stargeek
MEASURING ENTREPRENEURIAL SUCCESSMEASURING
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 (Twelfth instalment of the
upcoming book Natural
Enterprise.
List of previous instalments here.)Enterprises today have a dizzying selection of performance measurements to choose from. While at one time measuring financial profitability, growth and asset management effectiveness were considered enough, businesses are now told that they need broader metrics to avoid the landmines that may not show up in a simple financial report card. How does an entrepreneur decide which measures to use? The decision ultimately comes down to which measures best reflect and assess the achievement of the enterprise's objectives. As we explained in an earlier chapter, in a Natural Enterprise these objectives are more personal and less restricted than in a traditional company beholden to absentee shareholders and creditors, whose needs usually (and tragically) trump those of the people who actually operate the enterprise. In fact, Natural Enterprise recognizes that each member/partner will have different personal objectives, and attempts to accommodate those objectives, unlike traditional companies that merely contract for services of employees and make no attempt to assess those employees' individual needs (often at the cost of their best people). Some individuals may want or need to earn a significant income to meet personal financial obligations, while others may be prepared to trade off income for more time for non-business activities, and still others may not care about either financial reward or time demands, as long as they're having fun working with people they love. Just as the selection of members for a Natural Enterprise is a self-brokered juggling act (ensuring members' skills are mutually exclusive yet collectively sufficient), so too is the measurement of Natural Enterprise success a balancing act -- choosing measures that assess each member's achievement of his or her personal objectives and needs, yet still ensuring that the enterprise as a whole remains viable and sustainable. For that reason the selection of measurements needs to be a collective decision, one that optimizes everyone's desires and needs in a fair and objective manner. If one member has a huge mortgage that can probably only be serviced if everyone in the enterprise works longer hours than they want to, for example, this needs to be hammered out early, to avoid inevitable conflicts (and resignations) later. While the measurement process described in this article is designed for Natural Enterprise, it can also work in any entrepreneurial business with a democratic spirit. Just be forewarned it takes a bit more work than the traditional business success measures, and requires a lot more accommodation of individual employees' needs and aspirations than most entrepreneurial managers are accustomed to! Although there are many accepted sets of measures that attempt to look at enterprise success holistically, in my opinion none of the widely-used templates is flexible enough to meet the needs of entrepreneurs who are not fixated on maximizing profitability and growth. My recommendation, then, is that you start by having each member of the enterprise articulate his or her own personal objectives for being part of the enterprise, and then as a group reconcile and optimize them to create a set of enterprise-wide measurements. I've developed two tools to do this, the Personal Enterprise Success Scorecard and the Enterprise Success Scorecard. Those who have worked in large organizations that use Norton & Kaplan's Balanced Scorecard will recognize this as similar to the process used to reconcile personal goals to enterprise goals, but with an important difference: While in traditional companies this reconciliation is a top-down process ("describe how your personal goals and improvement objectives for the next year will contribute to each of the organization's Balanced Scorecard goals"), in Natural Enterprise the process is bottom-up. Here's how it works:
Most of these measures are contingent on others. For example, a member may be willing to work more hours if he or she has greater flexibility over when those hours are worked. So optimizing the needs and objectives of all members is not only a balancing act, it's an iterative process. And over time the demand for and costs of the enterprise's products and services may change for reasons outside your control, which will require a re-optimization of members' and the enterprise's scorecards again. Some of the objectives in the sample Enterprise Success Scorecard above are quite grandiose and abstract, and sometimes you need to employ some more readily measurable intermediary metrics to get a clear idea of whether you are achieving, and will likely continue to be able to achieve, some of the higher-level objectives. For example, achieving a cash flow target means achieving certain revenues and/or cost minimization targets. So there is still a place in this measurement process for the traditional financial and operating measures like margin and turnover, and like 'eyeballs' and 'stickiness' measures of e-commerce sites. You can find information on some of these traditional measures at About.com, at NetMBA, or at the UK Small Business Service site. While these ratios aren't terribly useful to most entrepreneurs as raw data, they can be very useful in identifying trends that may indicate problems or opportunities, in diagnosing the cause of problems, and in comparing your enterprise to companies in a similar business that are outperforming the market. Trends in intermediary metrics can also have great predictive value: I know of several businesses who noticed modest drops in gross margin or inventory turnover, and discovered that they signalled important (negative) shifts in customer perception of their products, early enough to take vital remedial action. If you are interested in knowing how much your business is 'worth' (at least on paper), I published a Primer on Business Valuation last year on my weblog. Norton & Kaplan's famous Balanced Scorecard, which you can learn more about on their site, breaks the measurable enterprises objectives into four major categories: Financial, Customer, Internal Processes and Learning, Growth & Innovation. Many variations of these classifications have since been published, adding Knowledge (Intellectual Capital), 'People' (Human Capital) and Technology categories, among others. No matter what objectives you choose or how you categorize them, it is essential that they meet three criteria:
