andrewnicol.net

Does advertising really work?

'Old marketing is dead
10 years ago we were able to advertise a position in a paper and know that people looking for a job would see it. Nowadays you need to advertise in many papers and on multiple websites and you are still not guaranteed a good response.

It used to be that you could build a product and market it really well and people would naturally use your service. Nowadays we are all bombarded with advertising and media and information. We as consumers often ignore these messages. When was the last time you made that call after hearing an ad? It is almost impossible to make an impression and a thousand fold more difficult to actually get them to pick-up the phone.

New marketing is everything we do
Brand is no longer about just having a great logo and good advertising. Brand is now driven by everything the company does. Every time we answer the phone or deliver a sales proposal or email a client or they use online, we build our brand. The aim of new marketing is to get talked about, in a positive way of course, because of how ingenious we are!

To have a strong brand you now have to have a service that is so ingenious, so smart and edgy and stunning that it gets talked about.  Think about Google. How many of you started using Google because you saw their ad. None, they didn't advertise. You heard about it, tried it, liked it, kept using it and if you're an early adopter like me, probably told others about it.' - quote from my eBook called 'Being INGENIOUS @ agoge'

All this means that the old way of attracting candidates or getting customers works less and less. It will get harder and harder get peoples attention. Your only chance is to focus on providing a stunning service or being an incredible employer, so that you get talked about.

Finally, fyi, we measure most of our advertsing, we change ads and try new and creative things. When you measure advertising, the results generally dont make good reading, it forces you to think outside the square. You should try it!

Casting Vision by writing an eBook

Albert Einstein once said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."

His words echo part of the thoughts that have been going through my head over the last month. How do I lead agóge so that it can become a really ingenious company? How do I teach people to think more? To be more creative? And most importantly to take their ideas and make them happen!

At work we have an internal blog and I write a weekly review, that is never weekly, but that's an SOI thing. 

Anyhow, I sat down and started thinking about all of the stuff I had to get out of my head about being ingenious and creative and thinking and execution. As I mulled over the content I realised that it would never fit into a blog post and spreading the message over 5 or 6 weeks would dilute it significantly.

I then had an idea to write an eBook. A small, 6 pages, electronic book which is called "being INGENIOUS @ agóge". Cherie then gave me the idea to personlise it, which I did and then I actually printed it and sent it to everyone in  the company. I guess its no longer and eBook although is available on our internal blog.

It has been generally well received and I will probably write another one some time, but the aim of the eBook is to not just write stuff. It's aim is to reinforce our vision, and in this case just one small part of it. There is very little in the eBook that is new, it is just a different way of saying it.

When I wrote the eBook I was doing my job. Casting Vision and Leading my team. It is a different way of doing it but in my role 'my imagination is more important than my knowledge'.

I forget that often!

[PS I might post the eBook in the future, once our competitors are so far behind us in being ingenious, so as to give them a fighting chance! :-) ]

[PPS After I wrote the eBook Seth Godin posted a blog called "You should write an eBook". He wrote one that now easily sits on more than 2 million computers. I feel a small sense of satisfication for coming up with the idea on my own, then having it reinforced by him]

[PPPS You can read a small excerpt of the ebook at www.viewpoint.net.nz]

Random Thoughts

I love mornings like this morning. You can hear the rain falling like a thousand tiny water falls on the tin roof. The house is quiet because most houses are at 5am. And I have time to reflect and think and scheme a little. As I do that my mind is drawn to a couple of quotes I read recently that are quite deep but v cool.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" - Alan Kay

"The kind of thinking that will solve the worlds problems will be different to the kind of thinking that created them" - Albert Einstein.

Wasting your advertising dollars

A couple of years ago, Amazon.com announced that they were going to stop their advertising all  together. No more magazine adverts or TV. Instead they decided to invest all of their advertising dollars into providing free shipping of books.

From what I have read the marketing industry thought it was a foolish decision and predicted that it would spell the downfall of Amazon. How could they possibly think that investing money earmarked for advertising into making the customer experience more positive would increase sales.

The results: 1 year after the decision total sales were up 37% and international sales were up 81%.

The implication of applying the same thinking to our industry is huge. What areas do we spend money on, that if deployed into making our customers experience more positive, would actually increase sales.

Is it technology or marketing or advertising or capital equipment or research & development. How could we redeploy this money, improve the customer experience and increase our business along the way.

