Unbound Ideas » economy

Two Ways to Tame the Anti-Growth Dragons

Lisa Nirell — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 05:16:26 +0000

Let’s be honest. In today’s volatile economy, foresight and planning are easily pushed aside in favor of reactively averting poisonous arrows and perilous moats. Those hazards continuously threaten us—and often appear from a surprise enemy. How many of us keep putting our foot on the gas and have not slowed down to finesse these dangerous conditions?

(photo courtesy of www.webweaver.nu/clipart/dragons3.shtml)

We may not be able to control unforeseen events and demanding clients. What we can control is how we respond. It starts with arming ourselves with knowledge and confidence.
Knowledge begins by understanding the most common pressures our clients are facing:

1. Information overload is pushing clients closer to “overwhelm” than ever before. They crave simplicity, and will pay handsomely for it. According to sales expert Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling, “If you do not offer a quick, easy way for clients to work with you and demonstrate your value, one of three things will happen: they either a) delete your messages, b) delay getting back to you or c) disappear into a black hole.”

2. Larger organizations continue to reduce suppliers.In many services and knowledge businesses, such as training, coaching, software, logistics, and IT services, the purchasing power has shifted from functional areas to the procurement department. Dynamics have shifted from a relationship orientation to a transaction orientation. Suddenly the purchasing department is your gatekeeper, forcing you into cost reduction conversations. Beverly Heinritz, Vice President of Customer Service and Support at Rearden Commerce, this has generated longer sales cycles. Rearden Commerce provides a network platform that connects mobile professionals with over 160,000 suppliers. Today, even these innovative companies can demonstrate immediate ROI yet still face these roadblocks.

3. Leaders continue to struggle to do more with less. In spite of the number of recovery indicators, massive currency fluctuations, tighter credit, and the increased cost of labor and materials has limited how much organic growth many B2B companies can pursue. This forces even high-end brands to provide lower-priced services to cost-obsessed customers.
How do you protect yourself from these challenging dynamics? Build your defenses by looking first at the gaps in your own company, and how you can eliminate them.
It might be easier than you think. After working with hundreds of entrepreneurs and dozens of Fortune 500 companies, I discovered that only two major gaps stop most companies from reaching their true potential. Thankfully, both are within your control to address:

1. Lack of a practical, easy to understand growth plan. You will notice I did not suggest you develop a strategic plan. This is overkill for most small to medium companies.

Most companies develop plans from the INSIDE OUT. In other words, they focus too much of their time on financials, operations, core values, mission statements, and ‘what if’ scenarios. During turbulent times, your finance and operations teams can be your best friends. But if you forget to re-focus on your clients during the recovery, they may also forget YOU.

Take a different approach. Start planning from the OUTSIDE IN. Look first at market dynamics, such as:

• The strategic market imperatives (internal and external pressures that are forcing your clients to change) – these may include pressure to reduce error rates, improving internal compliance, streamlining time to market, or positioning the company for eventual sale.

• The consequences and impact on the client if they do not address these imperatives—how will management be affected? Their employees? Their competitive positioning? Their ability to innovate?

• The Ultimate Result and Unique Value Factor—Shine a light on your “UR-UV.” Identify how clearly you understand your client’s needs, issues, and frustrations. What makes your company stand out in their mind? How do you make their businesses and lives better?

• Your Ideal client. After you have identified your company’s unique attributes, review the traits of your ideal client. Instead of focusing first on the demographics, analyze their behavior. This may include their decision-making style, commonly shared values, culture, and innovation philosophy.

2. Letting “the Beast” in your company run wild, and lacking a system to tame it.
The Beast is a whimsical yet pungent metaphor for your limiting beliefs. Author and change catalyst Daryl Conner, author of “Managing at the Speed of Change,” once said “The Beast takes dreams and turns them into nightmares.” He is right. They can kill a perfectly good growth plan and winning strategy in a heartbeat.

