Errors in managing athletic (and other) performances

1

The Coach

The man poked his head in and looked around the door. He had knocked but the person inside the office had not answered.

“What do you want?” said the annoyed voice of the person inside the office.

That voice came from a man who was sitting at his desk going over some papers. What he said was a question but the way he said it was a demand.

He was Coach McCloskey and he was a busy man, a successful man, a man who did not suffer fools lightly. Or much of anybody else for that matter.

The office Coach McCloskey sat in was small by top 1A standards. It was big enough for what needed to be done in it and and big enough to house the successful, busy, no-suffering fools coach that worked in it. But it wasn't anything spectacular, anything that befitted a man of Coach McCloskey's caliber compared to other schools.

The décor was what might be called Bauhaus institutional. Left to itself without any kind of attention paid to it, it would have easily decayed into old military drab chic. As it was, the cinder block walls were painted and clean, though the whiteness of it could be overpowering at times especially when the late afternoon sun shone into the room from the large picture window with the nice campus view. But the coach rarely noticed it. If he did, he'd just close the shades.

There was nothing much on those front and side walls, a picture here and there and some scattered paintings. These were tasteful and even interesting but a little on the sparse side as a percentage of the total square footage.

Around the desk where the coach sat, though, it was a different matter. There were pictures of family with the coach in them and pictures of vacations to exotic locations, again with the coach in them. And there were pictures of players including some signed with best wishes from some of them decked out in the jerseys of professional football teams.

These filled the walls, back of the desk and on either side for a few feet.

The desk was executive oak as well as the credenza and they both met on one side in a computer niche that contained one of those revered devices with two larges screens.

There were other touches added here and there—nothing overpowering—that showed someone with some decorative sense had had a say in what went into that around desk space.

In fact that was true. Someone with some decorative sense did have a say. It was the third Mrs. Coach McCloskey.

All in all it was cozy in that part of the office. The rest of it was just okay, nothing much to brag about. But it was the way the coach liked it. He bragged about his success and about his teams and about all the awards they had won together. He didn't need to brag in his office space.

And besides, too Wall Street a space would just get in the way. He couldn't think of any advantage it gave him meeting with prospective players in such an executive suite with expensive furnishings (even though the school would have, at least at one point, put it together for him) that a walk past the trophy case wouldn't do better. He was a coach and that other stuff seemed kind of vanity stoking—a sign of weakness to him. Besides, he'd rather have the difference show up in his paycheck, which it long since had.

“You are Coach McCloskey, right?” said the man still looking in.

“Yes,” said the coach who had set down his papers and was staring hostilely at the man.

“And?”

“And I'm supposed to see you.”

The man didn't wait for the coach to tell him to come in. He pushed through the door, crossed to one of the chairs sitting in front of the desk and sat down.

It happened so fast and so surprised the coach, who had never had his office invaded like this before, that he didn't have a chance to stop him.

No one ever did this kind of thing to Coach McCloskey.

“Wo, wo, wait!” said the coach. “Who said you could just come in here like this?”

“Yes,” said the visitor with a hint of apology in his voice, “I know this is somewhat of a surprise but I thought we ought to just get on with things. So I came over.”

“Look, whoever you are, I don't know you and I don't know what business you think you might have here but no one just barges into my office like this!

“How'd you get past my secretary?”

“Well,” said the man, “there was no one at the desk to announce me and what I have is urgent so I just took the liberty of inviting myself in.”

McCloskey leaned over to a speaker near his phone and pushed the button.

“Karen!” he said. “Karen! KAREN!”

No one answered.

“Where is that woman!” said the coach.

The coach started to get up but then looked down at his watch.

He clicked his tongue.

“Lunch!” he said as if that explained something.

He looked back at the man with a very hard look on his face as he sat back down.

“Well, you've got about ten seconds to give me a good reason for this,” he said, “or I'm just liable to bodily chuck your carcass back out of this office.”

