Steve Jobs said, “This is really hot,” when he unveiled the iPhone 4 at his Worldwide Developers Conference last month. He wasn’t joking.
It took Apple 72 days to sell a million of their original iPhone when it launched in 2007. Last year, the iPhone 3GS sold a million units in three days, a benchmark it took the iPad took 28 days to achieve. But all these look positively lethargic compared to the iPhone 4 and Apple’s most successful launch in its history: they’ve sold over 1.7 million phones in just three days since its release on June 24.
Estimates for Q3 claim sales of 10.2 million units, rising to 12.2 million for Q4.
The really interesting thing is that 77% of those early sales were to existing iPhone owners. Over three-quarters of sales are to folks who are upgrading! That’s the very definition of a want, not a need.
As Seth Godin might say, seek out committed customers and harvest a tribe by finding/making products for them. Inspire and reship.
Steve Jobs is the ultimate tribe leader. Love him or loath him, make no mistake you’re watching the Pied Piper of tech, folks.
Old news: technology and consumerism are intertwined. Simple example, the cheque book and then the debit card were tech replacements for cash.
Today’s smart phones and the rush of tablets we’re about to see really are changing the landscape now, not just tomorrow. Watch Scoble interview the head of eBay mobile, Steve Yankovich to see how serious one of the globe’s largest retailers is about mobile.
They’re serious about augmented reality; serious about decoupling from the desktop PC; and serious about going truely global. It’s 25 minutes long but hang in there, the second half is more ‘business’ than the first.
I was reminded this week that management is about doing things right and that leadership is doing the right thing. I’m sure you’ve come across that before.
But I’ve been thinking about small business leadership and exactly what that all encompassing term means on the ground.
Surely everything a leader of an SME does needs its output to ultimately fall into one of these two categories:
Scale – grow turnover, profits, clients, reach, output, customer perception etc; or,
Simplicity – repeating a good day every day; setting in place the systems to cope with stormy waters.
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.”
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.
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.
Nestle are used to their fair share of bad press; students the world over have seen to that. But March 2010 is when they will go into social media case study history.
For anyone who’s not read the full saga, here’s the short version: a video was staged which drew a play on eating Kit-Kat and orangutans’ fingers. Nestle had the video taken down but, of course, it reappeared. They chased it around the ‘net like a drunk trying to bath a cat and made life pretty miserable for themselves by fumbling over logo violations when Greenpeace were organised.
I’m struggling here between ethics and communication tactics. If you make a bad product – deem that as you will – then, with or without a great web interaction, you deserve to be called on it. But, lets assume you aren’t evil personified and you deserve your place in the world of commerce, what do you do when attacked online?
Despite what some experts portray, social media isn’t always a simple mirror, signal, manoeuvre affair. On top of the immense variables, there is the fear of inflaming situations, adding sugar to the fermenting jar that forums and blog comments can become. I don’t believe there is a definitive three, five or ten-point plan. Social media has only one absolute for all organisations: listening. If it’s nothing else for you, it’s an opportunity to listen.
That said, Seth Godin believes he’s got an answer: brands in public. He launched this aggregator back in September last year.
Strangely for a Godin fanboy I wasn’t convinced at launch. And after six months or so I can’t say I’m overly impressed with their client list – no Coke, no Cisco, no Microsoft, all of whom are being critiqued hugely online. If anything, is this not a $400/month garden where a bad ‘vibe’ can grow? From a brand manager’s standpoint, doesn’t she prefer any negatives to be disparate across the web, rather than collate neatly in one screenshot? Of course, the positives mentioned online will also look more powerful together.
Which brings us right back to our variables problem: join in and risk inflaming the situation or enter and solve problems with a swath of your service sword? The trouble is unless the Nestles of the world truly engage (as in adopt some of their philosophies, ecological or otherwise) with the likes of Greenpeace, they’re likely to find hugging a tree has morphed into overtaking a Facebook wall as the militant tool of choice.
But don’t be frozen by fear. The wonderful John Battelle at Federated Media recently wrote, “…all of our customers are already operating in social media. You can’t pretend otherwise. And it’s better to engage, make mistakes, admit those mistakes, and move on, than to not engage at all. I call this “conversational judo,” and suggest we all practice it, daily. Twice on Sunday, perhaps….”
