Telstra CEO David Thodey (who won’t remember me, but I worked for him once) has refused to rule out a possible sale of Sensis, Telstra’s directory business that, apart from white and yellow phone books, also owns Trading Post, Whereis and other Internet-based businesses.
Hey, I’m not surprised. Sensis is a business that needs to be sold off while it still has value (estimated to be up to $7 billion Australian, according to the Herald Sun).
You can only win by being different, by offering a viable alternative for the consumer and, well, being the same isn’t much of an alternative.
I should add that my impression of the Trading Post is that it made life hard, not easy, and my perception was formed as a direct consequence of actually trying to use the service. Of course, in an age of fast Internet, and slick competitors like eBay, you just can’t make life difficult and get away with it. Continue Reading
It’s such a relief to know that I’m not the only one who thinks so.
Lyrics
I want to tell you all a story ’bout a Harper Valley widow wife
Who had a teenage daughter that attended Harper Valley Junior High
Well her daughter came home one afternoon and didn’t even stop to play
And she said, “Mama, I’ve got a note here from the Harper Valley PTA”
Well the note says “Mrs. Johnson, you’re wearing your dresses way too high
It’s been reported you’ve been drinkin’ and a runnin’ round with men and goin’ wild
Now we don’t believe you ought to be a bringin’ up your little girl this way”
And it was signed by the Secretary, Harper Valley PTA
Well it happened that the PTA was gonna meet that very afternoon
And boy, were they surprised as Mrs. Johnson wore her miniskirt into the room
And as she walked up to the blackboard I can still recall the word she had to say
She said “I’d like to address this meeting of the Harper Valley PTA
Now there’s Bobby Taylor sittin’ there and seven times he’s asked me for a date
And Mrs. Taylor sure seems to use a lot of ice whenever he’s away
And Mr. Baker can you tell us why your secretary had to leave this town
And shouldn’t widow Jones be told to keep her window shades all pulled completely down
Now Mr. Harper couldn’t be here ’cause he’s stayed too long in Kelly’s bar again
And if you smell Shirley Thompson’s breath you’ll find she’s had a little nip of gin
And then you have the nerve to tell me as a mother you think that I ain’t fit
Well this is just a little Peyton Place and you’re all Harper Valley hypocrites.”
Now I wouldn’t put you on because it really did, it happened just this way
That day my Mama socked it to the Harper Valley PTA
That day my Mama socked it to ‘em at the Harper Valley PTA
It feels good to be the boss, commander-in-chief of all you survey.
Of course, the job is dramatically elevated in status if you’ve earned a place on the latest Forbes list, The 200 Best Small Companies.
The Forbes list of America’s 200 Best Small Companies features enterprises that have annual revenue between $5 million and $750 million, have been publicly traded for at least a year and have a stock price no lower than $5.
Rankings are based on earnings growth, sales growth and return on equity in the past 12 months and over five years.
So who is the best?
(In USD, for the previous 12 months)
Lumber Liquidators, which operates hardwood flooring stores, earning $507M
Allegiant Travel, which provides discount flights and vacation packages for small market cities, earning $521M
Quality Systems, which develops information systems to automate medical practices, earning $257M
LHC Group, which provides home-based health care services, earning $467M
Green Mountain Coffee Roasters which distributes and sells coffee-related products, earning $716M
Transcend Services, which provides medical transcription services, earning $57M
Rackspace Hosting, which provides hosting and cloud computing services, earning $579M
NVE,which uses nanotechnology to make sensors for medical devices, earning $25M
American Public Education, which provides online post-secondary education for military and public service communities, earning $128M
American Science & Engineeringwhichmakes security X-ray detection systems, earning $234M
Dolby Laboratories whichdevelops audio technologies for entertainment and electronics industry, earning $719M
HMS Holdings whichprovides cost recovery services to government health care programs, earning $205M
Synaptics whichdesigns user-interface hardware for PCs and electronic devices, earning $473M
Jos. A. Bank Clothiers whichretails men’s clothing and apparel, earning $727M
PetMed Express whichmarkets prescription and nonprescription pet medications and products, earning $228M
SMALL businesses can tackle business giants by becoming clever – and taking on the big guys need not cost a fortune.
David and Goliath battles are more about common sense than anything else.
If you’re in a small business that wants to take on the big guns successfully, you need to exploit the failings of bigger businesses and capitalise on any openings – and competing on price is not the answer because big business will win hands down every time.
Follow these 8 marketing strategy tips to take on Goliath:
1. DON’T MAKE A FULL-FRONTAL ATTACK.
Goliath is bigger than you.
If you attack him full-frontal he’s going to roll right over the top of you.
It will almost certainly be a costly exercise (especially for you) – and potentially a disastrous one as well.
He has more money than you. He has more resources than you and he has more to lose than you.
What can you learn from spies? It seems a great deal. Here’s how what they do can be applied in your business.
In this interview, Kenneth Knight (who describes his job as helping the president of the United States and his administration “avoid surprise”) shares insights into how he evaluates threats, overcomes cognitive biases, and constructs scenarios—challenges familiar to most private-sector strategists.
In his job as the national intelligence officer for warning, Knight oversees a small team of analysts who serve as an institutionalized safeguard against risk—monitoring and challenging the analyses and assumptions of the broader intelligence community.
So what does he say are the Challenges facing Strategists?