I've spent much of my career being paid to measure enterprise success, and in my experience most entrepreneurs know instinctively how well their business is doing, and many rely on one overarching measure -- daily cash flow -- to confirm or challenge their business instinct. I'll be describing how to manage cash flow in the next article in this series. In the meantime, some final thoughts about measurements:
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 Diagram ©2004 The Caring Enterprise
Coach
Today, the average North
American entrepreneurial business lasts just four years, the average
sole proprietorship even less. Yet entrepreneurship is not rocket
science; it's nothing more (or less) than making a living for yourself
with your business partners, instead of depending on some indifferent
corporation to provide you with a living wage. Running a business is
certainly no more difficult than raising a family, or landing a job
and
building a career with a big company. The essentials of
entrepreneurship could easily be taught in every school, and there'd
still be plenty of time left for the rest of the school curriculum.
But, perhaps because big corporations and the governments they control
want the 'labour force' to be meek, subservient, fearful and insecure,
most people have come to perceive entrepreneurship as a complex and
difficult art, fraught with danger, unprofitable, emotionally
scarring,
and demanding of enormous courage and energy. "It's certainly not for
everyone", I keep hearing.Entrepreneurship requires self-knowledge of what you're happy doing, what you're especially good at, how much you're willing to put into your enterprise and what you expect to get out of it. Without this self-knowledge, you're likely to be as miserable in your own business as working for some unappreciative boss, and that unhappiness will bear directly on its success. Beyond that, all you need are common sense, self-confidence, and a modicum of four key, learnable skills:
One of the 15 steps in the process of establishing and running an enterprise is avoiding the landmines. In MBA school they now call this Risk Management. This article identifies ten of the major landmines for entrepreneurs, using some real-life examples. I don't believe any of the enterprises described below is still in business (though some of the entrepreneurs have moved on, learned their lesson, and succeeded in other businesses):
Another technique entrepreneurs can employ to alert themselves to potential landmines is establishing an Advisory Board made up of people who have well-rounded business experience, knowledge of markets, and skills the entrepreneur and his partners lack. Such Advisory Boards are often reciprocal, offering mutual support and advice in lieu of fees. I am constantly surprised how few entrepreneurs use such 'support groups', relying instead on their own instincts, the counsel of inexperienced and costly 'professional advisors', and others (bankers, customers, franchisors, and various 'agencies') who have only a nominal, and purely financial, interest in the entrepreneur's success. Some 'support groups' and networks have been set up as money-making ventures, but these tend to be unwieldy and their members terribly needy -- ten people looking for advice and new customers for every one capable of offering useful information or counsel in return. It's best to create your own. The problem, of course, is that most entrepreneurs are paradoxically too busy fighting fires and avoiding landmines, to be able to invest time finding and networking with support groups and other valuable advisors who can help them avoid the next round of fires and landmines. But, despite the failings of the first generation Social Networking tools, such tools hold enormous promise. Although Shoshana Zuboff coined the term The Support Economy to refer to federations of businesses working together to support their shared customers, the first true Support Economy may well be entrepreneurs supporting each other. |
| (Tenth installment of the upcoming
book Natural Enterprise. List
of previous installments here.) Two of the fundamental principles of business are: Relationships trump credentials in buying (and many other business decisions), and It's not what you know, it's who you know that counts. These truisms show just how important business networking is, especially in an enterprise that doesn't have a lot of people or spare time to invest in relationship-building. Let's start with some definitions: Networking is the process of building and nurturing business relationships. Alliances are contractual arrangements between two or more businesses to achieve shared objectives, usually with a limited life. There are many good business reasons to network:
In a previous article I identified ten keys to effective networking. To recap, they are:
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(Eleventh instalment of the
upcoming book Natural
Enterprise.
