English: Justin Rose, English golfer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Justin Rose’s lesson: adopt a process mentality, be focused, be disciplined.

Amongst all the deserved accolades for golf’s newest major champion Justin Rose was a clue to his success: adopt a process mentality, be focused, be disciplined.

Easier said than done!

Rose has superb natural talent, a wonderful swing and a great temperament; but those assets are shared by many who will fail to emulate his latest achievement. It’s the same for many of us and the companies we work for. We may have access to fantastic resources, have intelligent, motivated colleagues and see great ideas emerge from strong team work – but unless we manage to achieve a single-minded focus, unless we are disciplined almost to the point of dogmatism, and unless we search for simplicity, we will fail to make these assets count at the very top of our game.

Listen to the words Rose used after his victory (extract from the BBC)

“We had three or four thoughts which are all process driven,” Rose said.

“What’s the appropriate shot, execute it, accept it, move on. And just keep running that over and over again.”

“If you start getting outside that, you are really not bringing anything helpful to the mix. That takes a lot of discipline to think that way, act that way and do that for 72 holes.”

Discipline and a process-driven mentality.

How many of us know what we’re aiming for but then find it difficult to pursue this goal because of outside influences, additional ‘inspiration’ or unexpected obstacles? Diverging is considered acceptable because we’re being flexible, agile, dealing with complexity. But doggedness and determination, however unpopular it may be at the time, whether it makes us look like robots or appear stubborn: this is what separates great execution from good.

This isn’t about sticking to a plan but sticking to a cycle of guiding principles:

• Focus on the goal.
• Choose an appropriate method.
• Execute.
• Evaluate. Accept the consequences. Move on.
• Repeat.

The beauty of simplicity is that it’s so elegant it almost appears achievable for anyone. Maybe if we follow Justin Rose’s lead we can simply achieve great things too – or maybe the steel it takes to do this requires more practice than we’re prepared to put in…

That’s the challenge we must accept if we want to elevate what we do from ‘good enough’ to the best it can ever be.

Tactics is looking at your feet – strategy is seeing the road, even if you take the same steps

Part of this discomfort stems from the medium itself and answering the question pulls at the seams of brand permission – an ever evolving concept in earned media.

Here’s the thing: having a long-term agenda can appear disingenuous. When playing in consumers’ own spaces, brands work best when they push event-based, flexible content. This means fire-fighting quality issues, recalls, complaints – United-broke-my-guitar-esque PR disasters. It also means jumping onto relevant news-worthy content and using it to emphasise a point of view. And it means opening up the barriers between the walls of the business and the consumer’s own experience – delivering deeper customer service integration. All of which is largely tactical.

But tactics in pursuit of an overall ambition and delivering a consistent underlying brand position are serving a strategic end. The better you strike this balance the less disingenuous; but the more onlookers can label your activity disjointed or dismiss it as merely tactical.

Building credibility takes a long time and developing a recognisable tone, a point of view and the permission to interact in such a flexible way requires a great deal of patience and perseverance. With a coherent, articulated goal and a conscious choice of earned media as the vehicle for delivering against these aims, you are delivering strategic use of social media, however it may look from the outside.

So don’t lose faith if it seems like what you’re doing is simply a collection of disparate elements. If you’ve defined what you want to get out of it, keep going, keep on brand, keep believing – and be pleased that not all strategies are obvious, particularly in such a delicate playground for brands.

We can’t beat the clock no matter how hard we try…

My father-in-law watched the recent Dave Allen tribute programme on BBC2 and reminded me last night of the classic clock joke (shown below on Youtube). The gist  is that we live and die by the clock, everything we do focused on the clock, our lives ruled by partially imagined constraints – and somehow we can’t escape the grip of time…even in retirement!

As I approach the ultimate deadline for completing my MBA dissertation, this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot at varying times of the day and night; and as a father to two boys under five it’s hard to think abstractly about time without also considering sleep. Just how little sleep can I get by on? What’s the balance between being awake and being mindful. Where is the point of diminishing returns? and…why does it feel like there’s never enough hours in the day?

