Hard times

Column: engaging a worried workforce

February 10, 2009 12:36 am by Stefan Stern

“Worried about the recession?” asked the nice young woman at the top of the stairs as I came out of the Tube station the other morning. She was offering little orange leaflets to my fellow commuters and she had a lot of takers. What were the leaflets advertising? Unemployment insurance.

But back on my desk in the office lay a pile of material on almost precisely the opposite subject: “employee engagement”. This stuff had been building up over the past few weeks. It is clearly something that people are thinking about – when they are not worrying about losing their jobs.

Employee engagement is a venerable management theme. It has long been seen as a magic ingredient for corporate success. Build an engaged workforce, the gurus tell us, and all will be well.

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post comments below.

Posted in Hard times | Permalink

Time to get the message on “masstige”

February 9, 2009 4:43 pm by Stefan Stern

Is anyone doing well out of the recession? It was a question that emerged from this morning’s business session at the Portmeirion symposium.

One company might be: PZ Cussons, new owners of the Sanctuary spa range of products.

This is an “affordable luxury”, an attractive proposition at a time like this. Our attention was drawn to this development by Alice Sherwood , who introduced delegates to the concept of “masstige“: prestige for the masses.

A bit more sobering was a thoughtful talk from David Smith, CEO of Jaguar Land Rover, who told us about his ambition to maintain high quality car manufacturing in the UK. As many as 75,000 jobs may depend on his business’s continued survival. (And he is at the prestige, not the masstige end of the market.) It was a welcome reality check in this rather surreal place.

Posted in Hard times, Marketing/sales | Permalink

Pick of the week

February 6, 2009 5:10 pm by Adam Jones

Lynda Gratton of London Business School reckons that recession is calling into question the command and control style of corporate leadership:

Many people are now questioning the wisdom of placing so much power in the hands of so few. At the same time, insights from research in decision sciences and technological advances have shown that often the best decisions are made by an “intelligent crowd”, rather than one all-powerful individual.

This is a fissure in the norms of organisational life that could well lead to the acceleration of a more democratic and distributed decision-making process and the idea that leadership can be held by a wider group of people.

Her advice? “Bring diversity back on to the agenda.” I can’t agree more — but can’t see an imminent end to the autocratic reign of the “middle-aged men with similar backgrounds” (her label for the decision-making elite).

That said, her prediction that hard times will lead to more “virtual teams” — as opposed to face-to-face collaboration — is bang on.

Elsewhere:

SoBe, what were you thinking of? Super Bowl adverts rated by Kellogg marketing prof Tim Calkins;
Henry Mintzberg blames management;
3M tops a list of 20 best companies for nurturing leaders;
Highly-paid non-execs give CEOs bigger pay packages.

Posted in Governance/CSR, Hard times, Leadership, Marketing/sales | Permalink

Column: the hot air of CSR

February 3, 2009 12:12 am by Stefan Stern

Thank goodness, now the recession’s here we can forget all that nonsense about corporate social responsibility (CSR) and get back to trying to make some money.

Admit it, the thought had occurred to you. There may have been much talk of (newly rediscovered) responsibility in Davos last week. But for most managers the biggest responsibility of all will always be to make a profit and stay in business.

The good news is that serious CSR types understand this. I went to a lunchtime meeting at the House of Lords last week where this became clear. This was no crowd of burbling do-gooders. One executive declared: “I can’t stand writing CSR reports. I hate it. It’s so boring.” Another – in fact our co-host, Michael Littlechild, the head of the advisory business Good Corporation – conceded that, for many business people, CSR was just a case of BDF: “babies, dolphins and forests”.

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post comments below.

Posted in Governance/CSR, Hard times | Permalink

(More) bad news for management consultants

January 30, 2009 11:48 am by Stefan Stern

Oh dear. Bloomberg is reporting that Siemens, the German industrial giant, is about to dispense with the services of management consultants as a cost-cutting measure. It will be favouring home-grown solutions for the time being.

Corporate belt-tightening is in this year. Even Davos man has restrained himself a bit this week. Perhaps, on reading the news, some of the consultants currently on the Swiss slopes will choose to extend their stay a little.

Posted in Hard times | Permalink

Column: forget about popularity now

January 27, 2009 1:25 am by Stefan Stern

Leadership teams are facing up to the ghastly trading conditions of 2009. It is horrible out there. To ensure survival, unpopular measures may be required. Do you have the stomach for them?

Tough decisions on headcount can provoke the traditional cry: “The bastards have gone and sacked me!” Sometimes the abusive language is justified. Often it is not. The fact that cuts are necessary will be little consolation. Getting canned feels deeply personal to the victim of the decision. But the chances are it will have been made on an impersonal and indeed almost arbitrary basis.

I would not expect readers of this column to waste an ounce of sympathy on the fate of a few journalists. But listen to the words of Peter Williams, finance director of the Daily Mail and General Trust, a leading British newspaper group, describing the recent sale of its famous London title, the Evening Standard.

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post comments below.

Posted in Hard times, Leadership | Permalink

The mastery of Donald Sull

January 23, 2009 4:58 pm by Stefan Stern

Please take a look at the first part (of four) in the FT’s new Mastering Management series, “Managing in a Downturn”. You will find lots of stimulating new material in there.

In particular, I recommend Donald Sull’s article “Seizing the upside of a downturn”. Don is professor of management practice at London Business School (LBS), as well as its director of executive education. (He was also an amateur boxer in his youth, not so long ago.)

Don argues that managers need to show resilience, courage and agility at a time like this – like a good boxer, in fact. But imagination is necessary too. There are opportunties out there, even now. You just have to have the nerve and ability to go for them.

At a breakfast meeting at LBS this week Don was in terrific form. He was disparaging about some of the inflated claims made by some private equity players in recent years. “Some people have mistaken luck and cheap debt for commercial genius,” he said. He seemed pretty confident they were about to be found out.

“A lot of CEOs drive with only one foot – the gas [accelerator] or the brake,” he added. “That’s why the ride can be a bit jerky.” We need to be able to do both to make the ride a bit smoother, he said. Work on costs and revenues at the same time. Not so dramatic, Don said. But a much more effective way of creating lasting value.

Posted in B-schools, Hard times | Permalink

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

Read it: the challenge to management

January 12, 2009 2:23 pm by Stefan Stern

My friend and colleague Simon Caulkin wrote this superb column for The Observer newspaper yesterday. Do give it five minutes of your time.

He argues that managers have been caught up in what has been, effectively, a failed 25-year long ideological experiment in rampant short termism.

You may not agree with his conclusions but they demand a serious response.

Posted in Hard times | 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