Popularity and Responsibility
Just about everyone knows that something is very wrong with the world in which we live. Problems are compounding everywhere. While we may be tempted to look for someone to blame, that effort, at best, will do nothing to alleviate the problems and, more likely, will only contribute anger and frustration to the mix. Blaming is not constructive. A better approach is to take personal responsibility for the situation, and look for opportunities to make a positive contribution to the solution.

Certain industries already occupy positions that have more opportunities than others. Advertising, marketing, public relations, and other associated promotional industries enjoy the privilege of having many such opportunities. This industry focuses on both capturing and shaping opinion, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. The work of this industry is not value neutral. While it appeals to commonly held values, morals and attitudes, it also works to shape them.

Responsibility
While it is true that the companies and manufacturers are legally responsible for the products they make and sell, that does not mean that those who advise them about things like packaging, marketing and advertising are without any associated responsibility. Manufacturers are legally responsible for their advertising, and those who assist in the advertising effort are also responsible for their recommendations. However, the concern here is not with imposed legal responsibilities, but with voluntary moral responsibilities.

The issue is not whether those who shape messages and place them before the public in someone else’s name have a moral responsibility, but only how that responsibility is exercised. That responsibility can be accepted, or it can be rejected. It can be done intentionally, or it can be done accidentally.

Read More

Everyone seems to hate spam — except Internet marketers. Admit it, we love email marketing because it’s cheap and easy. In fact, it’s so cheap and easy that Internet marketers are happy with a response rate of less than one percent. So, who cares about the ninety-nine percent who don’t respond?

Spam is not an Internet problem, it’s a marketing problem. And marketers are frantically scrambling to make their marketing efforts more effective by better targeting the recipients. How? By monitoring Internet use. Monitoring and measuring Internet use has become a war unto itself.

How do you feel about adware, also referred to by some as spyware? The terms refer to computer programs and scripts that work behind the scenes on your computer to keep track of various things you do, ostensibly to send you ads that will be of interest to you.

Apparently, the solution to spam is spying. Interesting.

I have spent the last two weeks trying to remove an adware program that has attached itself to my computer system and provides a bevy of Internet Explorer (IE) pop up advertisements, even when IE is not open. The script opens an IE window and violates my cyber space with an ad I don’t want. I don’t care what it’s advertising, I don’t want it. Shouldn’t the advertisers pay me to use my cyber space, my pixels, my bandwidth, and my electricity for their purposes?

How did it that program get on my computer? I do have teenagers, but as irresponsible as they may be, they are not the source of the problem. They are only easily exploitable. Nor is the Internet the problem. It is just a leveraging tool. The real problem is a marketing mentality, an attitude, a worldview.

Are you aware that there is a worldview war that is raging just below the surface of your computer’s system software. John Borland, writing for News.com, calls it A Secret War.

Read More

Thinking “outside the box” or “coloring outside the lines” is a popular idea in the business world today. People and organizations are told to think outside the box or color outside the lines as a way to stimulate creativity when they need to solve problems like streamlining production, establishing a new product, or developing a new process. And it’s true that creativity and innovation often arise from unexpected and unconventional thinking.

But there is a serious problem with trying to apply such thinking too broadly.

For instance, creativity is valued in art and advertising, but not in banking and accounting. An accounting firm recently ran an ad suggesting that it could think “outside the box.” Do you really want your business to be associated with creative accounting? Aren’t accountants supposed to put the numbers in the right box? Wasn’t creative accounting a serious problem for Enron?

In reality, clear thinking and the creativity that it produces are rarely a matter of thinking outside the box. And coloring outside the lines is for the most part just sloppy workmanship. The art of clear thinking is a matter of putting thoughts in to the right boxes or categories. Clear thinking is a matter of mental organization. Conversely, sloppy thinking involves the confusion of categories, of putting ideas into the wrong boxes or not putting them in order at all. Is a child who will not straighten his or her room creative or just sloppy? There is a significant difference. While creativity sometimes looks sloppy to an outside observer, it does not issue from sloppiness.

Picasso was a creative artist.
But his creativity was not a matter of the art he produced. In reality his abstract work is technically sloppy. It looks like the work of a child.

Read More

Spam was not invented on the Internet
The Internet just helped give it a name. It’s been around for a long time. Essentially spam is unwelcome advertising. The problem with the Internet is that you get a lot of it, and it’s VERY LOUD and in-your-face. TV’s not much different. Then there’s junk mail. Very few people even read it. In an effort to get our attention, advertisers are using the two tools that seem to work best—loud and obnoxious.

Hey, they work, don’t they! And whatever works must be okay because more and more people are willing to do whatever works to succeed. But does it really work? A successful bulk mail campaign would be ecstatic to get a five percent return rate. But, say a campaign is wildly successful, and gets a fifteen percent return rate. That means that it has an eighty-five percent failure rate. Yet, they call it a success because someone can make money at it.

Problem is when everyone is trying to succeed by being loud and obnoxious, things get pretty loud and obnoxious. Then, loud and obnoxious doesn’t work anymore because no one can hear anything. So, they get louder and even more obnoxious. People in an argument often assume (or at least act like they think) that being loud improves their position. And advertising follows suit.

Surely, there’s a better way.

Shallow and Immature Self-Centeredness
The values of loud and obnoxious have to do with image and impression. Loud and obnoxious want to create an image, and make an impression. And they do! But what are the underlying values of the image and impression they make? What is really being communicated is shallow, immature self-centeredness. If you think that I’m suggesting that the values of the reigning advertising and marketing wisdom are shallow, immature and self-centered, you’re right.

