9 posts tagged “management”

I forgot who gave me the bounce to this cartoon. It is worth its weight in gold:

Nz364

Knowledge Wharton posts an article about religion moving into work places and making work more faith friendly by incorporating different faiths into the human resources efforts. "In the world of corporate diversity and inclusion, first there was race, then gender and ethnicity, then sexual orientation. Now religion is knocking at the door, and, according to some experts and practitioners, it isn't likely to go away anytime soon." Prayer breakfasts and corporate chaplains are mentioned. "It's a genuine social movement, a confluence of forces including an increase in non-Western immigration, rising religiosity among management-level baby boomers, and a search for meaning prompted by 9/11."  The article also notes a lot of sticking points and possible areas where legal knowledge of the latest policies concerning religion would be beneficial. 

Commenting on a Wall Street Journal article, “Do Start-Ups Really Need Formal Business Plans?” by Kelly Spors, Small Business Boomers' Jim indicated he had written both sophisticated plans and cocktail napkin plans with little difference in the outcomes. What both plans have done is made him focus on two things: do you understand the market and do you have a grasp on the numbers.

Here is my comment there: Years ago, I asked several venture capitalists about which elements they found most important in a business plan and their answer was “is there a market.” The numbers told them you had looked into all the nooks and crannies, but that they were largely of no particular value because, by the time the deal was done, all the numbers will have changed. (spell checked after posting). 

Fast Company has a good post on an issue that a lot of older companies are facing and that is the communication and style differences between the Boomers who are in control of most of these businesses and the GenX people working for them. FC points out there have always been intergenerational communications problems. Another is the declining formality of the workplace where newer employees are used to dressing down and doing their own thing conflicting with a company dress code or standard.

Part of the communications problems have been previously mentioned on Marketing Canapes. And that has to do with the differences FC, and many others, noted - the current GenX lack of language and face-to-face communications skills compounded by the abbreviations used to speed communications on the devices GenX uses to stay in touch with one another.

FC says both need to adapt to one another. More points are here on Fast Company. 

Hmmm, I thought this gap was still closing, but turns out it ain't. It has been virtually static since 1990, according to the New York Times. So, a woman is still only worth 75% of a man in pay terms. Pity, some of the women I have worked for were worth much more than their male colleagues and better bosses to boot. 

You should know by now that I hold Seth Godin in high esteem. Today, he had a post from one of his correspondants about an incident at Whole Foods dealing with a customer, a bakery worker and bread. In short, a customer asked for some whole wheat bread and the clerk gave the customer what they give out. Then the customer clarified his original and VAGUE request to 100% whole wheat bread.

These are two different loaves of bread and, if I know Whole Foods, the non-100% whole wheat loaf falls within current labeling laws. Now, the customer in insensed and rants about how Whole Foods is deceiving customers and the clerk should change the sign on her own volition (based on what HE says - not management).  The worker says that she cannot because of management policies.

So, now we have the question, would you have changed the sign? Short answer, not if you wanted to be working there at the end of your shift.

My followup comment to Seth asks, as a manager of a business with policies and procedures in place, how long would you tolerate an employee changing things based on that employee's feelings or that of a customer. Short answer: a New York second. There does need to be a method to put that customer into immediate contact with a store supervisor (and there are such in Whole Foods based on my personal experiences - so I am wondering why the customer did not take that route) and that should be the level of the exchange, not ripping a bakery worker. The OP is acting like an unmittigated ass. BTW, she did get him another 100% whole wheat loaf once he made it clear that is what he wanted. 

AdPulp has a short bit based on a five-page rant at Network World on IBM's handling of remote workers and the problems that occurred because of the lack of socialization and communications that naturally occur in such situations.  I replied thusly: Funny, International Business 101 has taught for years and years that the more remote a site and the more disparate the local culture is from the worker's norm, the more essential it is that communications between units be amped up. Not only that, if it cannot be accomplished asynchronously, then you should do a good part of that communications in their time frame, not just the HQs.  

"Fear of failure" or "it's okay to be wrong?"

An interesting opposed pair that has far reaching implications. But, check this out, Over at Faster Thinking, the approach is positive: "it's OK to be wrong" and at Innovation Weblog - covering Faster Thinking, it is negative spin: "innovation and the fear of being wrong." In any event, Faster Thinking addresses the conflict between six sigma thinking and innovative thinking. Here are a couple of quotes:

"It's time to stretch our management wings and create opportunities for failure and second chances."

"It's time for some Six Sigma thinking.  If you aren't at least three deviations from the norm, you're just part of the crowd."

That thinking is OUT of the box, not kowtowing to the norm and fearing to take a chance. 

