by Charles Plant | Sep 27, 2012 | Leaders
Thinking Strategically (yesterday’s blog), in more prosaic terms is about seeing the big picture. What’s your big picture? For Richard Branson, it was customer service. He built the Virgin Group, a collection of seemingly unrelated businesses by targeting businesses where things were not being run well by other people.
From his first entrepreneurial venture at the age of 16 to his current big picture idea of Virgin Galactic, Branson has seen niches where others have chosen not to go or as in the case of Virgin Airways, where he was frustrated by current service levels. He founded Virgin Records because no one would produce and release Mike Oldfield’s hypnotic Tubular Bells. He founded Virgin Atlantic because American Airlines canceled a flight to the Virgin Islands.
“There is no point in going into a business unless you can make a radical difference in other people’s lives,” Branson says. “To me, it’s like painting a picture: You have to get all the colors right and all the little nuances right to create the perfect picture, or the perfect company. I know that there’s need for Virgin to come in and attack a marketplace, because I know that I’m frustrated by having to experience bad service in that particular marketplace.” (www.entrepreneur.com)
So frustration leads to big picture leads to another company. If you look at all of his business startups, he was attacking markets where he saw some combination of substandard quality mixed with high cost or slow service. For Branson, the big picture is all about changing the current paradigm of Quality, Cost, and Speed.
by Charles Plant | Sep 26, 2012 | Leadership Development
Getting ahead in business means thinking strategically. Easy to say but not so easy to do given that many people really don’t know the difference between strategy and tactics. So here goes, an attempt to explain the difference.
When you look in a dictionary (I checked online) it would say something like “A plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim.” Not very clear is it? Anything can be called a strategy under that definition. That’s why there are marketing strategies, financial strategies, HR strategies and so on. All of them are designed to achieve an overall aim. If you define your overall aim as earning a profit then you could have a cost reduction strategy too. But are those actually strategies? Nope, to me they’re tactics.
Remember that getting ahead is about thinking strategically so you have to know what to be thinking about at a senior level and what not to be thinking about.
Strategy relates to how you meet customer needs.
Going back to basics, a business is about finding and meeting a set of customer needs. If you want to be more profitable or more successful than you are now then you’ll have to be better meeting those needs than any of your competitors. So strategy first off relates directly as to how you meet customer needs better than your competitors.
When you talk about customer needs, there are only three dimensions within which you can have a conversation. Customers needs can be summarized in three big buckets. They are looking for a certain quality level, at a certain cost and with a certain speed of service. How your product or service fits in those three dimensions of Quality, Cost and Speed is how you’ll be perceived by customers and thus how you’ll stack up against competition.
Customer needs can be defined by Quality, Cost, and Speed
You can compare any two businesses by looking at those three dimensions. Look at MacDonalds versus The Keg for instance. They both serve beef and fries don’t they? But MacDonalds has lower quality, lower cost and faster service. They are strategically differentiated. The Keg’s strategy is to earn more money by selling higher quality at a higher cost with slower service. What matters most to both of these restaurants is how you perceive these three dimensions of their offerings.
To change or improve or fix your business, what you have to do is change, improve or fix one of those three elements of Quality, Cost, and Speed. It all comes back to that.
Thinking Strategically
Thinking Strategically means thinking about and spending time and money on issues that directly relate to Quality Cost and Speed. Furthermore, it means thinking about things that have a big effect on these three items.
by Charles Plant | Sep 21, 2012 | Research
What? A second blog today? I actually wrote the last one on Wednesday but got distracted and forgot to promote it until today. So much for focus.
You might have noticed that women are taking over the world. From university enrolment to the professions and now to politics, women are coming to dominate men in almost every field. You might have wondered why. (Or you might not have, but I’ll tell you why anyway.)
It’s because of focus. Men don’t focus as well as women. In order to advance mankind’s understanding of the human condition I have penned this blog so here it is, 5 reasons why men can’t focus.
