February 2010 – Change Meme

26 February, 20105 October, 2018 Louise McGregor Buzzword

“It’s a Cash Cow”

CM2010_02_cow “Cash cow” is a term I usually hear used somewhat sarcastically in reference to a high margin product. The expression itself is probably pretty old, but it’s adoption into business is about 40 years old and comes from a matrix produced by Boston Consulting Group in 1968.

It’s a 2 by 2 matrix, perhaps one of the first to be popularised by consultants, with decreasing market share on the x axis and increasing growth on the y axis, the four quadrants are then categorised as shown below.

Matrix showing the categorisation of products according to market share and growth

A star is a product with high growth and high market share, this is likely to be a new product. A company should invest in further development and marketing of this product.

A question mark indicates that a product has high growth but hasn’t really gained a sizable market share, it may be a new product. There is a risk that such a product could turn out to be a fad, or may be vulnerable to competition. A company must watch the question marks and judge investment carefully as the product could evolve into a star, or fall into a dog.

A cow, often termed a cash cow, has high market share and and low growth. It’s likely to be a mature product in a mature market. A company should exploit the revenues from the products in the cow quadrant to finance the investments in the stars.

The dog is in the fourth quadrant, and refers to products that have low market share and low growth, they may be products that have reached the end of their life-cycle. Companies should not invest in these products directly unless there is an opportunity to re-invent the product and relaunch it. In general companies should cease production of products categorised as dogs as they will quickly become unprofitable.

Of course this is a simplification but it does help understand your product mix and where your investment should go.

Image: Cow via pixabay

22 February, 20105 October, 2018 Louise McGregor Digital

Blog by Phone

Making a podcast has never been easier, it’s now only a phone call away with ipadio. I was interviewed via ipadio in the lead-up to speaking at a conference earlier this month. It was easy for me all I had to do was pick up the phone! The podcasts are recorded and presented in their own little player, which includes an embed code which I can’t get to work in wordpress – but it looks like this.

Mark Smith, the CEO of ipadio was also a speaker at the conference and he had some great stories of how his clients are using ipadio, he spoke about the use made by Oxfam to broadcast updates on the role.

I got to talk to Mark in one of the breaks, and was really interested to hear how companies are using ipadio for business goals; Virgin media have used it to deliver mass interactive communication for their 20,000 employees, Melcrum used it to preview their speakers. But perhaps the most unexpected use was “one to none”, using ipadio with the automatic conversion to text notes so that field workers such as district nurses could “dictate” their case notes following a visit and get a text draft back saving them a lot of time.

We’ve avoided podcasts for the most part because good recordings and playing/streaming on our systems is tricky. But this takes all the headaches out of that. With a lot of change coming up this year this could be a great tool for us.

I’m pondering how we can use this; as Mark Smith said in his blog “One phone call is sometimes all it takes… It’s good to talk!”

image phone via pixabay

16 February, 201023 September, 2018 Louise McGregor Book of the Month, Book Review

Drive

Drive; The surprising truth about what motivates us

Daniel Pink

It’s not money.

Or rather above a fair wage paying more won’t get more creativity or better “right brained” work out of us, in fact our performance may go down.

This wasn’t entirely surprising, I’ve known for a long time that what motivates me to go to work and try harder is not the salary but the opportunities to learn, to make things better, and to solve problems. I’m sure other people have a similar pattern of motivation, and yet our whole management system is based on the idea of paying for performance.

Pink draws on a lot of behaviourial research and concludes that not only does increasing the reward have no effect on our motivation, it can decrease the performance. Rewards work when they’re connected to routine or mechanical work, but as soon as the work has an element of cognitive skill rewards destroy performance. There is, it seems, a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.

So what does motivate people in the creative and cognitive realms?

Mastery; gaining skill or knowledge, “the desire to get better and better at something that matters”
Autonomy; being in control how we work, “the freedom to great work is valuable”
Purpose; working towards a larger goal or wider good, “those who work in the service of some greater objective can achieve even more

Pink finishes the book by offering 9 strategies for individuals to get into “Drive” motivation from asking yourself “Was I better today than yesterday?” to taking a year long sabbatical to recharge and learn. He also offers 9 strategies to take your team or organisation into “Drive”, including using “now that” rather than “if then” rewards so that your team gets a reward as a celebration for achieving something, rather than holding out a reward on condition of something being achieved.

It’s a good read, full of ideas and humour, thought-provoking, practical and well written. He’s also a good speaker, and talked about some of the ideas behind “Drive” at TED, here’s the clip.

3 February, 201023 September, 2018 Louise McGregor Editorial

Numbers Game

How many friends do you have?

According to Professor Dunbar the number must be 150 or less. His research apparently shows we can’t maintain more relationships or friends than that in real life, and our online behaviour reflects that. I don’t think anyone things that Ashton Kutcher has a deep relationship with his 4,400,000 Twitter followers, or that Kim Kardashian’s 720,000 Facebook friends are all that close. But 150 seems way low.

It turns out that the number is derived by watching other primates and correlating their social network size to the volume of the neocortex region of their brain, and extrapolating that for humans. The number arrived at was 148, or anything between 100 and 230. He then looked at the size of villages over history and contemporary networks and seem to observe a natural limit in that range.

It’s interesting from an organisational point of view, I have worked in organisations of very different sizes and know something Mintzberg’s theory on organisational design. I’ve seen how as organisations grow they tend to hit some sort of natural limit at around 200 people. One company I worked for at as it hit 280 staff found that suddenly policies and processes were needed where informal structures used to work.

Another company I know of has structured their formation documents so that they will be forced to split once they get above 150, their company culture is so important to what they do and they know it would be so hard to maintain it above that number.

Company culture does link to size and organisational structure, and maintaining it – or surviving a transition – is vitial.

But there could be a lower limit, I spoke to a guy last week who works in an “adhocracy“, their company is growing raising concerns about maintaining the company culture as they grow; to twelve colleagues.

image Spiekermann House Numbers /Stephen Coles/ CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

1 February, 20105 October, 2018 Louise McGregor Leadership

The unchanging nature of leadership

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves. ”
Lao Tzu

“Reason and judgement are the qualities of a leader” – Tacitus

Lao Tzu, a Chinese philosopher, lived in the sixth century BCE, and Tacitus was a member of the senate in Rome in the first century CE. But both quotes still reflect our understanding of leadership. A number of the historical ideas come through in the modern (well, 1970s) concept of servant leadership.

But all of that was pre-internet, surely it’s all changed with the new tools that we use now? Watch what Tom Peters has to say on the subject.