I plan on resuming the newsletter after the holidays so, here is the last one written before my hard drive descended into madness and started spewing forth a lot of incomprehensible stuff. Most of the material exists in PDF and that does not translate well into this space. So here is the source document.
Jim Lane's Marketing Canapes

Marketing Canapés

October 9, 2006 #27

Some of the following morsels require registration and/or subscription. We only cover the freshest of news and should there be nothing in the market we think is good enough, any given category may not have any listing.

Marketing - Product

Crocs are interesting sandals (at least until the tread wears smooth on the bottom and then they get REAL interesting on wet surfaces). Here’s a couple that figured out how to make additions to Crocs and have reaped the benefit. MSNBC News

Artisanal cheese making moves underground. Yep, those hand-crafted wheels of cheese are going into caves to pick up local micro-stuff that should make the same cheese produced in different locations taste slightly different than their commercial competitors – richer and nuanced. NYTimes

Marketing - Place

From the realms of science fiction comes teleporting goods from one place to another. If you think that is still the stuff of pipe dreams, try this report out and try to wrap your mind around a product line with NO physical distribution at all – just, “Beam me a dozen, Scotty!” CNN

Marketing - Promotion

Great pizza boxtop adverts, more at Twenty Four: (cannot load it, so go to the source).

If you bat an eye, chances are you may start missing some of television’s newest short format commercials. Called “adlets,” “blinks” or “winks,” these last only five seconds or less. The question is, just what can you get across and through all the noise in that time and will any marketers want these. So far, Clear Channel has few takers for their one-second spots. There are some longer, five-second, spots running. WSJ Online

Okay, Dick Tracy, where are you? No, we don’t have a wrist radio, but would a phone watch do? TechDigest How about Levitra’s sponsoring elevator UP buttons? AdRants

Marketing - Packaging

Oh what a difference a change of color can make – and tying the change into a non-profit fundraising event. Campbell’s Soup lost its red label and went pink, allying itself with Kroger’s Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and doubled Kroger’s October unit buy. AdAge

Marketing - Target Market

"You can slice and dice by demographic data all you want, but each individual person will always constitute a market segment of one. You can run a campaign that will, you're confident, connect with the "Positive and Responsible" group but you will never achieve 100% positive results. That's because people ultimately make up their own minds. And with more and more choices available to them they're going to be swayed by the information they *can find* much more than the messaging that's *pushed to them*.” AdJab

Here’s an interesting question and accompanying concept. Are you eating out more often than you have in the past? Turns out that when you compute the cost of your time in preparing your own food, it is about the same as going out and you do not have the mess to contend with. Another life-style consideration to be taken into account. Yahoo!News Of course, you should take that “pay yourself” into account the next time you drive a few extra blocks and wait in a line at a gas station to save two cents a gallon.

Apparently, media and big advertisers/marketers have made a fundamental shift in the way they view the customer. SHE has been recognized. RealMediaRiffs

Management

An article on “plateauing,” says many people in middle management are no longer willing to pay the price of moving up in the company. No kidding? Colleagues of mine have been negotiating for life-style concessions for more than ten years. “This plateauing is part of a bigger phenomenon in the workforce -- one that also includes people putting higher priorities on activities outside their jobs, from family to volunteer work to hobbies.” Nothing like timely. Knowledge Wharton

Are job interviews going the way of dinosaurs? Can you tell as much about a candidate by their handshake? BusinessPundit

Media Matters

British newspapers are downsizing and not only in terms of distribution. Many have gone tabloid in an effort to become friendlier to commuters. There are other changes happening – for instance free newspapers that will be home-delivered. Other changes include dynamic layouts and reader-generated information instead of reportage. Is the writing on the wall for US newspapers? American Journalism Review and Media Life

Music used to be the generational divide. The digital divide separates the generations today. David Cohen concluded "there is no doubt that we are moving rapidly from a world of passive receptivity to active engagement. No longer can we simply broadcast our messages to a mass audience and hope that our standard metrics of reach and frequency will guarantee success. Accountable engagement innovation is the battlefield of the 21st century..." Research Brief

Public Relations, Press Releases and Spin

Here is a Top 10 list about how to drive traffic to your website via press releases. First on the list is content. Larry Chase

International

Mexico’s “competition czar” looks forward to the next eight years to make Mexico’s economy more competitive and productive by cracking down on the nation’s monopolies and duopolies. Yahoo!News

If you are marketing internationally, one of the things you need to remember is that consumers like hearing/reading your missives in their own language. For starters, more than half of ALL consumers regardless of their language ability buy only at websites in their own language. BizReport

How would you feel if your local businesses dumped a load of absolutely smelly and sickening garbage on your lawn? It is doubtful you would be very happy about the situation and would seek immediate legal remedies. Think about that situation for a moment and then take a look at what happens when industrial waste gets dumped in the backyard of people in developing countries. NTTimes

Finally, here is a webpage that does have some good points, albeit with some moralizing. If the world’s population were 100 people . . .

jim