At work we all feel the impact of time-bound pressures and cope in startlingly similar ways to ensure we work effectively: we start our day earlier to avoid the phone calls; we take regular breaks to stretch our legs and allow other stimuli to iron out problems our rational mind can’t straighten; we section off time and find ways to shut ourselves away at key points or as deadlines approach; and we shamelessly ask for help, deflect, ask for more qualification and delegate often.

And yet we can never beat the clock…

Recently I read something startling. We all appreciate how susceptible we are to the natural cues around us – how we tire as the dark winter evenings draw in, or we feel vital and ready for the day as we hear the birds sing and feel the sun shining on a Spring morning. These are zeitgebers – the natural cues our body uses to calibrate its biorhythms.

On the other hand, a late night staring at the artificial light and fast movement of the television and suddenly we’re wide awake when we expected to be tired. Or we oversleep on a hotel stopover because the air conditioning and black-out curtains fool our bodies into thinking it’s still night time. And when we change the clocks to daylight saving time it can take us a week to settle into a new rhythm.

…because 24 Hours is Not Enough!

When test conditions remove all the zeitgebers, people fall into a natural sleep-wake cycle (a circadian rhythm for those who like technical terms) not of 24 hours but of 24.9 hours. In one particular case a man who was blind from birth had struggled, in the absence of natural cues, to fall into a sleep-wake pattern in harmony with our normal daily lives to the extent that he was moving his sleep-wake cycle each day by around an hour and falling so far out of kilter he needed sedatives and stimulants to fit back in with societal norms[1]

In fact several studies have supported this notion that the natural day might just be an hour too short for all of us – no matter how good we are at time management.

So the next time you’re up against a deadline, try to remember how ultimately we’re always an hour short no matter what we do. In a way it’s liberating to know we’re all living the same struggle no matter how in control people might seem to be!

In the run up to the recent US elections Forbes.com ran an article entitled “Why Government Should Not Be Run Like A Business”. The piece focused on the differences between the public and the private states and how the notion of ‘efficient’ business shouldn’t be glibly applied to the world of politics and national governance. This runs contrary to rather a lot of political grand standing in the last few years in which politicians have promoted choice and competition in the public sector as welcome market forces which will herald greater effectiveness according to the logic of microeconomic fitness.

So the question I’ve been unable to answer of late is which side am I on in this debate? and in trying to answer I find that the concept of sustainability has an ever greater role to play in the argument than I would ever have believed.

Sustainability must be the enemy of short-termism

The role sustainability now has to play – in governance as in firm competitive advantage – is to develop compelling narratives to challenge systemic short-term thinking. Big business seems to understand this better than most.

Ask Jeff Bezos about sustainability; ask Paul Polman; ask Warren Buffett.

Those I find myself most in admiration of are recognising the greenback version of sustainability just as easily as the green – securing fair access to resources; developing new and innovative ways to create positive consumer benefits; building transparent global supply chains which reward developing market entrepreneurs and drive lasting social as well as economic change because they know positive demographic shifts are as sound a predictor of long-term economic development as anything else.

Of late the strongest performing businesses seem to understand sustainability in a way that makes carbon-reduction feel like no more than a cheerleader. So long-term thinking is no longer so at odds with shareholder and market demands – and if more companies can fight the tyranny of quarterly reporting – and regulators can target the sources of amplification when macro-shocks rip through the world (I’ll expose my weak economic knowledge here and venture that minimum term stock-holding seems logical if the regulators really feel like getting involved), we may yet see long-term thinking become embedded not just by these visionaries, who see things more simply, more clearly and with their organisation and their customers at heart rather than their shareholders, but by every sane business leader.

So why can politicians not get it?

The fact is that they can’t.

