Tag Archives: business thinking

December 13, 2012 · 11:46 am

Playing Nice

I had a completely different post written this morning but it’s off in the digital ether.

Cougar / Puma / Mountain Lion / Panther (Puma ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s gone as a result of a misbehaving computer.  Yes, I save as I go but in a burst of prolific writing I got a lot text on the page in between autosaves and when what I’m about to describe happened, the brilliance I spewed was lost.  The topic was the balance between large audiences as measured by TV ratings vs. buzz as measured by Facebook.   As it turns out, they’re not one and the same.  According to a list published by Facebook the other day, most of the widely discussed shows on their platform don’t have large ratings.  Maybe I’ll come back to that another time.

Instead, I want to spent today dispelling what I’m suddenly finding to be a myth – that Apple stuff “just works.”  Ever since I installed Mountain Lion, my MacBook Air has something called kernel panics every day.  Chrome and the OS aren’t playing nicely, and I’m not the only one having this issue.  In fact, enough people are having it that when you search for “chrome and mountain lion crashing” you get nearly a million search results.  Yes, I’ve tried nearly all of the suggested fixes (as have many others on the product support forums I read) but none of them seem to solve the issue.  Honestly, I (and many others) am not even sure where the issue is.  Apple says it’s Chrome and we should switch to Safari, but other browsers seem to cause crashes including Safari.  Google says it might be Flash or an extension or Apple.  The only thing different is the new OS (which has all the updates installed as well).  Putting aside the walled garden ecosystem discussion for a minute, what I think of a lot is kindergarten.

We all learn very early on in our lives to socialize.  For me it was really around the time I began school (no pre-school 50 years ago!) and the message to “play nice with the other kids” was reinforced by my parents and teachers all the time.  Why the hell can’t that lesson get through the skulls of hardware and software folks?  It’s a good one for the rest of us as well – very few businesses exist on their own.  We process payments, we deal with suppliers, we (hopefully) have customers.  Play nice with the other kids if you want to succeed!

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December 11, 2012 · 10:16 am

The Fog

It was foggy all day yesterday and that resonated with me.

Fog

(Photo credit: rchughtai)

Maybe because it was the start of another week and like an old car I’m getting harder to start and was a little foggy, or maybe because all I keep hearing about is the uncertainty of financial markets, the economy, and lots of other things that are near and dear but not very clear.  Either way, a December day that was warm and foggy was unusual enough to give me cause to reflect.  Of course, it prompted some business thinking I’d like to share.  Let me digress, however, for a minute.

I like playing golf in the fog (no I did not play yesterday).  I know – “you like playing golf period.”  True enough.  But playing in the fog has a unique set of challenges, the most obvious being that tracking the ball once it leaves your club face is impossible.  Because of that, I find I have an increased awareness of all the things that tell me what shape the shot took – where on the face did I strike the ball, was it solid contact, was the face open or shut, my swing path – and where I might go find it.  I can see it go off in a general direction but without an awareness of if I hit it to bend right or left or how far it might have gone, finding the ball is almost impossible.  I pay more attention to what I’m doing in the here and now.

Back to business.  Like golf on a foggy day, the business landscape can be obscured.  Ask anyone in digital for a five-year outlook and you’ll get a lot of shrugged shoulders.  Maybe five months is clear, like the first 50 yards of the golf shot.  After that?  Who knows.  Then again, as with golf, the uncertainty makes us focus very clearly on every little aspect of what’s going on now, since there are a hundred things that can affect where the ball – and the business – ends up.  Rather than complaining about an obscured future, our job is to examine what we’re doing now that will bring about the possibilities that future holds.

While I liked the foggy day, I much prefer the sun.  We can’t, however, control the weather.  Business is another matter.

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December 5, 2012 · 10:23 am

Failure And Feedback

One topic that’s near and dear to me is innovation.

Innovation and Evaluation

(Photo credit: cambodia4kidsorg)

Throughout my time in business the issue of how to do or produce something in a new, better way has always been front and center.  That’s why when I read that the Economist Intelligence Unit had conducted a survey of senior executives to explore the characteristics of companies that are adept at promoting innovation, I checked it out.  You can read the entire study here.  The study was sponsored by the Oracle folks, and not surprisingly it found that most companies struggle with innovation. The report says it’s really hard  to keep coming up with new ideas, particularly ones that people will pay for.  I know what you’re thinking – any of us could have told them that without a lot of research!  It’s what follows that I find of interest.

It turns out that the most innovative companies not only permit failure, but welcome and harness it to come up with more successful ideas. Yet nearly half of the respondents to the survey  say their companies have no system in place that helps them learn from failures.   Highly innovative companies also actively gather feedback and ideas from everywhere they can. Fifty-four percent of the top innovators they surveyed said they pour over customer comments, whether gathered in direct interviews or on social networks, and scrutinize customer data for clues to effective future innovations. They recognize that collecting many ideas is the first step to identifying the great ones.

There’s quite a bit more in the study but those two points are of most interest.  How many of us can truthfully say we work in an environment where failure is welcomed much less have a system in place from which to learn from those failures?  Nearly half (49%) of the companies in the study said their company had no system to deal positively with failure. Among companies that do have such a system (38%), redeploying employees involved in a failed innovation from one business unit to another has been a successful strategy.  Contrast that with the reports we read each day of companies jettisoning employees or products rather than making a pivot of some sort.

We’ve touched on the notion of feedback quite often here on the screed.  I’m a believer that a company can never have enough and we ought to look at every opportunity to get it.  The study confirms this as a key to innovation.

Help your folks to be free to fail.  Encourage them to get feedback in great quantity and with increasing frequency.  Do so and you’re well down the road to innovation, which becomes more important each day.   Make sense?

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