Monthly Archives: May 2011

Swing and a Miss: On Failure

Posted by on May 27, 2011 1 comment

In baseball, batting .500 is pretty good right?

In basketball or hockey, staying above .500 pretty well guarantees at least a run at the playoffs.

But?

Doesn’t that still mean that the remaining .500 were failures?

There is a quotation that I have heard attributed to hockey legend Wayne Gretzky that states; ‘You miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take’

Yet in many small to medium businesses, any hint of the term failure causes organizational apoplexy, stroke, and other defense mechanisms.

Narrowing down Failure

First, lets get one big thing clear, there are failures of ambition and there are failures from sloth or laziness. Quite simply, they are not the same. The latter failures imply apathy or ignorance.  The former does not, the former implies an attempt to move forward in learning or understanding.

Some time ago I remember reading that the direct mail marketing companies were masters of controlled failure. It could be as simple as two or more different pieces of content per mailing, and including differing response codes to each piece. Then based on the response of each piece, work at improving the next mailing.

Simply enough, the concept of learning from failure is built into the feedback cycle.

Written in the Economist, this quote emphasizes this concept;

Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School argues that the first thing they must do is distinguish between productive and unproductive failures. There is nothing to be gained from tolerating defects on the production line or mistakes in the operating theatre.

The SMB Takeaway

Developing your business as a learning organization is important, test, then iterate. Consider it like a classical dance, you step, you pause to review, and you step again. Within businesses that develop technology, we often use the term fail fast. Test an assumption with minimal time and expense, then move onto the next test. At the same time though, there is not much  point in attempting the fail fast if you fail to learn from your mistakes.

So plan to take the shot, but assume that you will be lucky to get to .500, and design what you are doing to incorporate the results into your feedback loop.

Photo Credit: Ed Yourdon’s ‘Little League Baseball’ via Flickr

 

Real SMB IT: The Web Site Question

Posted by on May 25, 2011 No comments

Great sales staff ask their customers or prospects questions to pinpoint their issues or needs.

Great service staff probe issues or problems with questions to determine the best customer service resolution or options.

Heck, if you are going to a restaurant with a bunch of friends, questions determine the consensus preference of location!

The Web Site Question?

Your web site is a sales channel, and it is a customer service channel.

If you want it to be great at those tasks, follow this advice from Smallbizsurvival;

Ask.

No, don’t ask yourself.

What does your customer want your website to do?

Parental Advisory Warning: The answer may be surprising and not what you wanted to hear.

Routinize the dull stuff

Posted by on May 19, 2011 No comments

Being a great business is about getting the processes right NOT technology.

If you have been following along with this blog for any length of time, you are familiar with my mantra of people, process then (maybe) technology. For small to medium enterprises, what your investment in technology does is standardize or automate to improve your business processes.

To demonstrate this concept, look at this excellent article in Canada’s PROFIT magazine.

Previously I have used the term friction, in this quote, they call it the baton pass;

… not just for the usual purpose of managing sales but also to transform its handling of customer relationships “in the ‘baton pass’ from the sales team to our service-delivery engine

And another;

To spot inefficiencies, “Staple yourself to a customer order and see what happens as it moves through your company,” suggests Becky Reuber, a strategic management professor at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto. “Whose hands touch it? Whose desk does it get stuck on? This makes it easier to spot bottlenecks.”

Baton Pass, Bottleneck or Friction

All of these are just different words for the same issue. Where we as SME managers lose sight of what is happening in our business is in the details of;

Where is that information right now?

Who is responsible for it currently?

What is the next step that it has to take in our value chain?

Where in the process is that information stuck or losing time?1993 5.25 Inch Floppy Disk

And these questions can have real effects and outcomes on our business. Invoicing never leaves your facility for 10 days? Why?

Delivery is 4 weeks? why not next week?

It is when we ‘staple ourselves’ to that piece of paper moving through our call to cash cycle, or follow that ‘baton pass’ that we begin to see opportunities to improve our turn around times.

Improving these processes can be managed manually as well, but there is also the opportunity to use technology to assist in routinize that dull stuff.

