Monthly Archives: May 2012

May 22, 2012 · 10:30 am

The Rule Book

I was watching the hockey playoffs last night and had a thought about business. You might not find that strange given that for several years of my life hockey WAS my business. However, what occurred to me has both broader application and a less-obvious path. It has to do with obstruction.

NEWARK, NJ - DECEMBER 20: Kurtis Foster #2 of ...

Getty Images via @daylife

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, obstruction (and its cousins hooking and holding) is what players do to decrease the flow of the game. An easy way to think of it is as a player preventing another player who doesn’t have the puck from skating, obstructing their ability to play. Almost a decade ago, the NHL cracked down on the practice by enforcing the existing rules against it in an effort to improve the flow of the game and allow the more skilled players to show those skills. As one might expect, teams adjusted their rosters over the years to emphasize great skating and stick-handling over the clutching and grabbing that was so prevalent .

Watching the game last night, I was struck by how little free-flowing skating was going on.  Many of the other games I’ve watched during the season have seemed the same.  The rules, or at least their enforcement, seem to have changed.  Which is the business thought.

If you’ve built your team to play the game a certain way and the rules change, how do you compete?  If you’re a media company that’s built on ad revenue for eyeballs, what do you do when the audiences you’re selling evaporate to other channels?  If you’re selling SEO, what happens when the algorithms change and everything you do is now wrong?  Even if you’re in online commerce, what do you do with inventory when tastes change?

Ultimately, I think our success and failure revolves around change management – what happens when the rule book gets modified.  We need to be thinking about that as we bring on new hires – how well have they dealt with change in the past?  We need to maintain flexibility in our planning – why spend money to a budget that’s based on old rules?

I’m sure it’s frustrating to the coaches and managers when they find a different set of rules on the ice than in the rule book.  I know it’s frustrating to find a different set of business conditions and consumer preferences.  What do you do when the rules change?

Enhanced by Zemanta

1 Comment

Filed under Reality checks, Thinking Aloud

Tagged as , , , , ,

May 21, 2012 · 10:07 am

How, Not What

I had another rant planned for today but I went to my younger daughter’s graduation yesterday (Vassar’12 – atta girl!)

Leymah Gbowee

Leymah Gbowee (Photo credit: aktivioslo)

and it got me thinking about education. If you’ve read the screed more than a couple of times you’re probably aware that I’m pretty passionate about the topic. It was one of my majors in college and I had planned to be a high school teacher until I realized the kids were more mature than I was at that point so I went into business.  I know for sure that I’ve used all of the teaching skills along the way.

The speaker yesterday was Leymah Gbowee a nobel Peace Prize winner for her working in founding “Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace” an organization that helped end years of civil war in her homeland of Liberia.  Her topic focused on how passion and the education to activate it can be the greatest weapon of all (my words, not hers) by empowering people to make changes in their own lives and others.  It was an inspiring speech and you can read it all here if you’re interested.

It was something said, however, by the chair of the college trustees that resonated even more deeply and which I want to share with you today:

Clayton Christensen, the well-known Harvard Business School professor and author of the recent book “How Will You Measure Your Life”, says that rather than telling his students and clients what to think, he teaches them how to think, and then he lets them reach correct decisions on their own. He says that “if we knew the future would be exactly the same as the past, simply doing now what has succeeded before would be fine. But if the future is different—and it almost always is—then that would be the wrong thing to do.”

As businesspeople, managers, and mentors, we need to think about that.  Rather than teaching (or learning) the “what” we need to learn how to formulate using the “how” and to act accordingly.  The value of an education isn’t in the financial rewards it can help bring about but in the ability it brings to figure out how to change the world, regardless of what field we’ve chosen.  In Gbowee’s words:

Step into the world and shine. Step into the world and exert yourself. You may encounter bosses who will expect you to act dumb to make them shine. Remember that you have to blossom, not for yourself but for the people you will be serving.

Pretty good stuff with which to start the week!

Enhanced by Zemanta

1 Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

May 18, 2012 · 9:37 am

The Farmer’s Market

It’s Friday and it’s the time of year when a lot of the Farmer’s Markets open up around here so I thought I’d use our Foodie Friday theme to talk about them a bit.

Farmers Market

(Photo credit: tamaradulva)

As a recent article explained, “farmers’ markets are hot business nowadays. The number of markets shot up 17 percent last year, and in a recent survey from Mintel market researchers, 52 percent of people said it’s more important to buy local produce than organic, which will likely drive the growth even more.”  There are a number of them in my town and the surrounding area, almost one each day of the week.   Most of the vendors are local farmers and the produce is generally pretty good.

There is, however, a dark side to many of these markets.  Some of the produce sold isn’t local even if it appears to be that way (there are no local tomatoes here in Connecticut in May, for example, unless they’re from a hot-house which means they’re less tasty).  There is loose labeling too – local, organic, pesticide-free, no-spray – many vague promises thrown around.  Which is the broader business point today.

We’re in the season of vague promises better known as an election year but we encounter lots of misleading or purposefully vague language from brands every day.  “Natural” or “Earth Friendly” or “Vegan” are meaningless because they’re not regulated, and companies are able to use these terms at will. It’s up to the consumer to differentiate marketing from reality and then to act by refusing to buy products that use misleading claims.

At the risk of stating the obvious, once a brand is outed as using misleading language, all sorts of bad things can and do happen, especially since the newer tools such a social media and the older tool known as a class-action lawsuit empower pissed off customers.  Frito-Lay was sued over the all-natural claims it has made for its Tostito and Sun Chips products.  Colgate had TV commercials for a Sanex bath gel banned for suggesting that it contains no man-made chemical ingredients.  The list gets longer every day.  Guess there’s no quota on stupidity.

We all know I’m big on reading the freaking label even though there aren’t any at the farmer’s market.  I ask a lot of questions instead.  But isn’t it a sad thing that we can’t really believe what we read even when labels are readily available?   What do you think?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under Thinking Aloud

Tagged as , , , ,