Being that I am a “gigantic, slow-moving, extremely heavy beast that require[s] handling“, I just now realized that BNET.com now has Stanley Bing on board. I love reading Bing’s management insights. Sometimes his barbs hit a bit close to home, but they are always amusing and often true.
The Wall Street Journal has a fantastic, if troubling, look at the way a single layoff spreads its effects through the economy. Just think, there are tens of thousands of these ripples happening every day. Let’s hope these ripples do not turn into a tsunami. I don’t want to spoil the article by excerpting. It is worth reading the whole thing.
Quick takes for the week:
I completed a series of brainstorming sessions this week. I was looking for a nice tool to display all of the ideas, but highlight the most common ideas. I pasted the text of my notes in to Wordle and created a nice visual display of all the words that came up during the sessions. The only problem is that Wordle only allows you to print the results or upload the Word Cloud to their gallery. I am wondering if there is a service out there that does the same thing as wordle, but lets you save the cloud as an image. Does anyone know of any?
I also want to give a shout out to MindMeister.com. I have been using it to do mind mapping (including organizing the results of the aforementioned brainstorming). There are a couple of things that I wish it had (associations and clouds), but it’s a great tool for online mind mapping. Does anyone have other recommendations?
Bruce Temkin (have I mentioned how useful his site is?) posts a link to an interview with former-McKinsey director Richard Foster (registration required). As Temkin points out, this interview is one of the best explanations of the current economic out there. The whole interview is worth reading, but here are some of the juicy points:
The granddaddy of cycles in this economy is the equity premium, which is the difference between the longer-term total returns to shareholders and the supposedly risk-free debt rate. It is the premium the equity investor gets for taking the equity risk. Looking back, we can see seven great cycles. During the boom times, when the equity premium goes way too high, everybody hocks everything to get in on the game, and this creates the conditions for a crash. When the crash occurs, the politicians come in and say it was this or that person’s fault. Then they create regulatory institutions, and virtually every one of those institutions—starting with the Federal Reserve, in 1913, as a result of the crash of 1907—has been quite productive for the nation in the longer term. This includes the formation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, in 1934; the Investment Company Act, in 1940; the beginning of the end of fixed commission rates in 1970; and the Sarbanes–Oxley Act, in the early 2000s.
So that’s where we were before the current meltdown. How did the problems occur?
Continue Reading “How we got here”
Interesting Conversation Starter at HarvardBiz on how to
sell yourself when you job may be at risk. In this climate, everyone’s
job is. Here are the main points:
Send an e-mail to your boss praising a young employee’s work on a recent project. You’ll look like a team player – and a thoughtful manager – while drawing attention to your group’s success. It’s a nice thing to do for your direct report, too.
Ask your boss for feedback on your priorities (rather than your performance). Make a list of your key projects and goals for the next six months, and walk through the list together. Message to boss: I’m both thoughtful and action-oriented.
Find a teaching moment. Gossiping with your peers about the subprime mess doesn’t demonstrate leadership. Taking the initiative to get all the recent college hires in your department into a conference room and explain what “subprime” means does.
Get in early. Don’t work longer hours, just earlier ones. Senior people tend to be early birds – and they’ll notice if you’re there. Remember, you don’t know who’s making decisions about the names on that dreaded list.
I would add a few more manager-specific of my own:
Does anyone have any others?
Mixing a little eastern influence in with our western traditions… The Buddhist channel has an interesting piece entitled What Would the Buddha Buy?
What would the Buddha buy? Not too much, not too little. Picture him with his own reusable grocery bag slung over his shoulder, talking to a shopper about making mindful choices: “Do you really need it?” “Where does it come from?” “How will it affect the environment when you’re done?”
[snip]
The Buddha’s critique of mindless craving and needless suffering
pinpoints the precise moment during which real pleasure becomes
abstract desire – the want to want. In our addictive culture of
capitalism, it’s the exact same vital acupressure point that our basic
market economy capitalizes on. “Don’t get hooked,” the Buddha says.
Continue Reading “What Would the Buddha Buy?”