Sustainable Policy – Unicorns Dressed Like a Load of Old Pony

Short-term financial thinking has a demonstrative negative side which enlightened shareholders and pragmatic leaders are able to grasp and resist – and the battle is there to be won. Short-term governance on the other hand is fuelled by ever more frequent doom and gloom -peddling polls seeking eviction at the first sign of dissent from Mr and Mrs Jones or Rashid or Smith, the darlings of the besieged middle. Talk is of de-politicising the most important aspects of long term governance – infrastructure, education, the budget – a defeatist gesture acknowledging the impossibility of the current political set-up and an almost embarrassing admission that politicians simply can’t be trusted to get it right over the major issues. But while US politics forces an inevitable focus on individuals, the reality is that both sides of the pond we find a broken system not (solely) flawed individuals.

If regulators are keen to smooth the fuel that fires the after-burners of market volatility, surely more could be done to do the same in governance. Could we not let a government move more steadfastly towards the pursuits that got it elected in the first place without the checks and balances - so beloved of those in favour of modern democracy – becoming quite so violent, so heavily reported and – quite frankly – so unhelpful? Polls don’t help – but nor does an opposition party so mired in its attempts to re-write history and act as a foil that, for all its talk of what the coalition has failed to deliver, it as of yet hasn’t developed any discernible, coherent counter-narrative.

So Government Really Should be More Like Business

So the reason I can’t agree with the Forbes article is actually nothing to do with competition or choice, or efficiency, or profit but actually the ability of government to fight short-term thinking and agency problems, and to deliver better, more sustainable value for the people who matter – its customers and its employees – and those it impacts through the resources it acquires. The public are actually both shareholders and customers of government – and we aren’t as keen on short-term fixes as some politicians would like us to believe. But no obvious strategy is in place to remove the incentives for short-term action – every elected term becomes no more than a race to implement legislation, because so little is ever rolled back. But haste is the enemy of real strategy.

I don’t have any answer – but perhaps looking to business to watch it tackle its own short-term demons we may yet find the Bezos and Polmans of the political world. We may wait a while.

July sees the launch of something truly exciting at Meridian Speciality Packaging.

I’ve long had faith in the benefits to an employer of its staff seeking personal development. In terms of training and development, there’s a general acceptance now of a significant interplay between experiential learning and abstract conceptualisation[1]. So ideas become skills and vice versa when people get the chance to try things out, often at work, where they spend most of their time.

Shared experiences are also the core of a strong culture of success and innovation. What you try together doesn’t always have to work as long as you embrace the principles of experimentation: have an objective, leave hierarchy at the door, try something and observe the results, develop a hypothesis, test your theory, repeat and enjoy yourselves.

Trying to achieve continual improvement from the position of a manager can feel like a lonely existence at times, and this sense of alienation betrays the reality of top-down improvement initiatives: managers know least about many of the processes they’re seeking to better, struggle to embed best practice when because they’re trying to codify great subtlety and then to convey it – layers of abstraction which alienate the essence of what’s being taught and should really take place in an individual’s own mind to lead to genuine learning and improvement.

Shared experiences and whole-company learning programmes can offer a solution to this managerial problem. This facet has been at the heart of many of the most successful improvement methods employed in the past thirty years: lean manufacturing and more recently lean principles for service must be supported by a strong company culture and develop managers as the servants of their staff, facilitating change when the grounds for change have been spotted by the local experts.

So July sees Meridian embark on a path of whole-company development, every member of our small but growing and ambitious company working together in small teams towards a personal vocational qualification and, perhaps more importantly,  a common goal of finding ways to make the company more competitive, deliver better customer service and added value, and reduce waste. There’s an element of competition between the teams which will help to give our experimentation an edge; and hopefully allow some different social groups to emerge.

This is the beginning of the programme itself – which I’ve been proud to develop with an excellent training partner – but also the start of a path of continuous personal and company-based improvement for all involved. This is something to be treasured for our teams and I look forward to keeping you posted on how it’s gone and what we’ve achieved together in the coming months and years.