List of previous instalments here.) A lot of readers of How to Save the World will probably be disappointed with this chapter in my upcoming book Natural Enterprise for two reasons: I'm not going to plug any specific vendors of technology for small business (although I've identified quite a few, including some regular readers), because by the time the book comes out this information could well be obsolete. (When the book comes out there will be a companion website with a list of recommended vendors of technology, though, so don't despair). And although buying technology is one of the most fun parts of new enterprise formation, my advice is to buy as little as you can get by on. Most entrepreneurs, in my experience, go overboard. There is no blueprint 'best answer' for what technology a new entrepreneurial business needs. It depends on the industry in which you operate, the number and location of your customers and products, whether your product or service can or should be effectively offered online, and a host of other factors. So the first thing to do is develop a Technology Plan. Although you can hire a consultant to do this with you (don't let them do it for you), you can also develop the draft plan yourself and then run it by tech-savvy people you know, and (more importantly) other, established entrepreneurs you know with businesses of a similar type and style to yours. The entrepreneurs who've already gone through this process can tell you what you really need, and how to avoid the missteps they made, and this can really save you money and grief. You also need to talk to some prospective customers about your Technology Plan, because if it's inadequate to meet their expectations you'll need to re-think it. And if they shrug and say it doesn't matter much to them, that probably means your technologies are mostly internal, back-office tools: Avoid spending too much on toys your customers (who ultimately pay for them) don't see or benefit from. The Technology Plan need not be long, but it does need to be carefully thought through. Here's a checklist of the types of technology it should address. For each type, you'll need to assess whether you need it at all (some manual alternatives work just fine, and will do so even when your business scales up), identify and evaluate the alternative tools available (including an increasing number of free alternatives), and budget when to buy and how and how much to pay for each. Telephony: Most telephone companies offer packages designed for entrepreneurial businesses. It's essential that your telephone system, often the first point of contact with new customers, be reliable and professional. Consider voice messaging, call waiting and call routing needs. Look at them from the customer's viewpoint. Consider VoIP alternatives including free (but not yet ubiquitous) solutions like Skype. Fax: I keep thinking fax is dead. It isn't, yet. Avoid the hokey systems that require customers to call twice to send you a fax. E-mail: If you want to be taken seriously, you need your own e-mail/web domain, even if you don't have a website. Make sure it's short and easy to spell. Shop carefully -- prices are all over the map. Cardinal rule of e-mail: If you give your e-mail address to customers, check your e-mail very frequently (route it to someone else in the business if you can't) and respond to customers immediately. Public Website: Depending on your business, this may be the most critical technology you buy, or you may not need one at all. Talk to as many others as you can before deciding what you need and who to buy from. You will probably need someone to host your website, and the package the host provides will probably include software to build and maintain your web pages, and limit the size of the site and the volume of traffic (beyond which you pay extra). Most hosts also offer scalable additions for e-commerce at an additional price: Product catalogue, shopping cart, order management and credit-card handling etc. Beyond that, the sky's the limit: You can add functionality to do online surveys, offer multimedia presentations, provide help-desk support for your products, and many other business applications. As with telephony, think this through from the customer viewpoint: What do they want, what do they need, what might they actually not want to see on your site. Keep it as simple as possible, easy to use, clean-looking, and professional in appearance. If you're not taking orders for your products over the Internet, it's unlikely that putting marketing information on your website will produce much benefit: Focus your site content instead on educating your site's readers. If you give people useful information 'free', they're more likely to want to buy from you. Exception: Put a few, enthusiastic, signed customer testimonials at the top of your site (but get the customers' permission first). And make sure your contact information is up there with it, and that you're there to take the calls when they come in. And give your customers a simple way to give you feedback, good and bad, on your site. The good feedback can be the basis for testimonials and viral marketing. If you don't give them a simple way to vent bad feedback to you directly, they'll vent to others (including potential customers) instead. Financial Information System: Depending on the nature of your business, you will have certain statutory reporting and filing requirements for your business. Technology can automate these somewhat, but unless you have a lot of small transactions (purchases, payments, sales and cash receipts), or a lot of different products and services that you need to track and inventory separately, technology isn't going to reduce your paperwork burden that much or tell you anything you don't already know. Find a financial system that meets your needs, not the government's. That probably means a system that will allow you to budget, forecast and monitor cash flow day-to-day, easily. Don't buy a huge, complex accounting package with thousands of General Ledger accounts and reports you don't use to manage your business. Again, thinking of the customer first, you want invoices and other