The Sizzle

vive la différence

2012-05-27T02:00:39Z

Working across both the public and private sectors, we celebrate the differences between the two. The public sector is slower, more careful, more risk averse, but more costly for it. The private sector is the direct opposite of this.

As a vendor, we relish chasing a sale and proving our worth in service at the same time. This seems only possible with private clients, however, who inherently understand risk and time-cost.

The public sector sales process is thorough and fair but tiresome, soul-less and expensive. Public sector programmes to change this follow the principle that

savings is the oxygen of procurement reform.

I only wish they could find a way to balance risk and time-cost. Perhaps its about managerial courage and decision agility.

under promise over deliver

2011-06-04T11:07:01Z

Under promise and over deliver is a kiwi approach to self promotion. New Zealanders are reknown for understating their worth while they quietly excel; where other cultures are famed for the direct opposite - hyping up themselves, "faking it before they're making it". The NZ film industry adjusts expectations of candidates for big new movies - upwards for kiwis, downwards for some others. In other circumstances job applicants will talk about skills they don't have rather then what they do have. We seem to fear being labelled as arrogant or egotistical.

This approach is likely to be to our detriment, however, when it translates into understating what your business can offer - especially when competing against hardened international operators. Perhaps we need more exposure to international competition to appreciate what we do and to see how others represent themselves.

Confidence is infectious, spread it to your customers

how's your moral compass?

2011-03-29T21:31:55Z

I used to fancy myself as a rational capitalist business-person when I debated social and religious issues with my elders. I used to think the most powerful guiding pholosophy was simply:

create your own fate - at your own expense

This means the moral freedom to do whatever you want so long as you accept reponsibility for all your actions, inactions, and their outcomes and what you do doesn't hurt anybody else.

The challenge in business though, is this approach tends to reduce people and contacts to components in an economic system; components you try and exchange value with in order to move toward your goals.

This is a challenge because it's inhuman. I have always maintained that people do business with people. Business ethics may prevent us from dishonesty or doing harm, but what will motivate us to do things that help others but don't create us a pay-off?

Credit: ScinttThe answer is a deep, DNA-level, moral compass that probably goes back to tribalism, or at least to community-based survival. It's an urge to help others and a personal satisfaction from reaching out. The need for human connections may be part of what drives the social media phenomenon but it also works in business where authentic networking supports a comminity of interest. It also works in the aftermath of disasters, of course.

We can only hope it kicks in at a broader societal level should capitalism continue to fail us.

our ideal customer

2010-10-12T03:29:38Z

Recently innovation facilitator, Rumi Shivas, posed the question "what's your ideal customer profile?". He cited his own list of defining qualities, including:

1. Will return my calls or emails promptly, usually within 48 hours

2. Passionate about value creation and innovation

3. In decision making positions with access to funding and resources

4. Has a sense of urgency and prepared to take calculated risks

5. Has a customer care mindset

6. Cares about 'value & outcomes' more than 'process & methods'

In a world where the customer is always right, this is not as counter-intuitive as it may sound. Knowing clearly the personal attributes of your ideal client can help you focus effort and identify the gold in prospecting. At Ezidocs, we describe our ideal customer as:

A senior manager with the imagination to recognise a better way, the drive to make improvements, the appetite to take a calculated risk and the political equity to effect a change.

These are the heroes of change, the princes of possibility and the bridge-builders to the future. They also make our job a lot more exciting. We love working with visionary change agents: making the world a better place is what drives us.

If this sounds like you...we'd love to hear from you!

counting the intangibles

2010-08-24T04:05:32Z

image: PastoriusThe management meme "you can't manage what you don't measure" does not mean that "if you can measure it, its important to manage". Instead, it encourages you to find measures, or at least indicators, of the things you need to manage. It's even possible that the adage came from a Galileo quote: "count what is countable, measure what is measurable. What is not measurable, make measurable".

The risks of overemphasising the importance of easy measures are:

You may create a faulty compass - causing you to steer and drive the wrong way, thinking all is well
You may create the wrong behaviours in your team. People particularly motivated by targets (such as sales staff) can ignore uncounted activities - leading to unintended outcomes for the business
In capital or change decisions, you may actually make the wrong call.

In the field of document automation as an example, tangible, even bankable measures that can easily be measured, monitored, and managed include:

Win rates - % of customer decisions made in your favour
Productivity improvements - time spent on the activity
Quality - mistakes, incomplete information, or ambiguities apparent in queries or clarifications after publication
Production costs - use of ink and paper in the draft and review process
Training costs - what is needed to get new staff up to speed
Stakeholder satisfaction - customer, supplier, and staff feedback

Other benefit measures would require more indirect counting such as:

More informed management
Better institutional knowledge capture
Brand impacts.

Which measures are selected and the effort required for monitoring should depend on their priority impact on the business or business case.

