Tag Archives: managing

December 11, 2012 · 10:16 am

The Fog

It was foggy all day yesterday and that resonated with me.

Fog

(Photo credit: rchughtai)

Maybe because it was the start of another week and like an old car I’m getting harder to start and was a little foggy, or maybe because all I keep hearing about is the uncertainty of financial markets, the economy, and lots of other things that are near and dear but not very clear.  Either way, a December day that was warm and foggy was unusual enough to give me cause to reflect.  Of course, it prompted some business thinking I’d like to share.  Let me digress, however, for a minute.

I like playing golf in the fog (no I did not play yesterday).  I know – “you like playing golf period.”  True enough.  But playing in the fog has a unique set of challenges, the most obvious being that tracking the ball once it leaves your club face is impossible.  Because of that, I find I have an increased awareness of all the things that tell me what shape the shot took – where on the face did I strike the ball, was it solid contact, was the face open or shut, my swing path – and where I might go find it.  I can see it go off in a general direction but without an awareness of if I hit it to bend right or left or how far it might have gone, finding the ball is almost impossible.  I pay more attention to what I’m doing in the here and now.

Back to business.  Like golf on a foggy day, the business landscape can be obscured.  Ask anyone in digital for a five-year outlook and you’ll get a lot of shrugged shoulders.  Maybe five months is clear, like the first 50 yards of the golf shot.  After that?  Who knows.  Then again, as with golf, the uncertainty makes us focus very clearly on every little aspect of what’s going on now, since there are a hundred things that can affect where the ball – and the business – ends up.  Rather than complaining about an obscured future, our job is to examine what we’re doing now that will bring about the possibilities that future holds.

While I liked the foggy day, I much prefer the sun.  We can’t, however, control the weather.  Business is another matter.

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November 30, 2012 · 11:21 am

Substitute

Foodie Friday!  Today the topic is substitutes.  No, not the early song by The Who.

Butter and a butter knife

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I had a thought about the use of different ingredients when the things called for in the recipe aren’t available.  This is a little different from changing up the seasonings – using oregano for basil, for example.  Cooks often do that to vary flavors and that’s an integral part of one’s own cooking style and food profile.  In this case I mean the times when you go to get the unsalted butter and realize all you have is salted or when you decide to use skim milk to lower a dish‘s fat content instead of the whole milk (or heaven forbid CREAM!) the recipe requires.

Substitutions are tricky things. Take the salted butter example.  There is no standard amount of salt in salted butter and the amount of salt can vary quite a bit.  If you’re aware of that and don’t automatically salt your dish as usual you might be OK.  Another thing about it is that the water content in salted butter is higher which, depending on the amount of liquid in the dish can make a difference.  Not a big deal for most dishes but critical in baking.  By the way, this is why I’m not a baker – it’s way too specific!

I could explain the reasons why cream vs. whole milk vs. half and half in recipes will or won’t work but you’re probably wondering at this point what the business point is.  Well, it’s that people are very much like ingredients.  Many managers see tiny differences in staff members – salted vs. unsalted – but fail to consider the broader implications those differences bring.  An unanticipated resignation from a staff member forces a substitution, but thinking that all individuals are replaceable because substitutes with the same basic skill set are available is a fallacy.  Just as an improper substitution can ruin a sauce or a custard, failing to acknowledge and adjust for the differences in the human ingredients can spell disaster.

As managers, we need to be acutely aware of how each small change in our team can precipitate much larger issues.  People are our most important ingredients, and just as great cooks consider every nuance of what goes into a dish we need to examine our people and blend them appropriately.  Feeling as if we can substitute at will is short-sighted and can ruin our business.  Then again, a smart change can make it many times better.  Your choice!

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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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