Video: will the downturn kill my project?

January 21, 2009 6:09 pm by Adam Jones

It’s a disconcerting feeling. The reassuring noises your bosses used to make about your project have stopped.

You struggle to decode the silence: does it mean that the whole thing will be shut down or is it just that head office has other preoccupations right now?

The horrible deterioration in economic conditions in many countries means that there is no shortage of managers in this situation today. On their behalf, I asked Colin Gautrey, an executive coach and author, for advice.

He recommends following four strategies that mix scenario planning, intelligence gathering and networking. It beats waiting passively for the axe to fall.

You can watch the video here.

Posted in Career/skills, Hard times | Permalink

Pick of the week

January 16, 2009 11:41 am by Adam Jones

“Executive coaching isn’t therapy,” says executive coach Ed Batista, before declaring that Gestalt therapy actually provides rather a good framework for resolving workplace issues;
Don’t greet the guy sitting by the door first — 10 pages of advice from Harvard Business School on how to negotiate in China;
How the brain makes us fall into line with others — and how marketers can cash in on that hard-wiring;
Tips for keeping staff in emerging markets with high inflation (pay rises need to be more frequent that once a year, for a start);
The rules of movie marketing.

Posted in Career/skills, Managing others, Marketing/sales | Permalink

Podcast: how to keep Generation Y motivated

January 14, 2009 5:06 pm by Adam Jones

A new FT Management podcast has just been published, featuring Tammy Erickson, author of Plugged In: The Generation Y Guide To Thriving At Work.

Tammy, a perceptive blogger as well as author, wrote the book as a form of career advice for Generation Y, which she loosely defines as those born between 1980 and 1995.

However, I wanted to ask her how older bosses should approach the task of managing these younger workers. How do you recruit and retain the most talented “Ys”? And are they really as impatient as their critics make out?

Tammy prefers to call them “immediate” rather than “impatient”. On the plus side, they have a suppleness and adaptability that can make their seniors look rigid and over-scheduled.

Yet she says they can be naïvely ignorant of the unwritten rules that govern most workplaces:

The Ys often just simply don’t get how business in done within corporations… they don’t really understand how things happen.

Does any of that sound familiar?

Posted in Managing others, Podcasts | Permalink

Pick of the week

January 9, 2009 3:51 pm by Adam Jones

Bob Sutton is singing hymns to a 1984 study of peripatetic Methodist ministers.

The Stanford Graduate School of Business professor and author of The No Asshole Rule says it still shows how good leaders have the most impact on teams and small organisations, not vast companies.

Elsewhere:

Lucy Kellaway’s managerial twaddle awards for 2008;
Ways of figuring out if your job is safe (no.8: do you engage in high-maintenance behaviour that means the cost of keeping you employed is not just financial, but emotional too?);
A top Wall Street lawyer offers his advice to board directors in 2009;
“An air bag that works all the time, except when you have a car accident” — The New York Times Magazine anatomises Value at Risk’s failings (see also our new MBA Gym module on risk management).

Posted in Career/skills, Finance, Governance/CSR, Leadership | Permalink

McKinsey on decision making: obvious but handy

January 8, 2009 3:33 pm by Adam Jones

If a piece of research comes up with findings that are startlingly obvious, is there any point to it? I think so. So often ignored, the obvious bears repetition.

Take this new McKinsey survey on how companies make good decisions, on issues such as whether they should enter a new market or buy a competitor. The conclusions aren’t going to lead to a boardroom revolution. I paraphrase:

Detailed financial modelling and risk analysis works, as does looking at comparable situations from the past;
The person responsible for implementing a decision should be clearly identified and involved in the decision itself;
Decisions initiated and approved by the same person, however, generate the worst financial results;
Companies with no strategic planning process are bad at making decisions;
CEOs require particularly bold oversight since their pet projects often turn out to be either big successes or big failures;
Leaders of business units sometimes put their parochial concerns above the needs of the broader organisation.

