Three Ways to Cope with a Looming Layoff

Steven Demaio at Harvard Business Review writes there are three ways to cope with a looming layoff. By creating disruption at work … Steven argues a few small things to try. Risky I would say, but academics are sometimes out of touch with what it’s like in the corporate world. Here are his suggestions:

1. Choose a task to do your own way. Chances are, like every frontline worker and manager, you have at least one routine duty that you always perform according to a tacitly understood set of expectations. You don’t openly question the method because it seems to fit the M.O. of the organization or of the folks in charge, even though there’s no formal rule about it. Identify one such task and start doing it the way that you always thought would make more sense. The change obviously should not be something that amounts to insubordination or that would create chaos for coworkers. But in a climate where layoffs seem imminent, there can be room for small, refreshing changes of this sort. Your initiative might even be praised. And if it isn’t noticed at all, you’ll have at least shown yourself that change wasn’t as risky as it had initially seemed to be.

2. Rethink your order of operations. Organizing your workday is obviously more of an art than a science. You’ve probably settled into a particular pattern because it fit the bill when you started the job or because it was just easy to adopt. But when your pattern is threatened by external disruption, you can mitigate anxiety if you shake up your own world before it’s shaken up for you, even if at first that seems like a hassle. Change the sequence of things you do each day, and feel what it’s like to inhabit a new, self-authored routine. If your job is one that requires reacting to others, change the way you react so that things feel fresh to you (without acting fresh toward other people, of course).

3. Lay yourself off for a day. Ok, not literally. But take a day off in the middle of the week (Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday) and inhabit the workaday world outside the office as an observer. The key is not to run errands or get some other practical thing done, and certainly not to sit (or work!) at home. It’s to actively look around you and soak in the big picture when most everyone else is focusing on minutiae. The hum of the world when others are at work and you are not can be a liberating one to hear. And it can make the prospect of a layoff seem much less scary. Bring a souvenir back from your outing and place it on your desk or your wall at work. Let it remind you that you were out there already and that you can, if push comes to shove, go out there again.

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In Defense of Financial Innovation

Robert Shiller of the Yale School of Management has published an article in defense of financial innovation. This financial innovation, such as mortgage innovations, is the false target of blame for the housing bubble collapse.

It is critical that we take the opportunity of the crisis to promote innovation-enhancing financial regulation and not let this be eclipsed by superficially popular issues. Despite the apparent improvement in the economy, the crisis is not over and so the public continues to support government-led interventions.

Doing this means encouraging better dialogue between private-sector innovators and regulators. My experience with regulators suggests that they are intelligent and well-meaning but often bogged down in bureaucracy. Regulatory agencies need to be given a stronger mission of encouraging innovation.

They must hire enough qualified staff to understand the complexity of the innovative process and talk to innovators with less of a disapprove-by-the-rules stance and more that of a contributor to a complex creative process.

A coincedental tie-in to Shiller’s article exists in the future of IT for the enterprise. While it was intended to relate to the finance industry, it is something I’ve been trying to articulate for a while and I’ve never seen it relate so well to the future role of technology in society.

The advance of civilization has brought immense new complexity to the devices we use every day. A century ago, homes were little more than roofs, walls and floors. Now they have a variety of complex electronic devices, including automatic on-off lighting, communications and data processing devices. People do not need to understand the complexity of these devices, which have been engineered to be simple to operate.

Steps to reaching the Asian consumer

Todd Guild, a man I highly respect, has just published a McKinsey Quarterly marketing article on reaching the Asian consumer. His paper argues the most successful global enterprises are rapidly refocusing their efforts to target the up and coming Asian high-grwoth markets.

The paper argues for global consumer companies, a regional / local structure will be an enormous challenge but one that cannot be ignored. Asian market invovlement will soon become necessary for survival.

Todd, and McKinsey’s article, recommend a few steps:

1. Go where the growth is
2. Leverage innovation and talent through regional teams
3. Think in terms of cities, not regions or countries
4. Customize market reach locally, don’t just tweak existing product lines
5. Learn to market and sell across a larger variety of channels

Is your company caught in an IT alignment trap?

