THEN
Marketing and branding were about pushing your message to consumers. You sold them what they never knew they wanted.
Marketing used to be all about the product or service.
What made your product unique from anything else on the market? What was the value-add in your version versus a competitor? Did you have the best price or experience for the money?
I wanted to go a bit off topic tonight and talk about leadership. I am looking to hire a candidate this week, and it really got me thinking about whether I’m sticking to the leadership philosophy I wrote down earlier in the year.
That post was driven by a management seminar my company sponsored in November of last year called the culture of performance. It was a great seminar, and one takeaways was that leadership is within each of us. If we’re expecting someone else to provide guidance, then we’ll always depend on someone else for inspiration at work, and that is something we can control.
When was the last time you did work because the incentives tied to your work motivated you? i think incentives are a powerful force in driving people to do a better job, but I often feel they’re misaligned.The real question is whether companies can do anything about this.
For this post, I’m going to focus on equity as a motivational tool because I experienced this first hand in a previous company and I learned so much about the principal-agent problem. I believe directors/managers are your agents with senior executives as the principals.
I’m sure everyone has heard of equity (stock options) as an incentive for motivating employees. Most companies believe if they share equity in the company with their employees then employees will do what they can to increase the value of that equity. This makes logical sense. But for the people who do the real work, how long term thinking are they to be primarily compensated with equity?
Sales, whether management knows it or not, is usually driven by one to two external factors and one to two internal factors. Discovering these revenue drivers are critical to making the right investment decisions at your company to drive top line growth.
As I’ve worked at several companies, I’ve realized that very few within the company actually know what these drivers are. If you dig deep enough within the business, hopefully you’ll find someone in your planning department that is asking the right questions to uncover what truly increases revenue.
As an analyst, you are taught that data never lies. however, you eventually learn that data can be used to demonstrate almost ANY point you want to make. It’s not creative analysis but rather, slicing and dicing based on what you want to tell.
This is what the government is doing with the unemployment number. The number is WAY less than it was in the 1930s (although at the time of the crash, it was about 8% or so, which is near where it is today – it didn’t reach 25% until a few years later). However, a big reason for this is that the labor market is shrinking.
I read this article in Harvard Business Review while I was working out tonight. it really got me thinking, why don’t businesses do this more often? I feel like business simulations are fairly common at larger companies, but I think it would be a very useful tool for smaller businesses to use. I think experiments are a great way to reduce risk by giving small businesses an option to exit an investment before spending too much money.
Business simulations are experiments conducted by company employees to test an idea before fully implementing that idea. An example in the article is financial institutions testing TVs in banks and whether they reduce customers perceived waiting time.
To run a business simulation, follow these steps:
The customer may explain things one way, but that may not be exactly what they want. So do your due diligence and ask a lot of questions. Make sure you get them to sign off on it before you devote too much time. Don’t do the following:
One of my goals of 2009 is to develop a leadership philosophy. Over my career, I’ve always looked for others to provide leadership. Everyone has their own style, and if it wasn’t the style I was seeking, then I often felt uninspired.
I went through leadership training in November of 2008. It was called the Culture of Performance at HID. The biggest takeaway from this training, aside from the obvious networking within my company, was that I needed to develop my own leadership philosophy and work on instilling that in others. Of course, if it conflicts with someone else’s philosophy, then we’d have to figure out a way to gel.
This was a really impressive blog post that i picked up from signal vs. noise. it’s an apology note from Hulu’s CEO for removing “it’s always sunny in Philadelphia” from the Hulu site.
I love the honesty and direct feedback. it really takes a lot to admit a mistake, and it takes even more to broadcast it to everyone.
By the way, it’s interesting to note how the hulu team is monitoring blogs, twitter, and comments for what people say about hulu and their actions. it’s the best and fastest feedback for a company.
I’ve been thinking this weekend about what the best metrics are to measure the health of a business. i know that this is a generic question and every business is different. Therefore, I think it’s important to classify your business into what it truly is before determining how to measure it. This post will focus on classifying the business.
I think that to look at a very high level view of a business, a few things should be reviewed: