Filip

Modderie

16mei

Pop-up consulting

… or make it or make it Pop-up creation.

Getting the time to focus on the important (but maybe less urgent) things is not that easy. By borrowing the pop-up concept (be it from stores to agencies), there might be a solution to all your important needs. Image that a small team of external people comes in for 2 days, develops together with your internal people one concept (be it a new product idea, a go-to-market strategy, a marketing plan, a sales campaign,…), how time and resource efficient would that be. You combine the experience of your people, the knowledge and focus external people can bring to create a real output.

I know I would love it!
JOINED!ly, we can make it happen!

14apr

Can we?

Can we…
Yes you can!
When people in your team ask you: “Can we…”
… launch this product
… use this colour instead of that one
… postpone this project
… launch this new project
… send out this customer communication.

The answer should be: off course you can, if you think it is the right thing to do.
For this to work, you need 3 things (next to capabilities to execute):
– a good culture/values (kudos to The Hubspot at http://www.slideshare.net/HubSpot/the-hubspot-culture-code-creating-a-company-we-love)
– access to information (make sure your people know what others are working on, what is important for the company and the customers right now
– Trust.

Strange that those 3 things seems to be the hardest for every team or company to acknowledge and to develop. Maybe we should force ourselves to book a fixed timeslot in our agent to work on culture & values, on information sharing and on trust?

12apr

Minimalistic Design

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Vivamus molestie sem at est mattis ultrices. In et dolor ut mauris tempor tincidunt. Duis odio purus, fringilla nec tempus non, gravida in erat. Aliquam quis sagittis augue. Mauris luctus ultricies bibendum. Mauris adipiscing at turpis vitae vulputate. Integer quis vestibulum nisl. Aliquam et dolor lectus. Nulla facilisi. Nulla tincidunt turpis in elit tempus lobortis. Cras vitae massa nisi. Aliquam sed ante tortor. Sed sodales gravida tempor. Nulla fermentum mi nec augue hendrerit, in bibendum nisi vestibulum.

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4apr

Competition as part of your value chain

On selling ‘your default product’… regardless of the situation and customer needs.

True story: I work in a large office building that is shared by multiple companies. The owner of the building rents floors of the building including the services: Water, electricity, heat, working toilets, vending machines for food, coffee machines,… stuff like that. This also includes toilet paper being available at all time. Of course, this work is outsourced to a specialised company meaning that all toilet holders and the toilet paper they hold is from one firm who probably does not sell toilet paper by the roll, but sells something like: ‘99,9 % of working hours, your employees have toilet paper’.
Yesterday, something strange happened: All toilet dispensers (and also the towel, soap,… dispensers) where physically removed and replaced by others. Meaning in a lot of work (handyman coming in with drills and stuff), a lot of noise and dirt al over the place for – at the end of the day – having the same toilet paper (no, the rolls where not bigger, did not have a different colour, no fancy smell,…): plain old toilet paper.
Although I off course understand the importance of having your logo on the toilet dispensers as ‘service’ company and having easy access to the toilet paper,…, the end results is quite hilarious. No change (off course, probably at a lower cost for the building owner), no possibility of re-using the existing infrastructure and just replace… well… the toilet rolls.
Wouldn’t it be ‘innovative’ to just see your competitor as part of your supply chain? After all, it is more cost efficient for the both of you if you could ‘exchange’ the physical toilet dispensers if you trade a customer. Not to mention how much better it would be for the environment (less garbage, I’m not quite convinced that the old provider will come and pick up his old dispensers) and the customer (quicker transition period).

24mrt

The limits of strategy consulting

The limits of strategy consulting.

Circles2

Strategy consultants are a species of their own. They tend to come and go, but not always for the right reasons.

The thing is, as with most things, you should use strategy consultants as a cure for some diseases, not for all. Basically, they are probably a good choice when you need ‘exising knowledge’. Their business model is around best practices, so if you want to move into an industry, a new country,… they will help you in not making the mistakes others made.
They are also a good choice when you are the CEO of a major corporate and need to initiate a change. If they can back up your choice, it will not only be much easier to sell to your board of directors and shareholders, it will also make it easier afterwards when things get ugly.

 

But strategy consultants have their limitations. Putting your hope on them to do something truly innovating (if it’s best practices it is by definition done multiple times before you know…) or work on ‘small innovation’ by combining new ways of working, new tools,… with your day to day work, they are probably not a good choice (neither will they want to work on the day to day work since it seems to ‘small’).

That’s where intrapreneurs come in.

That’s where JOINED! can come in!

19mrt

The marginal cost of an extra customer.

