Tag Archives: management

September 29, 2017 · 9:42 am

Breaking The Fast

We’ve arrived at Yom Kippur again and there is a part of the holiday’s traditions that involves food so it’s an appropriate Foodie Friday topic. Beginning this evening, those who observe the holiday will fast for 24 hours. Traditionally, the meal that follows the fast is “dairy”: bagels, cream cheese, smoked fish of some sort, a sweet noodle dish called kugel, and cakes. The thinking is that a relatively bland meal is appropriate following a fast and the dishes can be prepared ahead since one doesn’t do work of any sort on the day. Hey – if Sandy Koufax can skip work and not pitch the World Series (which made a huge impression on me back in 1965), you and your bubbe can stay out of the kitchen.

My family generally had whitefish salad, egg salad, and tuna salad available as well. I know that blintzes are big with some families, although my family was never patient enough to cook them (listen, when you’ve not eaten for 24 hours, even another 10 minutes is an eternity). Everyone would generally grab whatever was available to eat immediately, breaking the fast while their bagel toasted.

Obviously, there is a much more important aspect to the holiday than food. Last year I wrote that:

Most people think of the day in terms of atoning for one’s sins. That’s not quite right in that it’s an incomplete statement. That atonement is only a part of the equation. There is a broader focus on other things as well. One is charity, one is repentance and the other is prayer. Those things can also be interpreted as trying to embody high ideals, returning to those values and ideals if we’ve strayed from them, and self-reflection.

Whether you’re Jewish or not, taking a day to think about that three-legged stool is a valuable thing, both personally and with respect to your business. Since this is a business blog, let me focus on the business aspect. Every business needs to give back somehow. Whether it’s mentoring on a pro bono basis or sponsoring a Little League team, it’s not only smart marketing. It’s the right thing to do.

Atoning in business is simply reflecting on the times over the past year when you missed the mark and determining to do better. It may be a badly handled customer service issue or it may be treating an employee badly. Identifying those instances and improving the future is a fundamental part of being a good businessperson.

And prayer? I’ll leave that to you. I was always taught that prayer is not about you and shouldn’t focus on your wants. I think even atheists can pray since, as Emerson said, “Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.” Not a bad place for any businessperson to be.

Happy New Year!

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September 22, 2017 · 12:01 pm

Unintended Consequences

It’s Foodie Friday and I have unintended consequences on my mind. What spurred that were a couple of food-related things. I went to do some research about an alcoholic product and of course, I was asked to verify my age before being allowed to read the brand’s website. I assumed that was some sort of regulation imposed on beer, wine, and booze makers since it’s the sort of thing I caution clients about doing all the time: preventing the user from completing their task as seamlessly as possible. As it turns out, there is no rule requiring alcohol brands to do this. What it might do, however, is deter the very people who should have more information about alcohol – young people – from getting educated. This is an unintended consequence. If they lie about their age to gain access, you’ve also caused them to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and making them break the law is another unintended consequence.

I also read a piece on the growth of restaurant delivery services:

As mobile food delivery apps like Seamless, UberEats, Caviar, and Postmates steadily expand their delivery zones and their customer bases, many restaurants are increasingly relying on delivery orders as a significant source of revenue — and they’re having to adapt operations accordingly to keep up with demand.

The unintended consequence here is that restaurant personnel are often spending so much time servicing the take-out business that the customers seated in the dining room have a lesser experience. Putting aside the fact that there is the potential for a restaurant’s reputation to suffer when the product delivered is way inferior to the product in the dining room, a failure to properly prioritize the kitchen to service the folks who have journeyed to the dining room could set up a lose-lose situation, with neither the folks eating at home nor the people eating out being satisfied. There is also the stress caused by having to refine the operations plan to support the take-out business.

We see unintended consequences all the time. Kudzu went from being an ornamental plant to a menace. When the British governor of Delhi, India addressed a cobra infestation by putting a bounty on cobras, they got more, not fewer, snakes, as people raised them to collect the bounty. I’m sure you’ve seen examples in your business of this, whether it’s a different response to a price change than what was anticipated or a sudden wave of popularity of a brand or product based on some bit of social media madness.

Whatever it is, it’s incumbent on all of us to think about every decision in the context of what the effects of a course of action might be. Who is affected and how? How will it affect competitors and what might their possible responses be? Do this more each alternative you’re contemplating and your odds of avoiding an unintended consequence will improve. You with me?

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September 20, 2017 · 10:46 am

Navigating To Success

One of the roles I play along with my regular consulting gig is an advisor. I am what’s call a “Navigator” at one of the oldest incubators in the area. Each month, the Navigators get together and listen to a pitch from a resident company. It’s good practice for them (you can NEVER have enough practice pitching your business) and it’s good for us to become better-versed in what’s going on.

Most of the companies headquartered at the incubator are engaged in scientific research of some sort and there are a lot of Ph.D.’s wandering around the building. They know a phenomenal amount about their fields and about the company they’re germinating. The problem is that they don’t seem to know that they’re building a business and not a science experiment. We had one of these get-togethers yesterday and I was speaking to another Navigator, comparing notes about the companies we’ve seen and the pitches we’ve heard. He had found, as had I, that most of these very smart entrepreneurs had no trouble explaining the nuances of some very complicated science but had massive difficulty in explaining how they were going to make money.

A book from a few years ago wrote up research that found that 87.5% of Millennials disagreed with the statement that “money is the best measure of success.” On a personal level, I couldn’t agree more with their thinking. There ARE many more important things in life that reflect success and failure. On a business level, unfortunately, that’s dead wrong. When you raise capital, your ability to provide a return on that investment – i.e. money – is the measure of success. Otherwise, you’re not a business: you’re a charity. Since these entrepreneurs – almost all of whom are Millennials – claim to be building businesses, part of what I and the other Navigators help them do is to focus on the business of their business and not just on the science and their products.

We ask them the kinds of questions I hope you ask yourself. What problem are you solving? Who else is solving it? Why is your solution better? How much will it cost to build your product at scale? How is it priced? What is the profit margin? What’s the competitive set in how big a market? Pretty basic questions, I know, but these are smart people who have never been asked them before. The ones that can answer them clearly are the ones that will get funded and survive. Do you fall into that group?

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