What People Do on Your Site and Why – thnkz to @TheGrok

http://www.bryaneisenberg.com/

In the most general scheme of categorization, we’ve learned that each of the millions of different personalities falls into one of four main groups, which my brother and I labeled in 2001 in our book “Persuasive Online Copywriting” as Driver, Amiable, Expressive, and Analytical, and later renamed them to:

Competitive. Fast-paced decision-making, logically oriented
Spontaneous. Fast-paced decision-making, emotionally oriented
Humanistic. Slow-paced decision-making, emotionally oriented
Methodical. Slow-paced decision-making, logically oriented

It doesn’t really matter what you call them. The thing is, you need to become intimately acquainted with these personalities. They are your website’s visitors. And once you know who they are, you have the inside track on how you shape your design and writing to persuade them most effectively.

At the most fundamental level, all people are motivated by a single, critical question: what’s in it for me (WIIFM)? Their dominant personality types strongly influence how they ask that question, perceive value, and consciously – or more typically, subconsciously – approach a decision-making task.

You can certainly see this behavior when you listen to people during usability tests. In fact, check out this video for people searching for “black diamonds.” Listen to their choice of words, how certain things make them feel, and what moves them forward or causes them to stumble.

Usability pundit Jakob Nielsen shared the results of an eye-tracking study he performed in 2007 on the U.S. Census Bureau’s home page. He uses gaze plots to describe four main types of visitor behavior: “search-dominant,” “navigation-dominant,” “tool-dominant,” and “successful.” If you were to look at these four types of behavior through the lens of the personality types you would naturally see beyond what people gazed at and clicked on, and into why they acted the way they did. It’s a natural preference.

Branding & Women By Randal Radic | brandingmagazine.com

According to Forbes and CNN, women make up 50% of the population and control 80% of consumer purchasing decisions. More importantly, women now own 30% of all businesses in the United States, and this number is growing. Women directly control over $7 trillion dollars. By the year 2010, it is predicted that women will control private wealth in the amount of $13 trillion. This fantastic growth in income is changing the face of marketing. Women are being targeted. Charles Schwab, Citibank and Merrill Lynch now have marketing aimed specifically at women.

Although married couples lead the way in home buying, the number two-position is held by single women. Women buy homes. Women invest their money. Women take luxury vacations. Women buy investment properties. Ignoring the affluent female customer is a mistake that no seller can afford to make.

The psychology of affluent female customers is different than that of affluent male customers. Now do not interpret that statement to mean anything more than what it says. For ultimately, affluent men and women purchase luxury goods and services for the same reasons, which will be discussed later. What is different between men and women is the way their brains actually function. Newsweek reported that brain-imaging technology has demonstrated definite distinctions between the functioning of male and female brains. Here are some of the distinctions:

– When asked to think about nothing, women think about the word “nothing.” Men think about sex or sports.
– Men are more adept at reading road maps than women.
– Women are more adept at perceiving emotions in people’s faces.
– Women’s brains are more flexible than men’s brains. Which means that women are better at multi-tasking because they are less channeled into one way of thinking than men. Continuar leyendo «Branding & Women By Randal Radic | brandingmagazine.com»

A Great Leader’s Year-end Checklist | Inc. |

The year is almost over. Great leaders know how to tie up loose ends and make sure their employees are happy and ready to move forward.Salespeople live and die by the annual review. Auditors have built an entire industry around it. For the next month, print and television media will pour out gallons of coverage of the past year in review.

And yet, as leaders, we often move from one year to the next with little or no time spent reviewing the year just past from a purely leadership perspective. To help counter that, here’s my five-point year-end leadership checklist: Continuar leyendo «A Great Leader’s Year-end Checklist | Inc. |»

(+) relevante ‘ outstanding | game-changer.net | Jorge Barba…

Powerfule Strategic Thinking technique for non-strategic thinkers

How can you get better at strategic thinking? Or in other words, “How do you improve your thought process?” One of the keys to becoming a great leader is to constantly improve your strategic thinking, so you can adjust to new global realities.

The first step is to accept that you are not right most of the time. You have to “constantly” question your own opinions. One way to do this is to surround yourself with people who don’t think like you. People who will question you. Make these people a key part of your team because what you don’t want is to be surrounded by YES men.

Another tip is learn game theory. Game theory is the study of strategic decision making. And strategic thinking is all about making better decisions. Game theory provides you tools to help you gain added perspective to generate alternative views. If you have added perspective, you’ll be able to anticipate and think critically about what may lay ahead; which are key strategic thinking habits.