INNOVATE

You owe it to yourself to create something remarkable one day!

Seth Godin

Is Your Job Just a Job?

"Your days can seem really long (and your life seem really short) if you're spending your entire career wasting time merely trying to earn some money.

Being engaged at work is seductive. It means that you're spending a big chunk of every day doing something you love, something that makes a difference. You get to motivate other people and create things that last. Unfortunately, this sort of opportunity is scarce and (apparently) getting more scarce. The gift I can give you is this: Since your boss hired you to make something happen, you now have permission to build something remarkable. You have the opportunity (on your boss's money) to build a project that will energize you and your co-workers.

You can do it.

The biggest insight about soft innovation is that anyone can do it. It's not based on your power in an organization, or your desire to become an entrepreneur or how creative you are. My goal is to sell you on your ability to champion an innovation in your organization. To find the Purple Cow and a team to build it. Then do it again and again."

This is a quote I enjoyed at 3am when I was trying to read myself back to sleep from Seth Godin's Book "Free Prize Inside"

Delegation meets the Monkey

The One Minute Manager meets the Monkey is, as the title suggests, another in the One Minute Manager series. Like the rest of the books, it is written in a narrative style with lessons along the way. This makes it easy to read but because the people are fictional you often wonder if a real person can implement everything taught the in book.

The storyline, for want of a better description, is about a manager who is over worked, doing long hours, stressed and as a result is a poor leader. He discovers that the reason for this is actually monkeys. Monkeys are tasks or problems that people below him should be handling and resolving, except he continues to say "I will sort that out for you".

The man in the story, learns to leave the problems and tasks on his people's back and helps them with direction. Effectively it is a story of delegation and coaching, so here are the 4 lessons of the monkey:

Rule 1: Describe the Monkey: the dialogue must not end until the appropriate "next moves" have been identifies and specified.

Rule 2: Assign the Monkey: All monkeys shall be owned and handled at the lowest organizational level consistent with their welfare.

Rule 3: Insure the Monkey: Every monkey leaving your presence on the back of one of your people must be covered by one of two insurance policies:

1. Recommend, the Act
2. Act, then Advise

Rule 4: Check on the Monkey: Proper follow-up means healthier monkeys. Every monkeys should have a checkup appointment.

In summary, it was an easy read with some timely reminders about getting your people to solve their own problems.

Book Summary

The One Minutes Manager meets the Monkey
Ken Blanchard

Genres          Management, Coaching, Delegation
Pages           130
Readability     2 (1 = Easy, 5 = Hard)
Enjoyment     4 (1 = Never Read, 5 = Remarkable)

Time Management meets the Monkey

A post of mine on www.viewpoint.net.nz about the One Minute Manager meets the Monkey. Like the rest of the books in the series, it is written in narative style.

The key lesson for me is:

Rule 4: Check on the Monkey: Proper follow-up means healthier monkeys. Every monkeys should have a checkup appointment.

In summary, it was an easy read with some timely reminders about getting your people to solve their own problems.

Read the full review [Here]

Where is my freedom of choice?

I passionately hate how two faced our country is becoming. The government claims to want to give people freedom, but only when it suits their self centred agendas.

People can now have a legal choice to buy sex for money or 18 year olds can buy alcohol or people enter into same sex marriages, but I cant choose to smack my kids. Please understand, I am not stating a view on the other things BUT my point is why, if people can have these choices, can't I have a legal choice to smack my kids?

The anti smacking bill was deferred on Wednesday night due to heavy debate. It will now not be back before parliament until after Easter (school holidays for our MP's is a good thing this time)

Here is the thing that annoys me the most about the bill. When it started off its purpose was to remove Section 59 of the crimes act. At the time Sue Bradford said we aren't trying to outlaw smacking, we are trying to stop people using it as an excuse to beat their kids. (There have been 2 examples of parents found not guilty as a result of using Section 59 as a defence)

Beating their kids it turns out in Sue's vocabulary means smacking. She now seems to use the words 'smack' and 'beating' interchangeably.

I wrote a submission for the original bill (which is a lot different to the current one). Here are a couple of key points

This bill will not in any way reduce child abuse. The people that abuse their children are often living on the other side of the law anyway, and will not, and do not give a damn about the bill. They will still abuse their children. ...