The marginal cost of one extra customer if you can produce at a marginal cost of almost zero is… well… almost zero. So economical theory suggest you should go for that extra customer with all of your heart. Even without economics, people tend in a natural way to aim for an extra customer.
But is the total cost of that extra customer as low as you think? Should you not incorporate a cost of a lower availability, a lower service level, a less personal service,… for all of your existing customers? Knowing when that extra customer will start hurting your current customer base is as important as knowing how to get her in the first place.

7mrt

Innovation is not a business unit, it is a mindset.

A lot of companies set up a dedicated innovation department, expect the world of it and then… get disappointed by the results.

The reason is simple: typically these departments are organised to work on business changing and money generation projects which tend to be… well large.

To make it very clear: they should be there and they should be filled with some of your best people, but innovation is more than only this. It is also about your team member having an idea on how to get your insights faster to the sales team, on how to save 1000 Euro by doing something different, on just testing out that new product tweak with a real customer (yes, he might be surprised, but he will not kill you for it), on trying to use a new tool to get organised better, on sharing that one thing you learned from that book/blog you read.

Innovation is about going out their, alone or with your team and challenge the status-quo of your day to day operations.

17feb

The end of the waterfall model in Strategy.

The waterfall model is well know in IT and general project management. Basically it’s model where you first let all business people work on requirements. When these are all clear, you let some outside ‘designers’ translate this ‘business language’ in project or IT language, then you hire an army of programmers to build the stuff. When they are ready, you invite the business guys back in and show them what you build.

It has taken a lot of time and money for companies to realize that this model is not always good: You have to invest a lot of money in order to actually get a shippable product, markets are changing faster than you can develop the ‘perfect’ product, projects take so long that you are forced to pull the plug out of them before there has anything been sold, people get demotivated because what they asked is not being delivered (business to IT) or because nobody seems to have an idea on what is exactly the requirement (IT to business).

Since once image says more than thousands words: it’s quite clear here: http://www.projectcartoon.com
The alternative that now is being used a lot is the scrum methodology, where you have iterations of short cycles where you create a shippable prototype, learn from that and continue to build further. In a world were market conditions change constantly, this is also the only way to make sure that you do not spend 2 years building to realize that is no longer what your customers want.

 


The strange thing is that with strategy, people still tend to use a waterfall model:

  • The CEO knows he needs a vision and strategy.
  • He hires a bunch of highly paid strategy consultants.
  • Those people mobilize the complete management to work on plans, create business cases,…
  • A committee is set up to decide upon and steer the actual projects that will be done.
  • Lot’s of interdisciplinary project teams are defined to do the work.
  • After one year, half of the projects are dead, the other ones have an outcome that is not what we expected.
  • The CEO is replaced or other strategy consultants are hired to determine why the organization was not able to deliver.

I dare to argue that in today’s world, strategy should also use a scrum kind of approach. Small teams of the most skilled people in your company should be able to challenge and convince the leadership that should give them the feedback and resources in order to try to set up small but strategic changes.

Imagine the typical timeline:

  • Hire a strategy consultant : 1 month
  • Let them take the the time of all your top people to come up with slideshows : 3 months
  • Decide on the priorities of the plans : 1 month
  • Let your people redo half of the business cases to ‘fine tune’ them: 1 month
  • Re-priorities: 1 month
  • Assemble project teams for your top 15 priorities: 1 week
  • Set up governance structure: 1 month
  • Do projects: 1 year
  • See results and ask yourself why the bottom line is not better even with the numerous projects: 3 sleepless weeks

And then it all starts over…

…or you can go for the following scenario:

  • Start with a strategy 1.0 workshop tomorrow: 1-2 day(s)
  • Empower your best people to try a first solution, develop a first beta version, test an approach: 1 month.
  • Let them come back after 1 month to see what it delivered. With their feedback, go into strategy 1.1 workshop: 1 day
  • Give them extra power to bring the next iteration quicker: 1 day
  • Let them do the next iteration: 29 days.

Ps: Don’t make it about problems, make it about solutions.

JOINED! can help you in challenging the strategy work you need to deliver this month, not in the years to come!

31dec

Resolutions for 2013.

What will your priorities be for 2013?

A new year, time for resolutions (or objectives if you prefer a more direct approach). Talking about resolutions is talking about priorities. It is about defining what will be important for you, your job, your team,… in the coming months. It can be about what you want to achieve, but also in how you want to get there (or with whom)?

I dare to argue that in the world we live in, where change is a daily given, thinking about the who, the whom and the why is even more important than the exact what. It still is important to know what you want to achieve in 6 months from now, but it might be even more important to know how you will monitor whether your course of action is still the right one, how to make decisions in case of storm, how to adapt quickly and keep your team innovative and alert.

Taking time to really think about it is not wasted time, it is a sound investment in being effective and successful in 2013.

Let me wish you a successful 2013, full of new challenges, great people to meet and lot’s of customers to please!