MPs have published a report this week, from the Business and Enterprise Committee, wagging fingers at Kraft for closing Somerdale after it promised otherwise.
Did anyone old enough to spell ‘business’ actually think Kraft weren’t going to slash costs as quickly as they could? As the song goes, the first cut is the deepest.
Does Mandelson et al actually believe Irene Rosenfeld – Kraft’s iron lady – cares one iota about what they do, let alone think? What possible retribution can they threaten her with? Perhaps they’re angling for an excutive discount at the latest coffee shops in town?
Westminster were stupid enough to believe the American’s rhetoric, now they’re scoring own goals by commissioning a report whose Executive Summary could read, “Hey everyone, we were naive schoolboys. Look at what the nasty business lady did under our noses.”
Mr Cameron has started his election campaign referring to the voting masses with the phrase “the great ignored” (stolen from Nixon’s silent majority). Maybe he was actually referring to the Business and Enterprise Committee.
Did we really need to spend money on this report? What’s the expression, ‘fool me once…?’
We want the best for our teams so we work hard. Sometimes we recognise that we’re not winning so we turn it up a notch and work even harder. But wait, that’s not working either.
At some point, we can see the failing – at least internally – but all too often we plough on with the bit between our teeth and nothing new in the arsenal that’ll change the situation. I bet you’ve seen it happen recently in your organisation.
It calls for something new. Some assistance. For the hubris to say, “I’m struggling with this project. Could I pick your brains for a minute?”
Help is the winner (and your team really want to win, don’t they?) so it’s counter intuitive not to seek it. But asking is the really painful bit. I don’t know about you, but I want to be asked rather than witness eleventh-hour meltdowns?
It tells about his unorthodox hiring process, about his talent development and his $200k consultant’s bill. But essentially, it’s about his business’s culture.
Culture is surely one of the most intangible aspects of business and as such can be the most frustrating. The culture can all too easily be clockwatching and pilfering in an entrenched oligopoly, but if you’re looking to push scale or improve net profits then you’ll find it almost impossible without the correct culture – whatever that is.
Culture in a company dictates whether you follow a 50,00 word business plan religiously or you hand the bank manager a one page outline of your ideas and put your best foot forward. Fred Goodwin’s culture of ‘win at all costs’ crippled RBS and Dick Fuld’s sent Lehman off the cliff. Culture is what Scorsese and Spielberg embody in their actors before letting them navigate a scene.
Isn’t this all really HR’s job? Well, I’m afraid I see too many organisations with HR departments that seem to treat their jobs in two facets: personnel operations coupled with a fear (and avoidance) of legal proceedings. Do you know many HR folk who treat their fellow employees like those at Nick’s Pizza & Pub? I’m sure you know more who would say that it’s not their remit, that line managers and supervisors should push those boundaries, not HR.
In an entrepreneurial business like Nick’s the form filling takes a distant second place to structure, satisfaction, autonomy and development. If your culture’s right then surely the marketing becomes the story of that result?
Akamai’s ‘State of the Internet report’ shows the average UK broadband speed is 3.5 Mbps and just one in 12 surfers are achieving 5 Mbps and above. At present, South Koreans can get speeds of up to 100 Mbps and Soth Korea plans on raising the bar further with a tenfold increase in their ultra broadband to 1 Gbps by 2012 (200 times faster than our ‘fast’ 5 Mbps).
Whitehall’s shoot-for-the-stars plan? Well, their Universal Service Commitment wants every postcode in the UK to get a bare minimum of 2Mbps by 2012 (yep, just 2Mbps). In order to install this they’re talking about a 50p per month tax on landlines (cumulatively that’s around £1billion).
£6 a year to get a fibre optic line everywhere probably sounds like a reasonable deal. But the naysayers point out that the poorest – and least likely to take advantage of it – will be funding the speed and convenience for the wealthier.