Read More

Salespeople are both a blessing and a bane to every industry. You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them.

“How are you tonight, Mr. Smith?”

“Fine.”

“Glad to hear it! Mr. Smith, my name is Phil, and I’m calling…” Click.

Salespeople are always “people” people. People have to love people to do sales because the life of a salesperson is filled with people. Most sales people are natural “people” people before they enter the sales market. That’s why they go into sales!

Then comes sales training, and the natural people person gets canned. No, she doesn’t lose her job. Rather, she is forced to learn and use a canned sales spiel and proven sales techniques. Much has been written about sales. And a lot of it is great, but a lot of it isn’t.

Sales Training Contradiction
The other night I stumbled across a blaring contradiction in the literature that puts sales people in an impossible bind. Every sales person is taught two fundamental sales techniques that are in stark opposition to each other, and few people seem to be aware of it—not even the sales people who use them. Perhaps this contradiction contributes to the fact that sales people generally have a poor reputation. This contradiction may help explain why identifying one’s self as a sales person so often engenders a smirk.

The Art of Listening
The first of these contradictory techniques involves the art of listening. Sales people must listen to customers in order to understand their needs, so that they can shape their sales approach to fit the needs of the customer. The sale must be tailored to the needs of the customer.

The customer is supposed to be king. Customer service is all the rage. The customer is the boss.

Read More

Principles¹ are tools for decision making that bring the moral² basis of decisions into focus. Recognizing the moral context of our decisions must precede any attempt to resolve related difficulties. The failure to recognize the moral context of a decision does not make it morally neutral, it makes it morally unknown and uncontrollable. You can’t control or avoid what you aren’t aware of.

Ethical dilemmas rarely present themselves directly. They tend to sneak up on us. They too often pass us by before we know it. Or they develop so gradually that we only see them in hindsight. Larry Colero says that it is a little like noticing the snake after you’ve been bitten. Principles provide indications that a snake might be present. Principles are like a “snake detector kit.”

But principles don’t only steer us away from what is bad, they also serve to steer us toward what is good. They proscribe and they prescribe as they work to set boundaries or borders. Because people are social beings boundaries and borders are necessary. Without them society would devolve into anarchy and chaos in very short order.

John Carver, the Policy Governance guru, says that “directing an organization can be like rearing a child. Controlling every behavior is a fatiguing and ultimately impossible charge. Inculcating the policies (principles) of life is far more effective and, even if some slippage occurs on individual behaviors, it is the only serviceable approach in the long run.” Carver teaches — and rightly so — that the best principles or policies for an organization should be stated negatively. By proscribing what cannot be done, maximum creative freedom is given to how the organization can be run.

Unfortunately, Carver fails to see that this insight is borrowed from the Bible. The Ten Commandments provide God’s principles for human life.

Read More

Most smaller enterprises grapple with mapping out future possibilities.  All too often companies become wedded to a single outcome without really understanding the full range of possibilities they face.  From our client experience, one way of dealing with an uncertain future is to consider a number of futures through a scenario planning exercise. One then monitors those futures as they unfold without getting wedded to any one too firmly.  This is known as “Everyday Scenario Planning”.

Everyday Scenario Planning (ESP)  In order to prepare your company to better operate in a dynamically changing business environment we recommend going through the following steps. Conduct a scan of market conditions, technology developments, competitor’s actions and your customer’s shifting needs, with a view to developing several future-oriented scenarios.  

Develop a range of four or five different futures or end-states. Make them deliberately different to capture a broad range of potential futures.  

In a recent aquaculture project we were involved in, our client provided higher quality feedstock into the fish farming or aquaculture industry at a much lower cost of production. We had to imagine an end-state where the local fish farming industry reduced its cost of production by 60% in order to compete equally with the fish that comes in from the Third World.  A number of events would have had to occur for this scenario to come about.   We also imagined an end-state where the EPA forced a debilitating higher cost structure on the industry.

The end-states must all have a good likelihood of occurring.  We recommend that clients avoid best-case,  most-likely, and worst-case scenarios.  These are usually variants of one set of assumptions about the future.

Read More

Rising food and fuel prices, unprecedented home foreclosures and a decline in the value of the U.S. dollar are current causes of consternation for economists and consumers alike. Business owners, too, are concerned about what declines in profitability may be in store. While some of the greatest minds continue to debate the length and depth of a recession, this much is apparent to me: Business owners need not give in to a negative economic mindset. Rather, by taking proactive measures now they can secure a more profitable future for their company, both in the short- and long-term.
 

Start with your staff
One of the most effective tools for determining an employee’s worth is the time-proven “to do” list. This is particularly true for support personnel, who often operate with minimal oversight. Have each support employee submit a “to do” list on Monday, followed by a status report on Friday. Use these lists to balance the workload between under- and over-tasked employees, and identify unnecessary job positions.

Cross-train your employees
Lessen the impact an absent employee has on your day-to-day operations by cross-training employees. Most workers welcome such an opportunity as it makes them feel valued by their current employer and more marketable to future employers.

Revisit your choice of vendors
Make sure you are purchasing competitively priced products or services from your vendors. Conduct on-line price comparisons and visit with potential replacement vendors. Don’t be afraid to ask current vendors for better deals via rebates, special offers, alternative products and locked-in rates.

Bring whatever tasks you can in-house
Compile a list of tasks currently being outsourced and decide if you can bring any of them in-house.

Read More