Tag Archives: risk

why measure today?

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twitter. facebook. youtube. wikipedia.

all of those sites and organizations have something in common: they’re all in the top 10 in website traffic in terms of monthly visitors. they also have something else in common: none of them started out as an idea to make money.

there was no business plan behind twitter on how the founders were going to turn a profit through selling ads or a subscription. they were a group of college friends who just wanted a way to share what they were doing with each other. zuckerberg was drunk in his dorm room one night when he launched facebook. and jimmy wales had an idea for a better encyclopedia anyone could access for free which had more current information than the heavily curated bookshelf versions.

so why do you insist that your business only go after the ideas that have a high ROI you can measure today? instead, shape the markets of tomorrow.

if not you, someone else will.

less than human

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even now, some weeks after the yahoo! changes, the hot topic is still collaboration and productivity and what it all means. what’s better? how do you define better? what’s the best way to attain high levels of either one? which is right and which is wrong?

for some organizations, productivity is important. standardizing processes, reducing rework, optimizing output from people and systems, it all leads to less risk and lower costs. i have n number of staff active for x number of hours in a day and i am getting (x – y) hours or productivity out of those people where my job is to make y approach zero. costs are lower, profits are higher.

these organizations are in a race to the bottom. striving to be the cheapest. fighting to get the most out of each hour in their people’s day. optimizing. minimizing. less than human.

for other organizations, collaboration is key. interacting with people to share experiences, build relationships, and work on new ideas, it all adds to greater levels of trust and engagement. it doesn’t necessarily reduce costs, and there’s argument over how much extra profit those new ideas generate.

but it’s not a race to the bottom for them. instead, these organizations believe that you have to spend money to make money, and time wasted when two colleagues spend 20 minutes talking about where they’re from, and which school they went to, and what they’re working on isn’t time wasted at all. it’s sub-optimal, but it’s worth the investment.

so which is right?

it doesn’t make sense for a manufacturing company running an assembly line to desire collaboration over productivity because you need to turn out as many trinkets with as few defects as your plant can provide in a single day. it doesn’t make sense for an automobile dealership to desire collaboration over productivity because you need to move more cars and more people in and out of the dealership to hit your quotas. and because you’re special—in a certain market, with certain restrictions, doing a certain type of work—and most importantly because you’re in the business of doing things that other people tell you to do, it doesn’t make sense for your company, or your agency, or your organization to desire collaboration over productivity.

or does it?

the excuse matrix

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you can approach your relationships with your customers as an “us versus them” situation. you can demonize them. you can sit on the other side of the table. you can push your own agenda. you can point to a million reasons why something is or isn’t going to work.

or you can put down the excuse matrix and start collaborating. you can listen, actively. you can put yourself, your name, and your organization out there on a limb, ready to create something special. you can delight your customers instead.

choose delight.

the united states: mba’ing ourselves out of an economy

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with the united states’ 2012 presidential election season picking up momentum (obama’s campaign has already changed his twitter avatar and background for the upcoming re-election bid), more and more of the discussion is falling back onto the topic of jobs.

it was reported some months ago that the united states was in a jobless recovery — where macroeconomic indicators showed progress while the jobs market remained stagnant. a lot of people have wondered where are the jobs? how can businesses be making so much money, but at the same time adding such few new hires to ‘fuel the furnaces’?

unfortunately things don’t work that way anymore.

manufacturing doesn’t happen that much in the united states — we just don’t make many things now a days. no, we’re an information and knowledge based economy now, and that’s exactly where the issue comes in at…

enter the mba graduate.

we’re graduating an ever increasing amount of mbas every year and application numbers continue to rise. and what are we teaching these graduates to do? with pressure to keep wall street happy, we’re teaching optimization: how can you manage your resources properly to get the most utility with the least amount of cost? how can you drive your profits up while using less? that’s a dangerous position for us to be in as a nation when you consider what it is we’re building… information.

in an information economy the people are the resources, and just so happen to be the largest cost drivers for any organization. in order to keep costs down, we have to keep the number of people down — or at least the cost of those people. anyone who has been working for 20 years and suddenly found themselves out of a job because they were replaced by a freshly minted college graduate knows this very well. why would a company, looking to maximize profit, choose to keep or hire an experienced professional with a higher market salary when they can pay a fraction of that for someone much younger? so, joe america, if you’re reading this during a break in between your job searching — understand that the fact that you haven’t been hired isn’t because you’re old, but because you’re expensive!

so where are the jobs at?

technology has increased drastically, we’ve gotten really good at doing certain things, and — believe it or not for all the problems with our primary schooling systems — our education system is pumping out more and more college graduates each year. where are the jobs? in short: we don’t really need them. not with the focus of the economy right now: bigger profits and happier investors. we’re mba’ing ourselves out of an economy. with no one at work, there’s no money at home to spend on those things which keep our economy afloat. no houses, no cars, no $100 cell phone bills, etc.

so how do we fix this? you can’t just take the billions of dollars that organizations’ c-level executives are making right now and reinvest that money into growing the workforce because you’re going to blow up the system. you’re going to have a lot of people getting paid to do nothing because they won’t have any work to do. we’ve already optimized what it takes to turn a profit; we can’t get any better than we already are. we need an economic revolution. we have to fundamentally change the way that we think about business. we have to embrace risk again (and reward it). we have to invent. we have to innovate. we need companies and organizations that are focused on helping people and improving the quality of life in our communities rather than being focused on turning a profit.

answering the call

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image by billy v, flickr artist

when you’re working on a project — of any scale — you’re going to have to accept risk at some point in time. the client is going to make demands that seem unreasonable. you’re going to burn through the wiggle room that you’ve built into your project schedules. you’re going to be doing work that no one has ever done before.

it’s in these times that leaders really need to answer the call.

“there’s only one outcome here: we’re going to succeed. that’s the bottom line. we’re absolutely going to get this done, and we’re going to do it the very best way we know how. i don’t care how difficult it is or how difficult it is going to be; look at everything we’ve accomplished to date. why would you believe in any other outcome? we’re going to do this.

“now… what do you need to knock this thing out of the park? because i’m going to go out and get it for you.”

the phone’s ringing. you might want to answer that one.

don’t shy away from risk. roll around in it.

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i was recently listening to a podcast on itunes u called the design thinking: a new type of leadership. the speaker for the event is a man by the name of banny banerjee, an associate professor at stanford’s institute of design (or d.school). in his talk, he mentioned something that really resonated with me, and it was about risk.

“risk aversion is actually very risky behavior because with every moment that you’re looking at risk averseness you are also throwing away a lot of seemingly improbable ideas, but those are the ones that might allow you to make a leap rather than just make an incremental advancement.”

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