If you looked at Coach McCloskey, examined him from head to foot, you'd see that he was mostly on the verge of going to seed. There were some soft lumps where muscle had likely once been. But there was still enough of the old athlete in there, in a fair assessment of the total man, notwithstanding the lumps, that it looked as if he could go a long way toward making good on that promise.

He tapped the desk top waiting impatiently for a good answer.

“My name is Sawyer Collins. You can call me Sawyer.

“At your service.”

Collins smiled and leaned forward with his hand extended across half the desk. It was within reaching distance of the coach but the coach did not reach for it. He did not even lean forward to attempt to reach for it. What he did do was to sit back in his high backed executive chair and get a very impressive scowl on his face.

“Okay, Mr. Sawyer Collins. I'm a very busy man and you just come in here and plop down on my chair right there without so much as a by-your-leave and I'm supposed to get some kind of thrill up my leg for that or some inkling of who you are and what this is about from your name?

“You haven't answered my question and your ten seconds are over.”

The coach started to get up.

“Well, okay,” said Collins with a smile. “I just hadn't gotten to that part yet. Just wanted to get the preliminaries out of the way first.

“I'm here because of that little incident that happened in the game this past Saturday.”

“What little incident?” said the coach still on his way up.

Collins raised his hand flattened out, extended it so that it was perpendicular to the floor and made a kind of jerked, waving motion with it, as if slapping the air.

To some neutral observer, on seeing that hand movement, it would have been extremely ambiguous at best and would most likely have conveyed no meaning whatsoever to him, but the coach, the very successful coach, the busy coach, the coach who did not suffer fools lightly, seemed to get meaning from it. What was more, though that motion seemed to be neutral in every way and couldn't have objectively been construed as any kind of a hostile shot at him, for whatever reason, with the coach at that moment, it looked like it hit some kind of a bullseye.

The coach's eyes went wide, his face became distorted—screwed up, was probably more accurate—as he slowly sat back down, all the while exhaling a long, used up breath of air. When he had settled back into the chair, he seemed to recover himself somewhat. He rolled his eyes and threw his hands up.

“That was just a misunderstanding,” he said. “What we had was simply a failure to communicate, that's all!”

“You slapped Williams.”

“Slapped? No, not slapped. It was more like a love tap! I love these players; they know I do. Sometimes I just give them a little love tap! That's all there was to that! Maybe there was some tough love wound up in it a little bit—these guys sometimes make the stupidest mistakes, and this one was a big one—cost us the game—but it's all about the love in the end.”

“It didn't look like one tap to me, coach. It was a couple of openhanded, heavy slaps that you swung out to make, right and left.

“It looked more like a one-two punch.”

“Nah, it was nothing like that!” said the coach leaning forward and quickly wiping the words Collins had just spoken from the air they had been spilled out into with his hand. “It was just a tap. He had his helmet on and I just wanted to put a punctuation mark on what I had told him. That's all!”

“You looked quite upset. Your face was red and it looked to me like the veins were sticking out on your neck—”

“No, no! That wasn't it at all! I told him what I told him. That's it.

“Maybe there was some heat in it somewhere but that was to emphasize my points. And then I just punctuated it with a little love tap.

“He had his helmet on anyway; how could I hurt him! Maybe jiggle his brains a little bit and put them back where they should have been in the first place. But nothing serious.

“The fact is that it hurt me more than it hurt him!

“But it was love. It was all about the love.”

“I don't know about that,” said Collins. “It looked pretty hard to me when I was shown the film. The president and the chancellor said it was lucky the incident wasn't caught on the network's cameras—doubly lucky because, with the stadiums as empty as they are, the camera people are looking for just about anything they can find in the downtime to make the game more interesting.

“And Covid-19 meant that the network didn't have as many people roving the sidelines as they normally do, which was a good thing. And they didn't have the numbers of people and spotters they normally do in the booth for the same reason. It looks like nobody in the booth saw it, either.