[If you’ve been involved or have overseen a similar initiative at your company, I’d love to hear from you…please add comments to this post or get in touch via Linkedin]

Reblogged from Bimba mia.:

My first reaction to a genuinely great flash mob has always been one of surprise, then a certain amount of bewilderment and a feeling of concern for the bystanders. I imagine what it would be like to feel a demand is being made of one to participate unexpectedly…

but then the joy of the moment takes over and they realise life’s providing an experience to treasure. If only every day could really be like this…

Brands and businesses have a role to play in people’s lives and the more they provide moments of joy the more they add value in ways no individual could ever achieve.

The video below was shared by a former classmate from my undergraduate degree. It shows what happened last month when Copenhagen Phil (Sjællands Symfoniorkester) surprised the passengers in the Copenhagen Metro by playing Griegs Peer Gynt on a busy train.

Let me know if you feel the same as I did as you watch it unfold – a strange journey from possible embarrassment and discomfort into a warm admiration for the human spirit.

Reblogged from :

Kindle kiosks…how will Amazon cater for online shoppers hungry for physical experiences prior to purchase?

US discount retailer Target’s decision to stop selling Amazon’s Kindle e-readers[1] has been seen as an attempt to stem the growing trend of consumer “showrooming” whereby online consumers try before they buy in the physical stores of the etailers’ traditional rivals. Indeed, Target’s CEO Gregg Steinhafel sent a letter to his company’s suppliers stating plainly:

“What we aren’t willing to do is let online-only retailers use our brick-and-mortar stores as a showroom for their products and undercut our prices without making investments, as we do, to proudly display your brands.”

The extent to which this affects Amazon’s short-term headline sales may be negligible, but the advantage it could give other e-reader producers is almost certainly not being underestimated by the online giant, which has actively encouraged the kind of consumer behaviour that’s so enraged Target by promoting its PriceCheck app. The app, designed to be used in store to compare prices against Amazon’s online offering, has even see customers incentivised with a 5% discount on items price-checked in a competitor’s shop and bought through Amazon within 24 hours[2].

The crux of the matter for Amazon is that all Kindle sales are needed, with loss-making Kindle Fire’s penetration the key to maintaining lucrative e-book and other digital media sales. In this scenario, any market share gains for competitors in the form of Barnes and Noble’s Nook e-reader or multi-function devices such as Apple’s iPads, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 2 or other tablets will hurt Amazon’s long terms growth and profits. Here we see a company whose albeit impressive recent gross margin improvement to 24%[3] marks it out as a powerful volume sales etailer with little scope– or indeed appetite – for a costly move into physical retailing. Indicating the lack of room for error in taking such a risk in the physical space, Barnes and Noble  – a rival which has struggled for years to move the other direction – can turn a healthy gross margin of 26.7% into a pre-tax loss for the quarter compared with Amazon’s 1.6% pre-tax profit in the same period (Amazon’s profit would have been greater but for heavy inward investment).

Compare this with Apple’s immensely successful – and historic – vertical integration into retail selling and you can see why the value of consumers touching, playing and feeling has seen such wrangling between Amazon and Target . The key difference of course is that Apple’s profits are incomparably high and an immensely strong cash position offered scope for risk even before the lucrative explosion of its Apple Stores[4]. And of course Amazon’s visionary, inimitable CEO Jeff Bezos has made it clear where he feels the company stands in terms of strategic positioning and the relationship between tech and profits:

“We think it’s a unique approach in the marketplace—premium products at nonpremium prices. We’re a company very accustomed to operating at low margins. We grew up that way. We’ve never had the luxury of high margins, there’s no reason to get used to it now.”[5]

So finding a way to harness the power and immediacy of a physical environment whilst maintaining the absolute faith in e-commerce, which has marked out the Amazon-inspired online sales e-volution, is a strategic challenge even for someone of Bezos’ vision.