As I said, not rocket science — but look where rocket science got us…

Posted in Strategy/ops | Permalink

Super Bowl advertisers work on their tactics for the big game

January 7, 2009 1:54 pm by Adam Jones

US brands traditionally use the Super Bowl as a platform for lavish television adverts. But will recession dampen the marketing sideshow attached to American football’s premier event?

The Super Bowl draws about 140m viewers and will take place on February 1. Two Kellogg School of Management marketing professors — Tim Calkins and Derek Rucker — are diligently blogging about the behaviour of key marketers in the run-up to the game.

Prof Rucker says advertisers face two big challenges if they want Super Bowl exposure in the current economic climate:

First, can advertisers successfully deliver a message with the right tonality to resonate with consumers’ current emotions? This feat requires a strong understanding of the consumer mind and an ability to tailor a message to speak to the consumer. Brands might seize the opportunity of the day to accomplish this task, but I also suspect many will play it safe by ignoring the issue all together.

Second, can brands walk the tightrope of spending an approximate $3 million on a 30-second spot without looking wasteful?

At least two long-time Super Bowl advertisers — General Motors and FedEx — will be absent from all the hoopla this year. Prof Calkins thinks the troubled carmaker is making a “huge mistake”.

What GM really needs, now, is to get people to buy its cars. And the only way GM will get people to buy its cars is to give them a reason to buy. Simply put, GM needs to explain to people why this is a great time to buy a car.

More importantly, GM has to project confidence. The company has to be confident in its products and confident in its future.

The best way to project confidence and get the company moving is to invest in the Super Bowl and portray GM as a refocused, determined, confident company.

However, he is intrigued by talk that PowerAde has cooked up a risqué ad to lighten the gloom, saying that it would be a bold move given the fuss caused by Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” in 2004, which ensured that subsequent Super Bowls have been “about as titillating as reading Newsweek”.

Posted in Hard times, Marketing/sales | Permalink

Pick of the week

January 2, 2009 12:23 pm by Adam Jones

How a surfeit of growth strategies can hurt a business;
Going from zero to one: the art of launching new products (such as the first electronic calculator) explained by one of Casio’s founders;
Eight reasons why General Motors failed as a marketer (no.6: “no global brand”);
The ideal farewell speech - a time to settle old scores?

Posted in Career/skills, Innovation/tech, Marketing/sales, Strategy/ops | Permalink

2008 European business school ranking: HEC Paris keeps all-round edge

December 1, 2008 12:38 pm by Adam Jones

Today’s Financial Times included its annual ranking of European business schools, based on aggregate performance across MBAs, executive MBAs, executive education and masters courses.

The top ten are listed below, with their 2007 rank in brackets (note that there are ties in fourth and eighth position):

1. (1.) HEC Paris
2. (2.) London Business School
3. (3.) Insead
4. (5) IE Business School
4. (4) IMD
6. (7) ESCP-EAP European School of Management
7. (6) Iese Business School
8. (9) EM Lyon
8. (8) Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University
10. (16) Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School

Check out the full, interactive ranking and the accompanying special report.

Posted in B-schools | Permalink

Pick of the week

November 28, 2008 1:26 pm by Adam Jones

Defensive and proactive strategies for a downturn;
A “hyper-tangled wholly mangled world”: a quotation from Bob Dylan’s poetry or an entertaining rant by Tom Peters?
Local can beat global;
How to make the transition from running a unit to running an entire organisation.

Posted in Hard times, Leadership, Strategy/ops | Permalink

If you are paranoid now, wait until you join Rypple

November 27, 2008 2:05 pm by Adam Jones

A new web-based service called Rypple is offering workers private, anonymous feedback from colleagues and bosses.

Members use the site to ask their peers how they performed in a specific task, or how they are doing in general. The peers write down what they think and these opinions are returned to the feedback-seeker without their names attached.

This ~~nameless character assassination~~ dispassionate evaluation enables members to work on their weaknesses on a rolling basis, instead of having to wait for their annual career appraisal, the company says.

Continue reading: “If you are paranoid now, wait until you join Rypple”

Posted in Career/skills, Innovation/tech, Managing others | Permalink