I long to be a great father to my children, and have a deep desire to see them grow up as law abiding citizens. I smack my children infrequently. They are generally sent to their room first, I then discuss the bad behaviour with them, and if it is significant and warranted they will get a smack on the hand or bottom with my hand. It is not damaging in any way, rather they learn quickly what is, and isn't acceptable behaviour in our society. I believe that this law will make that action illegal, will therefore make me a criminal, when all I have is the best interests of my children and our future society at heart.

I hate child abuse. This bill will not fix that! We must instead retrain our parents, in many cases first teaching them right from wrong and dealing to the social problems we have. Then, and only then, will child abuse reduce.

Please do not make ordinary parents like myself who long to raise great kids the criminals. I beg you.

YOUR FUTURE

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Mark Twain

THE LAZY EMPLOYEE

Lazy people irriate their employers, like vinegar to the teeth or smoke in the eyes.

King Solomon

Bracewell - MD of Freightways talks Technology

A few weeks ago I posted on Technology in the Courier industry. It is fair to say, from the verbal feedback I received, that it was one of the more provocative posts I have written.

Shortly after wards I saw that the NZ Herald was interviewing Dean Bracewell, MD of Freightways, so I thought I would post a question. Below is my question and his response:

A question from a Herald reader. They are interested to know how technology fits into the future of Freightways. They say that Freightways seems to have lagged behind their largest competitor - CourierPost - in this area, but they have maintained market share and profitability. Do you see any major disadvantages in not having had the technology?

Not at all, but that question's probably got three or four parts to it.

Just stepping through them, technology is a part obviously of running a transport business such as Freightways and it always has been a key part of what we're about.

We've actually three quarters of the way through a $10 million upgrade to our IT system, so there's a fair bit of money and investment attached with IT

It's played a pivotal role in the business for 20 plus years and the information systems that we have are geared around delivering scalability because our business has grown very strongly so you've got to have information systems that can cope with that significant growth.

It's a very robust system but it has also got to be flexible to meet the varying customer needs. So we've got a very powerful, core information management system.

The part about lagging a competitor and still maintaining market share, well I think we've actually done more than that. We've grown our market share and we've grown our profitability over a number of years, so it's not just about maintaining it.

I think we've done this by keeping in touch with our customer needs and developing our services to suit those needs rather than getting caught up in a side-game that technology can distract from what you're really here to do.

We think it's most important not to lag customer demand rather than try and keep up with a competitor whose strategies we might disagree with.

Are we disadvantaged by not having some of the technology? Well, we made a decision to roll out in-van data capture technology this year and that's as a result of our customer demand but a time when we've assessed the network that transmits that data as being ready for us and the scanners that will go into our courier vans as being ready for us.

So, a few things have needed to come together but we believe the time is right.

And whilst we've been lining up to make that decision about the technology in the vans we've been focussing very heavily on ensuring we deliver our core service, which is getting packages to the right place at the right time.

What we believe we now have is a very compelling customer offer - premium service, competitive price and the latest technology to over-lay it all.

You talked about the scanners - how are the trials for those going?

They're going fine. We're rolling them out into the Auckland marketplace which is the most rigorous, high volume market to test the scanners and we'll get any glitches that are involved with new technology out of the way in this market prior to rolling them out around the rest of the country.

What developments - technology or otherwise - can we expect to see from Freightways in 2007?

I think you're going to see more of the same and whilst that might sound a bit ho hum, it's kind of what our customers like.

They want consistency, they want reliability, they want innovation when they're ready to innovate and when there is demand for it.

So what you're going to see from us is really more of the same and hopefully that will continue to deliver the sort of performance to all our stakeholders - our people, our employees, our contractors, our customers and our shareholders.

The article serves as a timely reminder, well to me at least, that technology matters very little if you are not delivering your core service. In NZC's case that is providing consistency and reliability,

You can read the full Herald article [here].

74 of the toughest questions in business today

Jack Welch was chairman and CEO of the General Electric Company from 1981 to 2001.  He generally regarded as one of the top CEO's of his time and was recongised for his candid straight up view of doing business. This book follows on from his previous book "Winning" and answers just 74 of the questions that he has been asked as he has toured.

Many of the chapters serve as timely reminders, other chapters blew my mind with the scale of multinational business and a few chapters I just out right disagreed with.

Below is an excerpt taken from the last chapter:

Winning, actually, doesn't have anything to do with markets. Or we should say, it doesn't have to have anything to do with them. By our definition, winning is a personal journey. It's about you as an individual setting a goal and achieving it. That goal could be creating and supporting a happy, healthy family. It could be founding or funding a homeless shelter. It could be teaching children to read; it could be sailing around the world.

