Dec 03

I want my 52 minutes back. You should too!

Consulting No Comments »

52_minutes

According to a research by Personal Presentation Ltd, “Office workers waste 52 minutes per day in meetings”.

Now, this is near to 11% of the overall available time. Massive! Even if I think is optimistic.

What Julia Goodman, founder of the UK firm is suggesting, to sort this issue out, is to train people in more effective communication (this is what they sell), so that they can better contribute to meetings and not waste time.

In my personal experience, there’s a much better solution: cut your meetings by 20%, 50% or, why not, 90%. The only meetings a company truly needs are those with customers.

The 2.0 communication tools can easily handle the majority of the remaining internal interaction opportunities.

Have you ever experienced that nasty feeling, when you enter a shop and you see that the employees keep talking one each other about their personal stuff instead of asking you: “what can I do for you?”.

This is the analog of internal meetings in big corporations held while customers, out there, are meeting with their competitors.

Nevertheless, in many cases, most of the questions that arise during an internal meeting would require the presence of a customer to get an answer. Sounds familiar?

I think that if we want to speculate about the future, a god guess is to look what boys and girls under 14 are doing now. Looking at the way they communicate (IM, SMS, email, twitter,…) you can see the pattern for new corporations, where there will be much less meetings and much more communication.

Sorry, I’ve to go. I’ve a meeting starting in 3 minutes….:-)

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Sep 30

The small vendor dilemma

Consulting No Comments »

As an SMB, with a great idea and a great product to sell, we could be missing just one vital tool: a selling engine.

If that is the case, by putting the three contexts together, we come out with some interesting questions.

The small vendor dilemmaQuite often, as SMBs, we have not developed a strong channel for selling our products, as VARs and DISTIs tend to go for the already established brands. So looks like the easiest way is to go direct. But, after all the cost cutting driven by the crisis, it is likely that we can’t afford such an expensive option. So?

There’s one more option. If we look at the same issue, with the VARs’ eyes, this looks more clear.

The var dilemmaWell, the VAR has a big dilemma too. The good VAR is always scouting for new cool products, they invest in bringing them to new markets, they sell them and, after a while, they loose the reselling agreement or simply end up with no way to survive on the really tight margins left by the big vendors.

But, if you put the two pictures together, than a viable options pops out. The SMB vendor has the product and need help in selling. The VAR knows how to sell and market, but is looking for products. This is a clear call for both to cut a deal. A big one. Not a reselling agreement: a joint venture, if not a merger.

Can work, can not work. We’ll never know if we do not look into it.

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Sep 29

Cut costs strategy

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cutcoststrategy

If the only thing our company is capable of doing, when the answer to the second question is no, is cutting costs, than we’ll end up in one and only one way. A hint: try swapping “Cut costs!” with “Get new ideas!”

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Sep 28

Decisions, risk and ROI

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When we build a new company we start from a market need our company is going to give an answer to. Or, we get egoist. We start by thinking what kind of place our company is going to be.

Without the first approach we don’t even get our company start breathing. Without the second approach our company is not going to be breathing for a long time. Only if we build the right place, our company will be able to move from the first good idea that made everything start to the next one, and to the next one again and again.

So, short term we need a solution for our market, long term we need the environment that build solutions. This is what I was going around, when I remembered a video from TED that was shot May last year.

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, while talking about the role of play in creativity, provides some hints on why, building the right environment within a company is not easy. There’s a specific sentence he says that I find striking: “…if you want to build a design firm you probably also want to create a place where the people have <snip> the security to take risks”.

Well, this is true not just for design firms.

I’m getting bored about the idea that creativity and innovation is what we need to get out of the crisis. You can read it on any newspaper. But reality is that the crisis has made most of us focused on fact based decisions and ROI. Less interested in taking risks. We can see this pattern also in where people is investing money.

Let’s than put the 3 things together:

drr

Fact based decision and a ROI with no risk taking looks boring but safe (financially). This, of course if we don’t care about the enviroment we’re going to build. No risk taking is going to make our company not capable to move to the next solution.

