Tag Archives: business

June 30, 2014 · 10:28 am

Playing Defense

There was a valuable business lesson to be learned from yesterday’s Mexico/Netherlands game.

2010_05_26-NED_vs_MEX_006

(Photo credit: colin.merkert)

I don’t know if you watched it, but the Mexicans took a lead early in the second half. This was more than a bit of a surprise – the Dutch are one of the favorites in the World Cup and the Team Mexico had barely qualified. El Tri have rarely made it past the round of 16, the stage of the tournament in which this game was played.  They didn’t make it this time either and we can learn from what they did.

After a quiet start, Mexico dominated the first half and scored early in the second.  They played attacking football.  Once they scored, however, the went into a shell and were content to sit back on defense, making the occasional counter-attack but mostly allowing the Dutch to come at them.  Holland is one of the best teams in the world and features three of the best players in the world in the attacking end.  It was only a matter of time before they tied the game given many chances to do so.  yet Mexico played defense.  Sure enough, the game was tied after a corner kick (Mexico had kicked the ball out defensively) and lost when a Mexican defender gave the ref a reason to call a penalty on a (perhaps phantom) trip.

Why the sports report today?  Because we often make the same mistake in business.  We get to a point where we’re happy with what we’ve got and then we play defense.  We don’t develop new products or services.  We don’t encourage our people to advance their skill set.  We sit back and allow the competition to come at us and put all of our resources into defending or delaying their attacks instead of making them wonder how to defend ours.

The time to play defense in business is when there are overwhelmingly negative forces in the market and not when you have a lead.  There will always be other companies attacking you and playing defense is part of any business plan.  However, building a small advantage and then expending all your resources to defend it usually puts you out of the tournament.  Thoughts?

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June 26, 2014 · 8:26 am

Gnats

It’s summertime and I’m sure you’ve already had your first run in with a swarm of gnats.

English: A female Black Fungus Gnat.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There are lots of different types of them and you can almost see clouds of them at time during summer evenings.  You might not realize that business has gnats too and those are our topic today.   We create these business gnats ourselves – they don’t hatch from egg clusters as do the bugs.  I want us to think about why we do so.

Gnats are little bugs and I find them very annoying.  Yes, they’re harmless but they’re unpleasant.  They can also be a distraction – let’s see you read at the beach with a gnat buzzing around you.  Business gnats are the same way.  These are the little problems which serve as distractions from the things we ought to be doing.  Instead of worrying about big questions – what are our business goals and how do we align everything that’s going on in our enterprise with those goals – we focus on little stuff.  How many Facebook “likes” did we get this week and how can we get more?

Making things complicated is akin to creating optimal conditions for hatching gnats.  Yes, I’m an advocate for things like A/B testing to improve conversion rates but only after we’ve dealt with the business fundamentals that make conversions necessary.  Moreover, what are we measuring and why is a much bigger and important issue and the gnats of tweaking our Instagram strategy.

How does one get rid of gnats?  For the flying kind one good thing to do is find their food sources and cut them off from it.  For the business kind doing that is easy – go look in the mirror or around the table at a staff meeting – there’s the food source.  Discourage people from finding little problems – or even worse, making them up – so there aren’t distractions flying around.  Maybe you could hand out fly swatters to everyone in order to remind them to kill the business gnats around them.  Make sense?

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June 24, 2014 · 9:13 am

Skills

One of my clients has a few of their summer interns starting this week.

Film poster for Napoleon Dynamite - Copyright ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If they’re like most of the interns I’ve ever met, they’re eager to start learning about the business world because they feel a bit like Napoleon Dynamite.  While in his case he’s concerned that no girl is ever going to date him, they are concerned that no one will hire them for the same reason:

Napoleon Dynamite: Well, nobody’s going to go out with *me*!
Pedro: Have you asked anybody yet?
Napoleon Dynamite: No, but who would? I don’t even have any good skills.
Pedro: What do you mean?
Napoleon Dynamite: You know, like nunchuku skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills… Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.

OK, maybe the interns aren’t worried about THOSE skills, but a recent survey by the Econsultancy folks asked about the skills necessary to succeed as a modern marketer.   You can read a summary of the report here.  I found it encouraging because in addition to the specific technical skills the job requires, many top marketers are now emphasizing the “soft” skills I’ve always advocated as being the most important set of requirements in any job.

When respondents to our survey were given a pre-selected list and asked to rate which softer skills were most significant, those that scored most highly as being ‘very important’ included the ability to embrace change, to spot opportunities and adapt strategies quickly, and also being passionate, curious and hungry to learn.

In other words, the “skills” you can’t teach.  It’s not about a high IQ (although that’s not necessarily a bad thing) but about an ability to learn.  Scratch that.  It’s about a candidate having a passion to learn – the ability to be a self-motivated learner.   The key softer skill mentioned most by interviewees was articulation and persuasion but I don’t think you can be either of those two things unless you can ingest and digest the raw information you need to make cogent, coherent arguments.

I’m looking forward to working with the interns and to teaching them some of the technical skills they’ll need as they begin their business lives.  Hopefully their parents and teachers have already done the hard part by nurturing their natural curiosity about the world and getting them to be open to new ideas and information.

Do you have interns working with you this summer?  What skills have they brought?  What are you bringing?

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