On the anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ fall, the question remains:
What, if anything, has changed in the mentality of the financial community?
While Wall Street wallows in tales of the fallen, a different, more promising approach to capitalism is rising.
Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest consumer products company, has just announced a stunning new business strategy to jump-start growth.
It begins in a startling, almost counterintuitive way—with company values and sense of purpose.
Invoke the heart and care about human needs, the strategy seems to say, and the money will follow.
New P & G CEO Bob McDonald, who assumed office in July, is on the road promoting P & G’s “purpose-inspired growth” strategy of “touching and improving more consumers lives in more parts of the world…more completely.”
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.
Over the course of my career, like everyone else I’ve faced a wide variety of marketing problems.
Most of them were not difficult to solve – provided I took off a textbook mentality and applied some plain old common sense.
It isn’t education that makes you great at marketing – although it helps. It isn’t attitude either – although that helps a lot too.
Experience counts for a lot too, so let’s not dismiss its important.
However, even more than these attributes, what really helps the most is plain old common sense, something that is in desperately short supply amongst marketers and business people in general – and best of all, you don’t need a university or a degree to learn it.
To just need to learn to think.
For Example, Common Sense Says That:
If you have a commodity product that you are trying to charge a 30% premium for and nobody’s buying it because they do not believe you can justify your pricing premium, you need to revisit your pricing or brand strategy.
If you use generic keywords to attract visitors to your website, your sales conversion ratio is going to look really ugly because you’re going to attract a lot of traffic, most of which is not remotely interested in buying your product.
If you do not move your brand with the times, it’s going to become tired and boring, and you are going to be eaten alive by someone else that is more progressive than you.
If you treat your employees disrespectfully, their morale will drop. They will stop being champions of your brand and your business. And if they are any good at what they do, they will leave you and take their experience and skills to someone who treats them better.
If your product does not deliver what it is expected to – or what you claim it will – word will spread and your brand will be damaged.
The best way to create brand goodwill is to build engagement between your customers and employees. You only need to look at social media traffic to get the gist of this piece of common sense.
So as you can see, common sense tells you a lot.
Often the solution to problems or challenges (for those with a preference for more politically-correct statements than me) is very simple and can be fixed with a dose of common sense.
And simple is good. Simple ideas are usually more powerful. They are quicker to implement.
They get locked into people’s minds. You’ll get results faster.
Keep everything as simple as possible. And that’s another thing common sense tells you.
Rule # 2 : The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.
Rule #3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule #4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule #5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.
Rule #6 : If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule #7 : Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule #8 : Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.
Rule #9 : Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
Rule #10 : Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule #11 : Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.
If your answer is no, then there is something to be learned from the attributes of winning teams.
You see, winning teams play to win, and win they do, which only encourages them to keep on winning.
If, like me, you like the taste of success, make sure you play like a winner.
And here is how to do it.
Attribute #1: Winning teams play to win.
Team members realize that wins and losses are often determined by attitude alone. The difference between playing to win and playing not to lose is often the difference between success and mediocrity.
Attribute #2: Winning teams take risks.
You cannot stop taking a risk and expecting that you will succeed. Life simply does not work like that. You have to go for it and it’s easier to win when you’re the underdog since you’ve got nothing to lose.
Attribute #3: Winning teams keep improving.
They just keep getting better. Resting on your laurels has no place in a winning environment. You need to keep up the pace and stay in front. The highest reward from improving constantly is not what you get from improving – it’s the person you become as a result of it.
Attribute #4: Winning team members care about each other.
Each member cares about the success of each other. Andrew Carnegie realized that before he could become successful, he needed to make his employees successful. He once said “It marks a big step in your development when you realize that other people can help you do a better job than you could do alone.”
(Inspired by Dr. John C Maxwell’s paperback Be a People Person.)
Sam the Koala was put to sleep yesterday. It was a very sad day.
She had caught a cervical infection, chlamydia, that affects about 50% of Australia’s Koala population. She was three years old.
There was nothing remarkable about Sam. She was just another cute Koala, except this particular Koala had morphed into a symbol of hope amid the devastating 2009 Victorian bush fires. Continue Reading
On the anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ fall, the question remains:
