I've just returned from a fantastic 11-day trip to France with my family, and therefore, I thought it would be very appropriate today to blog about strategies regarding the return to work after vacation. Lydia Dishman has a terrific article on the subject at Fast Company's website. Specifically, I thought she had several good tips related to email. She cites several executives who recommend using the long airplane trip home or the evening before the first day back at work to chug through all those emails that accumulated while you were gone. Second, Dishman describes a tip from Andrea Wasserman, an executive at Nordstrom. Wasserman explains that one should take time after a vacation to "ask yourself some honest questions about your tasks and to-do list. 'What activities started to creep into your work day that aren’t a high return on impact or aligned to your strategic goals?'" Finally, Wasserman also recommends trying to capture the key insights or ideas that came to mind as one relaxed on vacation. Get those thoughts down on paper before they slip your mind!
The Wall Street Journal reports this morning on Best Buy founder and ex-Chairman Richard Schulze's plans for the struggling electronics retailer. As you probably know, Schulze hopes to take the company private. The paper reports that Schulze "envisions a turnaround plan for the electronics retailer that involves cutting prices to better compete against Amazon and other online retailers while ensuring that the in-store customer-service experience is as good as Apple's according to people familiar with the matter." Naturally, such a plan to lower prices, while not reducing costs aggressively, will shrink profit margins.
We need to know much more about this turnaround plan before being able to evaluate its prospects thoroughly. However, this initial news has not put investors and analysts at ease (understandably). The Wall Street Journal cites skepticism from Sanford Bernstein's retail analyst Colin McGranahan, who says, "As long as the top line is slowing you have to cut costs at a similar rate or your cash flow starts to suffer."
Beyond the simple math problem cited by McGranahan, the strategy may be flawed. Schulze appears to be trying to compete on price, while offering a premium experience a la Apple. However, we know that Apple achieves that premium experience by spending generously on branding, training, design, and the like. There is no free lunch. They make up for higher costs in some areas by charging premium prices. Schulze appears to want that premium experience, but if he doesn't get strong pricing, how will he generate decent profits? The risk here is clear. Could Best Buy end up stuck in the middle? They might not have the cost structure to compete with Amazon, nor the premium image and experience to compete effectively with Apple.
George Bradt has a good article at Forbes in which he describes his recent interview with Steelcase CEO Jim Hackett. Steelcase, of course, designs excellent office furniture and workspaces. Hackett explained that modern offices need a "range of settings to accommodate focused, collaborative and social work in both open and enclosed environments." Hackett emphasizes the collaborative "we" spaces a great deal, because many offices lack those types of environments conducive to bringing people together to accomplish a group task. Here is an excerpt:
Now, instead of designing traditional offices, Steelcase creates “we” spaces around the three-four most important meta issues. According to Hackett, executives don’t need homes, “command-level projects” do. So there might be a project room for a team working on a merger, product launch or a recall. Instead of people bringing information into meetings with executives, the information stays in the project rooms and executives travel to it. As Hackett explains, they made this shift because:
Innovation requires collective ‘we’ work. To this end, it’s critical to design spaces that not only support collaboration, but augment it (with) spaces that promote eye-to-eye contact, provide everyone with equal access to information, and allow people to move around and participate freely.
The idea of "war rooms" is very appealing to me. I think they create a powerful sense of group identity, as well as proving that all-important equal access to information. I think executives do need personal "homes" too... there is some focused, solo work that still needs to be done. People sometimes need time without distraction, as Susan Cain has argued. However, collaborative work often can be done much more effectively if "war room" type space is available.
This morning, I read this interview with Blake Anderson, Adam DeVine, and Anders Holm - the creators of the show Workaholics on Comedy Central. They describe how they brainstorm together to come up with ideas for the show. To me, the most fascinating portion of the interview addresses the issue of how they "put the brakes on an idea." Anders Holm explains that you don't want the same person always being the individual who is reining the group in or pruning ideas:
Adam: I don’t think any of us have a real problem, being like, “Naaaah,” to an idea. Because it’s not hurting our feelings, it’s just an idea and we’ll come up with a new one. We try not to be too precious with any of these ideas. And we’ve worked together now--like really, really worked hard together--for the last six, seven years. So we’re really comfortable knowing whether the guys are gonna love this one. Or the guys aren’t gonna love this one but I’m gonna keep pitching it anyway. Anders: You gotta juggle that role around or else all of a sudden somebody becomes the cop. Then as soon as that person speaks it’s like, “Uhhhhggg, here comes the cop.” For us everybody puts on the badge every once in awhile.