financial paperwork that is visible to the customer to look professional. If you have a lot of employees, consider outsourcing payroll and HR records management -- it's usually the most cost-effective application for small enterprises to farm out. Customer Information System: If you have (or hope to have) a lot of customers your first database application will probably be a customer information system, listing contact information, sales calls (held and scheduled) and successes. A simple spreadsheet application (free over the Internet) will probably suffice until you get more than, say, 100 customers. Order and Inventory Management System: Depending on volume and nature of your business, you may need Point-of-Sale (POS) and Inventory Management software to keep track of what and how much you've sold. Most entrepreneurs don't have enough distinct products or enough individual transactions to require this, and some accounting packages include rudimentary invoicing and inventory management capability. Intranet: Once you reach a certain size, or if your organization is virtual (i.e. your people are physically scattered), you'll probably need some kind of internal website, a space behind a firewall where your people can communicate and collaborate. Don't design it in a laboratory -- get the people who will use it to design it with you. Possible applications are: Scheduling and calendaring, Document- and file-sharing, Internal e-mail and instant messaging, Internal newsletters, Housing databases purchased from outsiders used by all employees, Hosting collaboration and project 'spaces' and tools. Your work colleagues will tell you what they need, what makes sense to share, and to what extent (e.g. setting up meetings automatically for other colleagues) they're willing to allow technology to impose on and make some decisions for them. Desktop Publishing and Marketing tools: Unless others have told you that you have a real flair for this, or it's your business, this is best left to professionals. If you're relying on viral marketing you need very, very little marketing material. A business card, a brochure, a simple website -- that's probably it. Get some one-time professional input on these, and then leave them alone. I know, designing these things yourself is fun. But it's not the best use of your time. And the results can be truly ugly. Computers, Mobile Devices and Local Area Networks for the Front Line: Let the users specify what they need, hardware, network and software. Consider free alternatives to the major business software packages. Stress connectivity applications over processing power, memory and multimedia applications -- they're the ones with payback. For applications essential to your business, make sure you have backups for everything -- the data, the hardware, the customer connectivity. Even the smallest business needs some redundancy and security systems. Customers just won't tolerate 'down time' anymore. But the more sophisticated your systems, the more costly the redundancy and security systems become -- think about this before you go for wireless networking. Weblogs & Social Networking Applications: I am of course biased about these technologies, but I'm the first to admit that they aren't the easiest to use, they aren't for everyone, and they aren't yet ready for prime time business application. If your colleagues are weblog-savvy, consider them for specific business purposes: Capturing valuable business lessons, Archiving subject matter expertise, and as a Substitute for internal newsletters. And consider running a weblog as an adjunct to your public website -- they can be informative and engaging for customers and prospective customers, at minimal cost. And keep a close eye on the burgeoning world of social software: There is a burning need for better tools and databases that can help entrepreneurs find partners, colleagues, advice, information in context, and even customers. Someone's going to figure out how to meet this need. Once you have your Technology Plan completed and vetted by users, customers and other entrepreneurs, you have one more critical decision to make: Lease vs. Buy. This decision is getting more difficult as the number of creative financing alternatives increases. There is a new phenomenon called "pay as you go computing" that looks at most or all of the above technologies as a single computing 'utility'. There are companies that now offer 'utility' computing packages, where you outsource all of the purchasing and maintenance of the technology of your business to a third party, in return for a single monthly payment that varies with your usage. The big computer companies are likely to offer 'utility' computing by the end of this year, though probably on a less extensive and less flexible basis. Unless you're a whiz with numbers it may be hard to figure out whether to go for such a plan or not. My advice: Gather up all the costs and the leasing, financing and 'utility' computing quotes, buy your friendly accountant lunch and have him compute what's the best deal. That goes as well for any lease vs. buy decision in your business: Cars, premises, and machinery. The calculations are complicated but straightforward -- if you're an expert in Present Value computations and discounting variable cash flow streams. Not only is the array of technology choices dizzying, it's changing daily. That's why the key is to leverage the Wisdom of Crowds: Talk to a lot of people, especially other entrepreneurs, who are usually all too willing to tell you their technology success stories and horror stories. It's all part of the homework for building a Natural Enterprise. OK, dear readers, this is the chapter of Natural Enterprise that I feel least confident, and competent, writing. So please tell me: What's missing, and what have I got wrong? Remember that this book is for the novice, so I've tried to keep it simple and jargon-free. This chapter will get the last re-write just before the book goes to press, but I'm still worried it will be obsolete by the time the book hits the stores. What do you think? |
| (The final*
instalment of
excerpts from the
upcoming book Natural
Enterprise.
