Tag Archives: management

October 30, 2013 · 10:19 am

Turn The Chair

I was having a coffee with an old friend the other day.  We plopped ourselves down in a couple of overstuffed chairs at one of the local Starbucks to chat and it became apparent in a couple of seconds that the sun was streaming right into her eyes.

Free chair, new fence

(Photo credit: Kentucky Photo File)

I mentioned that fact and asked if she wanted us to relocate.  She sat forward and said “no, if I sit like this it’s not an issue.”  It wasn’t, but since I had no desire to watch her contort herself nor to see her back go out from sitting in an awkward position, I suggested she do something to remedy the situation: turn the chair.

That, in three words, is pretty much what I do.  I help clients to come up with solutions that might not be obvious to them in the moment but which are readily apparent to someone who isn’t caught up in the problem.  Questioning the underlying assumption and changing the paradigm is what many businesspeople fail to do on their own (and what just as many of us do in the “real” world outside of business as well!).  It gets back to the “what if” conversation we explored here a little while ago.

My friend could have sat sideways and waited for the sun to move so it was out of her eyes.  That would have distracted her from our chat at best and left her with a sore back or half blind at worst.  In a sense, it would have been the equivalent of blaming a business failure on a bad marketplace.  When the market turns – when the sun moves – things will be fine.  I don’t think any business really has the luxury of that sort of thinking and turning the business’ figurative chair is how the enterprise can carry on despite unfavorable circumstances.

I’ve been told that consultants are a luxury in good times and unaffordable in bad times.  As you might expect, I disagree.  We’re the folks keeping the sun out of your eyes and the sun is always shining in business.  While we might know a lot about your business (in fact, we need to!), we’re not caught up in the day-to-day, in the politics, or the latest office drama.  We have a different perspective.  Not better – different, and sometimes, that’s all that’s needed to move forward.

That’s my take – what’s yours?

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October 23, 2013 · 8:35 am

Tossing It

Somewhere along the line it became most cost-effective to throw things away than it is to fix them.

broken ipad screen

(Photo credit: 3dom)

I know people who buy new printers rather than spend the money on the ink – it’s about a wash financially and they get a new printer.   I recently replaced a small appliance (ok, a little wine storage unit) because when I found out how much it would cost to fix the fan that had broken, a new unit, complete with warranty, made more sense.

Tech may be among the worst offending industries.  I mean, if the battery goes on your iPhone or MacBook Air, you can’t replace it.  We toss the unit and get a new one.  TV‘s are so cheap that the notion of repairing one is pretty alien these days, particularly when we consider that the new item will inevitably be better technology than what’s being fixed.

There is a problem with this mindset, however.  Too many people and businesses extend it to their thinking about customers, employees, and others.   When a relationship gets broken, we weigh the costs of fixing it against the expense of replacing it.  Rather than “fix” an employee who might have underperformed, we fire them.  That results in a few things – writing off the investment we’ve made in that person thus far as well as incurring the time and expense to replace them with no guarantee of better results.  Rather than investigating each and every customer complaint about service, we try to placate the disgruntled customer with some token gestures (the hotel room isn’t clean?  Oh, have a free bottle of water!) and don’t really mind when they don’t return again – they’re a pain.  We don’t look at them as fantastic suppliers of information about our failings – we consider them to be pesky children who rouse us from our daily business sleep.

Business relationships – with staff, with customers, with the public at large – are not disposable.  In many cases they are not replaceable and all efforts must be taken to repair them.  It’s almost never more cost effective to toss them.  You agree?

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October 9, 2013 · 10:42 am

Faulty Instrument Readings

I’m not a pilot (although I’ve played Flight Simulator a bunch). One of the things pilots are told is to trust their instruments because sometimes our eyes or other senses deceive us while flying. Things such as graveyard spins or spirals result, and I’m very sure that anything with the word “graveyard” is bad when using in conjunction with flying.

X-Plane 10 Flight Simulator Zero panel

(Photo credit: Wanderlinse)

Business analytics today are exactly the opposite of flying.  You see, there are so many things that can go wrong  – a misplaced space, code missing or in the wrong place – that going by what the “instruments” tell us alone can be fatal.  I’ll go back to a point I’ve stated before – we need to figure out what we’re trying to investigate and why before we ever look at the numbers.  That lets us process the information we’re going to receive in context so we can make decisions.  Knowing your web traffic is up is relatively useless.  What it should prompt is a response into both “why” and “what of it?”  That requires using your eyes and your common sense.  Let me give you an example.

You launch a campaign to increase sales using Search Engine Marketing – pay-per-click ads to use a less-fancy term.  You’re smart enough to make sure you have conversion tracking installed – a method through which you can assess how many people who come to your store via your fancy new campaign actually buy something.  Your developers check the code and make sure it’s in the right place and that the beacon fires when the appropriate action is taken.  However, no one ever does what a real-world user would do – click an ad and place an order – to make sure that the “instruments” are picking up the action properly.  As a result, you think, based on the reporting, that the campaign was a tremendous waste of money since it resulted in no sales.  Your instruments just crashed the plane.

Had you used your eyes and common sense, you’d have seen that the ads generated a lot of traffic and based on your history, some percentage of that traffic that stayed on the site (non-bounced visits in tech speak) does convert to sales.  Since that didn’t happen here, maybe something is wrong.  Click an ad and place an order – did it register?

There is a tendency to trust the instruments but unlike the gauges on airplanes, the gauges we use in business are relatively new and far more prone to error.  We can’t let faulty instruments over ride the business acumen we’ve developed over the years.  That can be a fatal error.  You with me?

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