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Casual Articles - (Re)designing Organizations
You’ve had a great idea, a winning idea. It’s been a hobby or a mission of yours for years and you’ve finally got the money and time to start your own business. Or you’ve been in business for some time and you are noticing that no one seems to love your products anymore – they are just not buying them. What do you do?Well the obvious answer is to find out why: * Ask your current and previous customers what kind of things they would like you to sell. * If you have products that are sold as a recurring matter, then ask your customers what improvements they would like. You can do this as a survey, a competition (if allowed) or a suggestion box. The answers may surprise you. * Is your product a copy of another much better item? * Look at what your competitors are doing – have they improved or re priced – or even stopped selling the item all together. * Are you sure that you have not just fallen into the new comers trap of selling something that no one really wants? You did do your research didn’t you? * You are marketing your product and your business aren’t you? If people don’t know you are there, they can’t buy from you. Don’t fall into the trap of slowing down on your marketing as you get more established.So now you know what is wrong, let’s look at a few things that you can do to your old products.* Rehash them to make something different. * Combine two or more products. * Repackage them. * Re-price them. * Sell them in a sale. * Sell them on an auction site. * Test new markets with your old and new products. * Develop a new niche market. * Redesi
The brands are coming! Their arrival has been evident in our supermarkets and on the main streets of our towns and cities for some time now. It started as a trickle, led by the makers and the retailers of consumer goods, but it has more recently become a fast moving torrent that races headlong through almost every business and walk of life. In certain respects, it has come later to the hospitality world than to many others but now that it has arrived it is clearly planning to stay.Make for the high ground! For many in the industry, it is something to be viewed uneasily as it threatens to burst its banks and overwhelm everything that stands in its way. Others are out constructing canals and reservoirs. For us, branding offers something new and exciting; a fresh flow of ideas that will bring renewed direction and vigour to our business.So, to brand or not to brand? This is just one of the questions facing Irish business owners in 2003 as we regard the landscape and consider our choices.Any unease that we may feel in the matter is readily understood. The B-word has been bandied about a great deal during the last few years and has been blamed (most famously in Naomi Klein’s recent book No Logo) for some of the worst excesses of globalisation. It is often presented as invasive, almost colonial, in its intent, something that we are particularly sensitive to on this island. (Ironically perhaps, two of the more prolific brands sweeping hospitality in the UK – Jury’s Inns and O’Brien’s Sandwich Bars - are Irish).Branding too is often associated with a cookie cutter approach to business and thanks to the efforts of
One tends to go for safe territory. If in your previous company you saw or were part of a merger or a particular reorganization that worked, you may be tempted to reproduce it. This is a dangerous path because what worked was contingent to that particular company, time and circumstances and may not be good for extrapolating here and now. Your management intuition may, by and large, be the best guide, but you may want to use more than that in your thinking and implementation.
There was a time when business schools taught that ‘strategy’ came first and ‘structure’ followed. In other words, make sure you know what you want to do and what the purpose is and then figure out how to be organized, not the other way around. It’s difficult to challenge this logic. However, the world today is more complex than traditional business school linear thinking. The above is
Do you have dreams, but you are putting them off until you fix this situation or take care of this problem or that problem? Are you just really unhappy where you are, but you refuse to leave until you put all of the “stuff” in place that needs to be in place?Well I don’t know if you realize it or not, but we are living in some very rough times. You are waiting for the perfect time to live your dreams and be happy. Guess what, there is no perfect time like today. Just imagine if you go through your whole life waiting for this and waiting for that to happen before you decided to live your dreams and be happy, and it never happens. What does that look like to you? How will you feel?Let me just share with you my short story and what gives me the right to talk about this. I have always wanted to start my own magazine. I love magazines. They are all over my house, especially magazines that talk about business and success stories. So in 2003 I decided that a magazine was too expensive to start, so I started my own newspaper titled Women In Business Today. I loved doing the newspaper, but I did not have a team in place to help me carry out my dream. I was doing everything including layout and distribution. I got burned out after one year, so I stopped publishing the paper.If I had had a team to take up some of the slack, my paper would have kept going, but I wanted to do everything myself, so my dream and myself suffered.So over past 2 years I have been trying to find things to fill the void of the magazine that I wanted to publish. Nothing was giving me much pleasure. The closes thing that came to filling this void was wh
One tends to go for safe territory. If in your previous company you saw or were part of a merger or a particular reorganization that worked, you may be tempted to reproduce it. This is a dangerous path because what worked was contingent to that particular company, time and circumstances and may not be good for extrapolating here and now. Your management intuition may, by and large, be the best guide, but you may want to use more than that in your thinking and implementation.
