Internal communication is not a business unit.

Typically, it goes like this: In small companies, internal communication is done by the owner of the company. It’s not in her job description (owner’s don’t tend to have a formal job description in the first place), she just feels the need to communicate to her company. All of a sudden, in larger companies, it becomes the role description of a dedicated person or even a whole business unit.

The people in this unit then can start the work of a miner. They constantly need to push all people in the organisation for information (Do we have a new product that we should push on the corporate website? Is there a new big client the CEO can use as a reference when talking to industry leaders? How good is the knowledge of all employees on corporate strategy?…). I can only begin to image how difficult their work must be. They are faced with a situation where every employee is their source of information on the one side (but nobody has off course the time to produce direct usable information) and the complete organisation is also their target group.

Off course, this is about knowledge and the thing about knowledge networks is that every single person has an interest in learning (getting knowledge), but not directly in sharing his own knowledge (because that off course takes time). As the value of the knowledge network is mainly defined by the individual pieces of knowledge in it and everybody seems to value the power of knowledge, we should try to push more the boundaries of the typical knowledge role of internal communication in large companies.

I would argue that ‘internal communication’ should not be the formal role of one or more people, it should be a part of the role description of every single employee. The role of internal communication should be transformed into a curating one:

enable the knowledge sharing and learning (through dead easy tools);
reward knowledge sharing;
create and archive of the most important knowledge;
create flows of knowledge exchange in all directions in the organisation.

Seems a lot more fun than bugging people for information also…

How is your internal communication team oriented?

Discuss also on Medium https://medium.com/marketing-strategy/39b0172b2fc9

The end of bad experiences?

City hopping in a Foursquare world.

NYC must be the place where you can use Foursquare-like tools the most easy. Maybe it’s because I’m only an outsider visiting the City that never sleeps, but the amount of coffee bars, places to enjoy an early afternoon cocktail or discover new tastes is enormous. When I was in NYC the first time a decade ago, finding a place was as easy as it is today, the only difference was that you had no clue upfront whether the place would be great, just good or plain rubbish. Every coffee you ordered was an opportunity for an new taste experience or a disappointment in humanity all together. Chances where about 50/50.

Today, things are different. Very different. I don’t think we had one drink/bite in a place that did not have a 8+ score on Foursquare… and preferably with an online OpenTable functionality (saves you a lot of trouble waiting for the place to actually open and a lot of money if you are on a roaming rate).

There is no more hiding in this world. Bad places can only exist for the group of people not willing or not able to check a place out before they enter. With this group growing smaller over time, all market players will need to push the limit, become more agile, more original, more customer oriented, more experimental, more cosy, more local, more specialised.

Tourist traps will only live so long. Don’t ever again say technology is not bringing good things to humankind! Don’t wait for the crowd and technology to change your industry, change it for them!

Article also on Medium.

Getting trough the silos (process evolution). A new C-level position?

When you start as an entrepreneur, life is hard, but straightforward when it comes to getting things done: you and you alone are responsible. If the product needs a new price, you do it. It you need to update the packaging, you do it. It’s always you. If things go wrong, you are responsible. If things go great, it’s you who made it happen.

The larger organisations become, the more processes, governance structures and job descriptions with clear lines between what is job of person A and what is the job of person B. At some moment in time, you arrive at a situation where processes seem to define everything. “Computer says no” becomes a reality. What really is the issue is when people start believing that there is a process for everything because this implies that having an issue, opportunity, idea,… that can not be funnelled in an existing process… cannot exist. In the mind of people fallen into the ‘a process for everything’-trap, it is virtually impossible to grasp the fact that their might be an idea that does not follow the ‘processes’. It’s a bit like telling to a medieval family that the earth is round. It’s just beyond their way of thinking. To make things even more complex, there is probably a separate silo in the organisation that even is responsible for processes. They tend to be the one that guard the processes…

It’s clear that innovation or even being able to adapt to the changing market in an organisation as this is … well … just not imaginable.

Now imagine a new C-level executive, directly reporting to the CEO. (S)he has no direct reports, no teams, just an MOO-printed business card and carte blanche to investigate each process, follow on every lead (because every employee can send Kafka-like stuff or roadblocks to the_mover@yourcompany.com) and force easier ways of working. He does not have to make a business case to change things, it’s the current process owner who is responsible for the business cases that proves that his current process is still the best).

What impact would this have on your organisation? Sounds like an interesting job to me!

Article also on Medium.

Agile for business

Working within and with a marketing team typically means working with always changing stakeholders (every project is different), a lot of young and eager people, a lot of overloaded decision makers, continuously changing market demands,… All the things that make business life lively. You have to love it, but this also means that quite some time is spend on aligning people, on planning, follow up, sharing information, status meetings,… This all seems like typical project management stuff and there is quite some research on that: what works and what doesn’t. However, in a typical project resources are committed to one scope, where’s in business reality today, you tend to be more in a web of different ‘projects’. Question there is: How to bring in the knowledge from project management without bringing in the heavy methodology and tools that might work in a large project setting, but nog in various day to day interactions?
Doing some investigations on how multidisciplinary teams can work more efficient together when not being in one great project, I learned some things.

things need to be able to shift/transfer quickly trough the organisation without loosing it’s point of origin
forget about one solution for the whole company if you are more than 100 people
extreme choice (as in: whatever solution you choose, push it hard and force yourself to put as much in it as possibel) has some advantages (don’t use multiple ways of communication).
one exception: face 2 face can (and should) always complement the communication method/tool you use.
as always, people and their belief in the process & the use of the tools define the outcome.

