a day to day basis.

The first of the big 5 to embrace the ’emotional’ side of their work will attract and retain people that can build a real connection with clients from the get go. They will create better client outcomes, win more business and not need to ask old cynics like me, that would never work for them in the first place, how to brand their recruitment.

02 July 2010

Smoking bureaucracy...

Every organisation comes with its own bureaucracy, and with that comes form filling.

My first office job at the tender age of 19 was temping for an international bank in HR Administration. When I joined, they were still reeling from having their name changed from ‘personnel’ as it was seen as an un welcome Americanism in their eyes. We shared one networked PC with email between 12 of us, but we all had our own ash tray and adding machine on our desk.

For about 3 months, I happily processed season ticket loan applications. My proudest moment being when my boss agreed to use my design for a new form when it came to reprinting due to a brand redesign.

Today global organisations of the shape and size of that one are proud to have all these forms as digitised applications on the Intranet, linked to a monolith integrated back end Oracle type system for HR and Finance (still called accounts back in the day). But why wouldn’t you, we all have a networked PC on our desk and having anything resembling an ashtray is a firing offence, no matter how many breaks you take instead. So we submit a form and authorisation requests and permissions effortlessly fly between inboxes.

But digital form filling has created 2 problems for me:

1. Amending a form to reflect new requirements and requests is now a major change request nightmare. We don’t just change the form and print some more; databases and workflows have to updated. Most forms I seem to fill in now are not fit for purpose, and you need to be an expert in creative writing to explain what you really want in the character limited free text fields;


2. And this is the most important one, not taking the form to be signed. This used to be the opportunity to chat with the pretty girls in HR, the smart people in accounts or the curious people in IT. Most of all, it was the opportunity to interact with your boss. To chat about the holiday featured in the request for time off form and to build a relationship beyond an email.

Best of all, it was when you could to sit in their office and ponce one of their cigarettesfor a change.