There was a time when business schools taught that ‘strategy’ came first and ‘structure’ followed. In other words, make sure you know what you want to do and what the purpose is and then figure out how to be organized, not the other way around. It’s difficult to challenge this logic. However, the world today is more complex than traditional business school linear thinking. The above i
Few building owners enjoy speaking to a salesperson. However, some of these same owners make the ordeal a financial and professional nightmare by going into the process unprepared.Keep in mind that the salesperson is paid on commission. If you don’t hire their company, they aren’t paid. So, many salespeople will say and do almost anything to get your business. Basically, they are the ‘hunter’ and you are the ‘hunted’.And, to make matters worse, the ‘hunted’ (you) often times help the hunter (the salesperson) land their prey, resulting in a nice size commission check for them.Here are some of the common mistakes Business Owner make while dealing with a janitorial salesperson.1. Letting them know that you are clueless to what it cost to clean your building. I use the word ‘clueless’ on purpose, so as to emphasis how vulnerable you are. When you say things like ‘I trust your opinion’ or ‘We need your expert advice’, you are handing the salesperson a blank check for them to fill in. Then, when you baulk at the price, they’ll use your confidence in their expertise against you.2. Another mistake owners make is allowing the salesperson to tell you what you need to pay for. Now, if we were talking about brain surgery or the like, then I would advise you to listen to the experts. However, janitorial service is 90% common sense. If you can operate a successful business, then you know 90% of what it takes to operate a successful janitorial company. Don’t let a salesperson tell you otherwise3. When you’re rude or disrespectful toward the current janitorial company, while speaking to someone who is bidding to replace
There was a time when business schools taught that ‘strategy’ came first and ‘structure’ followed. In other words, make sure you know what you want to do and what the purpose is and then figure out how to be organized, not the other way around. It’s difficult to challenge this logic. However, the world today is more complex than traditional business school linear thinking. The above i
Strategy making process for business existing in a particular industry involves the study of many factors in the industry. These factors, when studied together, shape up an overall context for an organization in an industry. To determine strategy for existence and profitability of an organization, the management should analyze the industry and its structure and how they change with the changing environment.Analysis of bargaining power of customers or buyers determines how much buyers can influence the demand/supply function, prices, profit margins and the quality of products. Customers can exercise such power when they are in large number or they use to buy a product in large quantities.The suppliers can exercise their bargaining power when they have large number of customers but they are fragmented. In some cases where the suppliers are aware of the fact that supplies or the input product have no substitute, they easily demand high prices for the supplies.An industry normally exists with a number of producers producing a particular type of product for a market. Therefore an environment of competition forms between these producers and their market shares are affected with the performance of their competitors.Alternative products or services offering the same or higher benefits to the customer are known as substitutes. Customers tend to switch to substitutes products when there is cost to benefit ratio for the substitute product is high than the current product used by that customer. New entrants can easily enter an industry and distort the existing distribution of market share and price equilibrium if there lesser barriers to
There was a time when business schools taught that ‘strategy’ came first and ‘structure’ followed. In other words, make sure you know what you want to do and what the purpose is and then figure out how to be organized, not the other way around. It’s difficult to challenge this logic. However, the world today is more complex than traditional business school linear thinking. The above i
Hank Bochenski’s story proves it is never too late to walk away from a life you feel trapped in and do something that you really love.Hank spent 30 years in demanding senior positions at large high-tech companies. By the time he went home each day, he felt like all the blood had been drained out of him.Hank’s real passion was his collection of more than 1,000 movies. He had recently spent hours converting the collection from VHS to DVD, a process he enjoyed. One day his wife walked by as he worked on this project and said, “It’s too bad you can’t make money doing this.” Before his wife’s offhand remark, he hadn’t considered that he could do this full time.He did some research and found a company called Home Video Studio Inc., in Indianapolis. HVS offers 21 services, including DVD transfers, DVD duplications, home movie transfers, photo-video keepsakes, sports scholarship videos and videotape repair.Hank and his wife did some due diligence and decided that this was a perfect opportunity for them and they went ahead and got into the video duplication business. And to top it all off, Hank's studio is in his own home--no more 1.5-hour each way daily commute.What Happens in Mid-Life?Mid-life is a time of challenges and crossroads. Often we re-evaluate our relationships, become more concerned about our health or worry about whether we are as financially secure as we should be. The biggest challenges in mid-life often involve our careers, and more centrally, whether our careers are providing the fulfillment we crave, or are simply exhausting us physically and emotionally. In mid-life, fulfillment and meaning begin to comp
Architecture is a strategy
For some of us, architecture is strategy. The way of being organized and doing things is itself a competitive advantage and a source of strategy generation. For us, strategy and organizational architecture meet in a circle, not in a straight line.
Pharma R&D organizations in particular face major challenges in terms of maximizing the potential of their structures and systems to deliver high productivity. Pharma R&D leaders should be less pre-occupied with copying what others have done, or trying off-the-shelf ideas, and more focused on reinventing their own R&D in a way that is specifically tailored to their ne
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