Last year the Financial Times and Bain Consulting published an interesting article on IT alignment in relation to costs. We’re putting this up as the principles still apply and the recession appears to be ending, it’s a lesson as to what should have been done ages ago but so many corporations fell into the trap.

1. Simplify. Simplifying the IT function may mean delaying incremental spending to upgrade customised legacy systems and committing instead to a standardised new infrastructure. Such an approach requires a greater investment of time and money up front, as standard systems are rolled out across the enterprise, but will lead to lower costs later.
2. “Rightsource” capabilities. Effective IT requires capabilities ranging from help desks to creating innovative business applications. Today, nearly all are available from low-cost IT specialists offshore. One useful way to guide sourcing choices is to decide what needs to be proprietary. In-house development makes sense for applications that are strategic or critical to competitive differentiation.
3. Focus on value delivery. To be highly effective, IT must complete projects on-time, on-budget, and with functionality that the business needs. To meet these challenges, IT must be equipped with the right objectives, processes, and resources. For example, without a business case and key performance indicators for IT projects, it is difficult to measure and improve the value IT delivers.

Video – Innovation & the Economy, Carngie Mellon

Customer Acquisition and Retention: Price with Confidence

A new paper has been published by Accenture on customer acquisition and retention about pricing with confidence. This is a key article for any company emerging back into the market with growth targets.

In markets where customer behavior is hard to predict, sales teams typically agree to less advantageous pricing and undermine plans for new business growth and revenue.

This article advocates rooting out the common cause for this behavior and foster a culture with leadership that enforces performance behaivor to help sales teams price with confidence and increase top line growth.

Four Keys to Customer Interaction

John Sviokla of the Harvard Business Review posts four keys to consumer interaction. He uses the online coupon group buying power company Groupon as his case study to illustrate the essentials for any company that sells over the web. These include:

1. Make the interaction super simple — one deal, one day, one city. What could be clearer?
2. Create a sense of urgency in your customers. If there are not enough people by midnight, the offer disappears.
3. Energize your customers to get other customers. Good word of mouth is useless unless it turns into sales.
4. Make it fun! Groupon’s tone is upbeat, enjoyable, and does not have that yet-another-boring-coupon feel.

If your company has an online presence, how does that presence convey the above points? How does your site drive new business? And what barrier does your company image have to overcome to secure returning business?

Eight Questions to Assess Your Sales Organization

Melissa Raffoni at the Harvard Business Review is in the process of surveying 50 CEOs ranging from 10-1000 employees. Now at the mid-research point, what she’s found keeping CEOs up at ngiht is how to optimize the sales channel.

The 8 key questions she suggests you ask in assessing your sales organization’s effectivness are:

1. “Ok, tell us again, what’s your value proposition? Why should customers choose you over the competitors?”  It’s so basic, isn’t it?  Yet, I continue to be amazed at how difficult it is to answer this question well. With the constantly changing competitive landscapes and customer needs, every company should take a second look at what they are pitching and why it still resonates today.  I’m sure, for most, the value proposition needs a facelift.
2. “What is your sales process and how does your organizational structure map to it?”
3. “Do you think your overall cost of sales is where it should be?  What makes you think that?  Are you comparing to an industry standard or mapping to a projected financial model?”
4. “What key measures are you using to track sales effectiveness? Do you have a sales dashboard?” Is it cost of sales as a percentage of revenue, close ratio, sales person productivity? Something else? You can’t really optimize if you don’t know which lever you want to move.
5. “If you believe there are two ways to drive sales–increase the funnel and/or increase the close ratio–what are you doing to achieve those increases?
6. “Is sales compensation driving the right behaviors?” Is there enough of a variable compensation component to make a difference?
7. “It’s a new world, how are you taking advantage of it?” Partners are willing to talk, new talent is on the street, customers are looking for high ROI offerings, social media is changing how people communicate. Are you experimenting?
8. Do you have the right people?

Harvard Video: How to Cut Costs–Strategically