Category: Gleaner Jamaica

I have a radical idea – if you have an idea of how businesses could improve the way they operate, it deserves to be turned into a column for the local newspapers.

I explore this idea in my latest article in the Jamaica Gleaner.

In this recent article for the Sunday Gleaner, I tackled a difficult problem to describe – scaling.

Or, in other words, why today’s solutions become tomorrow’s problems.

How to Detect and Avoid ‘Scaling’ Problems.

During hectic times, some executives argue against strategic planning activities, saying that they don’t have time to do anything more than firefight.

Mistakenly, they think that planning is only about dreaming up shiny new stuff that will happen only in the distant, imaginary future. They are wrong. Strategic planning is also about making sure that present-day success isn’t marred by future failure caused by scaling problems.

In the not-so-distant past, Blackberry and Nokia dominated the smartphone and mobile industries. Last week, Blackberry announced the layoff of 40 per cent of its workforce due to a loss of US$1 billion, causing its stock price to plummet by 17 per cent. Nokia was recently acquired by Microsoft after years of poor results.

In the last few years, both have lost huge market share and profits, but it’s not because they did anything wrong. Their failure comes because they didn’t do the right things: they simply didn’t see that their early success controlling their own, proprietary operating system would not scale.

WHAT IS ‘SCALE’?

Companies typically fix problems and implement strategies serially. The problem is that they cling to actions that work in the short term without thinking about the endgame: the conditions under which those successful tactics may eventually fail.

The ‘Mythical Man-Month’ is a typical example: putting more people on a project often reduces the time taken to complete it. However, there is a point after which the addition of more people – and the ‘man-months’ they add – actually makes things worse. Much worse.

The short-term solution – to add more people – doesn’t scale.

Blackberry and Nokia had tremendous early success that wouldn’t scale. Both should have switched over to non-proprietary operating systems, sharing in a much larger pool of apps and developers.

As important as it is, it’s hard to see destructive scaling problems happening in real time. Strategic planning teams struggle to see them for two reasons:

1. LACK OF COURAGE

Most executive teams include a few big egos, often in the roles of chairman, president or founder. They are proud of the company’s accomplishments, and look for opportunities to dwell on their successes. All this chest beating, however, makes it hard for their teams to discover that the very success being lauded is the seed of tomorrow’s failure.

‘Doubting Thomases’ are derided for not being team players or for being pessimists. Their inconvenient opinions are ignored because they require a level of confrontation that Jamaican executives find uncomfortable.

Those who think differently don’t bring up their doubts, preferring to sit silently. They go with the flow, especially when they have only a few hunches to rely on instead of the hard data they would need to present a convincing argument.

In this case, silence doesn’t mean consent; it only hides dissent.

It takes courage to speak up in these situations, but in most companies, people don’t get promoted for being renegades. They get to the executive suite by being agreeable, cooperative and ‘nice’.

When everyone wants to feel good, it’s hard to buck the trend by warning about bad things that are coming, like scaling problems. Who wants to be the one to make others feel scared about the very thing that’s making them feel good?

Most are unwilling to wander into this emotionally difficult territory, which is one reason skilful facilitation can make such a big difference.

2. AVOIDANCE OF HARD THINKING

When there’s no lack of courage, strategic planning teams can run smack into another problem – a dearth of smart thinking.

It takes some heavy lifting to imagine something that’s not currently happening, such as the rise of a new competitor that completely changes the game. For example, software giant Microsoft is wondering why it couldn’t foresee its rapid fall into irrelevance when it ignored mobile computing.

Cable & Wireless’ former Caribbean executives might also be wondering how its monopoly status, based on a century of experience, slipped through their fingers so quickly.

Martin Luther King Jr suggested why: rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”

Try this test in your company: Who is looking at the endgame of your current winning formula? In what ways are today’s strategies unable to scale? Who has discovered the equivalent of the ‘Mythical Man-Month’ in your business or industry? Are you sticking to strategies that future executives will laugh at because they work well only in today’s simple scenarios?

Don’t resist your annual strategic planning activity. It’s a must if your firm is going to prevent itself from sowing the seeds of tomorrow’s failure.

Francis Wade is president of Framework Consulting and author of ‘Bill’s Im-Perfect Time Management Adventure’. Email feedback to him at columns@fwconsulting.com.

 

How to Detect and Avoid ‘Scaling’ Problems.