“The stands were quite empty, too, mostly. But not a peep from anywhere about it—at least as far as we know at this moment.

“You can thank Covid-19 for that.”

Collins chuckled at this thinking it was funny for some reason but the coach just scowled deeper furrows into his face.

Seeing that the humor of it did not find any correspondence in the coach, Collins cleared his throat and went on.

“They haven't talked to William's parents yet. They think they might have been at the game but they're trying to get a hold of them now to see if they can smooth things over with them—if that turns out to be necessary.

“But they did get the whole thing on film from the athletic department cameras. That was the film I saw.”

“Where'd they get them from?”

“They got them from Jack Daws.”

The coach grimaced. Jack Daws was the interim AD and he just rolled over every time the chancellor breathed. He could expect no support from that direction, for one, because Daws had no spine. For two, he was a fawning little puppy who was only interested in what advanced him and his interests.

He clucked his tongue and resumed his defense.

“It was just a misunderstanding,” he said leaning back in his chair and raising his eyes to the ceiling. What was up there that he might look at or that would care to listen to him was not apparent. But there must have been something there that needed convincing because he now made his case in that direction.

“I talked to Chet after the game. I told him, quote 'I love you, man' and he said, quote 'I love you, too, coach' and it was all fine. I think maybe I'd of rather he'd given me an 'I love you, man' back than what I got but it was all fine. Things are back the way they should be, the way they were before.

“It's all fine.”

The coach waved his hand to emphasize that point and looked back down from the ceiling at Collins.

Evidently, whatever was up in the ceiling must have taken his point. He seemed more confident at that moment.

“Well,” said Collins, “the president and the chancellor think there's a problem. They think it's fortunate that it hasn't gone public but who knows, maybe it still will. What with all this sensitivity to how people are treated these days and all the hashtags and people who aren't liked very well getting taken down for—what is it? Issues of insensitivity?—they thought that there needed to be an intervention of some kind to pinch this thing off quickly.

“Are you liked very well coach?”

Collins said this and it sounded impertinent to the coach but his tone was really one of helpfulness.

The coach responded to this by trying to get something out. But it came out as a kind of rumbled nonsense.

“But, anyway, that's why I'm here,” said Collins, ignoring the coach. “They've given you a second chance. And I'm here to help you take advantage of it.”

The phrase “second chance” was a shock to the coach. He had never heard anything about this. Why he, a successful and busy man, a man who didn't suffer fools lightly, would need to be given a second chance for anything was beyond him. And to have it communicated to him by this, this, whatever he was was just beyond belief.

He was at a loss for words over this and over everything else that had happened since that man had come in. But he succeeded, after a few aborted attempts, in getting a few out anyway.

“Why didn't they call me to tell me this?”

“Well, they both remember some, um, discussions, shall we say, that they have had with you in the recent past. They don't feel like you were as supportive of their position as they would have liked and that it wouldn't be particularly useful to attempt anything like that now not in the mood they're both in. They feel like any run-in with you will just end up provoking them and then they'll just get upset and they'd do something in the heat of the moment they couldn't back down from and it would be a mess they don't need.

“You know the drill.”

The coach didn't really know what drill Collins was talking about but there was something in him somewhere that thought it might be a good idea for him to maybe figure it out.

“It's the middle of the season,” continued Collins, “and they think it wouldn't be in the best interests of the team for anything to be done that was rash what with the crazy, messed up season, the Covid stuff, and all the rest. They don't want the team demoralized by any of it.

“You know.

“So they just sent me over and said that you should clear your schedule to meet with me. I came right over.”

“That's it?”

“That's it,” said Collins with a smile.

There had been a number of those smiles since that man had come in and the coach was thinking that he didn't particularly like that particular smile or any of the ones that had preceded it. He would have thrown him out of the office just for that smile alone on any other day but he felt he was caught at the moment and couldn't think of a way out of it right then.

“I can show you the letter authorizing me, if you'd like,” said Collins, helpfully.