)The
hardest part of entrepreneurship is getting the business up and
running. Perhaps the second hardest is deciding when to let it go.
Consultants will tell you every business has four stages in its
life-cycle: Start-up, Early growth, Maturity, and Decline. They'll
draw
you a sigmoid (S-shaped) curve to illustrate it -- a long slow start,
then a surge as it catches on, then levelling off, and finally
dropping. That curve represents revenues and profitability, but it
often tracks closely with the passion of management and public markets
for the business as well. How does this apply to a Natural Enterprise which, almost by definition, is not focused on growth, but rather on well-being of its member partners, and on sustainability? The experts suggest that a company that is continually innovating can pile one of these 'S' curves on top of another, and theoretically grow at a reasonably fast pace forever. Innovation is equally critical, as we have seen, in entrepreneurial businesses, but its purpose in these businesses is somewhat different: to (a) discover new unmet needs that replace products and services that are no longer needed (or have been obviated by other companies' disruptive innovations), (b) discover new applications and markets for the products and services you already offer, and (c) continuously improve your products and services as you understand more deeply both the customer's needs and the solution alternatives. This is a process that offers entrepreneurs a tremendous competitive edge over large corporations, which get very attached to, and defensive of, existing products and services (in which they are heavily invested), and hence are loath to change. The pressures of meeting public shareholder expectations also makes large corporations short-term focused and less willing and able to incorporate radical innovations that can 'cannibalize' existing offerings and cut into short-term profits. So while the large corporation uses a mix of innovation, massive marketing, acquisitions and globalization to try to sustain growth as long as it can, and eventually and inevitably goes into a phase of permanent decline, divestiture or absorption into a newer, growing organization, more agile entrepreneurial businesses can stay healthy indefinitely, provided they don't grow too large, cease to be innovative or succumb to the lure of low-cost capital through public ownership. If the large corporation is the 'dinosaur' of the business world (big, rapacious, hugely successful but doomed to die), the entrepreneur is more analogous to a community of small animals, sustaining itself indefinitely as long as it doesn't succumb to an 'ecological' catastrophe. While competent entrepreneurs need not, therefore, worry about either the problems of rapid growth or the problems of inevitable decline, it doesn't necessarily follow that the enterprise should aspire to live forever. Here's where the elegance of self-managing systems shows itself to best advantage: The members of a Natural Enterprise vote with their feet if and when the organization no longer meets their needs. There's no need to plan for the sunset of the enterprise because it will happen organically if and when its members choose to dissociate from each other, naturally. Most entrepreneurs strive, usually without success, to put in place a succession plan, to encourage either family members or key employees to 'buy them out' when they're ready to retire. Why don't these plans work? Two reasons: (1) to some extent the entrepreneur is the enterprise, he or she represents it to its customers, and has so much of the wisdom, the intellectual capital of the enterprise caught up in his/her head that its value to someone else, even a child of the entrepreneur, is often negligible, and (2) it's hard to transfer the passion of the enterprise to someone who wasn't part of its inception and life-long realization -- most entrepreneurs, unless the price is very low, would sooner start their own business than take on someone else's with all its 'baggage'. Natural enterprises don't have to worry about succession -- they add and lose members organically as the needs of the business and the competencies and needs of the members evolve. Natural enterprises have no shares and no hierarchy to worry about transitioning, and the concept of 'retirement' doesn't apply -- if a member's needs change such that he wants to spend less time on enterprise activities, he simply declares this to his partners and they will, using the self-management techniques outlined earlier in this book, re-jig the mix of members and roles (and if necessary identify and invite someone new to join) organically to compensate. If you're in an organization with people you love, doing work that you love, why would you ever abruptly and completely 'retire' anyway? Just as an old goose never 'retires' from the flock, but just transfers responsibilities to others in the flock as needed, the concepts of retirement and succession just don't apply. The global business community, setting aside the somewhat artificial constructs of large multinational corporations -- hierarchy, oligopoly, unequal distribution of resources, propensity to bribery and corruption, lack of responsibility for others' well-being etc. -- meets the definition of a complex adaptive system. It's complex, rather than complicated, because it's impossible for anyone who know everything about it, or even everything needed to make a significant business decision. Like an ecosystem, the global business community (again, ignoring the corporate dinosaurs) is non-hierarchical and