It could be argued that if broadband is so important for the future of the UK’s infrastructure then our Government should step up and make funding available. But let’s be honest, as our economy’s gone to hell in a hand-basket, the IT slush fund disappeared into RBS long ago. No, those who want to use the infrastructure to become more successful need to take care of things themselves – nobody is coming to help (at least not any help worth having).
That’s where I think they’re looking to the wrong group to fund this. There’d be more traction and less voter pushback for a Business Broadband project (that’s my new label for uber-broadband).
UK business should be canvassed to put its hand in its pocket. Granted, now isn’t the best time to ask businesses for a handout, but when is?
Many large businesses operate on leased lines (such as banks) and don’t suffer the same bottleneck problem of demand we do but they too would benefit from faster coverage and the chance of increasing customer interaction.
This is an investment in their future, not a cost. As such, perhaps we could be allowed some accountancy leeway where we could do some fixed asset right down.
Contributing to it could be thought of like a church collection: the plate goes past everyone but only those who wish to partake do so. That said, we’d need the stern, furrowed brow of a priest-like character to make sure we all give fairly and not shirk out of our cumulative responsibility.
That’s where I see some A-list business folk coming in (think Alan Leighton, Alan Sugar, Deborah Meaden etc). These ‘celebs’ could form a steering committee. Their real value would be in persuading CEOs and proprietors to part with cash; they’d push the hard sell by demonstrating an understanding of their difficulties and a vision of the future.
Branches of request:
Peer levy – perhaps by business category e.g. shop keepers donate £500p.a. Perhaps by staff number (e.g. £75 per employee) or by turnover (e.g. £200 per £100k t/over).
Profits – pressure should be levied at those who stand to gain the most. That’s Internet service providers, search engines, telecoms companies and larger multichannel retailers for a start. Get the telecoms guys to dig as deep for this as they did for their 3G licences. Google donated $2 million towards the upkeep of Wikipedia this month because the strength of one affects the other.
Individual – the pot would also take private contributions. If Robbie Williams wants to throw in £100k to get a better Spotify connection it’s ready and willing to accept.
Google launched the Fibre for Communities program this year in the states. Essentially they want to pair up with providers and show the world that super fast broadband can get to the masses. The difference with a partner like Google is they’ll do so much of the heavy lifting. Personally, I’d take my Universal Service Commitment to the shredder and have Mr Mandelson on a plane to California (with his new pot of business money), persuading the Google team that the UK should be the first outside the USA to benefit from their new insight.
Have I got it all wrong here? If not, what would you and your organisation be willing to give over the next three years (if anything)?
The cigarette brand Windsor Blue is modernising their packaging. They’re “now the number one choice for above king size length adult smokers downtrading into the economy priced cigarette sector. The new pack design will build on this success,” says Rachel Smith, brand manager.
Compare this to the comments Seth had for Madecasse chocolate and their packaging of ethical African chocolate.
Both products demand a growth in sales to justify the cost of the design and reprinting. Given that cigarette and chocolate sales have proven buoyant in times of recession, which design gig would you rather boot up Photoshop for?
At first look ethical farming versus death is a no-brainer. Yet perversely, imagine how seriously you’d take the flair of the girl who lifted Windsor’s sales by another 15 points thanks to a redesign.
If a salesman turns up for a meeting in new Porsche 911, he’d better be flogging footy players, not underwear or umbrellas to BHS.
Most salespeople understand the principles of the game: set a tone that’s both professional and in line with your brand and product offering.
That’s why I’m amazed at business people who rock up to meetings in £40k cars and then produce cheap, battered, old laptops from leather briefcases.
If you’re selling top-end tyres, tiaras, towels, till systems or toothpicks, surely it’s unwise to do so with dated equipment?
Salesmen want you to procure something with an intangible benefit associated with brand equity (think perfume for the classic example where a tiny fraction of the cost goes to production). My problem is they often do so while displaying a lack of desire themselves. Yes it’s shallow. And yes, playing the game is a branding exercise.
It’s the equivalent of a builder turning up at your house in a beat up old transit, while he tells you how much quality and added value he brings with his £30k conservatories.
Cheap is perfectly understandable – frugal is fine – but when you’re selling luxury, quality or style, know that you should display some yourself as well (let’s call it ‘acting out’).