He reach into his suit pocket, pulled a folded sheet of paper out and handed it across the desk.

McClosky grabbed it, unfolded it, and looked at it.

“You'll recognize the signatures, I'm sure.”

The coach did.

He gave the paper back.

“So you're supposed to help me?” he said, rallying at this for some reason.

Collins nodded.

“With what?”

“Seeing more clearly your relationship with your players and staff and how that can affect the team and your success, fitting means to ends better. Things like that.”

“And what, may I ask, gives you the credentials to help me out—assuming that I need help which I do not accept for one minute, but just for argument's sake?” said the coach trying hard not to notice another big, raging smile staring him right in his face.

“Well, I—”

“You ever coached sports before?”

“No, I—”

“Pop Warner?”

“No.”

“Junior high?”

“No.”

“High school?”

“No.”

“Junior college?”

“Look, coach, I—”

“Any college?

“I'm here to—”

“Ever played any sports?”

“With my kids. That's about it.”

“So the answer is 'no.' You have no coaching experience whatsoever—didn't even play—and yet you are sitting here with a coach, who has one of the best won/loss records in college football, and you're going to help me with player relationships and success?”

“That's right. Sent by the president and the chancellor to do just that.”

The coach didn't hear it come from Collin's mouth but he felt the words in the air:

Second chance.

It was because of the shock he still had from that phrase that he didn't get up and escort that man out of his office at that very moment.

But underneath that shock a great deal of livid was building.

“If you need a label to put on who I am, let's just say that, for our purposes here, I'm an executive coach—”

“You mean,” said the coach throwing his hands up in the air in disgust and looking up again at whatever it was in the ceiling that had given him a decent hearing the first time, “that you're one of those—what's the name?—life coaches?—that you see advertised around. The ones who're supposed to help you smooth out your life?”

The coach wiggled his fingers in the air.

“Life is too hard! Help me! Help me!” he said.

“How do you study for that?” said the coach now down again looking straight at Collins.

There was a sneer on his face overlying the continued and deepening scowl. “Is there a 'life coach' degree? Or is there a college for it like for massage therapy and cosmetology.

“Or is it that if you scratch a life coach you'll find a waiter underneath looking for a better way to make a living.”

He threw his hands into the air again.

“Spare me!”

This was said with an explosion of disgust from the coach's mouth and, though it exploded in the direction of the ceiling—he had looked up again to find whatever he could find up there—its force was directed at Collins.

“That's a life coach and about everybody and his mother offers those services,” said Collins. “Not very useful at all I grant you.

“I'm talking about an executive coach but if I were pressed to tell what it is I actually do, I'd have to say that I help people see reality. I help them see what is before their faces that they should be seeing but because of any number of things that get in the way, they can't see or won't see.”

“For business?” said the coach.

“Business, yes, but I deal with anyone in any institution who needs to make important decisions. I help them see what they should be seeing but don't.”

Collins smiled and Coach McCloskey wanted to punch him.

No love tap.

The coach didn't know what to think of this other than that he had an urge to get pugilistic with the man.

“You want to help me see what's in front of my face, do you? The problem with that is that I win. There's no problem with me or with my program. We win; end of story.

“That alone would speak for itself with any other college president and chancellor.”

“That does speak, yes,” said Collins, “But what it actually says might be something different.”

“What different? Winning is winning. It's the Holy Grail of sports and business, too, I might add. If you're a winner that is success. If you're a loser that isn't. It's failure.

“I win.”

Collins sat forward a little in his seat.

“There's an old story, coach,” he said, now sounding didactic, “about a scientist who was running an experiments on flies.

“One day he caught one that had been flying around his lab and put it in a beaker. He sealed that beaker up with a stopper.

“He waited a moment, then he quickly pulled out the stopper, so that the neck of the beaker was now open, and yelled, 'Fly!'

“The fly flew away.

“He caught that same fly again, put it in the same beaker, stopped it up, then quickly unstopped it and yelled, 'Fly!'