I am now experimenting a lot with Trello combined with some sort of weekly (and in some periods daily) kind of stand-up meeting to get all our campaigns, strategic work, projects,… done.
What works well for you and your team?

Why a cover letter is just waisted time (aka: The BS of a cover letter)

The official version goes that a cover letter shows your motivation and your hunger to get the job. If you do not take the time to write a cover letter, you don’t really want the job no?? A more down to earth version goes that it helps the junior HR staff to preselect the short list of potential candidates. After all, if you get 100 cv’s, you need some help in drilling down… Would be ok if you believe it’s HR who does the final decision, but in a phase of just filtering the bad ones out, all you need is a CV.

But in my opinion, it’s all BS: If a recruiter only takes time to write a half pager with some generic stuff (you know the drill: open minded, team-player, 5-10 years experience in a BtB market, project experience,…), how do you expect somebody to already want the job with all their hart?? People who say this are only interested in either the company name (“it’s the coolest brand ever”) or in the job-title (“look at my new business card”), none of them are good reasons to hire somebody.

And yes, I know, you would love to see me telling how great your company is (it probably is, otherwise the applicant would not even go through the trouble of reaching out, asking to open up the conversation), but that should not convince me to hire me either don’t you think?

Wanting a job really shows trough interaction with people, by talking to people working there, by interacting with the company twitter, by walking to the interview space in their offices.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/interview_questions

Helping people to reach their goal.

There is a lot to tell about leadership, coaching, tutoring,… and how important it is in getting more efficient, more innovative, more customer centric,… as a team or company. Off course, you should help people when their success helps you to have a success (typically always the case for your team members).

However, what most people forget is just how good it makes you feel personally when you can help people in reaching **their** goal, even if it is not linked to your objectives. It is definitely not a pure hedonistic view on it, but it’s a strong and good driver I think. And also: when the going get though, they might remember you for helping them shine!

What about you, when did you help people in reaching **their** goals.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.

Off course, you always want to be AND harder AND better AND faster AND stronger (AND more AND less costly AND more innovative…)
The real question is: if you are forced to choose, what do you do?

Do you want to go towards more customers
or do you want to be there with more products
or do you want to be the first with a new idea?

Probably, there is no right answer, as it al depends on the situation.
If you are for example a large commodity supplier in a saturated market, you want to be STRONGER. Taking more parts of the existing value chain for example. If you are in a downside market, you want to be BETTER and do the same for less. Reduce your operational costs again and again…
If you are a start-up, you want to go HARDER: taking more customers with your one product/service you are build upon.

But when in doubt, the smartest way is probably to go for FASTER. Getting towards the market faster gives you either more revenue and margin/EBIT, or it gets you to failure more quickly. Which enables you to learn, adapt en beat the competition that has not yet failed but is loosing touch points with their existing audience.

Be hard on values.

Organisations should not be soft on values in times when things are good.
In times when things go good, organisations tend to be ’to human’. Employees who are doing an ok job, but not in line with the values are easily tolerated. Just because: they can afford.
The thing is however, that when things become more heavy, and the organisation needs to perform high to survive, you see that you are not getting there with those ’tolerated’ people. The problem now is however, that just because things are hectic, you cannot afford missing anybody now.
So always make sure you have people that are performing well and in line with your values, you’ll need the best when things are going to get rough.

Focus and organisation setup.

Getting focus in a world full of distractions (personally, I would call them more positively more inspirational inputs ;-)) can get you in some kind of idea paralysis. When you get to much inputs, idea’s, projects, opportunities,… the risk is imminent to overload your system and stop actually realising things.

There is a reason why in typical team profiles, there is paid a lot of attention in getting balanced teams: you need people who generate ideas, challenge them, other people to get the stuff actually done and still others for maintaing the survice (and often forgotten: others to monitor it). The challenge today is that organisations expect more and more for individual people to be able to generate ideas, implement them, get them to customers, monitor them,…

To get to this ideal situation, let’s train people to exchange information (learn from the guy that is good in implementation and the girl that is good in follow-up) and most of all: enable (stimulate even!) them to create small working units that can get the complete development cycle done without having to worry to much about rigid organisational structures. This way you will enable a way of working where the best people for each specific project get the work done (because typically for launching an internet product to BtB customers, you need Marlies to do the implementation, where you would need René if it is about an technical service for BtC customers).

Off course, you need some kind of ‘driving’ focus. To stir up the discussion, as a marketeer, I would tend to argue that your customer segment should be the overall umbrella (and not: product range, sales channel,…). What do you think? How does your organisation works today??

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!