From the monthly archives:

May 2010

Move the numbers

by nick on May 28, 2010

Someone recently told me about a conversation they’d had with Henry Engelhardt, the founder and CEO of Admiral Insurance. Engelhardt, an American, said the key to his success has been managing to the numbers.

At the close of business each day he gets a report (presumably a dashboard) of his core KPIs. One sheet of A4 tells him exactly how his business is doing. He says us Brits don’t manage by the numbers enough.

But isn’t leading and managing a business all about moving the numbers?

Feed more of the hungry, house more of the homeless;
Decrease the cost of sales, grow stakeholder value;
More page views, fewer bounces;
Acquisition costs down, conversion rates up;
Increase quality, decrease errors;
More support, fewer complaints;
Waste less, save more;
Ship more goods, shrink the deficit;
More followers, less churn;
Golf handicap down, stamina up (more a metephor, but you get it).

If you agree with Engelhardt, what numbers are you trying to move this month? This year?

Frank Tyger said, “Progress is not created by contented people.”

{ 1 comment }

George says billion, I say bull s**t

by nick on May 21, 2010

Yet again this savings figure of £6 billion is caught on the newswire this week. What a joke.

Our deficit is in the region of £167 billion. Trumpeting about saving £6 billion in a year is the fiscal equivalent of downgrading your weekly toilet paper and tea bag shopping to Tesco’s value range – all well and good but really a drop in the ocean. Let’s get our eye on the prize, the RIGHT prize.

The interest payment on this deficit is nearly £42 billion. On interest! That’s more than we spend on defence and more than three times our policing budget. We should all be praying to the house of credit that we don’t lose our AAA rating or we can add another £5 billion p.a. to our troubles. It’s starting to look like a Guy Ritchie movie, isn’t it?

The real issue is that after the longest period of consistent economic growth in our history – 16 years – we were spending 4.5% of our national income more than we raised in tax. You don’t need advanced math to know that puts you in the red.

Forget ring fencing, surely nothing is off the table. Scrutiny belongs everywhere, including our three largest areas of spending: social security, health and education. All budgets, from the Olympics to waste collections must come under microscope.

Our medicine will certainly be a bitter pill to swallow but Greece is the starkest warning to anyone who thinks simply muddling through is an option. Debt is a powder keg waiting for fireworks night.

With a new face in 11 Downing Street I was really hoping to hear a more honest fiscal message than £6 billion but I guess we’ll have to wait until the emergency budget. Emergency – what an understatement.

{ 0 comments }

Childish business passions

by nick on May 17, 2010

Teddy Eddy

Teddy Eddy

My daughter was given charge of the class teddy last week and became completely engrossed with him. He was part of nearly every sentence – Teddy Eddy this, Teddy Eddy that. They were instantly joined at the hip: at the dinner table, in the bathroom, washing hands, cleaning teeth, bedtime story and, of course, in bed itself.

This OTT passion was completely out of the blue and somewhat overwhelming. You honestly couldn’t hold a winning lottery ticket with more fervour than she did with this scruffy bear.

Seeing it, I was reminded of meeting an excellent facilitator, Pammy Johal of Backbone. Pammy is a captivating individual and exactly the sort of person you’d want to be stuck in a lift with. Our conversations have run into cycling. She’s confessed she’s mad on her four bikes; they’re her babies.

To calibrate her self-proclaimed madness she told me about her selling an old Trek bike. She bumped into the lady that bought this bike from her a couple of years later in the supermarket. “How are you enjoying the bike?” Pammy asked. “Dunno really. It’s at my sister’s. I think it’s in her shed,” came the unwelcome reply.

Pammy was so desperate for her (former) bike – her offspring – to be with a family that loved her, she wrote the lady a cheque there and then to buy the bike back for the original sale price. The beloved Trek was repatriated.

Yes, these are two extreme examples of passion but what if you could get your teams feeling and acting 10% of that level toward your products, your services, your clients? What would 50% look like?

Drucker’s infamous dictum goes along the lines of, ‘Business is all about finding and retaining customers.’ A fraction of the passion shown above would have your clients returning every time – the trouble is fostering it certainly isn’t child’s play.

How are you enabling your team to be passionate?

{ 0 comments }

Negotiation 101

by nick on May 10, 2010

Nick CleggYour lecturer this week, Nick Clegg.

When in a position of strength:

  • Have Suitor A believe they can be replaced by Suitor B at no cost to yourself;
  • Indicate to both Suitors how good the other is with you and your organisation;
  • Have Suitor A and B both believe they are playing second fiddle to each other;
  • Leave no stone unturned and explore every option from the start gun – you can never anticipate all the outcomes;
  • While various suitors are making offers, consider what all your stakeholders would appreciate and have other suitors make counter offers from those positions thus keeping momentum towards your goals;
  • Have your spokespeople dirty their hands with the groundwork leaving you free to play the trump cards in the 11th hour;
  • Keep your private thoughts just that, private. (Mr Clegg said far too much about who he’d do deals with during his campaign).

Note to dealmakers: this leverage negotiation can only work when you are strongly courted by suitors who appear, to each other, to offer you similarly successful products/outcomes. Sound familiar?

Questions:
Is Mr Clegg regretting what he wished for?
Will he overplay his hand?
Will he be wrongfooted?
Is it all a poisoned chalice?

{ 0 comments }

Where there’s muck…

by nick on May 4, 2010

Rebranding is an ugly word. All too often it’s a euphemism for ‘we were rubbish but a cleaner logo and new strapline means you should forgive our history and buy into this new stuff.’ Perversely, not rebranding is one of the reasons Mr Brown is going to be punished so badly on Thursday.

But I am a fan of change. I love improvement and progress and no one needs that more than a trio of uber-brands: Toyota, BP and Nike. All three have had a disastrous time in 2010 but the BP spill is sickening beyond belief. All three are surely hiring branding experts to refocus messages and ensure customer buy in?

But that’s the problem with most branding. It’s not the logo, or font, or jingle, it’s what the company does that makes it what it is. That’s why the purest marketing is a reflection what you are (your true story), not what Madison Avenue portrays you to be. Actions are what customers truly judge you on. The slickest branding in the world won’t get you to invest in Bernard Madoff!

So, Nike needs Tiger to stay on the wagon, Toyota needs consumer confidence more than we need oxygen and BP (along with everything they’re about to devastate) need a biblical miracle.

Nope, branding really isn’t about logo, is it?

{ 0 comments }