Anyway, here a few simple and cost-effective ways to begin developing your strategic thinking ability: Continue reading →

Managing in a Multipolar World

First mover advantage (Photo credit: rennygleeson)

Joyante’s Blog

Why global companies need to rethink their operating models.

In high-growth emerging economies, first-mover advantage is crucial, and having a coherent and flexible global enterprise management model that can adapt to (and get ahead of) rapid evolutions in the market can make all the difference. (An exerpt from an article inStrategy+Business by Paolo Pigorini, Ashok Divakaran, and Ariel Fleichman).

The last decade has seen a disruption in the nature of consumer markets on an unprecedented scale. The shifts on the demand side are well known: Emerging nations have displaced mature economies as the engines of growth, attracting Western multinationals in search of millions of new consumers. What has been less appreciated is a quieter shift on the supply side. The iconic American and European companies that have dominated the economic world order for the past several decades are ceding ground to an increasingly influential set of emerging market “champions.” Adding to the complexity, these high-growth markets are often distinct from one another in terms of the speed of the market, the drivers of demand and consumer preferences, and the regulatory and investment climate.

These developments have created a multipolar world that moves at different speeds and presents a more diverse range of requirements for success than the global marketplace of years past; one with multiple centers of power and influence that are changing the way business is done. Yet many companies are reluctant to move away from their legacy hub-and-spoke model — which evolved to support the old, more homogeneous business environment — to a global enterprise management model that allows for greater nimbleness and adaptability.

How can companies balance local autonomy with the need to achieve global scale and standardization? Does it even make sense to have a headquarters anymore? And where should the talent that runs the company come from? Such questions are critical, because they ultimately determine a company’s long-term viability. The answers, of course, are not universal, but in our work with multinationals, three key themes consistently emerge as enablers of success: a rebalanced organizational structure and operating model, more dispersed decision-rights mechanisms, and an approach to leadership and people management that emphasizes diversity and local talent.

A New Balance of Power… Continuar leyendo «Managing in a Multipolar World»

Successful Leaders Don’t Need to be Present by Stephan De Villiers

http://switchandshift.com

If you’ve not read Stephan’s writings then welcome. For 21st century leaders, the over dependence on managers to make decisions is a bottleneck to progress. Though it may keep change resistant managers happy, it leaves many dissatisfied. Stephan offers up some insights to move away from the staleness inherent in inflated importance. This is part one of two.

If Your People are not Thinking, You are Failing as a Leader

Meet Gary. He is the leader of a small organization and a very “hands on” guy. He makes a point of knowing about every single detail in the organization and gets involved in the detail 90% of the time. He further prides himself in his problem solving abilities. He is the “go to guy” and likes the fact that people look up to him when they have a problem. He gets involved in all the decision making processes in the organization. In his mind he plays a vital role in solving problems and making important decisions. Gary is convinced he is a very effective leader and his contribution plays an important role in the success of the organization.

Making People Dependant

The sad truth is Gary is not a very effective leader. The way he leads people creates a culture of dependence on him as leader in the organization. This results in people not thinking anymore, becoming lazy to solving problems and losing confidence to make decisions on their own. Through his behaviour Gary stifles the creative genius of the people he leads. By not affording them the opportunity to think and come up with solutions to problems and challenges, he has made them dependant.

Gary is not only doing the organization a disservice, but himself as well. By focussing so much on solving other people’s problems, he neglects development areas in his personal leadership, such as coaching and setting direction. He spends most of his time involved in problem solving mode, stealing time he could have spent more productively.

Successful Leaders Don’t Need to be Present

Successful leadership means your followers don’t need you around for them to be productive. They can operate without you. Once you set the direction, they move on their own accord towards the goal. This means as leader you can spend your time on motivating, coaching and course correcting. A successful leader allows people to make their own decisions. It means they must be able to face problems and come up with solutions, without involving the leader in the process of getting to the solution. To achieve this, people in the organization must think for themselves.

People need to be trained to think. It may sound strange, because doesn’t thinking come rather naturally? The truth is very few people actually learn to think in terms of problem solving. Thinking skills like lateral thinking, thinking out of the box and analytical thinking, unfortunately does not come without training.