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Sep 25

Do not settle for a little target

Consulting, Disruption No Comments »

Think Big

Think big! I’ve always been told to do so. And I do believe there’s always something good in thinking big.

In the process of setting up a new company, or opening our business to a new market, we tend to get naturally constrained by our resources, while elaborating our plan.

The entry ticket we have to pay to get into some new businesses is sometimes (varies from segment to segment) prohibitive. This is mostly true if you enter such markets without a disruptive model but with a “me too” attitude. You’ll agree with me that it is not always easy to come up with a truly innovative and disruptive business model. So what can we do if we are missing the great idea? Should we simply give up, or relegate our business to a small niche? Is it than true that you’ve to “go big, go niche or go home”?

The Long Tail opportunity, more than creating new companies that sell less of more, has pushed many entrepreneurs to follow niche opportunities. There’s nothing bad in doing it.

I do believe that we need to realize that our business model should look at our target market size as something that is only temporarily bounded by our resources. Building a platform that houses the relationship we have with our customers is becoming more and more important. What if we start small, with a small market target, and than we are hit by success? Is our model  going to require us to linear grow our invested resources? I think this is one of the reasons many small businesses remain small.

Do not settle for less

What if we build a business model around scalability? This is not needed when you have few customers, I agree. But skipping this step, when you start your new business, it is likely to put your company in a niche forever.

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Sep 24

Social Media ROI

Consulting No Comments »

There’s a lot going on discussing social media ROI. Mainly if there’s a way to measure it.

I’ve found Alexandra Samuel’s post really interesting. I witness every day cases of Google Analytics paranoia, and I’ve to admit I’m not immune too. So, IMHO,  Alexandra’s suggestions are a good starting point.

I’ve tried to put on paper (e-paper)  my own starting point and this is what came out.

socialroi

It is not a ROI model but, I think a starting point. Measuring how (speed and direction) we move toward the Hurray! spot in the middle of the diagram could start our ROI measurement exercise, keeping us on a focused and actionable plan.

P.S.: forgive my hand writing ;-)

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Sep 21

3 is the perfect number

Consulting No Comments »
Gustave Doré - Dante Alighieri - Inferno - Plate 9 (Canto III - Charon)

Gustave Doré - Dante Alighieri - Inferno - Plate 9 (Canto III - Charon)

This is not new stuff. As long as you’ve been exposed to Dante during your studies, you’ve for sure come across the number 3 many times. But, talking about business, there’s a reason for me to look to the number 3 as the reference number.
In my view, doing business is about solving customer problems. There are many problem solving techniques out there, most of which are incredibly smart and a similar number is incredibly complex to handle. The true issue is not to understand the value of such techniques but to make them usable by each single employee in one organization. Even more important is to make sure that, once a technique has been understood and socialized within the organization, it does not fade away because, being too complex, people stop using it and, after a while, they go back to “business as usual”.
When you approach a business problem, finding a solution is important, but you can’t call it a solution if you’re the only one that can implement it. This is a typical issue with consultants. They are smart, they know all the problem solving techniques, but once they are gone, your company slowly gets back into the “old troubles”, simply because the technique, due to complexity, has not entered into the company DNA.
A common pattern in all the problem solving techniques is to split a problem in little pieces and to sort it piece by piece. This is, quite often, driving to a situation where we can lose the big picture and the impact that taking a decision on one piece of the problem has on other pieces.
In the quest for simplicity, that should drive any consulting effort, we should be always considering how much our solution is helping eliminate the clutter.
Using an analogy with mathematics: how many people are capable to easily solve an equation with 4 or more variables? how many of them will feel comfortable in approaching their daily problems by trying to solve a 4 variable equation?
If we offer to a company a solution where every employee has to work on 4 or more variables, it is likely that 90+% of them will get lost. But if we move down to 3 variables or contexts to be kept in the picture it is likely that, while increasing dramatically the number of employees that can participate to the solution, we will still be able to cover most of the problem we are trying to solve.
This is why I’m fascinated by Venn Diagrams and I do believe that 3 is the perfect number.

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