“And the fly flew away.

“He caught the fly again, but this time, he pulled the wings off before he put it back in the beaker. He then stopped it up, quickly unstopped it and yelled, 'Fly!'

“This time, the fly didn't fly away.

“He stopped it again, unstopped it and yelled, 'Fly!' but the fly still didn't fly away.

“The scientist then put away the equipment, went over to his notes and wrote: 'When you pull the wings off a fly, it becomes deaf.'”

Small businesses and innovation

Here's an interesting little piece of information

Small businesses produce 14 times as many patents per employee as large companies do, and they are twice as likely to turn those inventions into successes, according to a Congressional report.

This confirms the folk wisdom that large companies are good at marketing and small companies are good at innovation. Why is this? Because the large companies have too rigid a structure and bureaucracy to allow for all of the uncertainties that innovating requires companies to bear with. They are too rigid and less forgiving than smaller companies are and they often have gatekeepers in place who have no clue about what is a good idea and what is not. So innovation is retarded or scotched altogether. It usually ends up that large companies buy innovation rather than developing it in-house.

The myth is that companies are these rational little entities made up of rational people who have their own rational way of communicating, creating rational policies and rational results. The reality is that companies are made up of people and often rage with the problems created by people. Smaller companies have less of this and that can make them more flexible.

Of course there are exceptions and it doesn't really have to be that way at all. One of the promises of the team idea was that is would allow for good ideas to percolate around a company. Hasn't happened much at all, I'm afraid. But at least it got the problem more right--the flow of information is the problem in any company. If we really had thinking companies which is possible to do, that information would flow the way it should and innovation would be possible in any company.

Advertising equals entertainment?

This article makes the claim that consumers don't want to be bored when they see advertisements. His argument is that there is a kind of social contract out there where the consumer says

"Entertain me, and I will give you my attention. Respect my intelligence, and I'll give you my interest. Do neither, and I'll give you neither."

I'm sure that entertainment is what they are looking for but I'm not so sure that that is what the advertiser should pay for. How about this: Keep their interest by educating them about what the product will do for them. I mean "educate," not cram it down their throats, force feed it to them, preach to them or give them a laundry list. I am saying put that product into the context of their lives.

I wonder how many people actually remember who the ads were about that they were entertained by. The ad people probably do. And if it plays enough times, maybe they will to. But I remember funny and/or entertaining ads and don't remember who it was the ad was advertising. Since these are expensive ads, if people have trouble remembering just who it was about, that means a lot of expense getting your message out.

Get geeky--at least a little bit more

Some quotes from a very good article:

I have sat in countless business meetings that were all talk. Rather than trying things to see what worked, we talked in circles for weeks only to end up doing nothing. It is quite different from my days as a digital circuit designer.

When I wrote VHDL for FPGAs, you could experiment. If we didn't know the best way to do something, we could try two different implementations. There was no shame in failure or missing the mark because we were always learning and iterating. No one ever nailed a design in one try.

In business though, there are too many people afraid to move forward. Failure can be a career killer, and the inertia factor makes it easier just to keep moving along the way you already are. An entrepreneur friend of mine doesn't consider it a failure when he gets out of a business, because as he says "I try businesses on like most people date. I'm trying to figure out what I like and what I'm best at." If business had more geeks, there would be a more experimental culture in business that would help make everything better by focusing on what works and encouraging small scale tests....

Too true, too true. And if something is decied on and implemented, when it doesn't work, it's not because the idea is bad, no, that could never be, but it's because someone isn't carrying his weight or we didn't get buy in--sign a pledge?-- or we suspect the loyalty of a gatekeeper somewhere. How about this: The idea was bad.

You can find countless articles on the web and in computing magazines about why Perl or Ruby or Java or Lisp is better than C or Haskell or VB or PHP for certain kinds of projects. Geeks like to talk about best practices and debate the merits of various approaches to programming or web design or hardware development or system configuration. Business people like to talk about who moved their cheese.

