347-878-3837

Business

Here are articles on Business

The Best Excuses Ever

,

Have you noticed that people don’t like to say,

“I’m making this decision because it’s convenient for me. It may hurt others. It may even hurt them a lot, but my convenience is more important.”

They don’t like to say it because it forces them to face up to their own selfishness. While I’d love to say something warm and supportive, like, “You go, Girl! You deserve to put your convenience ahead of your responsibilities to your family, community, etc.”
Sadly, I don’t believe it.

Here are some of the excuses I’ve recently heard for people justifying doing crappy things to other people so they don’t have to take responsibility for owning their own actions:

  • Convenience. Yes, I believe loyalty is important to employees. But it’s hard to reduce costs in meaningful ways. Layoffs are just the obvious choice.
  • Groupthink. Everyone else does it, so if I’m wrong, then so is everyone else. (And yeah, you’re right about that.)
  • Someone-think. If I didn’t do it, someone else would.
  • Kids. My favorite. Blame it on devotion to the kids. I love environmentalists who claim to care about their kids’ future, while driving convenient minivans that help guarantee their kids will suffer with global warming, oil shortages, etc.

Oh, crap!! I just realized this entire post probably counts as a complaint (see a Complaint Free World below). I’ll stop here and move my bracelet to the other wrist. And I was going on 3 days, too. Rats!!

A Complaint Free World. Drats.

,

My purple bracelets from A Complaint Free World. arrived today. Darn.

They’re based on the simple idea that it takes 21 days to break a habit. You wear one, and decide to change the habit. If you relapse, you switch the bracelet to the other wrist and begin again. After you’ve gone 21 days without switching wrists, your habit is broken.

This sounds fine and dandy, but gosh darn it, the habit in question is complaining. I love complaining. I complain about how screwed up politics is. I complain about the work world. I complain about executive pay. I complain about my messy office. I complain about how much I complain. And then, I complain about that. Just this morning during Power Yoga (read my humorous yoga essay here), I was doing my deep breathing, my Vinyasa flow, and mentally rehearsing everything to complain about today.

And ARGH! I just realized that this very post is, itself, a complaint. Fortunately, I haven’t put the purple bracelet on… yet.

What will I do with all my new free time?

U.S. Auto Manufacturers outraged at 12-year target to reach below-average performance

I’m not quite sure what to say. The Senate has voted to raise mileage standards to 35 mpg by the year 2020. U.S. auto folks claim it will never happen, as AutoBlog reports.

Is it just me, or are these folks crazy? Gas gas gone up 100% in the last 10 years, and 30% in the last 2 years. By 2020, whether or not you believe in Peak Oil, the price will likely go up considerably, if only because China and India are drastically increasing their demand for oil. And they think that offering sub-35-mpg cars when gas is $5-$6/gallon will keep them in business? Get real. This is long-term planning of the worst kind: long-term planning to go bankrupt.

And by the way, the EPA reports that Toyotas, even the non-hybrids, already get around 35mpg. That means the U.S. auto manufacturers think that 12 years isn’t enough time to become competitive with mileage available today from imports. Gee, talk about American “can-do” ingenuity. And we’re paying these auto CEOs how much money?

If this represents Detroit’s true attitude, let’s just liquidate the companies now and distribute their remaining assets to startups committed to helping us find a long-term transportation solution.

How to think strategically

,

What is strategic thinking, anyway?

Click here to listen to this article as a podcast.

It sounds easy: my client wanted to think more strategically. isn’t that the hot buzzword? “Strategic thinking.” Oooh! Sexy. There’s only one problem: what, exactly, does it mean?

You’d think we would know. But I’ve seen executive teams discuss in all seriousness what the lever does on a piece of machinery. That’s about as non-strategic as it gets. In fact, a general rule is that if you read it in a manual, it’s quite likely not strategic.

What is strategic is when you’re doing something that changes the structure of the business in some basic way. Paint a machine lever red? Not strategic. Decide to outsource manufacturing to China? Strategic, because it changes who you hire, how you manage them, and what they’re capable of achieving. You punt your machines and take on eager young managers who speak Mandarin.

This is the first kind of strategic impact: changing organization structure. This includes outsourcing, selecting vendors (since what you can do now becomes expanded and limited by what they can do), mergers and acquisitions, changing the org chart, going public, and hiring and firing people who will in turn make strategic decisions.

Or consider an entrepreneurial client who insists on answering the phones himself. He’s done it since founding the business 20 years ago and prides himself on knowing everything that’s going on. But now that the company gets a hundred phone calls a day, he decides to install an automated attendant, freeing himself to do other things. This is an example of “business process reengineering,” which is a fancy way of saying “doing things differently.” Changing how a business does something is strategic because different hows give the business different capabilities. If your product is produced on a machine that turns out 100 widgets a day, then you simply can’t bid on a job that wants 500 units by tomorrow. If you can rearrange your factory processes and produce 5,000 units a day, whole new markets open up.

Speaking of markets, choosing the markets to compete in, what to sell, and how to price are all strategic decisions. After all, those decisions determine who you’ll hire, how you set up your org structure, and how you’ll deliver your product or service.

The American Express web site lists 20+ cards. I called a friend in Amex’s strategy group to help me understand the difference between the “Platinum Business” and the “Business Platinum” cards. He said, “I work in strategy. I don’t really know our product lines.” A strategy group that doesn’t know the products? I don’t know what they do, but it seems awfully dangerous to be making organization structure and process decisions without even knowing what your customers are buying.