As a leader it is your job to help people to develop these skills. At first it will take a lot of effort and will not be easy, especially if your organization has a culture of dependency. It will also take effort from your side, because you will have to trust people to come up with solutions and make the right decisions. You will have to deal with wrong decisions and mistakes as part of the growing pains.

Being available as coach to guide and give advice will become your primary function during this transition. The good news is there is a process you can follow to make it easier to train people in their thinking processes.

The Think Training Process… Continuar leyendo «Successful Leaders Don’t Need to be Present by Stephan De Villiers»

Innocide!!!

Some organizations have an innovation process that includes assessment of successes and failures – but they measure what’s already gotten into the innovation pipeline, not what didn’t even make it in! Innocide is pre-process murder. It’s subtle, pervasive, socially acceptable and pernicious…which makes it hard to measure and harder to fix.

http://mills-scofield.com

Last month, my friend Whitney Johnson wrote a great post about entitlement being an innovation-killer.
Please read it if you haven’t. I’m sure we all know examples of this in many aspects of our lives. In some corporate cultures, Innocide is brazen and in others incredibly polite and subtle. Perhaps the subtlest of all is Suinnocide – killing innovation within us. Most of us are masters at that!

Some organizations have an innovation process that includes assessment of successes and failures – but they measure what’s already gotten into the innovation pipeline, not what didn’t even make it in! Innocide is pre-process murder. It’s subtle, pervasive, socially acceptable and pernicious…which makes it hard to measure and harder to fix. Continuar leyendo «Innocide!!!»

10 Data Points: Information and Analytics at Work

The New Intelligent Enterprise inquiry is all about the intensifying wave of data that organizations are facing, and its implications for managers. Companies are becoming data driven in ways that are new, raw and — in many cases — untested. And now so are we: We’re trying something new by letting the data come first, without a lot of editing or parsing. Here is a slice of the raw goods, a kind of behind-the-scenes look at the data we gathered from our survey of nearly 3,000 managers and executives from every major industry and all regions of the globe. (Also see “10 Insights: A First Look at The New Intelligent Enterprise Survey.”)

We chose these 10 charts to share because they captured our attention. Some are provocative, some are telling, and some raise questions we haven’t even tried to answer yet. They’re by no means comprehensive, and our final report will cover many more points accompanied by rigorous analysis. But we do think you’ll find these graphics worth a look if for no other reason than that they allow you to do some immediate benchmarking. How does your organization compare with others? What are your peers doing, and how might that influence decisions you’re considering right now?

The survey respondents answered two questions that allowed us to group them and their answers in some interesting ways. One question asked them to assess where their organization is along the journey to an ideal state: an organization that has been “transformed by better ways to collect, analyze and be prescriptively guided by information.” Those that were farthest along that path we deemed Sophisticates; those who were midway became Intermediates; while those that were just beginning to look at data and analytics we called Starters.

We also asked them to describe their organization’s competitive position. Those that rated themselves as substantially outperforming their industry peers we named Top Performers. Those that were underperforming we labeled Lower Performers. You’ll note both groups called out in the accompanying charts.
1. Innovation is the Top Business Challenge

More than 60% of all respondents chose innovation for competitive differentiation as their main business challenge over the next two years. In a recessionary business climate, doing more with the resources and talent you already have is always a favored strategy. When we parsed the data, we found that Starters (new users of analytics) were entrenched in “survival mode,” focused on cuttings costs and creating efficiencies as their main challenge. Intermediates (moderate users of analytics) were in “growth mode,” focused on growing revenues. Sophisticates (advanced users of analytics) were in an “expansion mode,” focused on growing revenues and expanding their customer base through acquisition or retention strategies, perhaps because their use of analytics had already helped them optimize their operations and general growth approaches.

http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/articles/2010/fall/521150/10-data-points-information-and-analytics-at-work/

By Nina Kruschwitz and Rebecca Shockley

Early returns are in from the first annual New Intelligent Enterprise Survey. Here are major highlights of what executives and managers said about how they are — or are not — capitalizing on information.

PDF Buy article & permissions

1. Innovation is the Top Business Challenge

View chart Continuar leyendo

Mentally Hijacked: How to Recognize Constructive and Destructive Emotions

Emotions are a natural and basic part of life. They signal how we feel about a certain situation or occurrence, so we can take the necessary action to deal with the situation. Emotions in this sense aren’t positive or negative, but are more along the lines of constructive or destructive, depending on how they are utilized. Emotions can become destructive and cause serious distress when they become overwhelming and take over how we act, what we say, and what we do. This emotional high-jacking is where many problems emerge.