Ouch. That one's gonna leave a mark.

All I can say is "amen to that." I wouldn't take the geek part too seriously but his points are all spot on. More of this, please.

More innovation

This is a case where innovation overcame a larger rival with a bigger advertising budget. Works for me.

I've been reading BusinessWeek. Can you tell?

Structured innovation--the only way

Here's an interesting story from Whirlpool about their efforts to innovate:

Believing that brilliant ideas were buried in the corporate hierarchy, he invited each of the company's 61,000 employees to unleash their creativity: Everybody everywhere, he exhorted, Go out and innovate!Off in the Italian Alps, a crew of workers got right at it. Handpicked by managers from across the company's European staff, the 25 employees were freed from their regular jobs and packed off to Whirlpool's office in Comerio, Italy, with a single purpose: to dream up products or services that would truly differentiate Whirlpool from rivals. A year later, they came back with their big brainstorm: an Internet business that would enable people to race one another over the Web on stationary bikes. So much for that experiment. It was obvious that Net bike racing, which didn't draw on any of Whirlpool's strengths, was a nonstarter.

The point is that innovation must be structured for it to get anywhere and to not end up wasting a whole lot of time. That means brainstorming too. Any idea in the abstract is as good as any other idea in the abstract, but you may end up with something that is highly unworkable on the ground--Whirlpool's experience. To get a good result requires structure and, I might add, a leader to hold people's feet to the fire-- figuratively speaking, of course.

This all goes against what people believe. They think that creativity is structureless, that it requires no judgments to be made on ideas until they are all in. A complete waste of time. (And, by the way, not borne out by any study on the subject--not a one of them.)

Whirlpool learned the hard way that real innovation requires a lot more than simply urging thousands of employees around the world to tap into their inner designer and then waiting for the great ideas to roll in. It requires hard work, structure, and unwavering discipline. After its inauspicious start, the company retreated from the all-out effort to democratize innovation and moved to a more traditional centralized model of product development. That did the trick. Since 2001, revenues from products that fit the company's definition of innovative have zoomed up from $10 million to $760 million in 2005, or 5% of the Benton Harbor (Mich.) company's record $14.3 billion in total revenue. Whirlpool's shares, at $92.64 on Apr. 25, have almost doubled in price over the past five years.

That's about right.

By the way, what Whirlpool ended up doing is thinking contextually. More companies need to do that.

There's a lot more in the article.

In the face of uncertainty Part II

Part I

So when the Germans invaded where did they come? They moved north through the Ardennes forest completely bypassing the Maginot Line. Some people had pointed out this problem earlier, Winston Churchill, for one, but it was dismissed as a non-issue because the French had an army at the northern point that they said could move to intercept any thrust coming from the Ardennes. "But we don't think it will be necessary. The Ardennes are impassable. No army can come through it."

But the Germans went right through it and it took them only a few days to do. And they did it with 3 armies, the northern and southern of which moved to engage the armies of Belgium on the north and the French army stationed north of the Maginot Line, to their south. The center army struck through to France and would have wrapped up the British Expeditionary Force if Hitler hadn't lost his nerve and slowed the offensive down. That probably saved Europe in the end. That was the only thing that day that slowed the Germans down.

The Maginot Line was an impressive thing and would have prevented a war like WWI. The problem was that WWII was a completely different war fought using different tactics. It was a mobile war where armies maneuvered around fixed positions and focused power on points along static fronts. That made the Maginot Line irrelevant. What France was to prepare to fight the last war.

This is often true of business, they fight the last war. Put another way, we engage based on what we know. That is human and understandable and we can be charitable about it. But we must realize things are not so static as this, even if the original "war" has been understood and prepared for adequately. (The issue in Europe moved from impregnability to mobility.) Markets change, attitudes change and technologies change to make the future uncertain to a great extent. Companies who cannot or, worse, will not, continually reevaluate what they are doing might make money and be successful but that is so long as the original rules apply that were set down before or the troops on the front line are flexible enough to make things work. But when those rules change, and they will, the company could be left with the equivalent of the Maginot Line, something we look at now and wonder how anyone could ever have been so stupid.

