Tag Archives: management

November 16, 2012 · 9:30 am

Miracle Berries

Let’s end the week with a Foodie Friday Fun look at miraculin.

Things are about to get real tasty

(Photo credit: Jonathan Harford)

I know – you haven’t really thought about it in a while, but as food topics go it’s very interesting.  Miraculin is the stuff found in an African berry that serves to change completely the taste of foods you ingest after eating the berry.  The berry is known as a miracle berry and was discovered almost 300 years ago by a guy exploring the wilds of Africa.  It seems that there was a terrible famine and yet one tribe out of the thirty the explorer met were well-fed.  Apparently they would eat this berry and were then able to eat stuff that under normal circumstances was unpalatable.  In short, it makes bad tasting food taste good.

The berries work by masking some of the taste receptors on your tongue, primarily the ones that read “sour”.  Things that are sour taste sweet.  That’s the business point today.

I’ve known a number of managers who seem to eat miracle berries right before they read their financial reports or analytics.  There is never anything wrong – nothing tastes sour – at least not internally.  Oh sure – the market may be bad (good time to steal share!) so growth is limited or the new product we launched isn’t really being trashed on social media – it’s just a few vocal haters.  This is the business miracle berry at work.

I’m as big an optimist as there is.  However, there is a difference between being optimistic and lying to yourself.  It’s one thing to put a good face on the numbers; it’s another to overlook the realities those numbers express.  If you can’t understand what the data is telling you then you need to do one of two things – find someone who does and is unafraid to tell you or get into a business where you can make sense of what’s going on.  Reading the numbers whilst under the effects of the business miracle berry is not an option.

While miracle berries helped the African tribe avoid famine and stay healthy, the business equivalent of eating miracle berries can get you very sick and maybe even kill your business.  How are your taste buds as we end the week?

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November 9, 2012 · 11:42 am

The Confit Solution

For our Foodie Friday Fun this week, let’s examine  confit and what it tells us about business.

Duck confit with salad

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m thinking specifically of duck confit, one of my favorite foods, but the process is often used with fruit or vegetables such as onion or garlic.  For those of you who’ve never experienced it, duck confit is made by salting the duck, generally legs, and letting it cure with some herbs for a day or so.  The salt is removed and then the legs are poached in their own fat at a low heat.  In a way, it’s a fancy version of barbecue  where meat is spiced, left to cure a bit, and then slowly smoked to add flavor and render the fat.  The result is a rich-tasting product that can be heated (particularly to crisp the skin) and eaten as is or shredded to use in other dishes.

Interesting, you say, but what does this have to do with business?  The beauty of confit to me is that the key to the dish isn’t fancy external additions but, rather, the technique.  The main ingredients – the meat and the fat – are right there when you begin (OK, you might need some additional duck fat to cover the legs when cooking but stay with me here).  That lesson is often lost on us in business.

It’s hard for someone who makes a living parachuting in to help companies to say this, but more often than not the keys to success are already in place.  What happens is that managers tend to make things too complicated by searching for external resources or solutions when the ingredients they need are already on hand.  Confiting something is nothing more than a deep, gentle immersion in something that’s already there – fat for meats, sugar for fruit.  Instead of cutting off the fat and discarding it since it’s often seen as a problem, it becomes the key to the dish.  How much better off would many businesses be if they allowed all of their resources to shine instead of writing them off as “just” an accountant or secretary or junior analyst?

There’s a Shakespeare quote of which I’ve always been fond – “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves…”  That’s confit, and good business advice in a nutshell.  What’s your take?

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November 8, 2012 · 11:41 am

Cable News And Your Business

One of the things that our highly segmented media world has done is to provide a lot of information on things that are, in the scheme of things, pretty meaningless.     That thought occurred to me as I was watching the election results the other night and there’s a useful business point that it raises.  We’re all aware of the various “tilts” the news networks have.  They tend to focus on every little fact that advances their point of view and that denigrates a political figure with whom they don’t agree.  I’ve written before about the echo chamber and what it can do to your perspective.  This is an extension of that phenomenon.  What’s the business point?

Partisans are focused on every detail. Most people aren’t. They build a narrative that’s as simple as possible and once that’s in place it’s very hard to change it.  As an example, I saw a Latino interviewed who said Romney lost his community with the “self-deportation” remark he made many months ago in a primary debate.  Game over.  The various commentators seemed surprised by the fact that certain arguments and billions of dollars in political ads didn’t seem to make a difference in the outcomes of many races.  It works that way for your business as well.

We’re partisans for our brands.  Hopefully we know our brands and our businesses inside and out and we’re fixated on every little detail.  We can talk for hours about why the store is set up the way it is or the amount of work that went into a piece of content.  That’s myopic.  Most of our customers don’t care.  Like the hard-core viewers of cable news, there are some who pay attention to the details but the bulk of folks don’t.  To a certain extent these media outlets are seeing the trees of today’s news cycle and missing the  forest of the public.  We might lag behind our customers in the same way.

No amount of marketing will fix a bad initial experience.  Opinions are very hard to change once they’re formed.  What’s your opinion?

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