Easy win: an £800 MacBook comes over way better than a four year-old Dell some folks would schlep around. (And, no, don’t kid yourself, it’s not JUST about the label.)
You’re having a conversation with a company Big Wig, perhaps an interview, and she asks, “What do you think of this social media phenomenon?”
Well, imagine it’s the 1960s. Horses pull milk floats, colour TV is just around the corner for most households, shillings are in your pocket and the Bay of Pigs has petrified the world. In between watching Steptoe and Son and listening to Elvis or the Beatles, someone asks you, “What do you think about this telephone phenomenon?”
With 20/20 hindsight you could’ve said, “It’s going to be amazing in ways we can’t yet imagine. The infrastructure we and other countries are laying now will be used for revolutions in communications and commerce that sound like science fiction if we talk about them now (think fax and Internet). User take-up will be so overwhelming that the lines will be stretched to breaking point and the ‘phones themselves will become like your watch or wedding ring – always with you. In short, phones will become an integral part of our personal and business lives.
The ‘60s Big Wig would nod sagely, probably with a slight smirk, and take the conversation elsewhere. But the answer to the question if you’re asked tonight at dinner is that, “History will repeat itself here…”
Following their best Christmas to date, the very on-form John Lewis was recently voted Britain’s best shop by Verdict and its 6,000 shoppers. Let’s be honest, what’s not to like? The stores are upmarket but unpretentious. They’ve a quality product offering and peerless customer service.
John Lewis is different from normal retailers. They’re known as a bell-wether for high street trading, not because they mimic other retailers but because they report sales figures weekly as opposed to the normal quarterly results from the likes of Tesco and M&S. They are incredibly transparent; a throwback to being a ‘partnership’, owned by its 69,000 employees partners. This transparency and an old fashioned willingness to ‘serve’ clearly run through this business.
Although, that said, the latest ForeSee Christmas E-Retail Satisfaction Index tells a slightly different story of their online offering. In this brief but excellent study of the top 40 retailers (according to traffic), Amazon trump John Lewis as clear overall winners.
JL did come out on top when looking at the multichannel category, ahead of Boots and HMV. Most surprisingly of the pure plays (Internet only retailers) ASOS rank seventh, behind QVC and M&M Direct.
Regardless, both polls show JL is getting it very right where its customers are concerned. If I were Andrea O’Donnell, JL’s Commercial Director, I’d be very pleased but a little puzzled as to how a cold pure play like Amazon could best me when customers can’t even speak to an individual, let alone be impressed by one. Email updates obviously go a long way.
I was asked this week, ‘What does a manager really do?’ It was a fairly innocuous, rhetorical, jovial question from a well-paid, senior person.
The graduate switch flicked and I immediately thought, ‘seeing that the company’s goals are met’. After all, it’s the leader’s job to define and create those goals and aims, and it’s management’s job to realise them. Right?
But managing people is rarely a squeaky clean affair. I’m not a huge supporter of lofty job titles as they can often cause internal problems, but anyone claiming to be a ‘Manager’ will find themselves wearing several hats (in no particular order):
go between
consultant (to those above and below)
amateur psychologist
negotiator
dispute resolver
idea instigator
organiser
governor
role model
decision maker (the buck stops and all that)
communications expert (surely THE key to management)
soldier (ever metaphorically fallen on your sword?)
captain
big brother/sister (you need to eat more, drink less, curb spending)
counsellor
teacher
steward
servant
policy pursuer
change agent
supporter (of others, of the different viewpoint – perhaps the weaker voice)
challenger (of the status quo)
It strikes me that a manager who only wants to manage isn’t anywhere near up to the job. The seven-letter title is low-balling the variety of commitment needed in all but the safest of environments.
MPs follow their vocation diligently to improve our land;
teachers are wholly dedicated to the development of children;
police and law courts will keep criminals off our streets;
companies believe staff are their greatest asset;
hospitals are clean heavens of care.
What assumptions have you made about that meeting you’re holding this week? Might they be worth revisiting?
Piano maker Kemble & Co is closing after nearly 100 years producing over 350,000 pianos. They were the UK’s last large scale piano manufacturer.