The Beast is sneaky. It expresses itself during meetings and private conversation. You may recognize these common Beast remarks:

“I’m a banker, not a marketer.
I don’t have time to focus; I am too busy.
Let me explain why that won’t work…
Planning is expensive and time-consuming.
If I focus my market too much, I will miss out on new opportunities as they arise.”

Charlie, the CEO of a global engineering firm, took nearly ten years to identify the Beast in his organization. In his company, his lead engineer Bill was channeling the Beast. He repeatedly told co-workers “here we go again…another change initiative. This too shall pass.” Charlie’s new initiatives were repeatedly sabotaged.

We asked a series of revealing questions to help this client manage the Beast. In the end, they felt more committed to their key priorities and more confident about their business strategy. Team members became more open during weekly meetings. Bill chose early retirement. Within just 12 months, their collections improved by 50%, profitability was restored, and they were featured in Inc. Magazine.

If you can address these two major gaps, you will be miles ahead of the biggest beast of all: inertia. Don’t wait. Don your finest dragon slayer gear and start now.

About the Author:

Lisa Nirell, EnergizeGrowth

Lisa Nirell is the Chief Energy Officer of EnergizeGrowth® (www.energizegrowth.com) in Bend, Oregon. She and her team help B2B companies increase their wealth, improve their performance and attract great clients. Within just three years, she helped her clients generate over $83M in new business.

Over the past 27 years, Lisa has worked with Microsoft, Wells Fargo, IBM, and hundreds of entrepreneurs in nine countries. Lisa is also an award-winning business columnist, FastCompany expert blogger, and the author of “EnergizeGrowth® NOW: The Marketing Guide to a Wealthy Company.” Visit www.energizegrowth.com and register for EnergizeNews to download four complimentary educational bonus gifts and a free chapter from Lisa’s newest book.

The economy (and time) changes everything

Unbound Ideas — Mon, 04 May 2009 20:05:53 +0000

Much has been written and discussed about Gen Y in the workplace, including in our own webinar with Lisa Orrell. As this article in the Wall Street Journal shows, Millennials are becoming “good workplace citizens.”

Social networking, meet digital commerce

Unbound Ideas — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:39:03 +0000

Apple is about to sell its one billionth “app“, an amazing pace of development for a marketplace that just got established 8 or 9 months ago. In contrast, it took a couple years to sell a million songs on iTunes. A lot of entrepreneurs are toiling in basements and coffee shops to make those kinds of numbers happen.

Ning has now generated 1 million social networking sites, evidence that virtual networking is becoming a way-of-life. When social networking becomes a way-of-work we’ll see projects, teams, and organizations run differently.

Now expert advice service is becoming increasingly virtual, too. The question will become – how do you determine quality and how will those services be delivered in ways that solve our work and life frustrations?

When innovation comes of age

Unbound Ideas — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 19:25:23 +0000

You can read a great review in the Wall Street Journal of the book, The Industrial Revolutionaries by Gavin Weightman. The author makes the case that the practical applications of innovations – and the systems that underly their successful deployment – are what really changes our lives, not the innovations themselves. For example, telegraph lines existed before Samuel Morse, but it was Morse’s telegraph system and his famous code that made long-distance communication indispensable for businesses. Similarly, it was Trevithwick’s steam locomotive that enabled steam power to change economics and society.

Peter Drucker made similar points about the Internet. The internet, he wrote, is our steam engine. But internet commerce, or the “buy-button” as Lou Gerstner once put it, is our steam locomotive. Think of how our buying and business habits have changed with the widespread emergence of digital commerce.

Al Vicere, our June presenter, has a similar view of the economic shifts we’re experiencing now. According to Dr. Vicere, the information age is finally upon us. The economic crisis of 2008-2009 is hastening the demise of many traditional economic institutions and organizations, and what emerges on the other side will feel a lot more like the promises we’ve been led to expect for some time now.