In the face of uncertainty Part I

One of the points I try to make with clients and with students, with varying degrees of success, I might add, is that everything should be constantly evaluated and reevaluated as you go along. A certain dose of uncertainty is a healthy thing for business. What was once the case may no longer be even if we have accurately figured out what the original case was at first. And that may not be so certain either.

I find it amusing some of the conclusions people draw about successful people and companies. One late night, I saw this guy and his wife making a pitch for a course on how to be successful in business. "We have taken the most successful businessmen and figured out the characteristics that made them successful." All of that was available to the viewer for a fee as a seminar. The problem is, and it is the same problem with books like "The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People" is that it is not necessarily the case that the success came about because of those habits or characteristics. It might have come about notwithstanding those characteristics. To be a better study would require figuring out the habits of other people who might not be successful and seeing if there is a difference. And if you did that, I think you will find that those habits are not in short supply.

The same thing is true for business. It is the case that companies and managers, especially those who have pushed the thing that is getting the praise, say that it is because of the system that the company has been having the success it has. But it might be that the company is having the success in spite of the system. Employees are clever and they can often make it look like the system is being followed while doing something that is different, something that is more effective in making the company work. But the system gets the credit.

The point is that whatever it is you are implementing must be evaluated all the time to make sure that it is doing what it is supposed to do and that the results are actually what they are purported to be.

The Maginot Line was the great fortress the French set up to prevent the immense tragedy of another world war on the level of WWI. Millions of people died in that war and it was said that one in four of every French male between the ages of 18 and 40 something was killed in that war. (But that pales in comparison with what was to come.) It was based on fixed fortifications pointed toward the Germans and it was a military and technological marvel based on the best military and technological thinking of the day. All the weapons were trained on specific areas and they overlapped to blanket an area with firepower. And men could be moved from one spot to another to fortify a given position that had the potential to be overrun, by using an underground rail system. The whole French defense was based on the Maginot Line. It was impregnable. And all who looked at it agreed that it was impregnable. We would call it a benchmarked system.

Part II

Duct Tape Tips on Marketing Your Business

Here's some good information on small business marketing. What's the bottom line? Give the consumer useful information instead of bombarding them with "buy me" messages.

One result of that: It is one way to distinguish your business from the rest of the pack.

Good advice.

Critical thinking and business

Contrary to what some may think, business really doesn't want employees who can think critically, if that critical thinking causes them to question company policies, procedures and direction. That is not acceptable at all. What they want is an employee who can implement policy that comes down from above, implement it efficiently. Critical thinking limited to implementing policy. What they really want is an employee who wants the answer, which management supplies, who then will implement that answer. No muss, no fuss. And that is what schools tend to supply, students who have been supplied the answers and who then apply those answers to certain factual situations. The perfect employee. But this makes critical thinking a skill, one that is learned and applied to certain areas only. Critical thinking, if approached correctly, cannot be limited in this way. People who think critically are not answer dependent, that is answers that someone else provides. They think independently and they question policy until it makes sense to them and will say so when it doesn't, (unless they come to a calculation that their job is more important and that it might be threatened by doing something like that.) In other words they have the tenor of mind that makes and influences policy not that accepts it as the truth they must implement. To put it plainly, critical thinking, as conceived and taught here, makes for good high level leaders. Critical thinking as a skill limited to implementation, makes for good lower level managers and employees.

I have had some people say that their company is the exception to this rule. It may be. But I would first like to know if the company management really allows the worker to think critically or are they jsut saying that that is what they want even though in practice the facts say something different but the employee has accepted the hype as a working creed. I won't say that categorically all companies act this way. There are some notable exceptions. But more companies do than don't.

