A Consultant's View

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Are you ready for the next phase of consumer wants? Are you ready to have your organization's guts in full view of everyone? The information revolution is openning up businesses—or shall we say, exposing them. More and more, people want to know about how you run your business than what you have been used to.

At a supermarket in Denmark, each package of beef has a label on it which can be taken to a kiosk. At the kiosk the concerned consumer can find out exactly from which cow/steer that beef came, how it was treated, where it was raised, and vital statistics about its diet.

This level of information is the exact opposite of the mass merchandising that has been so successful for modern companies. The idea was to be able to sell the same thing to everyone with standardized manufacturing and distribution. The idea was that a cow was a cow and it didn't matter how it got to your local hamburger stand. People are rebelling against that idea.

We see this rebellion coming, not only from customers towards their food supply, but from major corporations towards their suppliers. There is intense pressure to open up how we are doing business. Major corporations are telling their suppliers that in order to speed up the production cycle, the suppliers need to open up how things are made in order to gain the trust that the newer production needs.

The whole thing is part of the backlash against a modern, disconnected world. People are sticking their noses into the inner working of companies, because they want to be able to trust others. Companies and managers who used to be able to command respect from their clients have had major, public, humiliations. The trust is disappearing.

In order to regain the trust we need, we are being asked to open up how we do business. Are you ready for that?

Vol. V no.1

April, 2001

Surprized by Defeat

Have you ever been surprised by defeat? Such a surprise is common in sports. During the course of the game, one team will be far ahead of the other team and then wind up losing the game. It happens so often that there is a phrase for it, "snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory."

The same thing happens in business. Sometimes we can see it happen, sometimes we can't. The common thread is that we were surprised by the defeat.

A common cause for this problem is getting distracted from the goal. Daily, we have multiple interruptions and occasional emergencies. The tasks we find before us pull our attention from the end of the field...where the goal is.

There are those who claim that distraction is the only cause for defeat and exhort us to keep a constant focus. In reality, we need to be able to focus down in emergencies and also be able to back out to plan how to prevent future emergencies.

Sometimes, we actively choose to give the victory away; in fact, I have seen a number of times when a sale was given away. A sales person is contacted by a prospect wanting make a to purchase, but the sales person can see how there wasn't a perfect match between what he was offering and what the prospect wanted. Instead of focussing on a solution for the prospective client, the sales person focussed on how his solution had defects. Focus on defects long enough and any prospect will walk away.

We can also simply drop the ball. Digital Research was selling CP/M. IBM wanted to buy CP/M. CP/M was the best operating system of its day, but the folks at Digital Research were not able to make time in their day to meet with this "large prospect."

Swamped with small jobs, they couldn't take on a new client no matter how big the client appeared to be. So Digital Research let Microsoft have the IBM PC operating system sale#8212;and Microsoft didn't even have PCDOS yet. Digital Research was so caught up with little things, they could not see those giant goal posts.

It's also possible to take the heart out of a team. When striving towards a goal, we have to balance our efforts with how much strength we have left. In a football game, you don't want to spend all your energy by the third quarter and have nothing left for the fourth quarter. I watched that happen in a volunteer setting where the leader spent weeks building up a team and urging them to greater efforts. Then, at the critical point, he took the heart out of the team and the team totally fell apart#8212;he lost sight of the goal.

If we see a lot of defeats, we might benefit by asking "is there anything on our side contributing to these defeats." Sometimes, removing the log from our own eye is the best thing we can do to achieve victory.

It's a Risky World

A number of people have purchased a product called WinU which is supposed to provide extra security to a Windows environment. Unfortunately, the company designed in a number of back doors to allow them to support their customers (who often lose their passwords). These back doors got published on the web which makes the security worthless.

A Consultant's View is published by Prairie Trail Software, Inc., a business and computer consulting firm

Making information from streams of data

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