The Contra Cyclical Instinct

Unbound Ideas — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 03:25:53 +0000

Jay Light, the dean of Harvard Business School, is calling for business school education to swing back toward the center: “We lived through an enormous extended period of financial good times, and people became less focused on risks and risk management and more focused on making money.”

Christoph Bangert for The New York Times

We needed better risk management over the last 5 years, but now that we’re on the downside of the cycle the need for innovation and risk-taking is at a premium. It’s time to grow new businesses and new products not preserve a diluted balance sheet.

Daniel Gross noted today in Slate.com that the “zeitgeist has spun 180 degrees” and adds: “For the economy to recover and thrive… business must once again be willing to roll the dice.”

Some of the greatest entrepreneurial ventures have been founded in recessionary economies. As Wired Magazine put it in December 2008, “When the economy is in turmoil, the time is ripe for ambitious innovation.”

FG Ghadar and Al Vicere will have much to say on these topics in the next few months.

Don’t worry, be happy

Unbound Ideas — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 18:22:47 +0000

In every life we have some trouble
When you worry you make it double
Don’t worry, be happy……

There is plenty of doom and gloom surrounding rising unemployment, free-falling equity values, locked-in credit markets and a housing situation that, well, you know. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine panic, dread and misery being a frequent co-pilot among the millions of mass-transiting, ride-share laneing commuters across the world. But beyond the anxiety over our economic security, are we generally more unhappy now?

Paul Ingram, the faculty director of the Columbia Senior Executive Program at Columbia Business School, recently released the results of a longitudinal survey of 500 young executives who are mostly based in New York or London and on the front lines of the financial crisis. Of the survey’s findings, he says “the overall happiness in this group has not changed as the financial crisis has unfolded.”

What the survey uncovers is the notion that how we motivate ourselves, what we value and whether we are forward or backward looking has much more to say about our happiness than the economic conditions of the moment.

We have found that people who are disposed to comparisons are less happy. Of course, relative status matters for happiness, but people who think more about their position compared to others are less satisfied with their lives. In times of loss, it is also happiness-destroying to make comparisons to yourself in the past. It is likely that this has created despondency in a few of the formerly super-rich who are now merely rich. The prescription that results from this evidence is to think less about what others have and to not dwell on what you have lost.

We have also found that people who are vigilant about protecting what they have and value — whatever it is — are happier. We recommend that you make salient what you have now that you want to keep, and be conscious of how you might lose it.

Finally, people who are eager in pursuit of some potential gain are also happier. Be explicit about what it is you want for the future, lay out concrete plans to get it and think about how you’ll feel when you do so.

Our experiments suggest that a useful exercise for putting yourself into the mindset associated with happiness would be to buy a small notebook and regularly write about what you have now that is valuable to you, what threats you must protect against, what you hope for the future and what it will feel like when those hopes are realized. Happily, the same exercise will have positive spillovers on your creativity, risk-management and decision-making abilities. And remember that the relationship between the economy and life satisfaction is muted and that our capacity to adjust to negative events is great. The biggest influence on the ultimate outcome — happiness — is not what happens to us but how we motivate ourselves.

Although we understand the pain the current climate is causing, at Unbound Ideas, we too are focusing on positive motivations and a better tomorrow. With apologies to Bobby McFerrin, we’ll do our best to sing that idea note for note.

What job slowdown? Not in health or education

Unbound Ideas — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 19:38:17 +0000

In most industries, the jobs picture is bleak. Unemployment is high and new opportunities are harder to come by across the board – almost. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, education and health services continue to project job grow that is much faster than average through 2016. In fact, they predict that a full 30% of all new hiring done will be in these sectors!

A significant cause of this growth is the overall increase in spending on heath and education related services relative to the overall economy. But another important cause is the aging nature of many of the workers – at all levels – in both fields. Education and health are ranked in the top tier among all industries that anticipate recruiting and retention pressure as their workforce begins to retire in greater than average numbers.

