Tag Archives: management

May 25, 2018 · 12:56 pm

Dealing With An Intolerance

Happy Foodie Friday! It’s an especially good one as we head into Memorial Day Weekend, the unofficial start of Summer and the grilling season for many of you. I have a friend who will be a lot more circumspect about what she is grilling this weekend because she found out the other day that she has a bunch of food intolerances. What are they and what do they have to do with business?

Food intolerances are different from food allergies. You’re not going to die from the former while you just might from the latter. Instead, your symptoms develop over time as you keep eating things for which you have an intolerance. Maybe you get headaches or stomach aches. Maybe you retain fluids. Maybe you develop a cough that won’t go away or hives or a runny nose. All can be symptoms of a food intolerance.

They’re caused by several things, one of which can be a chemical – caffeine, amines, salicylate – which occur naturally but to which your body is sensitive. The ones you hear about most often are gluten intolerance and lactose intolerance but there are as many intolerances as there are foods, it seems. Fortunately, it’s not difficult to live with a food intolerance as long as you’re willing to adjust your diet and avoid things that you’ve identified as problematic. It’s less easy to fix an intolerance in business.

I’m sure that every manager has a story or two of employees who can’t get along. I certainly do. It can be a huge problem for a business, especially if the employees are managers themselves. There are a lot of reasons why two adults can’t tolerate one another. One feels the other isn’t pulling his or her weight. One gossips. There is a perceived inequity in titles or salary or responsibility. I’ve run into each of those along with the most basic reason for a business intolerance: they just don’t like one another due to some perceived slight that was never corrected.

You cannot let this situation fester, and the key to fixing it is to identify the real problem. Telling them to “grow up” won’t fix anything nor will telling them to “work it out.” You need to speak with the parties involved individually and together and you must follow up your discussions with action. You can’t have a chat and assume the matter is solved. Like a food intolerance that won’t kill you, two employees who can’t tolerate one another won’t destroy a business but they can make things pretty miserable. Also as with food, identifying the source of the problem and following it up with action and monitoring is how you make the problem go away.

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May 16, 2018 · 11:48 am

Well Aren’t You Special

I came across a quote in a report that prompted a thought about one thing I think has gone wrong in many of our businesses. Actually, it’s less about the businesses themselves and more about those of us who operate them. The study was GroupM’s annual “State Of Digital” report which I always find very informative. The quote is this:

In a statement, GroupM global CEO Kelly Clark listed automation and talent as the “big themes in advertising’s current revolution.” “One of the downsides of specialization is the increase in specialists who know more and more about less and less,” Clark said in the statement.

That’s a big problem in my eyes, and it’s not limited to the ad business.  Let me explain why, both from a personal and a professional point of view. First the personal. It’s great if you become the “go to” person on a very narrow subject. You may know a particular operating system inside and out or you may be the country’s leading subject matter expert on something else. That’s fantastic as long as nothing changes. What happens when it does? You just might have to start over if your particular, narrow skill set is no longer in demand. If you do one thing very well but no one needs that one thing, then what?

From a business perspective, having a team of specialists who can’t crossover is equally bad. Their siloed skills make cross-functional conversation difficult if not impossible. You want a team that has flexibility. Putting aside the ability to cover for other team members during vacations or peak demand periods in some area, having people with a broader knowledge base makes for a better product. Having multiple people weigh in who can consider the big picture and not just a slice of things makes for coherent, complete, well thought out solutions.

It’s incumbent on each of us to grow our skill set. In my practice, I’m called upon to provide thinking on everything from strategy to analytics to SEO to sales. Each of those is an area of specialization for some people and I know I might not be as well-versed in each of them as some of those specialists. What I do have, however, is a broad perspective (to go along with my broad experience) that lets me guide my clients. I have very deep knowledge in some areas and shallower in others. Not specializing makes me special!

If you’re not learning, if you’re not widening your range of knowledge beyond your specialty, then you’re probably setting yourself up to be less resilient when the need arises. That’s not good business thinking, is it?

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April 13, 2018 · 12:43 pm

A Slice Of Menu Advice

It’s Foodie Friday and our fun this week derives from some things I took away from an article on pizzeria menus. I know – what is a guy whose consulting practice focuses on strategy and media doing reading an article on how to write a best-selling pizza menu? Well, as I’ve often mentioned, one never knows from where a great insight will spring and so it’s incumbent upon us to look under every rock and (pizza) stone, don’t you think?

The article, from Pizza Today, talks about a number of things that can drive more sales from the same menu. I think a number of those things are applicable to most businesses, food-related or not. First, there is such a thing as TMI – too much information. If the menu details every bit of information about each ingredient in the pizza (local mushrooms grown in special caves, organic, non-GMO cheese from a particular type of cow, etc.) it’s likely that the customer‘s eyes will glaze over and they’ll stop reading. I don’t need to tell you about information overload – most of us suffer from it and despite the often-cited false information that our attention spans are now shorter than those of a goldfish, I do believe our tolerance for excessive information has vanished. We’re all too time-challenged, so respect your customer by providing enough detail so that they can make an informed decision (it’s pecorino cheese)  but know that too much and they turn off (it’s pecorino, a hard, salty sheep’s milk cheese from Lazio).

The piece also talks about changing the menu a few times a year. One owner mentions that he

changes 25 to 30 percent of the menu about four times a year, “which we need to do as a neighborhood restaurant. It gives us a story to tell customers — why we have changed it up. That keeps customers excited and chefs stimulated and allows us to serve seasonal food.”

That’s a good thought regardless of your business. It’s imperative that you keep in touch with your customers but to do so you really need to have something to say. A new product or service or the fact that something that customers are used to seeing in your offerings will be discontinued is news. Too many businesses post what amounts to spam and make their user bases less like to engage when they really do have something to say.

Finally, the article mentions how the menu should call out information that is important such as gluten-free and dairy-free items along with upcharges. Recognizing that some customers have special needs and that most customers aren’t happy when they get it with fees they weren’t expecting is just common sense for anyone in business. We’ve been over the mess the airlines have made of doing fare-comparisons because almost no airline sells you a ticket without some sort of extra fee. The same is true of concert tickets, hotel rooms (those resort fees!), rental cars, and many other businesses. Are you happy when they pop up on your bill? Neither are your customers.

That’s what I learned from a pizza menu. You?

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