Measuring Sales Metrics
October 19, 2010
There are all sorts of ways to measure the health of a business. I think the less scientific and common sense methods may be best.
Take this example.
One of my favorite walking routes takes me by a new small shopping area. The landscapers decided that a nice low hedge between the shops and the road would be attractive. The store closest to the road where lots of people walk for exercise was a Starbucks. Unfortunately there was no way to get to the coffee shop without an extra 50-yard walk to the driveway in either direction.
Six months after the shopping center opened there was a clear path worn through the vegetation and the hedge where pedestrians, too lazy to walk the extra distance to get their daily latte, had created a shorter route.
About 18 months ago, the Starbucks closed, as part of the corporation’s restructuring and slowly the hedge recovered and the path disappeared.
Three months ago a new locally-owned coffee shop took over the Starbucks’ location. I asked the owner recently how business was and she said, “Fine, it’s only been a few months but we’re doing well.”
I’ll believe her when I see the path through the hedge re-appear.
Business Ethics 101-Case Studies
October 18, 2010
Ethical business decisions come in all forms. Here are two that I came across. Your comments are welcome.
A client wanted to explain why she was l00king for a new job so she related this story from her most recent position. She was not my client at the time.
She’s an HR specialist with over 25 years of experience. She had decided to explore other options, as they say, and had applied for a number of positions in her field. She got an interview for a senior position at a firm about 300 miles away. Close enough to drive for an interview but certainly requiring relocation if she got an offer.
She went to the interview and a few weeks later got a call from her would-be manager with a job offer. They negotiated the usual, pay, moving expenses (none) etc. and she decided to uproot and take the job although there was a 6-month probationary period.
Five months later she was laid off when the woman who was apparently out on maternity leave decided to return to her old job. Still on probation she was an at-will employee and had little recourse, but throughout the interview process no one ever mentioned the employee on maternity leave, and while she was working, she was never led to believe she was not doing a good job.
In hindsight she notes that she should have realized that getting an offer just two weeks after the interview was too good to be true – especially in HR. But apparently the firm was so desperate o fill the job they didn’t feel any ethical need to say that the job might be temporary. Probably because no one would have taken the gig.
I find the company’s action reprehensible, even if there had been no relocation involved.
OK, second example. Met a man who is responsible for finding new locations for a major retailer. As part of the job he negotiates ‘tax incentives’ that states offer to lure businesses. His firm is a multi-billion dollar firm which is often a destination site and also offers on-line purchasing.
As a requirement to get a new location he asks states to forgo the sales tax on internet purchases. For those of you unfamiliar with the law, in most cases you don’t have to collect tax if their is no retail site in the state. But once a brick-and-mortar store is built, you are supposed to pay the local sales tax if there is any.
He admits that he is asking the states to ‘look the other way,’ and allow his firm to have their cake and eat it. As he noted, “There will never be one of these stores in California, because they won’t agree. It’s their loss there are plenty of other states who think the agreement is fine.”
My response, “Go back to any of those states who signed agreements to forgive the tax requirement a few years ago and see if they wish they wish had said no.” I think they may be regretting their decision.
Again, is it unethical to make the request, or is the ethics question just an issue for the state?
I know, the state is lured by the promise of jobs and a retail center that may attract others, but with internet sales increasing faster than in-store purchases says you have wonder if it’s a deal with the devil.
Your comments are welcome.
Corporate Rudeness
October 14, 2010
A recent business forum I follow was focusing on rudeness in the workplace and how to create a better corporate culture. One participant suggested that HR professionals needed to introduce courses to teach employees how to behave.
The issues this brings up are numerous, but I will leave some of them for future posts. For now, I would suggest that if you did not learn how to treat others – friends or co-workers – when you were growing up, taking a course now is not going to help. It’s like teaching business ethics to MBA students: it’s already too late.
Rudeness and it’s related activities are part of any business’s corporate culture. That culture is created at the top. If the chief executive allows it in the executive suite, it will be tolerated in every corner of the business.
If the CEO creates an environment based on civility his or her managers will run their departments the same way.
Examples are numerous but even this week the impact is clear. When the Chicago Tribune suspends an executive for sending an improper email just days after the New York times featured a lengthy report on the ‘bankrupt’ corporate culture at the newspaper the connection is obvious.
Unfortunately, chief executives often fail to see the connection and will ask a coach, or management consultant to come in and ‘fix’ the problem. I’m more than happy to take the corporate money, but unless the ‘fix’ starts at the top, anything I do will only be temporary.
Next: Corporate culture and productivity
What Does a Coach Do?
October 7, 2010
I met a potential new client today. He wasn’t looking for a career coach and I wasn’t exactly looking for him but our paths crossed and he asked what I did for a living. I told him I was a coach.
