Archive for March, 2009

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100 Best Business Books of All Time

18 March, 2009

bookicon2
 The 100 Best Business Books of All Time
What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You
By: Jack Covert, Todd Sattersten
This book was published last month, and does what it says in the title – lists the best books, and tells you why they’re important.

The books are also listed online – take a look and see how many you’ve read (I got to 17, although I have to confess one or two of those I didn’t quite finish). And you can vote; the authors will publish a new edition of the book next  year, which makes the “of all time” part of the title sound a little odd, but in any case there’s an online vote.
On a completely separate site – although many of the same books are mentioned – you can contribute a story to your favourite business book.
After you’ve submitted your story, you can download a “badge” for your blog to display which is your favourite, unfortunately WordPress doesn’t display it as prettily as the site delivers it.

The story I contributed was on Presentation Zen, by  Garr Reynolds – it’s a long time favourite of mine, and if you haven’t already used it you should. It’s the clearest guide to how to improve your presentations, and make powerpoint into an effective tool, that I’ve read.

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Posted in Book Review, Business | 1 Comment »

And the ads for the girls?

16 March, 2009

I went to a movie this weekend, a movie that featured a lot of sparkly shoes, pretty clothes, champagne parties and a predictably happy ending. A movie some would call a chickflick. The few men in the audience were on dates, at a guess the audience demographic was female (80%) and young (18-35). So the movie had found the right target.

The ads presented before the movie were interesting.

Ad 1: Grolsch
It’s a beer I like, but this particular ad features a famous architect (Roberto Meyer) and a famous rockstar (Barry Hay) discussing blueprints. Two middle-aged guys making witty comments about architecture and sharing a beer.

Target audience male, 30+.
Ad 2: Killzone
Killzone is a playstation multiplayer game. It’s a particularly violent game, you can get a taste of the ad here.

Target audience: male, 30+
Ad 3: Adidas
One of the “houseparty” advertisements from Adidas, with shots of skateboarding, tagging, dancing, painting, swimming… all young and happy people. Ratio of men to women = 3:2

Target audience: both sexes (more male?) under 30,
Ad 4: Axe
This is an ad for male deodorant, set in a caveman village. Where the caveman wearing axe gets to wear leather, ride a bison, and of course – get the girl. The ads can be seen in its entirety here.

Target audience: male, 30ish

There’s not really anything wrong with the ads per se, but they’re missing their demographic. Women do drink beer, play online games and wear sports shoes. Potentially they may buy deodorant for their boyfriends or partners. But none of these ads really targetted women. None.

Why is that?

A similar line of ads could have included Coke, Wii,  Nike, L’Oreal. All of whom have products that suit women and produce ads that are more relevant for women.

The media sellers from the movie theatres are not smart about their sales strategy. They’re lazily selling in bulk avoiding all the tools marketers should use. If they used market segmentation tools to understand to whom the movies are targetted they could sell the advertising space to the right companies at a premium.

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Posted in Advertising, Marketing | Leave a Comment »

The Crisis Explained

14 March, 2009

There are lots of videos on youtube trying to explain the crisis, 275 results for “financial crisis explained”, most of which are talking heads – watching them generally makes my eyes glaze over. There are some attempts at cartoon style simplifcations – most of which display get distracted by the narrators anger at the banks/regulators/government.

But there is one that stands out, it’s the rather brilliant work of Jonathan Jarvis. It’s clear and simple, but not over simplified. There’s not too much attitude in it.

more about “The Crisis of Credit Visualized on Vimeo“, posted with vodpod

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Posted in crisis, finance, video | Leave a Comment »

Gurus

12 March, 2009

I went to a seminar today given by C.K. Prahalad, author of “The New Age of Innovation“, discussing innovation and strategy. He’s an entertaining speaker, stimulating and teasing the audience.

Much of his speech focussed on the two big insights from his book, summarised as N=1 and R=G.

N=1
One consumer at a time		 This encompasses the idea that successful, innovative businesses will customise the consumer experience to an individual level. He pointed to examples such as NikeID, iPod.
R=G
Resources are global		 Few companies will have all the resources within the company to create these individual experiences so will rely on other companies and form partnerships

None of this felt new or startling to me, the book was published a year ago – but that’s not it. We’d discussed the same sort of concepts in a class I took at Nyenrode almost 10 years ago.

I found the question session more interesting; when asked about the current crisis his reaction was that we’re seeing a “fundamental reset of the finanical systems” adding that a year ago “no-one would have predicted you’d be able to buy a cup of coffee for the price of three GM shares”. He advised that the only certainty he could see is that we will be doing things differently “you can’t do more of the same to get out of this”.