Fortune has a piece outlining 8 experts’ predictions about the future of the economy. Most of these folks predicted our current predicaments. As per usual, Nouriel Roubini brings the scary:
For the next 12 months I would stay away from risky assets. I would stay away from the stock market. I would stay away from commodities. I would stay away from credit, both high-yield and high-grade. I would stay in cash or cashlike instruments such as short-term or longer-term government bonds. It’s better to stay in things with low returns rather than to lose 50% of your wealth. You should preserve capital. It’ll be hard and challenging enough. I wish I could be more cheerful, but I was right a year ago, and I think I’ll be right this year too.
I hope he’s wrong, but I don’t know. The others are not much better.
I’ve come across a useful series of top-ten articles from insideCRM (here, here, here).
A couple of items in “10 Steps to Getting the CRM Solution You Need“ really caught my eye:
[snip]
7. Realize that CRM is most effective in existing relationships. Corporations that view CRM as a way to capture customers may well be headed for disappointment, since the technology is better suited to managing business that’s already in place.
[snip]
9. Once a CRM solution is in place, introduce the system slowly. After having spent a lot of money — not to mention a great deal of time talking to vendors and honing expectations — business leaders and IT staff are naturally eager to crank out returns. However, internal staff will need a little time to digest the changes that a CRM system brings about…
This advice is something anyone embarking down the CRM road should heed. It’s very easy to get caught up in the features and potential of a tool. It’s even easier when you are starting from zero and do not have a tool and only fragmented processes.
The challenge with this advice is getting the right people to the table to talk these items through. Although it’s tempting to think so, a CRM system will not be a silver bullet. As with most software implementations, CRM is more than just a new app, it’s a whole new way of managing customer operations. Getting buy-in from all the players is key.
Has anyone out there gone through this process? What worked in getting people to talk about the process instead of the product features? What didn’t?
I am catching up on some reading and had this article from Harvard Management Update on the list. It’s a bit heavy, but the crux of it is focusing on services that clients want and not solely on things like technology, features, and functionality. I agree with everything in the article. It seems obvious–a service will fail if it is not something a client needs or sees value in. The value part is the trickiest, in my opinion. Further, it’s getting increasingly hard to demonstrate value in this economic climate. Understandably, most of the services clients, myself included, want right now involve the word “free” or at least “extremely low cost”.
[snip]
Merrill has suffered net losses of $11.67 billion this year and is about to complete its acquisition by Bank of America Corp. later this month. On Friday, shareholders of both companies separately approved the deal. Mr. Thain has said he deserves a bonus because he helped avert what could have been a much larger crisis at the firm, say people familiar with his thinking.
BLUF: “Things didn’t suck as bad as they could have, so give me money.”
Look, I know, that Thain did the best he could with a bad hand, but to ask for this kind of compensation is more than a bit unseemly in today’s economic climate.
Of course, according to the article, the original ask was for $30mil. That begs the question — What is reasonable compensation for a CEO? Who determines “reasonable”? Additionally, is a bonus ever warranted when a company suffers a loss?
Anyone else out there use Redbox to rent movies? I love it. The only flaw I have found is getting stuck behind an indecisve person when waiting to pick up movies.
I like the model. You can reserve titles online. Nightly rentals are so cheap ($1 per night) that it incentivises you to watch the movies quicky and return them. There is no membership fee. Finally, you can return them to any location (pretty much any grocery store in the area). Returning to a specific location was always my main pet peeve with Blockbuster or Hollywood. With redbox, I can pick a movie up by my house then return it down by my office.
For me, it beats Netflix. I liked Netflix, but I found the automatic queue a pain to maintain. I’d forget to update it and then we’d end up with a movie we wanted a few weeks back. It would usually end up sitting on the shelf for a week (or longer) and then we’d send it back unwatched. Good for Netflix, bad for us.
I guess the option that comes closest to redbox is OnDemand, but I could write another post about why I think that service, at least with my provider, is awful and a poor value.
Read an article on BNET about Southwest’s acquisition of 7 slots at LaGuardia and what they may be up to with them.
Something I didn’t know about LGA:
Houston is always a possibility for a couple flights since that
would get people directly into the airline’s home state, but there are
still restrictions preventing them from flying nonstop from Dallas/Love
Field, and Austin and San Antonio are just beyond the 1,500 mile
perimeter rule at LaGuardia.
That’s right, there’s still a rule saying that flights from
LaGuardia can’t go beyond 1,500 miles except for Denver (which was
somehow grandfathered in) and on Saturdays when there is no
restriction. For that reason, all of the West is out of the question.
Interesting.
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