self-organizing, and despite the fact no one is 'in charge', certain decisions and behaviours that work very well tend, in an evolutionary fashion, to emerge over time (which is why complex adaptive systems are sometimes called 'emergent' systems). Using a combination of self-adjustment (in self-interest) and instinct, like flocks of birds that swirl in the air like a single organism, and stay in perfect formation during migrations of thousands of miles that, thanks to the 'collective intelligence' of the flock, take them precisely to their nesting grounds each year, entrepreneurs and their customers comprise an adaptive commercial 'ecosystem'. More than any other factor it is this attribute, this elegant capability to do the right thing almost perfectly, collectively, every time, that makes Natural Enterprise -- natural. And that brings us to the end of our journey. [I'll be putting a brief re-cap of the entire book, and the key things to remember, here, when it goes to press] It is my hope that the purchasers of this book and other entrepreneurs will take advantage of the Internet, and particularly the new and evolving social networking tools, to learn much more about Natural Enterprise and about entrepreneurship in general from each other, than I could ever hope to teach in this one volume. To that end, I have created (I'll do this soon, and blog about it) the Natural Enterprise Forum. Readers are welcome to use it to pose questions or comment on this book, or to tell their personal entrepreneurial stories (to give other readers all-important context) that capture your learnings, good and bad, about entrepreneurial business. I'll be active on this site. In addition, through my business Meeting of Minds (website for this also going up shortly), I can offer entrepreneurs, Natural or otherwise, guidance, advice and coaching on a wide variety of business-related matters, especially business innovation. Pricing and contact information may be found in Appendix Two.  * Table of Contents for Natural Enterprise: Making a Joyful Living with People You Love (each chapter will be edited for book form, additional material will be added to some chapters, a bibliography will be appended, and about 50 'mini-case studies' of entrepreneurial best -- and worst -- practices will be included throughout the book.):
|
 It
is a strange irony that the people who study innovation seem to be
rather unimaginative at finding ways to stimulate it and measure it.
Two new Canadian studies retread tired old ground in this regard.First, a Canadian federal government National Summit on innovation came up with these 18 lame 'priority recommendations' (I'm paraphrasing):
So the real answer to Canada's poor innovation performance (according to the following measurements, about which I will talk in a moment) is to take back Canada's economy -- phase in 51% Canadian ownership and Canadian management requirements for all businesses over a certain size. Require profits made in Canada to remain in Canada, by imposing a 100% tax on cross-border distributions. Scrap NAFTA. And if you want to stimulate innovation, invest in the people that live and die by innovation -- entrepreneurs. Their profits stay in the community, get reinvested, and create jobs. By all means subsidize those entrepreneurs to do their research at Canadian universities -- you better believe that research will be focused on commercial opportunity. OK, now let's look at how the Science Council of British Columbia proposes to measure innovation, to determine whether we need more wringing of hands in another Innovation Summit next year over our 'poor' performance. You thought the Feds' list was bad -- check this one out:
Canadians are quite probably the most innovative people (relative to our size) on Earth. Many of the most successful software companies in the world were started by Canadians. We nearly dominate the ranks of the world's best comedians, female singer-songwriters, and women novelists. We have a disproportionate number of Nobelists. A recent survey found that on average each dollar invested by non-Canadians in a Canadian-invented patent generates $40,000 in revenue for the patent-buyer. We're world leaders in renewable energy research. I could go on, but that would be bragging, and that wouldn't be Canadian. So why do we beat ourselves up over meaningless measures of our innovation 'uncompetitiveness'? Perhaps because we're ashamed to admit that we sell ourselves short. We work hard for unappreciative and often rapacious foreign bosses who take the money we earn for them with our ingenuity and run. We have lost control of our own economic destiny, which may lead inexorably to a loss of our political and social autonomy as well. If we spent half the time and energy (and money) trying to stimulate and measure our economic autonomy that we spend trying (not very competently) to stimulate and measure 'innovation' we'd be much further ahead -- by any measure. |
 Regular readers know that my mantra for entrepreneurial success is Fill an Unmet Need. A couple of readers have suggested that this might also be the formula for blogging success. I got some confirmation that this might be true from reading the results of an exhaustiv e survey of 17,000 readers of 50 top political blogs conducted by WebAds. Key findings for this unique category of readers:
So if you're one of those bloggers (or prospective bloggers) who defines 'success' as a lot of readers, how do you go about finding out what current (and prospective) blog readers' needs are? I suggest you can do this the same way you identify unmet business needs: by doing focused research and getting creative. Here's where to look for unmet needs (this is exactly the advice I gave budding and struggling entrepreneurs looking for unmet consumer needs, except I've changed the word 'business' to 'blog' and 'buy' to 'read'):