And then again, it could be building thriving company that succeeds in the global marketplace.

Winning is about reaching the destination you chose. It is not necessarily about profit, though it can be. But winning is, at its most fundamental, about making something of your life. It is about progress and meaning. It is about achievement.

If you enjoyed reading "Winning", then this book is a great follow on, and is worth reading.

Book Summary

Winning: The Answers: Confronting 74 of the Toughest Questions in Business Today
Jack and Suzy Welch

Genres         Business, Leadership, Winning
Pages           272
Readability   3 (1 = Easy, 5 = Hard)
Enjoyment    4 (1 = Never Read, 5 = Remarkable)

Winning - Leadership Development Booklet

Around 18 months ago I brought the majority of the staff in our company the book "Winning" by Jack Welch. The purpose for buying the book was to use it as a leadership development tool and to stretch their thinking, which in turn helps grow us as a business.

To assist in the learning I developed a booklet that people used to stay on track. People would read 2 -3 chapters a fortnight. We would then have a conference call with groups of 5 -7 people, discuss our obersations and learnings from the chapters.

Agoge is a small business with limited funds for training and leadership development and has staff based all over the country. I found that this process worked really well and we learned a lot as a business as a result. A key lesson for us was Candor, which has since become one of our values.

Below is a link to the PDF file. I hope you find it useful. If you would like a word copy please email Andrew Nicol (links in side bar)

Download winning_reading_plan.pdf

The values our kids are being taught

Recently I attended the parent information evening at the Rototuna Primary School. I have always felt that the school was doing a great job, but that evening reinforced it for me. 

The school motto is "He Rawe Mo Aka Tonu - Our Best Always"

They teach values through the "Rototuna Learner" pictured here. The six key values are:

Communicator - Give and receive - Kids are taught to be great verbal, written and verbal communicators

Researcher - Figure it out - Kid are taught to be naturally inquisitive and to problem solve.

Thinker - Think about it - My favorite, kids are taught to think. My kids are often doing mind maps at home.

Risk Taker - Have a go - Kids are taught to step out of their comfort zone and give heaps of things a go.

Team Player - Work together - How important is team work.

Self Manager - Manage me - They teach the kids they are responsible for things. Kyla class are responsible for doing their own homework.

How cool is it that my kids are learning these values. These values could easily be used in a business, and yet my 5 and 7 year old are learning them. These are the values of people who contribute to society, of our future leaders and of well rounded individuals.

If their short time at primary school can equip them with these values, and they can build on them through out their life. How far could any of the kids at this school go?

As I sat at the meeting I found myself wondering, how many of these kids could be their generations leaders. I had renewed hope in the next generation. I also wondered what the difference in education would be at a decile 1 school (Rototuna is a decile 10) I suspect it would be disheartening.

Well done to Phil and the team. It is a privilege to have my kids at your school.

What makes me an entrepreneur?

I have almost finished "Winning: the Answers" by Jack & Suzy Welch.

In one of the questions Jack is asked "How do I know if I have what it takes to be an entrepreneur?" Jack answers by posing four great questions:

- Do you have a great new idea that makes your product or service compelling?
- Do you have the stamina to hear "no" over and over again and keep smiling?
- Do you hate uncertainty?
- Do you have the personality to attract bright people to chase your dream with you?

Interesting that all four of them really excite me. I mean really really excite me. Number 3 is my favourite. Here is the whole paragraph:

Do you hate uncertainty? If you do stop reading here. Entrepreneurs spend more time in blind alleys than stray cats, if not chasing dollars, chasing new technology or new service concepts, not to mention everything else they need to build a business. If not in blind alleys, they're aboard a leaky boat on choppy seas - or put it more plainly, they are often running out of money while betting on the unknown. If you're an entrepreneur, that actually sounds like, well, fun!

It is fun!

I suspect a few of my team will nod their heads and say yip thats Andrew. I can also understand why a lot of people would not like to answer to these 4 questions, but I'm glad I can and do!

What is your website worth?

An interesting website that summaries your website and values it.

My Site is worth $60 How much is your site worth?

viewpoint.net.nz is worth $40, and agoge.com is worth $145.

Kiwiblog has a PR5 rating and is worth $26,950.