The high-road and low-road

Taking a closer look at the human brain and how it relates to emotions, we can examine two overall parts of the brain; the high-road and low-road. Both parts communicate with each other and help us navigate through the world. The low-road is the primitive part of the brain, where our emotions immediately come from, and signals when we feel sad, mad, or fearful. This can be helpful when it’s necessary to act quickly for our safety, or to remind us how we felt in a previous similar situation.

But, this low-road route is where emotional high-jacking occurs. It can lead to rash decision making, not thinking before acting, and ultimately hurting ourselves or others.

Your low-road sends the immediate signal of an emotion, and the high-road then assesses the situation to see what needs to be done to deal with the threat. The high-road is there so we can think about things before acting, and find the best options to solve our problem.

Written by Joe Wilner
http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/mentally-hijacked-how-to-recognize-constructive-and-destructive-emotions/

The high-road and low-road

But, this low-road route is where emotional high-jacking occurs. It can lead to rash decision making, not thinking before acting, and ultimately hurting ourselves or others.

If you’ve ever been emotional distraught, you know it can be tough to think straight.

Using emotions advantageously comes from thinking before acting, and can help to prevent causing harm to yourself and others. Continuar leyendo «Mentally Hijacked: How to Recognize Constructive and Destructive Emotions»

“On Second Thought” Takes a Second Look at Our Thinking Process

Regardless of industry, experience or pay-grade, all of our work ultimately consists of a long series of decisions. The thinking process behind them involves either careful, deliberate calculation or the use of instincts, impulses, and “following your gut.” In the workplace, terms like “Jack-of-all-trades,” “wearing many hats” and “thinking on your feet” bring to mind images of multitasking, prioritizing and decisive action.

Which leaves us with a dilemma: ideally, you would have unlimited time and energy to carefully ponder every daily decision. But, realistically speaking, you’ll never have the resources to approach every challenge this way. Would you honestly eliminate dozens of choices one-by-one to find the perfect pre-interview lunch? Can you imagine picking out the perfect business attire by weighing the pros and cons of each and every outfit in your wardrobe?

The truth is, we have neither the time nor the mental focus to ponder every decision with pros and cons or the process of elimination. To save brainpower, you might choose a “lucky lunch” that experience has shown always seems to get you a second interview or callback. Similarly, to pick your business attire, you might assemble an outfit much like one that impressed you at the last meeting. There’s no true calculation behind these decisions; they’re based on a tangled combination of instinct, experience, correlation, opinion and nuance.

Peter North | //workawesome.com

Book Review and Innovation Summary – “Predictable Success”

A few weeks ago I received “Predictable Success” by Les McKeown in the mail. “Predictable Success” is an approachable 194 pages, and is an easy, and pleasant read.

Les McKeown is the President & CEO of Predictable Success, and has 25 years of global business experience, including starting 42 companies in his own right, and as the founding partner of an incubation consulting company that launched hundreds of businesses worldwide.

“Predictable Success” is a book focused on helping people understand the natural evolution of businesses and why some succeed and some fail. The book hinges on a simple, illustrative framework that makes the case that business success is not something to be achieved, but instead something to be maintained. You don’t arrive at business success and stay successful, but instead continually fight to maintain the delicate balance between too much policy and process, and too little.

Les McKeown asserts that there are seven different descriptors that any successful business can take on at any one time. The key here is ’successful’ business.

* Early Struggle
* Fun
* Whitewater
* Predictable Success
* Treadmill
* The Big Rut
* Death Rattle

by Braden Kelley
http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com

A few weeks ago I received “Predictable Success” by Les McKeown in the mail. “Predictable Success” is an approachable 194 pages, and is an easy, and pleasant read.

Les McKeown asserts that there are seven different descriptors that any successful business can take on at any one time. The key here is ’successful’ business.

Early Struggle
Fun
Whitewater
Predictable Success
Treadmill
The Big Rut
Death Rattle

Continuar leyendo «Book Review and Innovation Summary – “Predictable Success”»

10 Insights: A First Look at The New Intelligent Enterprise Survey

How do you win with data? SMR surveyed global executives about turning the data deluge and analytics into competitive advantage. Here’s an early snapshot of how managers are answering the most important question organizations face.

