Seth Speaks about engaging innovators

December 2, 2009 — andrewnim

Interesting and useful list from Seth Godin

It is a great list below are a few items which jumped out at me,

  • Simplify the problem relentlessly, and be prepared to accept an elegant solution that satisfies the simplest problem you can describe.Hire the right person. Don’t ask a mason to paint your house.
  • Part of your job is to find someone who is already in the sweet spot you’re looking for, or someone who is eager and able to get there.
  • Pay as much as you need to solve the problem, which might be more than you want to. If you pay less than that, you’ll end up wasting all your money. Why would a great innovator work cheap?
  • Cede all issues of irrelevant personal taste to the innovator. I don’t care if you hate the curves on the new logo. Just because you write the check doesn’t mean your personal aesthetic sense is relevant.

That last one is great, don’t tell the person you hire how to do the job you hired them for.

But you should read the full list over at Seth’s

Posted in Collaboration, Doing Business, people. Leave a Comment »

Google Social Search

October 27, 2009 — andrewnim

Its all the rage this week as its due out for the masses on Monday. Sites all over the web are discussing it and telling us all how it will work and how great it will be. Google have released videos telling us how they envisage it and how it will build us a circle of “friends” around our Google Profiles. Each time you search and are logged in to your Google profile it will begin matching and building your network. Connecting with your other social media activities.

I see a glitch, user names and email addresses are often very different. My twitter name is not the same as my Google account name and my business email is not @gmail.com. As a freelancer I work under other email addresses as well, reflecting the branding of the client.

So the picture which Google social search is going to create is not going to have me at its true center. It is more likely going to look like a Venn_diagram . Now this may turn out to be very valuable in the long run as the connections who reside within the overlap are possibly identified as the most meaningful. But how will they get their if you are not logged in to a specific Google account at the time?

It will be interesting to see if it works in practice and proves to be more than a gimick to get us all building our Google profiles. Which is the only way it is really going to work, with Google as the center of our online lives.

Posted in Collaboration, Marketing, people. Leave a Comment »

Free range ideas

July 29, 2009 — andrewnim

One expression I really don’t like hearing is people extolling others to “think out side of the box”. It’s often too late for that by the time this is being requested. It’s usually said to people who have actually been trained by school, parents, work and their peers to think in certain ways and do certain things. Fit in, do as you are told, be part of the gang, do it this way, do it our way. Some of this is needed, it gives us grounding and allows us to achieve as a society. But it needs to be offset by encouraging freedom of inquiry and analytical skills. We need to encourage young people to do what comes naturally: to question.

But that’s for the future, that may help our companies in a few years, but not now. Now we need to think about the staff both present and future. When you are next looking to hire a new employee what will you be looking for? Someone who will just fit in or someone who will stir things up a bit? I don’t mean hire a work place psycho, I mean someone who is free- range rather than battery reared. Some one who does not want to be a wall flower, but who is actively going to suggest new ways of doing things and is going to challenge when it is needed. Some one who is not afraid to say NO!

Not every organization wants or needs a blue sky thinker and i’ts the last thing you need in a small close knit organization. But you need someone who is happier with open fields and green pastures. However, and this is an important however, this one person is not going to be a catalyst for change unless you allow and encourage it. Which means you also need to encourage your other staff to do the same. It will not happen over night and does not need trips away for team building. You just need to get them to start thinking about how they do their jobs and give them incentives  if they come up with an idea that boosts your business. People generally are happy to tell you what is wrong with a process they are involved with, if it is one they have been given to follow. They are quiet happy to make improvements. You just need to encourage them. When people criticize see it as constructive.

If you want free range ideas you have to create a free range enviroment, not a box you then have to get them to think outside of. It means meetings which are informal and without hierachy; it means subtle continual changes in the way you interact in your company. You have to be brave and you have to learn to listen- really listen, in the same way you should be listening to your customers; customers you will get more of as your staff start solving customer problems and giving great customer service.

Posted in Collaboration, Ideas, people. 1 Comment »

Training, Training and Training

July 19, 2009 — andrewnim

I am a technology fan. I love technology. One of my favorite TV programmes as a kid was the  BBC’s Tomorrows World which showcase new tech every week. I enjoy trying new things and finding out what works but strangely I am not addicted to gadgets! I like to try things out and see if they will make a difference, not just get it because it’s the hottest new  item. Maybe this is because for me there has to be a point to the technology, it has to answer a need, or create it. The point’s always the same: does it make my life easier? does it make my work easier?  The new thing may be a great idea, but if it’s  badly implemented it is going to increase my work not decrease it and chances are no amount of training is going to change that.

But if it has been well thought out and implemented the new tech- say a web based accounting package for monitoring your bank account, some training is going to mean you are able to get the maximum use very quickly. My advice to anyone developing an application of this nature is spend at least 25% of the development time ensuring your user -experience is geared towards training simplification and that your training material supports it.

My advice to the user, whether an individual or a company installing a new system, spend at least 25% of the first month of use in training. Many companies often  spend thousands on a software package and not a cent on training, then wonder why they are not attaining the desired ROI. Outlook is a great example of the failure of companies to ensure optimum use of a man tool of the company.

Here is a scenario which is played out in hundreds of companies all over the world: It’s Monday morning and the new employee arrives, straight out of college and eager. They get a desk, they get a computer, they get a login and email via Outlook. They may get asked if they have used it before and about five minutes help logging in and they are off. Well not quite, what’s missing here is that they may know how to use outlook to some degree but do they know how to use it the way the company does? So, now the company has someone who is learning as they go and making mistakes which need correcting by another member of staff who is then taken from their work.

Now think about implementing a company- wide CRM or accouting package and not providing any training, just letting the staff teach themselves. Just how inefficient would that be? Sounds like madness when you see it written down here like this doesn’t it? Yet it happens.  Dont let it happen to you, use good change management techniques. Ensure you understand what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how you are going to do it. Make new technology work for you and remember that your new technology is only going to work as well as the people who are using it.

Posted in Doing Business, people, systems. 2 Comments »