It’s a reflection of yesteryear when a piano was a central asset in the home. Mum and dad would teach their kids the odd tune in the hope of lighting their musical spark. Much more likely now to see a Playstation and laptop alongside the Sky box. Even if it were still fashionable, I doubt many modern living rooms are large enough to house a piano. I’m sure Kemble is a wonderful manufacturer but they belong to a sunshine industry that is clearly setting.
Another sign of the times is the UK release of Amazon’s e-reader, the Kindle. If I were a newspaper boss I’d be doing everything in my power to have my subscription service available to e-readers and smart phones. If I want eyeballs, I need to be where they are.
So why on earth are only four titles available via Amazon? The Evening Standard and Metro are free in London, but not so here. Hello! Amazon’s profits were up 68% in Q3 with the Kindle now their largest selling item by value and by volume (that’s staggering!). The music industry was far too slow to realise digital was a game changer, you’ve got to ask will the publishing and newspaper guys have learnt their lesson?
I can’t help but think of the Royal Mail strikes in the same (dimming) light. With the CWU seemingly taking glee at delaying some 50 to 60 million items, surely they’re speeding up their own inevitable death march.
Right or wrong as the union’s position may be, letters are in the same ‘sunshine industry’ as pianos and newspapers. No picket line will change that.
Marc Prensky is acknowledged to have coined the term Digital Natives, but when the business world heard Rupert Murdoch use it, the term became commonplace (remember he owns MySpace).
The reference is to the swathes of people who don’t think twice about technology being an integral part of their everyday lives. It’s not exclusively a generation Y (18-28 year-olds) phenomenon either, even though saturation surely peeks there. Two ingredients strike me most about young digital natives:
They are not colour blind. They are arguably the first to start/finish higher education with a true post-racism attitude. An Obama Whitehouse can only help cement that mindset.
They are not data phobic. On the contrary, they often broadcast and share masses of information in an open display of incredible honesty.
Seems to me companies might benefit from having a digital native or two in their organisation, regardless of the CV’s relevant work experience. How about you?
The preeminent Seth Godin commented on a Charles Blow report in the NY Times, pointing out that the internet’s low barrier of entry had led to the markets flooding. He said, “If you can’t sell to 1 in 1000, why market to a million?”
The numbers from Blow’s piece were, “…of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.”
This tells us the long tail of the Web makes Pareto’s 80-20 principle defunct. (Perhaps poor salespeople might stop overly quoting it?) The Amazons and the Play.coms of the world are now playing to different laws.
Wouldn’t you just love to get your hands on their analytics to see it with your own eyes?
Photo: Chris Anderson (from Wikipedia), who coined the phrase Long Tail in his Wired magazine article October 2004
The Web makes the impossible possible. Just imagine the pitch for eBay on a 1998 version of Dragons’ Den. “You bid a fraction of the real value… may sell for less than you paid for it… pay before you’ve even seen the goods, let alone held them… trust the seller to post the product to you… count on people writing nice reviews about you… etc.”
How about the pitch for an online encyclopaedia compiled by unpaid, unprofessional authors? Would you have fancied investing in a Wikipedia concept a decade ago?
Tom Peters advocates not even starting a business until you’ve canvassed a huge range of opinion. He’s not looking at the middle ground but the edge, the ‘berserk.’ Peters said, “Never get seriously underway until you’ve surfaced a couple of ideas that score perfect 10s, or at least 8s, on the … Berserk Scale.”
Cue eBay, Wikipedia and Craigslist.
I’m not sure if many entrepreneurs would go there deliberately, but if you end up on that much of a fringe listening to the berserk, at least you should know you’re in good company.
Debating freelance pricing recently, I started thinking how many variables can affect daily rates:
Future proof – repeat business is virtually everyone’s goal. Will this project have a long-term effect (perhaps even an adverse one) on your business?
Order book – are you currently desperate for the phone to ring or are you (and your team of assistants) flat out?
Difficulty – is the project a walk in the park requiring little incremental input from you, or will it demand herculean effort?
Sacrifice – your time is a scarce resource, what will suffer as it’s taken? Will you need to shelve other projects or cancel your honeymoon?