In today’s world, there are a tremendous number of issues that don’t lie within a nation state, that don’t involve a military or defense-related kind of background. So trying to transform that system to be more adept, more dynamic, more able to deal with and anticipate emerging challenges in this global environment we’re in today is the hardest thing, because it’s not an organizational change as much as it is a mind-set and focus change.
Most experts become experts and rise to the top of our community because they have a very good analytic framework for looking at their issue. That allows them to process lots of information, put it in some kind of strategic context, and say something relevant and useful to the policy people.
A lot of times surprises occur when those analytic frameworks that the experts have—and have built their career on, and have built their experience on—no longer apply. And so we are constantly kind of pushing that and causing tension, where a nonexpert from my office is engaging with an expert and challenging their expert bias. I think the ways to get around that: there’s really two. And we’ve tried in both areas, and I think have made progress in both areas.
to me, it’s this constant articulation of what are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to avoid? And then a conscious examination of the world and the information you have in front of you to try to, from a possibilities-based perspective, imagine how this information and the situation you see developing could make an impact on those things you’re trying to accomplish.
I think this constant need to look at your own business model or your own, in our case, intelligence model, and to look at what are the baseline assumptions that you have that that model rests on and to challenge those—and not just in a check-the-box way, not just do an alternative assessment at the end of your baseline analysis and reconfirm your analysis, but to truly challenge them—to me it’s the only way, I think, to stay current and perhaps stay ahead of the curve.
I would say that not all analytic problems are the same. I think the kinds of issues we’re trying to deal with fall on a spectrum from the known knowable to the more complex chaotic. I think it was Joe Nye, when he was chairman of the National Intelligence Councils, who described this as mysteries and secrets, which is not a bad shorthand.
And it says that a year after the global economic system nearly collapsed, many companies are finally finding ways to increase profits under the new economic conditions.
But almost as many expect profits to continue falling, and executives have also indicated that their broader economic hopes remain fragile.
Many expect more government involvement in economies and industries over the long term.
So what else does the survey reveal? Here are some of the highlights:
Some companies have moved beyond merely coping with the crisis and are once again actively planning for the long term. Now, for the first time in a year, more respondents expect their companies’ profits to rise than fall in the near term. Product development and long-term planning are back to being high priorities for many companies, and most are optimistic about their prospects in the longer term.
In the longer run, many executives expect the globalization of financial and other markets to resume after slowing notably in 2009. They foresee additional significant changes in their industries and economies over the next five years, including a stronger government role in both.
While the crisis started in the United States, executives in North America have consistently indicated that it will end sooner than executives elsewhere expect. Those in the eurozone have consistently been gloomiest about their economic situation and outlook. But the pattern for expectations is essentially the same in all regions, indicating that the present crisis hasn’t fundamentally disconnected the world’s economies.
A majority of the executives don’t expect GDP to rise soon, and the responses also suggest other indicators of economic anxiety: 54 percent, for example, say that governments should scale back—but not stop—their support for economies.
The anxiety of the executives is also highlighted by the plurality—42 percent—of them still think “battered but resilient” is the best description of the economy over the next several months. This finding suggests that the respondents expect a long, slow recovery.
Expectations for profits are significantly brighter than they were six weeks ago, and expectations for customer demand are notably brighter. The share expecting that their companies will increase the size of the workforce over the next six months has risen to 26 percent, equaling—for the first time in a year—the share that expect it to decline.
The top current priorities of companies are a mix of short- and long-term moves, including cutting costs, developing new products, and working to ensure that organizations are flexible enough to respond to changing economic conditions.
Respondents from almost three-quarters of the companies expect them to be in a stronger competitive position five years from now than they were before September 2008.
We’ve all heard the term rightsizing, and the mere mention of the word serves as the catalyst for a room full of eyes to roll towards the heavens. Groan. Here we go again.
In this era of layoffs, restructures, downsizing (or should I say rightsizing), corporates have tended to grab the opportunity to reduce the cost of employing people with a flourish. And it’s easy to see why.
Inside the hallowed walls of your average corporation, more than half the people employed never ever deal with a customer. Compare that to a small business where 75% of employees are dealing with customers – and it doesn’t take Einstein to see it’s easy pickings for a corporate to target its human cost base.
And, in an era where quarterly results matter, and stock markets will whack your business hard if the numbers aren’t right, so there is plenty of incentive for senior management to look at ways to actively reduce costs. And often employees represent a large proportion of the cost.
So why then are there more downsides than upsides when it comes to restructuring.
Because a headcount reduction – in the absence of a program of work that looks to streamline business process (and this program of work needs to be initiated before the restructure and almost never is) – is one of the dumbest things for a business to do and yet smart well-paid executives keep on doing it. But you cannot reasonably expect fewer employees to do the same amount of work – instead you can reasonably expect a substantial impact on productivity and morale, and the increasing engagement of contractors to help bridge the gap in delivery left by the departure of employees. SO you might shift costs across budgets – but you ain’t shifting them out.
So before you slash and burn your headcount:
Put in place a program of reengineering processes and streamlining them.
Remove duplication of effort
Dismantle bureaucracies
Reduce cycle times
“Any company that is more successful at restructuring than reengineering will find itself getting smaller faster than it is getting better,” Hamel and Prahalad, authors of Competing for the Future, told us back in 1994. Words that still ring true today.
If you don’t pursue growth and new market opportunities with the same zest you apply to rightsizing your organisation and creating operational efficiency, you will die by the numbers you live for. And you may fatally risk the health of your entire business in the process.