Photo is a vintage  5.25 inch floppy disk dated 1993 I had to get a photo of

A Random Thought on Books

Posted by on May 17, 2011 No comments

There is a particular book sitting on one of my bookshelves. Bound in a leathery type of material, its prose is a little flowery, vaguely puritanical, and it was printed in 1860. A little over 150 years ago.

The book? It is a biography of Benjamin Franklin.

What is a book?

A book is simply thoughts and words, in text and presented on a medium of some sort. In this case a fairly old medium.

Today?

Before doing some travel next weekend, I took a list of several books that I want to read and did some shopping. Just about all of them now are delivered digitally. Print versions needed to be ordered.

The Digital Medium

A book printed over 150 years ago can still be read today. Will a digital book published today be able to be read 150 years from now? Say about 2160?

After all, a they are still ideas and thoughts, expressed in text via a medium.

However, let us look mat the last 40 years of history when it comes to the audio / visual world.

45 RPM vinyl, 33 1/3 RPM vinyl, 8 Track, Cassette, DAT, Laserdisc, minidisc, betamax, VHS, CD, DVD – you name it.

And each one not compatible with its neighbour. If you purchased music or video in these formats, each new format forced you to either throw it out, or purchase it again in the new format. (assuming the content was ever reproduced in the newer formats) In other words, for historical information, possession of a method of playing the medium is more important than the content on the medium.

Will this be the same with books?

Will the formats and devices that display these formats today, bear any resemblance to the formats or devices common in 150 years?

Perhaps not.

I am sure that pieces of work society deems to be classical works will continue their ‘translation’ from format to format over the years. But I doubt it all will.

Perhaps in 150 years it will be more important to have the device to display or present the medium than the content on the medium itself.

McLuhan stated the medium is the message, so what is the result when the medium disappears? Is the message gone too?

Managing IT: Feedback

Posted by on May 12, 2011 4 comments

I want to lead off on what is a difficult subject with this quote from Geoff Schaadt at Delta Partners;

We have been trained to provide consistent and clear feedback to our direct reports. When is the last time that you asked for their feedback on your performance?

As leaders, perhaps we think feedback flows only downhill. (along with that other substance that usually does) If feedback only goes downhill, you are missing a good part of the conversation and the opportunities for improvement. Ask yourself if you believe that your teams can supply you with honest feedback.

A question, did the thought of your team providing you with feedback set off a little tinge of anxiety?

Feedback: it is harder than it looks. Here is why

Just a day or so I heard someone state the old adage that there are “two sides to every story“. I think most of us have heard that line, or at least something similar.

Unfortunately, that phrase is usually wrong. There are usually more than two sides to every story.

More than two sides? Absolutely.

When it comes to the term feedback, we feel in our gut that this is not a conversation about the home team losing last night or what the weather is doing this morning.

We anticipate news that could be negative. We tense up, our stress rises, we may even begin to get defensive.

The Identity Conversation

Research in the psychology and behaviour fields (eg Stone, Patton et al) demonstrates that when we are in a conversation that includes criticism, anticipated criticism, or just perceived criticism, our conversation turns into a multifaceted conversation that goes beyond a conversation of words, we also start a conversation of our personal identity. As individuals, we may have three or more of these personal identities, however lets just look at one.

Our Feedback Conversation

At a verbal level you and I are communicating. But in a situation where there may be criticism, we are also communicating at an emotional level where our identity is asking; “Am I competent?”

And at this level, if we perceive an attack on our emotional personal identity, we get knocked off balance. Which usually results in defensiveness, anger and other obstructive behaviours.

There may be two sides to our verbal communication during this feedback session, but there are two more conversations occurring at the unspoken level of identity. (“Am I competent? ” & “I’m beginning to think you aren’t competent“)

In organizations where business managers are responsible for IT, this identity conversation can be a hard issue to deal with. If an IT staff member feels upset and defensive when an IT peer is hurting their personal identity issues, how are they going to respond to the same doubts or questions raised by a CFO or COO that does not understand the IT role at all?

Resentment springs to mind.

This road is a two way streetIdentity

You have your own identity issues and triggers. Recognize them, and anticipate your own reactions. And if you do need to provide negative feedback, be aware of the possibility that you will be triggering someone else’s.