Want – does the project team really want you on board? Really, REALLY want you?
Competition – are their 20 other freelancers willing and able to step into the breach for less than you currently charge?
Investment – are freelancers viewed as a cost or an investment? The latter will be regarded as beneficial in far-reaching areas; the former is a painful necessity to be stopped ASAP.
Development – what will the project bring to your personal and professional benefit?
Desire – do you want to work for the organisation and on this project? Will it bring satisfaction or fulfilment?
Add to this the insecurity of being freelance in the first instance: little job security, no guaranteed income or employee benefits (for better or worse).
Should all 9 to 5ers be thinking a little bit more like this?
“…That is what strategically building a strong brand is all about today. Sure it’s about being different and creating desire and preference. But it’s also about evoking compassion, passion and pride.”
I’d go a smidge further and say that since our near complete capitalist meltdown (not yet fully avoided) there’s a new strain of business ethic and decency breaking through the scorched earth. The bankers, real estate guys, mortgage brokers et al have vividly painted a canvas of greed followed by ruin. GM, once the largest company in the world, is just the latest example of how wrong things have been.
Non-myopic businesses can highlight the error of our ways and show a better understanding of decency, purpose and belief. Of not doing ‘it’ simply because you can; because it’s legal and within the rules or guidelines. Of doing more of the right thing even if it hurts your immediate bottom line.
Unfortunately it’s not going to be an en masse phoenix-like regeneration. Things will be much subtler and change will take time, but surely consumers will migrate to those organisations that act more correct: more ‘green.’
If only our politicians had realised more of this selflessly, rather than playing by the Enron book of ethics and being browbeaten into change by the Telegraph.
It’s the time of year when schools christen students with some work experience by sending them out to organisations to be blooded with genuine toil.
I vividly remember donning a snazzy tie and Hush Puppies and turning up for my fortnight’s work experience at a high street bank. They were great. No floor polishing or coffee making for me: I sorted the personal cheques (remember them?), I printed statements, I opened mail and weighed coins. They even gave me the code for the door so I could get back in from lunch!
But thinking about this also brought back memories of the cheery store manager. He was a large character that would be right at home holding forth in the golf club bar. On day one, I thought he was a nice chap.
Then I saw him grab one of the female teller’s backsides as she walked past him. Between repeating this on several prey and dishing out overly long hugs that had women craning their necks away from his leer, I soon changed my mind.
Sexist rubbish in the workplace has come a long way in twenty odd years but a business forum I recently attended tells me it’s not come far enough.
The opening speaker was littered with innuendo and lewd comments. Granted, there was a sporting slant to the day (Joe Lydon’s coaching talk was excellent) but the title of the event was ‘High Performance Society,’ not ‘Bar Room Tales of Totty.’ Three of the seven seats at my table complained; two left early asking for their money back.
We’ve still got further to go gents. Much further. Even your work experience student can probably point that out to you.
Photo: one of my favourite business women, Mary Portas
By day, Nick Fluck is a director of Tredz, a bicycle retailer with a strong web presence. By night, Nick can be found moonlighting on Digitally Minded, waxing un-lyrically about marketing, business, new media, technology and innovation. This semi-personal, part-professional blog is a collection of Nick’s weekly(ish) ramblings as the wannabe business partner/love child of Seth Godin Want to know more?
Steve Jobs said, “This is really hot,” when he unveiled the iPhone 4 at his Worldwide Developers Conference last month. He wasn’t joking.
Piano maker Kemble & Co is closing after nearly 100 years producing over 350,000 pianos. They were the UK’s 
Marc Prensky is acknowledged to have coined the term Digital Natives, but when the business world heard Rupert Murdoch use it, the term became commonplace (remember he owns MySpace).
The preeminent Seth Godin 
I’d go a smidge further and say that since our near complete capitalist meltdown (not yet fully avoided) there’s a new strain of business ethic and decency breaking through the scorched earth. The bankers, real estate guys, mortgage brokers et al have vividly painted a canvas of greed followed by ruin. GM, once the largest company in the world, is just the latest example of how wrong things have been.
It’s the time of year when schools christen students with some work experience by sending them out to organisations to be blooded with genuine toil.