In these industries, which require postsecondary education for many employees, ensuring an adequate supply of appropriately educated workers now is critical to avoiding severe shortages in the future. In fact, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing worries that 500,000 positions per year could go unfilled.

Certainly, if the current economic condition persists for too long, workers who had planned to retire may stay on and new job growth will be lower, but relative to other fields these two industries will continue to require greater flexibility and skill from responsible human resource personnel.

For these and other reasons we are looking forward to Lisa Orrell’s webinar on How to Successfully Recruit, Manage, and Retain Our Next Generation of Young Professionals. Understanding the cultural differences that set the “Millennials” apart from other generations will be important for attracting the best talent, mitigating clash between the incoming and outgoing (Boomer) groups, and allowing their diversity, independence and optimism to shape an organization’s success. This will be doubly true in those fields that now have – and will soon lose – older workers in great numbers.

Atlas shrugged, Amazon trembled

Unbound Ideas — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:00:31 +0000

According to the Economist, sales of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” track nicely with the ups and downs of the economy.

Whenever governments intervene in the market, in short, readers rush to buy Rand’s book. Why? The reason is explained by the name of a recently formed group on Facebook, the world’s biggest social-networking site: “Read the news today? It’s like ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is happening in real life”. The group, and an expanding chorus of fretful bloggers, reckon that life is imitating art.

Creative Destruction in Theory and Practice

Unbound Ideas — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:14:50 +0000

The economy dominates everything right now – business planning, personal planning, hopes and fears for the future. We’re eyewitnesses to one of the greatest periods of creative destruction seen in our lifetimes. This article in the NYT captures the scale: “Job Losses Hint at Vast Remaking of Economy.”

Our authors are as focused on this churn as you are. Marshall Goldsmith in his webinar on Succession and Career Planning advised everyone to hang onto what’s working, even if it’s not completely satisfying, and think about what’s important at least as much as you think about what’s urgent. Jim Kouzes certainly echoes that perspective in his understanding of the journey of leadership.

Several of our upcoming webinars, including Lisa Orrell and Cindy Ventrice, are about generational issues in the workplace. While some people might think it’s a time for workers to pipe down about their concerns, in truth, those issues don’t just go away because of external circumstances, and organizations need to be as productive as possible right now. Bev Kaye tackles this issue head-on in her webinar on Engaging the Kept-On Workforce. Those who remain behind at a corporation that’s been shaken up can be traumatized and unproductive, unless they’re skillfully brought through the crisis. Rayona Sharpnack talks about the reality that women leaders are facing, with the double crisis of work and home.

On the big scale, FG Ghadar is going to be talking about tectonic shifts and how those impact an organization’s long-term business and people planning. And Al Vicere’s webinar is about the gap between planning, rhetoric and culture. As the New York Times’ article noted: “This rapid deterioration has prompted talk that some industries are being partly dismantled.” This holds to Dr. Vicere’s view that what we’re experiencing now is transformational change of whole industries and organizations, but when the rubble has settled, we’ll see the long-awaited rise of the true information-age economy.

How do leaders respond to job-market pessimism?

Unbound Ideas — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 02:07:01 +0000

As economic conditions continue to deteriorate, workplace leaders not only face having to deliver bad news at times, but they also face the consequences of the increased anxiety caused by today’s market conditions. A recent Gallop survey indicated that a majority of workers are not worried about being laid off, which is a good thing. But a closer look at the data indicates a very high level of stress is being carried by workers everywhere.

Economic climate places additional stresses on workplace leaders

Even if the “majority” are not worried about being laid off in the near future, having nearly 1/3rd of respondents answering affirmatively to the first four of these five survey questions has to be pressing on workplace morale and productivity. How leaders respond to this anxiety and steer the nervous energy into productive outcomes, while not hiding the threats or economic realities, will go a long way in determining which firms survive and prosper.