Apple is currently the ultimate in cool. But can it last this time?

Last month I had the pleasure of giving a lecture to some post-graduate design students at the Pratt Institute in New York.  During a discussion about sustainability I was suddenly conscious that out of around 20 students, all of whom had their laptops open, only 2 had PCs whilst the rest had Macs.

Elastic People

Have you ever been in the situation when you introduce a new way of doing things to someone who seems to embrace the change, only to discover that the next week or month they are back doing things the previous way?    I have previously posted about how change management is difficult but it is important to understand that people avoid change in many different ways.  The most common is a general reluctance to accept the new way forward because they do not agree with it - what I call inelastic behavior.  This is understandable because people get comfortable the way things are.  When you present a new situation to them they resist it initially until they gradually get used to the idea and over time the new situation replaces the established baseline.

Too small to succeed

"Too big to fail" is the popular term of the moment but sometimes managers can make the mistake of thinking the opposite is true i.e. that their business or department is too small to succeed.  This particular manifestation is when companies put off common best practices using the excuse that they are for big companies only.  Implementing processes and procedures is a great example of this where managers will cite they do not have time or that they do not want to be slowed down by needless bureaucracy.  This is simply an excuse for poor planning because the reality is that the difference between big companies and small companies should not be whether they have processes and procedures - they both need them to survive -  it is at what level of detail those procedures should be written.

Metrics versus atmospherics

As the political world reacts to the 'stunning' upset of Scott Brown's senate election in Massachusetts the media is full of talking heads saying "the people have spoken" and this marks the turn around point for Republicans. They say it is the beginning of the end for the Obama presidency. But on closer inspection Scott Brown won his senate seat with a majority of little more than 100,000 votes. That equates to 1.7% of the Massachusetts population or 0.04% of the US population. Does such a marginal change in the political landscape merit such hype?

Planning for the New Year

"Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump,  bump on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin.  It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it, and then he feels that perhaps there isn’t."

A. A. Milne

As we start a new year invariably our thoughts turn to New Year resolutions and how we are going to make this year better than the last.  In management if you have not already started working on your 2010 plan (most large organizations will have started this process in September of the previous year) then it is not something you should put off for much longer as the window of influence for the year is rapidly shrinking.

Removing the reset button

As we exit the ‘noughties’ and prepare to enter an exciting new decade it seems an appropriate time to reflect on change, as this seems the only constant we can predict for the future.  Managing change is difficult.  People work to type and even though you can introduce new ways to do things it is hard to prevent old habits coming back and people reverting to the previous ways they did things.  I recall a friend once telling me that it is less about how you tell your child not to do something, and more about how often you tell them.  I guess this is a trait not limited to children and is part of the reason change is hard, and change management itself has developed into a discipline in its own right.  It is important to bear in mind that maintaining change can almost be as hard as enacting it in the first place, as often there are embedded reasons why things have occurred a certain way in the past.

The Egg and Spoon race growth strategy

I had the thought the other day that growing a new business is a bit like running an egg and spoon race. Everyone wants to run as fast as possible but the danger of running too fast is that you drop the egg.  So judgement has to be used in order to maximize speed but prevent the set back of dropping the egg, or worse still breaking it.  So who is in the best position to judge the speed at which you can run?

No canned laughter allowed

I have long been interested in management theory and since my postgraduate studies have read countless management books from the classic "Effective Management Skills" by Scott & Rochester; to the novel "The One Minute Manager" by Blanchard and Johnson; to the much hyped such as Tom Peters’ transition from prescription management in his book "In Search of Excellence" to his more liberal and flexible views in "Liberation Management". Recent best sellers such as "Good to Great" by Jim Collins, "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni or "Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell are all interesting reads.

Happy 100th Birthday Mr Drucker. I am glad to say you were not a management guru

This week would have been the 100th birthday of Peter Drucker who is widely regarded as one of the greatest management thinkers of all time.  Drucker, who died 4 years ago, was not one for pomp and circumstance.  Rather he was a practical thinker who developed his guru status through 60 years of management thought and incite.  Affectionately known by even his peers as “the father of modern management” and “the world’s greatest management thinker” he was an intellectual who was influenced by the likes of John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter.

Customer appeasement versus customer satisfaction

Early in my career, when I was a customer service manager, I interviewed for a job where I was given a hypothetical problem to resolve.  It was one of those questions where there is no right answer; rather the interviewer is simply trying to test your lateral thinking skills.  The hypothesis was that the customer had experienced terrible service and wanted the problem resolved immediately.  After running through a number of potential solutions, including involving my manager, escalating up the tree etc., all of which were ruled out by the interviewer, I eventually suggested I would go back to the customer and explain that regrettably what they wanted was not possible and proceeded to offer what I thought would be attainable.