So what is to be done about it? A lot can be done but it requries some shifting in focus. I would like to tak about it but will probably save it for the other blog, Prometheus' Brain.

"So, you seem to have a lot on your chest. Are there other things that are really bothering you?" Yes, there are. How about this: Brainstorming doesn't work. And this: Benchmarking rests on an assumption that has not been proven. And there are others. We may get to them here.

Loyalty

Is loyalty too expensive? Not for Nucor.

I would say it is expensive to not have it.

I once tried to make the case to a group of MBA students in one of my classes that loyalty was not something companies cultivated but was something that they needed to rely on. One student, an accountant by day, said that cultivating loyalty was too expensive. Nucor suggests that it isn't and that it is a necessary thing. But setting that aside, my student was looking at it from a "we-have-to-buy-it" perspective. But can loyalty be bought, really? Isn't loyalty a result of respect, mutual respect? Does that cost anything?

A lot of it is simply being human. But that is tough for some MBA educated sorts who see businesses as machines made up of replaceable parts. If a manager feels he can easily get a replacement--something that is not obvious at all-- what kind of respect will there be?

A company with a loyal workforce can weather all kinds of storms. And it will have a number of eyes watching out for the interests of the company. How much is that worth? But this won't be the case with a company where employees are doing what is required of them only and waiting for their next paycheck--and the company sees that paycheck as the limit of their obligation.

Some business plan questions

Here are some questions we send to prospective clients to help them flesh out their business plan. This is just to get them started, a starting point. There are more detailed questions that should be asked later.

Maybe these will help you get started.


The Market and Competition

What is your market?
If you are looking at a market segment, what is that market segment?
What is the size of your market?
If your company is looking to manufacture and/or sell a product, how much of the market is from domestic manufacturers?
i. How much is from imports?

What is your competitive advantage?
Quality? What is it about the quality of your product that is better than that of the competition?
Cost? If it is cost, will it be cost alone? How will the company make sure that it remains competitive on cost in the face of increased competition?
New technology? Why will the consumer purchase the new technology over staying with the old?

If your competitive advantage is a new technology, is that new technology protected by a patent, copyright (for things like computer code), or trade secret?
If a patent, who owns the patent? Do you have a royalty agreement with the patent holder?
i. If so, please include the details of that agreement?
If the business is dependent on a patent or proprietary formula and the company does not now have the rights to manufacture or market the product under the patent or proprietary formula, how is the company going to secure the rights to the product or formula?

What is your competitive strategy?
Why do you think you can capture market share with your product?
Why will the consumer buy from you rather than buying from the other current competitors?

If you are looking to build a factory to produce the product, why build a factory instead of having it manufactured for you either locally or in some other country?

Financials

If you are already an existing company:

Include Information on the sales history of the company for the past three years. This will mean total sales set out by month as well as information on the source of these sales. (Who were the customers who bought the company’s products?)

Include information on the expenses of the company from month to month set out by month. This would include wages and salaries for workers and management; any payments on leased equipment; any rent needing to be paid for company offices, warehouse or factories; shipping charges; advertising expenses; any taxes paid for the business from month to month including the date due; and any other expenses needing to be paid monthly.

Both of these will be needed to put together an income statement for the company.

Management

Who will be the principal managers of the business?
What is their experience, education and background?
What are their management responsibilities going to be?

Please include a current curriculum vitae for each.

Marketing

What is your marketing plan?

How will you price your products for sale?

If you are now a company doing business, who are the principle customers the company has now?
Who are the customers the company is looking to sell to in the future?

What method will you use to market to these customers?
How will these potential customers be identified by you?
How will they be informed of your products?
Why are they going to buy the product from you rather than to keep purchasing the product from the competition?
What methods will be used to sell these potential customers your products?
i. A sales staff?
ii. Advertising?

Where will the company advertise and how much will it cost per month?


We ask for the information on the principles because we need to know who they are andwhatt their experience is. This the kind of information you will need to provide when looking for financing. So be prepared to give a good account of yourself.