The reality is that the important dynamics in business may be difficult to gauge. People are complex. While Deming is often quoted as saying "In God we trust, everyone else bring data, he also said "the most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable, but successful management must nevertheless take account of them". And when decisions come down to faith, judgement and intuition, assumptions should at least be realistic and defensible - note the dispute over the cost/benefit of the Fifa World Cup for South Africa, for example, because of hidden, intangible or long term consequences.

"not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts" Albert Einstein

process as competitive differentiator

2010-08-04T02:49:38Z

How to improve customer service levels and enhance productivity without incurring costs? How to manage risk and compliance without losing business advantage? Some of the tough questions that remain critical executive priorities on the back of the latest recession. In 2008, Oracle's analysis of the business process management (BPM) market showed rapid growth - projecting a tenfold increase to $10b by next year (download report here).

Organisations are increasingly turning to process as a competitive differentiator as they strive to do more or better with less. It's a double whammy - increased revenues (through better customer engagement) and reduced costs at the same time.

With time and commitment, advantage can be realised with a process focus. The secret, however, is not to rely solely on technology but to recognise the importance of executive support and planned change management. To create innovative and flexible process solutions, business and technology must collaborate closely.

Such transformation is not only possible, its happening more and more by winning companies.

machines should work, people should think

2010-07-05T00:57:49Z

New Zealand is struggling to keep up with its peers in wealth generation and its leaders are struggling to understand the root causes and how to change them.

The easy measure of business activity is productivity - and business owners are often criticised for the lack of it. Does this mean we don't work hard enough? Are we complacent; settling for the "bach, boat and BMW" rather than striving for the national good?

My view is that, aside from our small local markets not offering the aspirations and hardening fire of strong competition, our productivity problem is a capital problem. New Zealand's venture capital is broken, such that passionate entrepreneurs often have to seek offshore funding to grow.

Capital enables investment in machines, and machines work. Automation is what accelerates processing and output speed far more than flogging people - particularly in a country where skills are scarce. The paradox, in fact, for people is that they will output more if given the chance and not treated like computers. Better to recognise the importance of thinking time and the process of creative focus - especially for people charged with making new things or solving problems.

The solution to our productivity problem is to invest in automation, to release our intelligence to focus on human touch-points and high return fixes by enabling machines to run the repetitive tasks. The challenge is our approach to investment; maybe there are big answers in our capital market system (med report - pdf), but at an individual business level, the answers lie in recognising the different time value of machines vs people:

Machines should work, people should think (IBM Pollyanna principle).

flow: your happy place

2010-04-19T00:43:42Z

the psychology of challenge vs skillConsultants: highly paid experts for whom time really is money. Consultants (incl. engineers and lawyers) are often called upon to complete activities that involve painstakingly following client policies and processes. These can be laborious, complex and time-consuming. If you think they'd be happy about this because it means more billable hours, I think you might be wrong.

Often maligned and usually misunderstood, people tend to think consultants are motivated by money. I believe instead they are motivated by fully utilising their skills to help clients. Knowledge workers like to think - to be challenged for their creativity and opinion - not to follow administrative rules.

That is why consultants love productivity tools. Tools that speed up the repetitive elements of their work and free them to do what they are really good at. To better get them in the state of flow, a state when your skills are fully employed and your attention fully focussed. The buzz of flow is a consultants happy place. See the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi for more on this theory. Don't be surprised then if your consultants are the first to embrace your process automation.

supporting Blue Smoke

2010-04-12T06:13:01Z

Ezidocs supports the work of Blue Smoke Records in modernising the legendary Blue Smoke music of Pixie Williams. When this music hit the airwaves in 1948 it was an instant hit - only knocked off the NZ charts by Bing Crosby and something about a white Christmas. Blue Smoke was THE first NZ pop song - wholly, written, sung, and produced in NZ.

Today the team at BSR has reworked the original with the voice of modern blues artist, Shelley Hirini. It is a beautiful rendition, preserving the spirit of the music but bringing in a modern and high def polish. It is deserving of anthem status, I applaud the initiative and thank them for breathing new life to it to keep the memories alive and relevant to a new audience.

left brain developing

2010-03-13T19:55:26Z

When I finished my MBA in the late 90s I immediately took a class in drawing from the left side of the brain. I needed to rebalance things. While the left brain - right brain theory can be criticised for its simplicity, it is a useful framework for appreciating that people do approach tasks from very different angles and with very different cognitive functions. Right is about rationality: logic, detail, facts, words, math and science, order/pattern. Left is about feeling: perception, imagination, spatial perception and possibility. This may go some way to explain why most business documents are content driven and only superficially consider look and feel. It also suggests why visually oriented design tasks favour some people while others excel at pain-staking rules based tasks.

Web application development is one activity where both sides come together. It is rare to find a software developer who can create a visually appealing and intuitively good design. It is also rare to find a creative designer who can build robust and elegant functional code. How well the two marry is what makes or breaks a good application.

However, applications are like icebergs - most of the work is under the surface, hidden beneath the user interface. Changes to the interface can be relatively simple compared to functional changes to the underlying code. This is useful to bear in mind when selecting skill-sets for a build. After all, form does follow function.