Yesterday in the Sunday Gleaner, I had an article published that speaks to new thinking that needs to happen on the front-line when employees interact with customers via email.

Change Your Email Response Strategy! Now!

 

The end result is tragic: employees burn out and quit after making themselves available to their company’s customers 24 hours a day while replying to customer emails within 60 minutes. At some defining moment, they realise they can’t do it anymore and leave.

Where did this kind of stress come from? How did a straightforward service job turn into a nightmare?

Here’s one reason: Companies fail to manage customer interactions via email. Many firms are pressuring their employees to provide a level of service via email that they can’t deliver.

It began in the late 1990s when customers began to demand email communication with companies. Some firms refused, deciding to ignore the new technology altogether. Lots of government agencies still don’t deal with customers via email. Many tried and failed, setting up generic ‘info@yourcompany.com’ addresses that go nowhere.

Others made a good-faith effort, encouraging customers to email anyone in the company at any time. This may have worked well when the number of email messages was low – one or two per day. At the time, it met the needs of the occasional tech-savvy customer.

As time passed, however, the use of mobile technology expanded, and the number of emails sent by customers increased exponentially. But no policies were changed. Individual employees were still expected to respond to emails within the hour and customers were conditioned to expect a response to each and every message.

What happened next was unintended but disastrous. Employees became slaves to email.

Consider the problem this was. An important customer innocently sends the company a message: “I’m coming by to pick up the (very important) cheque in 20 minutes’ time.”

Not wanting to disappoint this customer and others like them, management tells its entire workforce to ‘be responsive’, which requires responses within 60 minutes. To meet this objective, employees need to check their email every 45 minutes at least. In a company of 200 people, this translates into 2,400 separate inbox visits per working day. Multiply that by the number of minutes it takes to scan every inbox message and you arrive at a total amount of email checking time.

Most of this time is wasted. Perhaps only one per cent of emails is from customers, but 100 per cent of messages need to be checked, most of them more than once.

What managers don’t know is that ‘just checking email’ interrupts productive work.

According to Mihaly Csikszen-tmihalyi, the author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Expe-rience, it takes 25 minutes to get back to your most productive state once you have been interrupted.

Do the math: that leaves a mere 20 minutes of productive time per hour before it’s time to check email again.

The solution, as IT departments will attest, has been around for a while. The best IT departments don’t let technicians respond to individual emails in a scattergun fashion. They use help desks as single points of contact to coordinate their responses.

Follow these steps to apply the same idea to your customer email:

1 Discourage customers from using email for emergencies:

This principle, which must be implemented companywide, solves two problems. First, due to technical glitches, email is successfully delivered only 80 to 85 per cent of the time. Using email — an unreliable medium — for time-critical communication is crazy.

Instead, a live phone call guarantees that the message is received and helps the employee understand the urgency of the situation.

Second, training customers to avoid email in emergencies frees employees from the constant email checking mentioned before.

2 Set up a help desk for customer email:

Let customers know that an instant response to their queries is available at a designated email help desk. Staff it full-time, and programme an autoresponder that tells the customer what to expect next and how to immediately escalate an urgent problem.

3 Teach employees how to steer customers:

Employees need to retrain customers to use the appropriate channels under the right circumstances. They need to understand that individual responses to customer issues might solve an immediate problem, but they create a much bigger one for everyone included. They need to be able to explain this logic.

My June 10, 2012 column, ‘How executives unwittingly turn employees into morons’, explains why executives also need to be retrained.

The contract between employee and customer must be constantly re-examined to keep up with the times. When this doesn’t happen, everyone suffers, including employees who can’t handle the stress – all because the problem and its resolution don’t fall neatly within a single executive’s portfolio.

Employees bear the brunt of a lack of cooperation between departments, falling victim to policies that simply weren’t meant for the mobile Internet age.

They struggle hard, but they can never, ever catch up.

Francis Wade is president of Framework Consulting and author of ‘Bill’s Im-Perfect Time Management Adventure’. Email columns@fwconsulting.com.

 

It’s a technique that was abandoned in the 1990’s when it became synonymous with the term “downsizing” but Business Process Improvement has powerful roots that need to be followed by every Caribbean company that hopes to become more efficient. Here’s my latest article in the Jamaica Gleaner on the topic.

