Tag Archives: business

October 5, 2016 · 10:50 am

Sport At The Service of Humanity

I’ve spent many years in the sports business. Having grown up playing many sports and spending many hours watching them when I wasn’t playing, working in the business was a dream come true. As with many businesses, however, I and many of my colleagues sometimes lost sight of the basic appeal of the product. It’s taken the Pope to help remind me, and hopefully many others, of that. Let me explain.

Any product needs to solve a basic need. Identifying that need and building products that serve it are the basis for any business. What often happens, however, is that we get focused on our own needs and not those of the customer. We worry about profits and supply chains and staffing, and we’d be insane not to focus on those things too. We can’t, however, let them blind us to the fundamental purpose of solving the problem and servicing the need of the customer.

What does the Pope have to do with this? He is running a conference which began today called Sport At The Service of Humanity. It’s billed as the first global conference on faith and sport. No, it’s not about getting every player to thank some higher power every time they score. It’s intended to launch a “movement” to develop ­­life skills through sports ­­ and characteristics across six principles: compassion, respect, love, enlightenment, balance and joy. You should check out the conference’s website here.

There are a couple of things stated in the “declaration of principles” that resonated:

  • Sport has the power to teach positive values and enrich lives. Every one of us, who plays, organises and supports sport, has the opportunity to be transformed by it and to transform others.
  • Sport challenges us to stretch ourselves further than we thought possible.

I liked to hire people who were athletes, and not just because it was the sports business. It was precisely for the reasons stated above. Moreover, ex-athletes “got it.” They understood the sheer joy of sports, and that joy is a big part of the reason why fans watch them.

The Pope’s conference is about using sports to make us better human beings, but I think it can also serve to remind us of a fundamental business principle too. Your product needs to serve people and not just investors. Using your product to make people’s lives better – in this case, to teach life skills – is really the goal of business in my mind. Yours?

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August 22, 2016 · 1:07 pm

Believe It Or Not

We’re busy prepping Rancho Deluxe for sale and so we’re in need of some outside services to perform tasks such as washing the roof (damn lichen). In our digital age, I’m doing what any person would do: checking the web for reviews as well as for potential service people. The problem is not finding information. The issue is knowing which information to trust. I suspect this is an issue for you and for your business as well.

There are review sites such as Yelp and Angie’s List. Yelp, in particular, has a reputation, justified or not, of having issues. Fake reviews are allegedly rampant and the company has been accused of elevating negative reviews to higher positions in the results if the company doesn’t pay to advertise on Yelp. As an aside, a court found that even if they were doing that, it wouldn’t be illegal, but it sure makes one question the validity of what you learn. Angie’s List has had similar problems, saying that they’re consumer driven when 70% of their revenue comes from advertising. That makes them less than disinterested information brokers in my book.

Do people really use reviews? A new study by Trustpilot suggests that 88 percent of consumers say that reviews help when deciding what to buy and where to buy it. The study also found, however, that only 18 percent say they think online reviews are actually valid, so do consumers believe them or not? As a business owner, can you believe what you’re reading or not before you think about taking action?

I don’t think there is a simple answer. Most fake reviews are fairly easy to identify. You look at how many other reviews have been written by the author, you check if there are multiple reviews with similar verbiage, etc. I’m a fan of Amazon’s identifier of reviewers who actually purchased the product via Amazon, and some sites let you see if the person has actually checked in. That’s more of a clue for negative reviews in my book. Yelp and other sites are probably more of a help as a consumer than they are as places to conduct business based on some of the alleged shady business practices. Check multiple sites and social media, gather a lot of information and form an opinion based on the preponderance of the evidence (can you tell I hang out with lawyers?).

Actually, that last sentence is probably good advice for anything we do in business, wouldn’t you say?

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August 11, 2016 · 10:37 am

Transforming To The Digital Future

One of the questions clients ask is how they prepare for the digital transformation of their business. In some cases, the businesses are completely digital and the answers are much easier. For legacy businesses, however, the changes are often slow and painful, if they happen at all.

The folks at the MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte Digital released the fifth annual Digital Business Study. Called“Aligning the Organization for Its Digital Future, it presents an increasingly wide gap between the companies that have transitioned successfully to the digital world and those who are struggling to do so.

The report found that digitally maturing companies have organizational cultures that share common features, including an expanded appetite for risk, rapid experimentation, heavy investment in talent and recruiting, and the development of leaders who excel at soft skills. It also examined the different types of companies with respect to their digital transformation:

Additional analysis of this year’s study found three distinct cultural mindsets that relate closely to corporate stages of digital maturity. Some characteristics include:

  • Low appetite for risk– This mindset is common among early stage digital organizations. In addition to being risk adverse, early stage companies tend to have a hierarchical leadership structure, conduct work in silos, and make decisions based more on instinct rather than hard data.
  • Experimentation and speed– Conversely, digitally maturing companies value experimentation and speed, embrace risk, and create distributed leadership structures.
  • Collaboration– Digitally maturing companies also foster collaboration and are more likely to use data in decision making.

Nearly 80 percent of respondents surveyed from digitally maturing entities indicate their companies are actively engaged in initiatives that bolster risk taking, agility and collaboration. For early stage companies, the number falls to 23 percent.

Finally, they found that nearly 90 percent of digitally maturing organizations are integrating their digital strategies with their companies’ overall strategies. In other words, digital is not something that’s “tacked on” or just another channel.

Where do you fit in the spectrum? Do you have the skills – having a transformative vision, being a forward thinker, having a change-oriented mindset – the study found are critical for a successful transformation? How are you putting them to work?

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