Tag Archives: business thinking

September 5, 2014 · 8:50 am

Scallion Pesto

Foodie Friday brings one of summer’s great dishes: pesto.

English: this is a picture of self made pesto ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When you hear the word you think of a mixture of basil, pine nuts, cheese, and olive oil, and there is no better time of the year than late summer for basil. Of course, what I’ve just described is the traditional pesto alla Genovese, named after Genoa where it originated. The word itself comes from the local dialect’s word for “pound” which is what one must have done to make the sauce before the advent of blenders and food processors.

The term refers to a method, not an ingredient.  The French adopted it, called it pistou, and omitted the nuts since there aren’t a lot of pine trees around.  Cheese is optional as well.  Yet most people think of pesto in just one, very traditional way.  I had my mind semi-blown the other day when I made a batch of scallion pesto.  No basil, just a bunch of scallions thrown in the food processor with the other traditional ingredients.  While I was expecting a sharp hit of flavor, this was a mild, wonderful sauce I smeared on chicken and baked.  Since good scallions are available year round and basil can be expensive outside of summer, it’s a great alternative. Which is, of course, our business point today.

We make too many assumptions and don’t focus on alternatives.  When you shift pesto’s paradigm from specific sauce to method it opens up a world of possibilities.  Different greens, different oils, maybe different cheese.  We tend to get too focused on a specific recipe or outcome and forget that we have options that may produce better results, even if they are unfamiliar.

As business people we need to entertain every ingredient and see what happens.  Not being afraid to fail is a key to success.  I thought scallion pesto was a really weird and potentially bad idea.  It’s now going to be a staple.  What kind of pesto will you make?

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August 26, 2014 · 11:37 am

The Only Two Numbers That Matter

Everyone in business has heard talk about “big data.” It Takes 2!There is no question that we know more about our customers, their buying patterns, their media usage – heck, just about anything – than ever before. It’s easy to get trapped into micromanaging all that data which will overwhelm even the best systems and the smartest analysts.  So today I’m going to try to get you to follow some great advice from Thoreau:

I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.

He wasn’t exactly talking about big data, but he might have been.  In my mind there are really only two numbers that matter.  While I’m going to speak of them in web terms the reality is that they apply to every business as I will explain.  They are:

That’s it.  Multiply those two and you get a measure of success.  The first is how many opportunities you have to create a successful interaction; the second is the rate at which you do so.  That successful interaction can be a newsletter sign up, a sale, a social share of some content – you will need to define it.  Taking the number of times that successful thing happens and dividing it into the number of people who potentially might have done it (your traffic) gives you a conversion rate.  Simple!

You would be surprised how many of the analytics accounts I’ve looked at over the years haven’t set up goals, and without goals there are no conversions.  It’s not just web-based businesses that can do this.  Retail can count foot traffic and numbers of sales, for example.  Numbers of customer service calls with a successful (in the customer’s eyes) resolution.  Once you’re focused on measuring traffic and conversions, you can place everything else you do in marketing in those contexts.  More traffic without conversions is useless.  More conversions from the same traffic is fantastic.

Big data is great and I use it all the time.  As with all things, however, start with the simple, which often gets overlooked – the necessary and the real, as Thoreau says.  You agree?

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August 15, 2014 · 9:50 am

Dirty Hands

Foodie Friday and this week I want to talk about two of my favorite kitchen tools.  You already own them and you’re probably not using them as much as you should while cooking.  I’m talking about your hands.  I’m not talking about using them to hold a knife or any other kitchen implement.  I mean using them to touch and feel ingredients and dishes as you go.  Yes, it means getting them dirty and this is why I generally cook with a towel tucked into my waistband – I’m constantly washing them.  But let me explain why you should be getting your hands dirtier more often.

I’m thinking specifically about pasta dough.  Many people dump the flour, oil, salt and eggs into a mixer and once the ingredients are combined they’ll switch to a dough hook to knead the dough.  That’s less effective than using your hands.  The warmth of your hands helps to develop the gluten and unless you are checking the dough constantly there is no way to tell when it had reached the right consistency (it should feel like Playdoh, by the way).  You can’t feel if it’s too grainy or too dry without working it by hand for a bit.

There is no better tool for mixing ingredients together in a bowl than a hand.  You can feel for pockets of ingredients that haven’t combined evenly and it’s almost impossible to mix together a meatloaf or form meatballs without using your hands to do so.  It’s an important business point too.

You can’t manage a business without tools but you must get your hands dirty as well.  I have worked with managers who considered their staff to be a set of tools that would do the work efficiently and they were right for the most part.  However, they never got their hands dirty by getting deeply into the work and two things would happen.  The first was that their staff came to see them as detached and aloof.  The second was that they had no feel for things.  Like the pasta dough, the only way to assess how things are developing is to get your hands into the work.

Anyone who claims they’re a cook and has long fingernails isn’t getting their hands into the food often enough (or is making people sick!).  Any manager who sits behind a closed door and reads reports isn’t getting their hands dirty either (which might make the business sick).   How dirty are your hands?

 

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