Last May, at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium main-stage discussion on “Emerging Stronger from the Downturn,” one panelist listened with a growing private smile as his fellow speakers described example after example of how technology-driven information and analytics applications were transforming their companies. The stories were of data and analysis being used to understand customers, parse trends, distribute decision making, manage risk; they foretold of organizations being reinvented and management practice being rethought. They told of change, basically. A lot of it. Driven by ever-emerging technology and the new things it could do.

That was the point at which the panelist, a multinational industrial COO, turned to the audience and unofficially summarized, “So, the lesson: If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

He’s right. Change is here. Failure to adapt means irrelevance. Time and progress march on, but at a Moore’s law pace instead of a clock’s. [Más…]

However, the focus on exactly what’s changing can be misplaced. For all the swiftness with which technology is shifting — getting smarter, more powerful, more cognitively “human” — it’s sometimes true that the attention we pay to the next new technology is a distraction. It distracts us from the changes that organizations could make with no more new technology at all — the changes organizations could achieve just by capitalizing on how current technology can enable them to capture, analyze and act on information. (Though the “just” in that sentence may be ill-advised.)

MIT Sloan School’s Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, talked about that kind of change in an interview with SMR:

“Although most of what I’ve been talking about has focused on changes in the technology, I think the biggest changes are going to be in the way the companies use the technology. If some catastrophe happened and technology just froze for the next couple of decades, I believe the pace of organizational change would continue just as rapidly, because we have so much catching up to do. Specifically, I think this cultural mentality of using data more effectively, running experiments and responding to the environment and replicating it is something that is going to happen regardless of what additional advances we see in the underlying technology. A decade from now, I expect companies to be far more responsive, far more innovative, far more analytics-minded.”

Brynjolfsson gave experimentation special emphasis, but his observation fits other information-enabled practices found under the big tent of analytics. The technology is here. The data are available. How will companies use them to win?

To answer that question, SMR has teamed with the IBM Institute for Business Value to build a new innovation hub and research program called “The New Intelligent Enterprise.”

Through the SMR and IBM IBV collaboration, The New Intelligent Enterprise aims to help managers understand how they can capitalize on the ways that information and analytics are changing the competitive landscape. What threats and opportunities will companies face? What new business models, organizational approaches, competitive strategies, work processes and leadership methods will emerge? How will the best organizations reinvent themselves to use technology and analytics to achieve novel competitive advantage? How will they learn not only to be smarter, but to act smarter?

In the months ahead, this inquiry into the makeup of The New Intelligent Enterprise will consist of survey research, in-depth interviews with thought leaders and top corporate executives worldwide and the most relevant academic research and case study work in the field. This article presents (very) early returns on that research — especially on the first annual New Intelligent Enterprise Survey, a global survey of nearly 3,000 executives who told us about their top management goals, their uses (and misuses) of information and analytics as they attacked those goals and the management practices in play in their organizations. In both this article and “10 Data Points,” we call out some of what we’re learning. The articles have been coauthored by core members of The New Intelligent Enterprise team: Steve LaValle, IBM Global Strategy Leader for Business Analytics and Optimization; Nina Kruschwitz, SMR Special Projects Editor; Rebecca Shockley, IBM IBV Global Lead for Business Analytics and Optimization; and Fred Balboni, IBM Global Leader for Business Analytics and Optimization.

Please note: What’s here is only preliminary — a true “first look” at the themes, benchmarks and questions that are surfacing. Next on the schedule: conclusive analysis of the survey and stage-one interview findings will be published in a New Intelligent Enterprise Special Report on October 25. Selected interviews will be published online through early winter. And in late December, the Winter issue of SMR will include further exploration of the key ideas in October’s Special Report.

For now, though, consider the following notes — and the survey statistics in “10 Data Points” — as a collective reminder to reexamine your own practices and plans. As the gentleman said, If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.

Here are 10 observations and questions about analytics-driven management that have popped out of research and interviews so far, and which we’ll be exploring more deeply in the major reports ahead.

By Michael S. Hopkins, Steve LaValle and Fred Balboni
http://sloanreview.mit.edu

He’s right. Change is here. Failure to adapt means irrelevance. Time and progress march on, but at a Moore’s law pace instead of a clock’s. Continuar leyendo «10 Insights: A First Look at The New Intelligent Enterprise Survey»

Integrative thinking and the misuse of power

The cascade

Some say that the power affects the world view and I agree!