The Overlooked Power of Business Process Management

I recently wrote an article for the Gleaner that focused on how much companies can do to set up space and time for volunteers.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20130804/business/business7.html

In the Caribbean, we maintain a distinct fear of being ripped off, especially when it comes to someone else “stealing” our ideas. In this article for the Sunday Gleaner, I argue that it’s better to give away ideas in order to generate leads, than it is to keep them to oneself. Giving them away allows for new ones to arise, which keep the flow going, and actually improves the quality of the ideas.

One remarkable difference between doing business in the United States and here in Jamaica is many of us are obsessed with holding on to ideas. As professionals, we keep innovations close to our chest, for fear that ‘s’maddy might tief dem’.

I hear this complaint from people who should know better. The conversation often goes like this:

‘My sales are down. This recession is killing me. The usual techniques aren’t working – cold calls, advertising, discounts.’

‘What about putting your best ideas together in an opinion piece to the business editor of The Gleaner?’

‘An mek s’maddy tief dem? Yuh mad?’

Then, out comes a story of the long hours he or she spent on a proposal, which a client turned down right before taking the ideas and using them anyway – for free.

I suggest a bold counterstrategy. Give up the fear of being ripped off, and forget about holding on to your ideas. They aren’t yours to begin with, and the more you hold on to them, the fewer you’ll generate. Stop playing defence, and instead go on creative offence by burying your listening audience with new ideas.

Over the past eight years, I have produced hundreds of articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, white papers, presentations, online training, and books while trying to share my very best ideas in this column. More than 95 per cent of these individual pieces were produced for free.

My recently launched book, for example, was available for free for five days. More than 3,000 people around the world received the book, making it No. 1 on the list of free books in its category.

When people ask me if I’m crazy to give away so much, here’s what I wish I could explain: The ideas aren’t mine (or yours).

Where do ideas come from? I’m a bit of an intuition junkie, and I listen keenly for new insights – as soon as they pop up, I capture them. They have fuelled my business for 20 years and are the reasons I can produce new content freely today. I have a long backlog of fresh topics.

But, this wasn’t always the case. Before moving back to Jamaica, my business partner complained that I never contributed to the company newsletter. It was true: I never did. To me, writing was a nasty chore. She had a gift honed by a Harvard education, and I did not.

On the eve of my return, however, I began to write a blog about the move, and found that I couldn’t stop. It was the beginning. But the impetus didn’t come from me.

So where does inspiration come from? My short answer is that they don’t come from me anymore than air or water do.

Instead, like the earth’s elements, they come through me. Trying to hold on to them is a mistake. Giving them away actually allows more of them to come. Like most other things that truly matter, they come from God, the ultimate source.

All I have to do is never block the channel.

TURNING IDEAS INTO SALES

We are in the most desperate of economic times. I have had more sleepless nights in the past 12 months than in the past 10 years of my life, all related to the future of business here in Jamaica.

One thing I long for, like many business owners, is help. Preferably free.

Your clients also need help, especially in these times. Preferably free.

How can you deliver the ideas that God has loaned you in a way that builds your business revenues?

1. Start with your prospective clients’ problems. In your head or on paper, brainstorm the difficulties they have and the gaps that exist in their information. Look carefully at the decisions they can’t make because they don’t have a process.

If you hang out with these questions long enough, your experience will bring you to some of the answers.

2. Pick a single problem, preferably the biggest one, and find a free, popular channel for your message, such as a blog, YouTube or Facebook.

3. Get enough feedback to make your content interesting and as attractive as possible.

4. Before it’s absolutely perfect, stop working on it, send it out and start working on the next edition.

5. When you gain a bit of a following from your clients and prospects, start asking for their email addresses in return for continued and guaranteed early access. Take the prospects and qualify them; then, convert them into clients.

The process I have outlined here is simple, but as you probably know, the difficulty doesn’t lie in the technology. It’s in having the right overall mindset. Work on that, and the rest is easy.

Here’s the link to the article: Try This Revolutionary Sales Technique – Give Away Your Secret Ideas.

I wrote the following article for the Sunday Gleaner’s business section based on the findings of Why Workers Won’t Work: The Case Study of Jamaica by Kenneth Carter.

How to Overcome Employee’s Demotivation

 

Is there a way to get employees to work harder, and to do it in a way that meets their interests? My latest article in the Jamaica Gleaner focuses on this important topic, and the jobless recovery that’s the most likely path of recovery.

How to Get Employees to Do More Work… Willingly.