I should point out that ‘Nelson’ is a recent college graduate with a degree in criminal justice and was working at the kind of first job everyone gets. No relation to the field he wanted and no prospects for advancement. Naturally, he hated it.
I asked what he wanted to do and he rattled off a few possibilities but admitted he didn’t really know. At one time his goal was law school but he did poorly on the LSAT (twice) and didn’t have any money to take it again, so he figured that wasn’t meant to be.
“So,” he said, “you don’t like, coach football? That’s the only kind of coach I know, but you don’t look like that kind of coach.” I had to laugh – if you’ve seen me you’re already laughing too – but I explained that I help people make decisions.
I tried to use an example he could identify with. “If you go home tonight and tell your dad you want quit, he’s gonna have 12 reasons why you shouldn’t and why your ideas about what you could do won’t work – probably because they didn’t work for him,” I told him.
But if you tell me, a coach, I don’t offer an opinion, I just help you go through what it would take to get you to the goal you want. It’s up to you to decide what’s right, and any decision you make is the right one as long as you understand what it means.
He smiled, like he had already had the conc0versation I described. and offered a few more ideas about what he might want to do, including a small business idea, getting an MBA and three or four other possibilities.
After 45 minutes we had taken cursory look at most of them and he said he had to leave but added, “That’s the first time I ever had a conversation like that with anyone, that was great.”
“So.” I said, “Now you know what a coach does.”
“Yeah,” he said taking a bunch of my business cards, “But when I call, I know I’m gonna have to pay you right?”
Maybe he doesn’t need that business degree.
The Perfect Resume
October 6, 2010
I have yet to see the perfect resume. I’ve helped a lot of folks write resumes and they are all ‘right’ when we’re finished but I’m not sure I would call any of them perfect.
The purpose of a resume is to get an interview. The purpose of the interview is to get a job offer and then you can start negotiating for the actual position. This progression is easy to write and most people understand the words but few understand what they mean.
People seem to think that the resume has to a multi-page treatise on their life. Rather than a document that explains the unique experiences and skills that make you the right candidate for the job opening.
Organizing your resume chronologically by position makes the reader search for items that suggest whether you can perform the functions of the job that’s open. It’s your job to connect the experiences to specific skills and relate them to the job you want.
Even if you have relatively few work experiences – as a recent college graduate, or an older worker re-entering the job market – you have skills that you have learned. They may be from part-time summer jobs, or from volunteer positions at a local community group but they are skills.
When I put together my first resume – typing and retyping – on my trusty Underwood (or later a
Smith-Corona), creating a separate resume for each job was a difficult proposition – especially for a two-finger typist. But now with ‘copy and paste’ on my Mac, crafting a resume with specific skills and listing relevant jobs is easy.
Believe me, if you don’t take the time to customize you’re already behind the competition and might wind up in the circular file. Remember, anyone looking at resumes in this environment, is just looking for ways to edit the pile, so anything can be an excuse to put you out of the running.
Graphically it should be easy to read and the layout should emphasize the message. It’s not an exercise to show the HR folks how many typefaces you can use. If the experience you have that’s relevant to the position does not include a specific job, you can either leave it out or relegate it to a single line.
You can always add details during the interview.
We Need the Sounds of Silence
October 1, 2010
I always been a walker/hiker. No big deal, I like to walk in Hawaii, in Yosemite, around my own neighborhood, wherever… it’s a good way to meet people and see what’s going on. Just observing the world and listening to nature.
Since MP3 players, primarily iPods and their kin, became popular there seem to be a lot more folks walking around listening to music. I have no objection to music but it seems to me. if you’re hiking, or even jogging in a beautiful natural setting, listening to the birds would be pretty good music.
Not to mention how those little earbuds close you off to the world. They prevent even a pleasant ‘hello’ or ‘good morning.’ Maybe that’s the intention but chance encounters make life more interesting.
This week I finally found someone who agrees with me. Please listen, he knows what he’s talking about. He must, he’s speaking at a TED Talk.
Coaching Should Start at the Top
September 22, 2010
A participant in an International Coaching forum I follow was recently looking for advice on a problem a colleague encountered.
It seems a coach in South Africa was asked to coach various mid-level executives to sort out a contentious atmosphere that had developed after a recent merger. The CEO noted that he wanted specific detailed individual reports about each of the participants and when the coach declined, and offered to provide only a global overview, the contract was canceled.
Solutions suggested by forum members, included providing the global overview and letting individual manager provide the details they were comfortable revealing.
But in reality I don’t think the CEO had a full grasp of what coaching is or how it could benefit the company. The coach could have used some of the examples cited as a way to bridge the gap – i.e.having the managers reveal their plans for change – but given the CEO’s attitude – I think coaching in this environment had little chance of success.