Because you will be having both a verbal conversation, plus a non verbal emotional identity conversation.

So, if there are two sides to our verbal conversation, plus two sides to our identity conversation, we are already at four sides to every story.

Photo Credit christine zenino via flickr.

Are You Guilty of Changing Your Mind?

Posted by on May 4, 2011 No comments

My apologies for the title of this post.

You see, I believe that asking that question; are you guilty of changing your mind? is a trick question, a useless question, even a damaging one.

Do you equate changing your mind as the implicit admission that you have made a mistake? That changing your mind is something to feel shame or guilt about? Or is it because you think it destroys a veneer if infallibility?

A Story

Our business was taking a hard look at moving our facilities. Our management team looked at options, costs, services available from our current landlord, versus pulling up stakes and moving to a new facility.

Through this diligence stage, moving was beginning to look like the most cost effective option. In fact, the company President declared that he was 99% sure we were going to move.

But then a funny thing happened.

As we got closer to finalizing that decision, working with our corporate controller, we found that last minute tweaks and concessions from our current landlord changed the financial dynamic radically. Moving costs, plus projecting lease costs out three years clearly demonstrated that not moving was a better decision financially.

As the company President had been the keenest proponent of moving, he stated that he felt guilty about changing his mind after being so confident that we would move.

To my mind, keeping a firm hold on a decision without changing your mind when presented with new evidence and concrete financial information would be the thing to feel guilty about.

As Mike Myatt states in this article titled; Leadership & Changing Your Mind ;

A leader’s ability to change their mind demonstrates humility, confidence, and maturity

‘Nuff said.

 

 

 

CFO Managing IT: The RFP

Posted by on May 2, 2011 No comments

For senior executives responsible for managing IT, here is one area where you have my deepest sympathies;RFP

The dreaded RFP response.

Why do I use the term dreaded? Imagine that you are looking for a new IT product or service, you spend massive amounts of time writing a Request for Proposal (RFP) to outline your needs, your requirements, and your objectives.

Great news!

You receive a handful of responses from vendors eager to prove they can provide that service, or product.

Logically you assume that since they are all bidding to supply the identical product or service, you should be able to look at these responses and and perform a direct ‘apples to apples’ comparison on each line item or deliverable, right?

Unfortunately not.

You look at each of the responses to your RFP and the tides of confusion, fear, uncertainty and doubt come crashing down.

As a senior technology manager, I shudder at poring through these RFP responses.

Forget concepts and terms such as performing an ‘apples to apples‘ comparison. Heck, these things usually aren’t even in the same food groups. The only similarity among them is that they contain enough text in a PDF document to deforest a few acres.

If IT Managers have difficulty wading through the minutiae of these things, what is a CFO or other business executive to do?

It isn’t easy.

The only advice I can provide is to concisely summarize the key requirements of your RFP. Then for each response, outline how each vendor handles that line item. Make notes on possible risks, benefits, and how the response differs, or is similar to others. Make key notes of every detail or question you are unsure about.

IT staff, consultants, or even a technology peer at a different organization could then be assisting you deciphering those notes and questions.

An Example?

As a simplistic example, lets assume that a single line item of your RFP includes the provision of a hosted server to run a web site. Does that sound relatively simple?

As a non-technology manager responsible for IT, lets look at that one line item;

Responses for line item: Server to host web site

One single, hopefully simple line, then we look at how our possible vendors propose services for that single line, Server to host web site;

Vendor A: More expensive, (ask why?)  quoting a ‘chassis’ and CPU count? (what is this?) Security is included (Is this important? should I be concerned)

Vendor B: Significantly less expensive.(why?) Quoting ‘VMM Pooled Resource’? (what is difference?) Security not included (Is this important? should I be concerned)

Vendor C: States ‘cabinet allocation’ but ‘device required’? (what does this mean?)

The SMB Takeaway

There is no easy answer. Deciphering these things is a challenge, and will remain a challenge.

The three sample vendors above are all providing legitimate services, but not one of them is doing it the same way.

If you are outside of IT, and were able to figure out the difference between those three vendors. Congratulations, you are a truly tech savvy executive.

Photo Credit Loty via flickr

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