And here's a reminder about what, from my own previous research and experience, blog readers want to see more of (each of which implies unmet needs):
But what if you don't care how many readers you have? I would suggest that, in that case, blogging fills an unmet internal need for you personally. Whether that's the ability to think out loud and clarify your own thoughts, or to keep in touch with a small circle of friends you can't meet face-to-face as often as you'd like, or to practice your writing skills, or to organize and document your personal filing cabinet or your 'personal memory' before information and ideas are lost or misplaced, these are important personal needs (for some of us, anyway) that blogging fills. But you might just find, as I did, that in the process of filling those personal needs, you also fill the unmet needs of others, and your audience becomes surprisingly large. And then, like me, you'll begin to feel a responsibility to continue to fill that unmet need for your readers. That's when you know you're hooked on blogging. And if you quit blogging, as most bloggers do, I'll bet it's because either you, or your readers, have found something else that meets your, or their, unmet needs better. Photo from Agence France Presse via the excellent Glob al Policy Forum, a reminder that for many of us, there are unmet needs more urgent than information, inspiration and entertainment. |
 If
you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I'm
opposed to unregulated 'free' trade, very worried about the
extraterritoriality of the WTO, NAFTA, Davos and other corporatist
captives, strongly opposed to domestic corporations 'offshoring' jobs,
using influence with the Bush regime and other right-wing governments
to circumvent social and environmental laws and responsibilities, and
a
great believer in taking the pledge to buy local, and in community
self-sufficiency.At the same time, I'm a strong supporter of the UN and other multi-lateral NGOs, and I believe that we each have a responsibility for the well-being of all the people and creatures of this world. Some readers have said this view is inconsistent, and I wasn't quite sure how to respond to such charges. Fortunately, Peter Singer, in his recent book on global ethics, I'll have more to say next week about Bush's fraudulent and despicable Earth Day media blitz, and the major media's shameless lack of critical evaluation of the utter nonsense that his propaganda machine has been churning out this week on the environment -- newspeak of Orwellian proportions. The first part of Singer's book deals with environmental responsibility, and his prescription for increasing it -- immediate ratification of Kyoto by the US and other holdout countries, and introduction of an emissions trading mechanism to make the realization of Kyoto feasible (subject to the need for some oversight on the disposition of the proceeds of such trading when it involves autocratic governments). The second part of the book deals with the global economy, and Singer adroitly tears apart the Economist's (and other neocons') naive assertion that economic globalization somehow benefits both rich and poor countries. He then goes on to prescribe a substantial reform of the WTO and the GATT, which could actually lead to more equitable distribution of wealth and more efficient production of economic goods, while safeguarding human rights, labour and the environment. Unfortunately, the multi-national corporations and corporatists who hold sway in the WTO would never tolerate Singer's prescription, since it would entirely divert the benefits of economic globalization from their pockets to those of the world's poor. The third part of the book deals with international law, and Singer lashes out at Bush for his unconscionable refusal to ratify the International Court of Justice, and for the UN's continued hesitancy to accept a duty (not a right) to intervene in situations of genocide and other humanitarian crises, even within a single nation. Singer is sanguine about the limitations and dangers of 'global government', but supports strengthening the UN to enable it to act as a 'protector of last resort', and including in its mandate the responsibility to supervise elections in all member nations. The fourth and final part goes back to ethical principles and proposes that countries must, in this world where national boundaries no longer have any logistic meaning, set aside national interest and embrace, once and for all, global interest, impartially. That does not mean cultural homogenization, but imposes a responsibility for the reduction of inequality, both of economic resources and personal rights and freedoms. Always the pragmatist, Singer concludes by worrying out loud about how the responsibility for a global ethic could be managed: It
is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an
unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the
EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global
tyranny,
unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken
seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous
tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them
effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is
a
challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of
political science and public administration.