The contentious atmosphere sounds like it may be a bi-product of the CEO’s management style. Unfortunately he doesn’t seem to have the self awareness to realize where the problem is.
This is not a unique problem. CEO’s may be no different than any other employee. They fail to see reality and decline to accept any responsibility for a problem. It’s an aspect of emotional intelligence that takes considerable soul-searching to remedy.
It’s like the well known cartoon which starts with a boss berating an employee and ends with a child mistreating the family dog. It all starts at the top.
Visiting the ‘Googleplex’
September 20, 2010
I was recently invited to Google. I’m helping to coordinate a career event they are hosting this January for my Alma Mater, Bucknell University.
Like a lot of companies Google requires a non-disclosure agreement, so I can’t go into a long post about everything I saw, but I have to say it is a very unique place. You can’t help be impressed with the atmosphere.
And yes, lunch was free. I couldn’t help but wonder if it would be a good place for experiments in whether people really do it more just because it’s available. I didn’t notice too many overweight employees. Must be the volleyball court, soccer filed , endless pools or workout rooms. Or possibly the Google bikes people use to ride between buildings.
After all, the Google campus is bigger than my college campus at least when I attended school.
How To Make a Change
September 19, 2010
Change is never easy. Organizational development specialists have made careers out of teaching companies how to successfully adapt to it
. Not surprising, numerous books have been written on the the topic.
“Switch” by Chip and Dan Heath is just the latest to win public attention and climb up the list of business best sellers. It is well written, entertaining and filled with the usual list of everyday examples which ‘prove’ the authors’ contention.
Maybe I’ve just read too many books which claim to hold the key to effective change management, or maybe the authors just make it seem too easy, or perhaps I spent too many hours trying to motivate people or organizations, but it’s just not that easy.
The Heath’s use an Elephant and Rider metaphor to illustrate their theory. It’s just a more concrete way of explaining the rational vs emotional brain dichotomy. They admit the metaphor is not their own but they have adopted it to illustrate the need for a three-way change process.
In a nutshell, the Heath’s note, people need a rational fact-based reason to change, but they also need an emotional reason to make a move and they need to have a clear path. Their theory makes perfect sense, and they have numerous examples of how managers used their reasoning to make changes.
From Brazilian railways to the Woman’s Cancer Center at UC San Francisco there are numerous examples of how managers created both a rational and emotional reason for change and then put people on a path and direction they wanted. I’m not sure the managers they cite were consciously following the logic because they read the book or because it just seemed like the right thing to do, but it worked.
I think you learn more from mistakes than success and I would have liked to have seen more examples of change management that went awry when they attempted to use the theories in the book but maybe that’s too much to expect.
Still, I think the book is worthwhile and provides some valuable insights into some successful changes and can provide the underpinning for an organization or an individual trying to make a change.
It’s certainly another example of a technique any coach can use to work with client’s who say they want to change but can’t seem to get moving.
As I noted in an earlier post this was my first electronic book. I downloaded it from Amazon and read it on my iPad. Emotionally I just wanted an iPad, rationally I could carry this and many other books wherever I wanted and Steve Jobs certainly made the path pretty easy to follow.
It’s the Economy, Stupid
September 7, 2010
Been traveling over the last few weeks and while I continue to read stories about high unemployment and how it will give Republicans an edge in the Fall elections, I have to say, I just don’t see it.
The New York Times had a recent front page story claiming that even the hi-tech industry wasn’t hiring.
Maybe it’s my own version of cognitive dissonance – refusing to believe facts counter to you own beliefs – but I hear a different theme.
Every major firm in Silicon Valley has openings. Google’s stock has recently taken a hit, in part because they have added more people – too many according analysts. Yahoo, Intel, Apple and others are all looking for talented employees.
The problem seems to be they can’t find enough with the right skills so they are all trying to hiring the same folks. That’s not an employment problem it’s a skills/training issue.
I know a man who was unemployed in Silicon Valley for 18 months and recently found a job and has since had two other opportunities. That’s a far cry from what he’s been through.
Or take my friends in Hawaii, who don’t claim the economy has recovered, but say, it’s certainly better than last year.
Or take the woman in Boston who I ran into. She just started working after a 9-month forced vacation. She says the hotel in Cambridge that hired her has been booked solid since she started working in April.
Or take the man in New York who I met, who works three part time jobs and just lost one of them when a financial services firm closed. He’s able to collect unemployment so he’s counted in statistics but he’s not exactly desperate.
My unscientific survey of ‘Help Wanted’ signs in store windows shows a marked increase over last year. I’ve seen them in New York City, Boston, and San Francisco.
I’m not sure what all this proves except that, as I tell my clients, if you believe things are bad that will come through in your interviews and enthusiasm. But if you believe things are headed in the right direction despite the political rhetoric, you’ll have a much easier time finding something.