The recent development of AmazonSupply[6] as a challenger in the B2B office and building supplies environment proves Amazon understands what it takes to move into new space, but physical retailing would still represent a much larger leap.

Resisting the pull into physical retail may not be easy[7], and finding ways to put Kindles into the hands of consumers before they commit is a major challenge which may yet have a say in the overall success of the company in the coming years. Of course Kindle devices aren’t the only way to encounter the ‘Kindle’ reading experience as Amazon also pushes into apps[8], but the fact remains that Target’s decision is likely to provoke yet more innovation to help Amazon reach those consumers who demand to feel.

The answer?

Well far be it for me to proclaim great innovation in the space of one blog, but I have faith a solution will be found which doesn’t leave Amazon at the mercy of its somewhat peeved traditional rivals. Whether it be hot-dog stands, automated credit-card release kiosks in the mould of RedBox, permanent product road shows, select high-end showrooms, “Amazon ladies” birthing an Avon strategy for tech, or a genuine stride into the physical[9] retail space, I’m sure it will as fascinating to observe as Apple’s own groundbreaking retail manoeuvres.

I read a nicely written short blog by Stuart Cross the other day and it got me thinking about the difficulty of wearing two hats as a manager of a small company, where you can’t simply create a vision and inspire others to transform it into action.

Stuart was a guest speaker at a Service Management module forming part of my MBA and he delivered an engaging presentation on the impact of store layout on retail sales performance, as well as his personal journey from finance into strategic development, and more recently strategy consulting.

His blog – which is definitely worth a read – questioned why so many managers find it hard to deliver strategies.  His conclusion put me in mind of an appealingly simple phrase used by one of my former Managing Directors – right to left planning[1].

The aim is to work back from your company’s vision and define the bitesize activities that will deliver this vision in the shortest time. Stuart uses the metaphor of an architect designing the plans and an engineer leading the project to deliver them – and thus touches on the heart of a problem faced by many SME managers: having to achieve the almost impossible feat of being both architect and engineer whilst maintaining momentum and enthusiasm.

I can’t ignore my love of sport when searching for an example to work through so I considered Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur.

With impending changes to the structure of football finance through UEFA’s financial fair play regulations, City’s owners felt the only way to achieve their vision was through right to left planning, throwing money into the club to lurch forward by dominating the transfer market, holding hugely valuable human assets and seeking to galvanise a group of success-hungry mercenaries around a rather crudely defined (albeit beautifully simple) common aim; and it may yet work.

Spurs on the other hand have worked from the ground up, seeking to move forward incrementally from their current position as Stuart puts it in his blog. In doing so, players and manager are expected collectively to build the vision and to deliver it, and this has weighed heavily on a jaded team now likely to miss out on a Champions League spot.

It can be empowering to be involved in imagining and realising something, as it may have been for those members of the Crazy Gang who created the impetus for a hugely successful, league climbing Wimbledon FC. But to create the vision and then have to implement it is tiring work no matter how rewarding it may feel, and it requires a special kind of resilience together with an awareness of the importance of role play.

So as managers how can we achieve this balance and play both roles effectively to deliver the success we will for our companies?

The answer may lie not in sport but in the silver screen.

The art of being both writer and director is widely considered the hardest twin role to play in the industry and requires great powers of mental separation.

The benefit of the writer-director’s mindset is that they implicitly understand roles and so can inhabit a persona and work to a set of traits which suit the requirements of the situation. The skill is also in leaving behind the strategic thinking, the search for perfection on the page, and instead letting something organic develop when real people become involved. Perfection is no longer in play, instead the director is seeking something believable, engaging and motivating.

Wearing two hats is hard, but by remembering the importance of role-play, and leaving perfection behind in pursuit of something deliverable, which works towards a vision in real terms, writer-directors are able to  grasp the nettle.

As managers we must try to replicate this gift and seek inspiration, not just from Stuart Cross’ architect-engineer metaphor, but from the arts.

A writer’s contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that’s what being a director is.[2]

Taylor Hackford