Everything we’ve discussed so far is cross-functional; they can involve changes that affect many parts of a business. Though it’s possible to make strategic decisions in one area of a company without involving other areas, that’s a dangerous game. If our marketing department starts competing in a new market that cares about delivery time, but doesn’t tell our shipping folks, they can set the company up for failure.

Don’t make the same mistake. Learn when your decisions are strategic. That means decisions about org structure, process–the HOW–, cross-functional decisions, and the marketing decisions of what to sell and who to sell them to.

If you want to learn more about strategy, my very favorite book is Co-opetition by Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff. I also liked Geoff Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm.” Both books are circa mid-90s. There are 83,416 other business books that will teach you some kind of strategic thinking. I’m not sure the specific strategic approach is very important (though consulting firms will make big bucks telling you otherwise); to me, the value comes from learning to think at a strategic level consistently and integrate strategic thinking into your daily running of the business.

Newly minted Harvard MBAs, already violating ethics to make a buck

I had dinner tonight with a friend graduating from Harvard Business School tomorrow. Her family needs an extra ticket to the graduation ceremony. A fellow classmate is offering to sell her his spare ticket for $100. The catch? The administration has specifically told students they’re not allowed to sell tickets for cash, and if they do, their diploma can be withheld.

So under these clear unambiguous guidelines, our Fellow is already making a profit by acting against community standards. “But everyone does it” is, I’m sure, the rationalization. But it’s only a rationalization. I once hoped that places like Harvard would strive to instill in graduates a sense of duty to be an example of the highest standards of ethics and moral behavior. Nope. They aspire to get what they want, happily enjoying the privileges that come with the degree, yet stooping to the “everyone does it” excuse when asked to exercise a modicum of integrity.

“Everyone does it.” Imagine a world where “everyone” acted with honor, generosity, and trustworthiness. That’s a world where “everyone does it” might be a reason to follow the crowd.

Wish Verizon IOBI would get a clue

,

Use your product before selling it. Please!

Verizon’s IOBI service sounds nice: manage your phones from your web browser. It’s kind of cool. But they screwed up royally. The product likely cost tens if not hundreds of millions to roll out, and it’s clear no one bothered to try using it.

IOBI lets you change your call forwarding, call blocking, etc. remotely. How? You call a phone number and speak your commands. Sounds pretty sensible, eh? Very 21st century.

Too bad they clearly never tested it. IOBI has two show-stopping problems. First, you can register up to 3 phones allowed to call in to the 800 number to change forwarding. Again, sounds reasonable. I registered my cell phone, home phone, and work phone. But wait! I was traveling and lost my cell phone. Now, I’m totally unable to reforward my phones to the house where I’m staying, since I can only change my forwarding from a pre-approved phone. Why not just let me enter a PIN or password, like I can with every other service in the world? (And even if I call from an approved phone, they require a PIN, so it’s not like they don’t have the capability!)

To make matters worse, the system is only voice activated. Let’s see, a remote forwarding service. Where are people likely to use it from? Their cell phones. While walking down the street. With traffic, wind, and random noise in the background, not to mention a poor connection. I’ve found IOBI is utterly useless from a cell phone. Even when quiet, it often can’t understand me.

I’m amazed that these flaws—which are really show-stoppers—didn’t come up in user testing. It’s a nice service that just doesn’t work except under perfect conditions.

The icing on the customer service cake is that Verizon used to offer a touch-tone activated remote call forwarding that could be called from any phone. I used it for years and was quite happy. But that’s now a discontinued product, so my “trial” of IOBI eliminated any possibility of resuming my reliable, working service.

Chalk one up to progress.

Productivity has limits!

,

Last night at my birthday party, a friend told me how his company insists he show up at work before 9 to make sure everyone’s productive. It seems we’re always trying to increase productivity. But this isn’t sustainable.

You see, productivity has its limits. Period. A woman can’t have a baby in six months by trying really hard. The process takes nine months. You can’t add a woman, hoping that two women working together can make one baby in four and a half months. The process takes one woman nine months.

Every task takes a certain amount of time to complete. If you’re manufacturing round metal paperweights, the metal has to be melted and then cooled. Those physical processes can only happen so fast without the metal breaking. We might be able to speed them up a little here and there, but at the end of the day, no amount of investment can speed the process beyond a certain point.

So it makes me wonder how we know when we’re as productive in an area as it’s possible to be? I have timed myself over and over, and I write about 400 words of finished draft per hour. My mood doesn’t affect it much, my typing speed isn’t the limit. That just seems to be how long it takes me to write a finished draft. Do I try to improve it, thus improving my productivity, or am I going as fast as possible already (since writing happens subconsciously), and I just relax and go with the flow?

It’s a question worth asking businesses, who often pour resources into misguided attempts at improvement, where the status quo is just fine on its own.

It’s also worth asking yourself. Some people look for their weaknesses and try to improve them. But your weaknesses may be just fine as they are. Maybe your time is best spent enjoying life, instead!

Propoganda, by any other name, is still as manipulative

As I write this, CNN is announcing that the U.S. Military is now posting “unfiltered” videos on YouTube, to show what it’s really like on the ground in Iraq.

In the five minutes I watched the segment, every one of the videos showed uniformed servicemen playing with kids, shooting hoops, and giving presents to grateful families. Wow! Iraq looks like my 19th birthday party, only with cool combat fatigues and neat machinery.

Noticeably missing are the body bags, the servicemen whose limbs have been blown off by roadside bombs, and the blood and bodies of Iraqi civilians killed in the daily suicide bomb attack. And oddly, other than campaign ads for Republicans in 2004, no coffins of the young men and women who have died in Iraq.

Let’s hear it for unfiltered videos.

Coming soon: “unfiltered” financial data on Enron, Worldcom, and many other of your other favorite companies.