As with any seminar we were anxious to know what was the takeaway – and the presenter obliging asked him “what should we be doing tomorrow?”

C.K. Prahalad’s answer was “Don’t do anything tomorrow morning”

There’s answer I can use I thought, but he explained that to act without understand was doomed so time needs to be spent analysing, reflecting, thinking. And then when we do act we should “Think Big”, “Start Small” and “Scale Fast”.

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Posted in Business, Innovation | Leave a Comment »

Digital Is Forever

11 March, 2009

What happens to your web presence when you die? Does it hang around forever? With much of our personal administration done online how do our families handle those accounts? And now that we have “virtual” friends and relationships online, does a withering avatar inform them of our demise?

digital_tattooThere’s a new service to be launched next month, called Legacy Locker, which provides storage of all your online profiles, logins and passwords and will release them to a family member in the vent of your death (and on provision of a death certificate and other documentation).

It will certainly easier to go through this process once, rather than multiple times with each social networking/blogging/email/service website.

They’re not the only ones to contemplate this issue, a Dutch networking site Mediamatic has been contemplating it more from a philosophical point of view. They’ve created an exhibition “Ik R.I.P” (Ik = I in Dutch), which is billed as “an exhibition about death, internet and self-representation”. There’s a matching website where you can leave a sort of digital will, linked to one of several online profiles. The focus here is more on the social aspect of what happens after your death, whereas Legacy Locker looks at the very practical problem of your personal information and services online.

Given how much of my life is now online, it makes sense to plan for aspects of my death online.

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Posted in Innovation, think outside the box, Toys | Leave a Comment »

The Law of Unintended Consequences

6 March, 2009

There’s a law in the Netherlands regarding temporary contracts, it says that you cannot have three consecutive temporary contracts with the same employer. The third one should be a permanent contract with all the rights that that entails.

It sounds great in theory.

But the very practical result is that low cost companies simply give two long-term temporary contracts and then don’t renew. However good the performance of the person. This is especially true of call centres and other “low-skilled” work areas.

So rather than protecting workers the law means that many people are now let go, with no redundancy package, into the worst economic climate for finding work in a decade, while the company will recruit new blood and will receive a subsidy to train them.

There’s something wrong there.

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Posted in HR | Leave a Comment »

Who stays, who goes, who decides.

1 March, 2009

The news is full of financial woes, failing companies and bailouts. Many of the company recovery plans include layoffs, in the thousands – and representing 5-10% of many companies.

So far the focus has been on the “big picture”, and as the decisions are being made we’re starting to see the effects – on our colleagues. For most it sucks, for a few – a very few – it’s a welcome relief and they can fund a big change.

Who goes?

Who goes?

But how is the decision made?

  1. First in, first out
    It has the advantage of being easy to decide, but may be expensive;
    - long service people will receive higher redundancy packages
    - your company loses valuable experience
    - you may put the company at risk of an age discrimination case
  2. Last in, first out
    Again this is relatively easy to decide, but also has some costs;
    - some of those new people are talents, and you spent time and money hiring them into key positions, presumably because the skills did not exist within the company.
  3. Bottom 10%
    Using the lowest performers based on their recent performance review, it’s seductively simple; but
    - good managers will retrain, change roles or remove the worst performers every year so by removing 10% across the board you may punish efficient (and money making) business units more than inefficient ones.
  4. Who wants to go
    Making those redundant who do want to go has the advantage of removing a lot of personal anguish for both managers and employees however
    - it’s unlikely to be in large enough numbers to meet cost cutting goals (and if it is you may have other, unconsidered problems.
    - if the “volunteers” are in key positions you may struggle to find a replacement internally, or make a case for external recruitment
  5. Anyone the boss doesn’t like
    While I suspect that this is a factor on occasion – perhaps when distinguishing between two otherwise equal candidates for a layoff- it’s not a useful, fair or legal strategy.
  6. Structural
    By analysing the work done in the department/business unit or company, including prioritising tasks you can assess which roles are less critical and make a decision on that. This has the added advantage of removing the analysis of performance or personalities for at least the first steps.

So what is the best answer?

I think a combination; the structual approach to make the high level decisions, possibly inline with any strategy changes that are also required. This will generate a list of positions that need to be removed. Then within each position chose the person who must leave based on a combination of “who wants to go?” and performance analysis.

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Posted in HR | Leave a Comment »

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