Posted by John Hall on Wednesday, March 7, 2012 In : Business Design
Here are two challenges for your organisation.
- Have
you a business purpose that drives your business model and is associated
with management methods for managing perceptions, customer feedback,
setting performance metrics, identifying hold-ups and bottlenecks,
adapting to change etc.?
- Are
you using the same approach at departmental level, and at team level s...
Continue reading...
Posted by John Hall on Wednesday, March 7, 2012 In : Some Fun
This is a bit of fun, although there is a hidden message. You may be aware of the management expression that states that
when you are up to your arse in alligators, you forget that your original task
was to drain the swamp. This calls for purposeful thinking.
Alligator management is loosely based on this. It tracks a
career into, and through, management, which goes through the follo... Continue reading...
Posted by John Hall on Monday, February 20, 2012
Standing for Strengths,
Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, SWOT is used as a frame work for
brainstorming where an organisation is positioned in relation to its
market, and the challenges that lie ahead.
The SWOT approach can be used in many
ways, either as an open brainstorm, or with a facilitator. The process can be good for helping the top team share different views about the business,
and forming a common point of reference for taking the business forward. It
is usually one of ... Continue reading...
Posted by John Hall on Tuesday, January 10, 2012 In : Business Design
The fourth law of marketing, according to Al Ries and James Trout in
their book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, is that ‘Marketing is
more a battle of perceptions than it is of products’. They offer
significant evidence to support this. Perceptions matter.
They matter about your products, your organisation and you. They are
quickly formed and then slowly altered, provided there is very strong
evidence to do so. Many businesses hope for the best, but there are ways of managing perc... Continue reading...
Posted by John Hall on Tuesday, January 10, 2012 In : Business Design
Here is a way of testing whether you have a good business model. Use the following as a checklist for your business. You could score what you do out of fifteen by giving yourself 1 point if you can say exactly how your business model does the things suggested, half a point if you can manufacture a reasonable explanation, and no points if your business model does not do this, or you cannot work out what the question means. The end result is that you will have a good idea of the strengths of you... Continue reading...
Posted by John Hall on Tuesday, January 10, 2012 In : Business Design
Yes, although there are a number of caveats to my reply. Some of this
is because management speak tends to be ambiguous. That includes the
use of the word ‘Mission’
Take a look around the Internet and you will find a number of
different ways a mission is expressed. Some, and this is where the
consensus seems to be, take it to mean arriving at a particular
achievement e.g. being number one in the market, getting a man on the
moon etc. Others talk about a mission as a never ending jou...
Posted by John Hall on Tuesday, January 10, 2012 In : Business Design
This is a fundamental question in Business design. OK, it does depend on how you define a business. An easy way to define a business is as a source of independent revenue.
So a hotel could have sources of revenue from the bar, from the
restaurant, from the bedrooms, from conferences. There is the same asset
(the hotel) and some common backroom systems (paying staff), but
different ways of interacting with customers with different purposes.
A garage may do repairs, as well as sell cars, so a... Continue reading...
Posted by John Hall on Tuesday, January 10, 2012 In : Business Design
A good business design process will help you form:-
- A coherent business identity
- A separation of the different business streams and what you have to coordinate
- A customer focus purpose statement for each business stream
- A purpose statement to drive your business
- A purpose on which you can build your business model
Your first challenge: Have you any of the above?
The above represents a step along a journey. The first part of the
journey is to form that inspiring business purpose and create a bus... Continue reading...
Posted by John Hall on Tuesday, January 10, 2012 In : Business Design
Business design is an ambiguous expression. Everyone can tell you
what they think it means, although they may have slightly different
understandings on how it is defined.
Ask a range of people and you are likely to hear expressions such as:
— the business processes we use to serve customers, an organisational
or accountability chart, the look and feel of the business (including
the business logo), how we interact with the customer, the mission and
culture of the business, a business ... Continue reading...
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