Tag Archives: Strategic management

March 13, 2015 · 10:46 am

Will It Blend

the cheeseburger burrito from California Tortilla

Cheeseburger burrito from California Tortilla

It’s Foodie Friday and this week I have trendiness on my mind.  I came across a report recently from the National Restaurant Association. The What’s Hot in 2015 survey was conducted in October 2014.  They surveyed 1,276 members of the American Culinary Federation. The chefs were given a list of 231 items and were asked to rate each item as a “hot trend,” “yesterday’s news” or “perennial favorite” on restaurant menus in 2015.  You can read the results here – consider it “coming attractions” for what you might find on a menu when you dine out this year.

I’m not sorry to say the biggest declining trend (#1 in “yesterday’s news”) is the use of insects in dishes.  It appears that foams have run their course as well. Locally sourced ingredients – meat, seafood and vegetables – is the top trend.  How they’re used is a different matter and the winner there as a general trend is ethnic fusion.  These dishes are mash-ups from different cultures resulting in things such as a cheeseburger burrito or a poutine taco.  Since we live in a country of many cultures, this isn’t surprising.  But it is instructive well beyond food.

Great ideas are all around us.  Maybe they’re buried in the ways a competitor does business.  Maybe it’s something in an unrelated field (kind of like how we look at what food tells us about business each Friday).  We need to be looking constantly for sources of inspiration.  Mark Turner, in his book The Origin of Ideas: Blending, Creativity, and the Human Spark, says that “humans are innovative and good at creative thinking due to the ability of our brains to blend two or more ideas and create a new idea.”  While we can argue about how great an idea topping Kung Pao Chicken with crumbled goat cheese might be, the important thing is that as business people we need to avoid the Not Invented Here thinking and look everywhere for inspiration.

I read a quote that “anyone can combine hoisin sauce with chutney and put it over pasta, but the end result has to taste good.”  That’s a great point.  Not every piece of fusion business thinking is great just as not every blending of ethnic foods quite works (Curried goat ceviche?  Nah…).  Thinking out of the box and trying to combine good ideas into great ones is the point.  If they blend, it just might be magic.

 

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March 6, 2015 · 11:55 am

Indian Food And Your Team

It’s Foodie Friday and what has my attention today is an article in the Washington Post Wonkblog.  Anything titled “Scientists have figured out what makes Indian food so delicious” has my full attention. After all, anyone who cooks wants to learn some secret to make everything taste better, right? As it turns out there was a business secret in there as well.

English: Thali

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As reported in GeekWire:

The researchers broke each dish down to ingredients and compared how often and heavily those ingredients shared flavor compounds. What they found was the less often dishes “shared” flavor compounds, the more delicious they tended to be. “The unique makeup of Indian cuisine can be seen in some dishes more than others, and it seems to be tied to the use of specific ingredients,” they reported. “Spices usually indicate dishes with flavors that have no chemical common ground.”

In other words, in the West many of us try to find flavors that “go together”.  The MIT Technology Review put it this way:

The food pairing hypothesis is the idea that ingredients that share the same flavors ought to combine well in recipes. For example, the English chef Heston Blumenthal discovered that white chocolate and caviar share many flavors and turn out to be a good combination. Other unusual combinations that seem to confirm the hypothesis include strawberries and peas, asparagus and butter, and chocolate and blue cheese.

And of course, as with so many things in this world, that’s a right answer, not THE right answer.  The lesson from Indian – and as it turns out many other Asian –  cuisine is that more flavors with less overlap makes for a better dish. And that is a great business point too.

Many of us build teams that are way too homogeneous.  In our effort to hire people who will “fit in” to the team, we don’t optimize our flavor profiles – how well the team functions.  The team would be much better with people who have less overlap.  You need members who will challenge ideas and not just go along.  More perspectives, more skills, more voices equals a better product.  Just as what makes a great chef is the ability to get those contrasting flavors to mesh so too is the test of a great manager how well he or she can bring together a diverse team of strong people.

Recipes as a network – who’d have thought that?!?!

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March 4, 2015 · 12:32 pm

Bloatware

Do you use an app to clean up the digital flotsam and jetsam on your phone?  I do and it’s constantly telling me I have files I don’t need or use.  I have 16 gig of storage on my device and quite a bit of that storage is taken up by software I didn’t install – it came with the phone.  I can’t remove it either, not without gaining root access to the device which might cause other issues.  Call it bloatware, crapware or whatever.  It’s unwanted and some of it runs in the background, eating up battery life.  There is some here from the device manufacturer and even more from the carrier.  It is a constant annoyance.

This issue is only going to become a bigger problem as newer devices do not have expandable storage.  In addition to the built-in device storage I have an SD card inserted to give myself another 16 gig of storage.  Without this, my phone would be full.  Yes, I know how to use cloud storage to keep my device clean but you can’t run apps from the cloud nor do apps cache data there.  More importantly, when consumers buy a product which is advertised to have 16 gig of storage (or 32, 64 or whatever) there is a reasonable expectation that the product will have about that amount available.  Both Apple and Microsoft have been sued for promoting devices with far less storage available than advertised, and in their cases it was actually just the operating system that was taking up space.

Why do I bring this up?  I don’t like the vision of the world in which you don’t own or control the goods you buy, and the company who made it has embedded everything possible to give them access to your information.  That seems to be the attitude of the manufacturers and carriers.  Yes I know about unlocked phones (they still have crapware) and how to disable (but not remove) this stuff, but it seems to me that the negligible revenues taken in by adding some of this bloat are negated by consumer disdain.  Put aside the potential data vulnerabilities – and fallout – each of these apps pose.  They are annoying at best and harmful at worst and there is no reason for them.

Ask yourself this – is my business doing anything similar?  Am I trying to make an easy buck while annoying my customers?  Think about how people feel about their wireless carriers as you do.  Is that how you want your customers to feel about you?

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