- The Hunter Instinct – Men are evolutionarily designed to be hunters. From the earliest days of mankind, men were responsible for killing game. To do that requires that men be highly aware of the smallest movement in case it means there is something out there to kill and eat. Nowadays when men are in meetings, they still carry this evolutionary trait and are easily distracted by the smallest things.
- Superior Intelligence – Men are the more intelligent of the sexes as they have so many important things to think about. Who can focus on doing dishes or putting the toilet seat down whene there is world hunger to solve or hockey games to think about? Perhaps men will become more focussed this year as a result of the hockey lockout.
- Emotional Attunement – Men are so emotionally attuned that it hurts. They notice each and every change in emotions, especially in women. With such emotional attunement men are constantly distracted by even the slightest display of emotion. In order to focus, they have had to block these messages out and as a result, they have blocked them so successfully that many men deny having any emotions whatsoever.
- Sex – Yes, sex. Did you know that studies have shown that men think of sex on an average, every 8 seconds. If you’re thinking about sex that often, how could you focus any anything else effectively?
by Charles Plant | Sep 21, 2012 | Exercises
One of Steve Job’s greatest strengths was knowing how to focus. When he came back to Apple in 1997 as a consultant, he found a company that was severely unfocussed. Apple had a dozen different versions of the Macintosh and each of the versions had a different confusing number ranging from 1400 to 9600. Even Jobs couldn’t figure out how to recommend which versions one of his friends should buy.
At one product session, Jobs had had enough and he grabbed a magic marker and drew a four square chart on a whiteboard. “Here’s what we need,” he stated. On top of the two columns he wrote Consumer and Pro. The two rows he labeled Desktop and Portable. Apples’ new focused job was to make four products, one in each quadrant. This ability to focus saved Apple from extinction.
“Deciding what NOT to do is as important as deciding what to do. That’s true for companies, and its true for products.” And it’s true for managers.
If you’re having trouble figuring what to focus on, then sit back and think. What are you doing that gives you the best bang for the buck in:
- delivering and improving quality,
- reducing cost, or
- saving time.
by Charles Plant | Sep 18, 2012 | Emotional Intelligence, Leadership Development
As a typical guy, I’ve always wondered why women obsess so much about their shoes. After all, they’re just shoes. In particular I used to wonder why women spend so much time shopping for shoes and so little time shopping for cars for instance. I’ve seen women agonize over shoes for the longest time and make a decision to buy a car without much angst at all. A guy on the other hand will spend all sorts of time researching and discussing cars before he’ll make a purchase but he’ll typically just buy the same type of shoes he bought the last time.
I used to think that this difference between the sexes was because women just didn’t understand the concept of materiality. After all, a car is so much more expensive that a pair of shoes. Shouldn’t you spend much more time on a car decision than on a shoe decision? Now that I am working on my emotional intelligence I realize that it is exactly because of materiality that women spend so much time on a shoe decision and men, so much on cars.
So, you’re probably wondering what is so special about this concept of materiality. This concept is a prevalent one professionally but it has not always crept successfully into the hands of the people working in businesses. This may be due to the fact that ancient proverbs seem to go against the concept of materiality. In fact an old Scottish proverb advises people to “Take care of your pennies and your dollars will take care of themselves.” This proverb is in fact ass-backward. What you should be doing is minding your dollars and paying no attention to your pennies.
Something is material if it matters. Matters to what? Well it could be to you, your boss, the customer. The point is if you want to spend your time wisely at work and not waste it, you should only spend time on things that are material, not on things that are immaterial. Don’t waste your time on stuff that doesn’t matter and if you do this one thing well, you’ll find that you’re almost never scrambling for time.
Back to shoe shopping. Why would anyone spend more time shopping for shoes than shopping for a car? Well it all comes down to materiality but with a twist. Materiality isn’t always just about the money. Sometimes, the emotional impact matters more than the monetary one. Some people really care about how they look in pair of shoes and couldn’t care less about what their car says about them. Others have a much stronger emotional connection to a car than to shoes.
What is material to one person, isn’t material to another. But the same principle holds at work. Spend your time only on stuff that matters, stuff that is material to your success and the company’s success.