Some experiments show that people in a position of power shows to have patterns of behavior usually associated with fault zones of the cerebral cortex that control the empathy and the ability to imagine the world from the point of view of others .

The power destroys the ability to understand that there are other perspectives in addition to the hierarchy. The hierarchy works like a waterfall.

But there is no easy cure for the paradox of power. [Más…]

Keltner argues that “the best treatment is transparency, and that the worst abuses of power can be prevented when people know they are being monitored. This suggests that the mere existence of a guard dog or a regulatory active directory may help deter people from doing bad things.

However, people in power tend to reliably overestimate their moral virtue, which leads them to stifle oversight” Lehrer

But power can also be refined in other ways and become a lever for success as declaring the Mattimore Laura, Procter & Gamble.

“Integrative Thinking has become an essential component of the training and development program for our most senior managers at P&G. Our executives are able to take the lessons of integrative thinking back to their jobs with them, putting the tools into action to solve the thorniest issues in their businesses.”

How integrative thinking can help managers and holders of power to look into the “world” and for people as an important part in their decisions ?

The cascade

Some say that the power affects the world view and I agree!

The power destroys the ability to understand that there are other perspectives in addition to the hierarchy. The hierarchy works like a waterfall.

But there is no easy cure for the paradox of power. Continuar leyendo «Integrative thinking and the misuse of power»

From The Magazine «MIT Sloan Management Review»

When Staff Shape Facts to Fit Decisions

Many managers think they’ve committed their organizations to evidence-based decision making, when in reality, they practice decision-based evidence making. In the MIT SMR summer issue, Peter Tingling and Michael Brydon explore the downside of having subordinates shape evidence to meet perceived expectations of company leaders — and what can be done to lessen the negative impact.

ALSO IN THE NEW SUMMER ISSUE:

The challenge of finding just the right trust level with partners, in “Why Too Much Trust Is Death to Innovation.”

COVER STORY: Strategy

What to Do Against Disruptive Business Models

Constantinos C. Markides and Daniel OyonFighting a disruptive business model by rolling out a second business model is one option for companies under fire. The risk, though, is getting stuck in the middle.

Feature: Sustainability

Sustainability Leadership’s 3 Phases

Christoph Lueneburger and Daniel GolemanSustainability initiatives can’t be driven through an organization like other changes. They have three distinct stages, each requiring different organizational capabilities and leadership competencies.

Fight The System: Battling Bureaucracy — Part 2

(…)

Ensuring Approval

When working for a large organization, you constantly require the approval of others to move anything forward. If you want a budget for a new Web project, you need to get senior management to buy in. When you conceive an approach for a new design, it needs to go through marketing and the brand police. Sooner or later, everything you want to do on the website needs approval.

This approval process is often a nightmare. But it doesn’t have to be. Understanding a little about human behaviour (which you should already know) smoothens the way.

The first step is to identify key influencers.

Identify the Influencers

Every decision-making process has key influencers. Sometimes the influencer is obvious because only one individual gives approval. But it is usually more complex. Sometimes the person you are dealing with is not really the one with the power. In many cases someone else is, someone with whom you have had no contact. When dealing with committees, you will also learn quickly that not all committee members are equal. Some are senior, while others are simply more dominant or aggressive. The trick is to identify the key influencers.

But don’t assume that the key influencers are always the loudest or most senior. Sometimes it is those with the most connections or a close relationship with an executive. Identifying who can swing the decision in your favor can be tricky but is incredibly important.

SM8-20100805-171809 in Fight The System: Battling Bureaucracy — Part 2
A Web designer tries to identify who the real client is.

Once you have identified them, the next step is to get them on board. This means dealing with them directly rather than wasting your breath arguing in a committee…

Avoid Committees, Talk to Individuals

The committee is the scourge of larger organizations. They stifle anything but the most conservative of ideas, they move slowly, and they undermine decisive action. Unfortunately, committees are here to stay, and there is little point to fighting them. But there is more than one way to skin a cat and more than one way to run a committee. In fact, you can use one of the committee’s greatest weaknesses to your advantage.

One reason committees are so slow is because getting everyone in a room to make a decision is hard. In our case, this is a good thing. Instead of meeting the committee as a group, start meeting its members individually. Some of these meetings can be over the phone or quick chats. But with the key influencers, take the time to sit down face to face and properly discuss the project.

Meeting with committee members individually has two advantages. Continuar leyendo «Fight The System: Battling Bureaucracy — Part 2»