I'm in agreement about avoiding the conversation cop phenomenon. In working with executives, I often talk about the value of assigning someone to play the role of devil's advocate to enhance the quality of high-stakes decisions. However, I argue that a group should rotate the responsibility for playing the devil's advocate. Otherwise, that person can become a broken record, and other group members can begin to downplay the arguments put forth by the constant critic.
Procera Networks reports that streaming traffic on Netflix has fallen by 25% in recent days (reported on CNN Money website here). The company believes that the Olympics accounts for the decreased activity on Netflix. Indeed, Netflix has admitted that the Olympics may have an adverse effect on the firm this quarter. I'm curious as to the financial impact, as less streaming on the part of someone who still pays the monthly subscription fee doesn't have a negative impact on Netflix earnings. On the other hand, if the Olympics slows new subscriber growth, then the company has a problem.
This report makes me wonder what other firms might be adversely affected by the Olympics. Will Redbox take a hit as well? What about movie purchases and rentals via iTunes? Do people go to movie theaters less often during these two weeks? Perhaps sporting events such as minor league baseball take an attendance hit as well. What do my readers think? Any thoughts on the firms that might have a nasty financial surprise this quarter due to the two-week Olympic effect?
David Burkus, Professor at Oral Roberts University, has written a terrific blog post about some new research on creativity. Burkus describes the work of NYU's Evan Polman and Cornell's Kyle Emich. These scholars found that we tend to be more creative when we think of others facing a challenging situation, rather than thinking of ourselves caught in that predicament. In one experiment, Polman and Emich found that subjects could solve a tough riddle only 48% of the time when they imagined themselves facing that challenging situation. Meanwhile, two-thirds of the subjects actually solved the riddle when asked to imagine someone else facing the same predicament.
The goal of a corporate "dashboard" should be to provide a quick snapshot of how the business is doing. However, far too many firms create complex dashboards full of a wide variety of metrics. They overload managers with information, and they don't get the results that they intended to achieve.
I was reminded of the power of simple metrics, as I read this article at Knowledge @ Wharton. It discusses the concept of "net promoter score." The concept is straightforward: How likely would you be to recommend my company, my product or my service to your friends, your colleagues or your family members? Fred Reichheld and Rob Markey developed this concept, and their research suggests that a firm's net promoter score is highly correlated with a number of other key measures of financial performance.
In this exchange between Markey and Wharton Professor Peter Fader, we see a fascinating discussion about Net Promoter Score. The bottom line: We could enhance the accuracy of the Net Promoter Score, but it may not be worth doing so. Every firm should keep this conversation in mind as it identifies and formulates key business metrics:
Markey: The truth is that the Net Promoter Score is designed to be radically simple, not because it is statistically better, but because it is statistically fine and that simplicity appeals to frontline employees. Even CEOs can understand it. The designations of promoter, passive and detractor are based on one question. It's a simplifying construct that helps motivate and inspire people to want to create more promoters and fewer detractors. If you really wanted a statistically robust thing that was about the statistically accurate correlations, you would always go for more questions. But what we found is that there's about a 10% or 15% improvement by adding more questions in terms of statistical accuracy, but it tremendously degrades your ability to motivate the organization to take action because then you get into these debates: Which questions are part of the index? How are they weighted? I don't know, maybe that question isn't relevant for my business. Then you end up debating the score and not actually focusing on what matters, which is getting your customers to stay longer, buy more and tell their friends.
Fader: Indeed, what you've just described is very consistent with the academic research, which shows that a richer, multidimensional scale can be 10% to 15 % better. But this one question -- this ultimate question -- really is good enough. In the academic community, it's kind of a half-full, half-empty [situation]. I'm a half-full kind of guy, saying, "Give me a measure that is good enough, one that managers can actually appreciate, understand, implement and spread throughout the organization." It raises the whole idea of measurement and understanding customer differences to a level that we've never seen before in any organization.