I'd like to believe that this was possible, because if it isn't, we're in serious trouble. We cannot expect national governments to set aside parochial interests, especially when this entails accepting a responsibility that would, for the richer nations, inevitably lead to a drastic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations and hence a sudden and sharp reduction in, at least, economic living standards (if not necessarily well-being). But as John Ralston Saul has so eloquently argued, larger organizations and institutions, whether public or private, are almost always, and inherently, less efficient, less agile, more resistant to change, more hierarchic, and less transparent than smaller organizations. So the challenge is to achieve the best of both worlds, having organizations of global scope and authority and responsibility, but broken up into sufficiently small, autonomous and dynamic units that they are sensitive, resilient, responsible and responsive to the people and communities they serve. We can only hope that "the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration", wherever they are, are up to the task. |
 Graham Westwood of ProCarta gave me a copy of Bill Jensen's Simplicity, a book that claims
most business problems are a result of unnecessarily complex
decision-making processes. I recently
wrote
that if Knowledge Management were relabeled Work Effectiveness
Improvement, both the requirements of the job and the customers'
expectations would be much clearer, and we might finally get the job
done. Jensen's book offers a prescription for WEI.Jensen's thesis is that poor decision-making is the root cause of business error and ineffectiveness, and his diagnosis of the four causes for it is shown at right. Most employees, he says, want to do good work, but are impeded by these four causes, which produce unnecessary complexity in each of our jobs. I concur with this diagnosis, though I'm not sure large organization have either the capacity or the will to fix these four problems. At the individual and team level, Jensen suggests* five behaviour or learning changes that could alleviate these problems:
These are useful suggestions for improving work effectiveness and hence decision-making in organizations, but none of them is new. Those that would take up WEI (or KM) as a career need to understand why these techniques have not worked in the past, before they attempt to implement them in their organizations. In many companies, both employees and managers raise their eyebrows at 'soft skills' courses like time management, effective communication and story-telling. We know how to do that, they will say, the problem is more systemic, more entrenched than merely teaching common-sense skills can hope to solve. These critics are half-right. Many problems in business are structural, strategic, or systemic, and raising people's hopes by suggesting that these basic work management techniques are suddenly going to work bottom-up when they didn't work before, will merely create disappointment. Excessive size and hierarchy, poor managers, and inappropriate success measures (that reward executives more for cutting staff than for making staff more effective, for example) are at the heart of much work ineffectiveness, and need very different solutions. But these critics are also half-wrong. Each of us today is increasingly in charge of our own careers, our own jobs, and hence our own work effectiveness. The five skills listed above are critical skills for every entrepreneur and every front-line worker, and we should each ensure we have these 'core competencies'. If the big, cumbersome organizations we work for do not allow these skills proper exercise, then the answer is either to leave them or reform them, not to revel in our ineffectiveness and just blame management (even when they are to blame). The remainder of Jensen's book prescribes some higher-level organizational 'disciplines' that can enable improvements in work effectiveness:
Nevertheless, this book provides some of the much-needed definition for WEI, which I believe will be the next wave of organizational change, and will accomplish much of what reengineering and knowledge management failed to do. The #1 purpose of management must become empowering people to know and do what's important to achieve the organization's goals, and enabling them to stop doing the other stuff that, today, takes up most of their time. * Jensen uses different words for these, and for many of the key ideas in this book. As much as I liked his messages, I found sometimes his choice of labels for his key concepts confusing. |
I've now finished Jim
Merkel's book