Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: management

  • Daily links – Chinese tourists, mars landers, Zappos management

    Daily links – Chinese tourists, mars landers, Zappos management

    Where do Chinese tourist like to travel to? One of today’s links looks at where the modern PRC tourist likes to go. Other links include how jaywalking became a crime, Samsung’s attack on the low end Indian smartphone and how disguised Starbucks may be popping up in your suburb.

    Kicking off today’s links is an examination of how Zappos’ CEO and founder Tony Hsieh is carrying out a daring experiment on the management structures of his company.

    Zappos’ strange management experiment

    No-one can accuse Zappos’ founder Tony Hsieh of thinking inside the box, his experiment with new form of management called holacracy is another example of how he tries to do things differently. Whether it will be successful or not remains to be seen.

    How Jaywalking became a crime

    Vox tells of how cars took over our cities’ streets during the early Twentieth Century. It’s an interesting description of the political, social and economic forces at work as the effects of the automobile started to be felt by our communities.

    Lost spacecraft found on Mars

    “It was a heroic failure.” Britain’s Beagle space mission to Mars ended in mystery when the lander vanished just before Christmas 2002. Now it’s been found. I find this story quite touching.

    Your local cafe might be a stealth Starbucks

    Like McDonalds, Starbucks is facing structural changes in its market. One of the ways both companies are responding by launching experimental new stores. Some of which might be near you without you knowing.

    Samsung launches a sub $100 Tizen phone in India 

    Just as the car changed the Twentieth Century the smartphone may well be one of the critical technologies that shapes this era. Cheap phones in emerging markets are the equivalent of the Ford Model T a hundred years ago.

    Samsung’s move is a response to the Chinese manufacturers who are dominating that market. That Samsung is using their own Tizen operating system rather than Android which most of the Chinese companies use is something worth watching.

    Where are Chinese tourists going

    As Chinese manufacturers look to emerging markets as their economic future, the country’s tourists are exploring the world. This article laments how those PRC travellers are ignoring London and the UK but also has some interesting observations about the destinations they prefer.

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  • Stack ranking claims another victim in Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo

    Stack ranking claims another victim in Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo

    One of the clumsiest management tools deployed by modern executives is stack ranking, the practice of putting staff members on a scale where the bottom 20% miss out on bonuses and, in bad times, are the first to be fired.

    The process has terrible effects upon the morale of workplaces as it rewards political manoeuvring over effective performance; the worker who focuses on their task and the business tends to be overlooked compared to those who curry favour with the boss.

    Another debilitating effect is it destroys teams as it has the perverse effect of discouraging people joining teams with high flying colleagues as it increases one’s chances of receiving a poor rating.

    Stack ranking has previously damaged Microsoft and HP and now it appears Marissa Mayer has made the same mistake at Yahoo!.

    That Mayer has made the same mistakes at Yahoo! is a disappointment; there were so many high hopes for her in reinvigorating the troubled company. Indeed carrying out the stack ranking process every quarter seems particularly debilitating and management intensive, it’s hard to think of a more effective way of destroying morale and distracting management.

    In some situations Stack Ranking can be effective but the way companies like Yahoo!, HP and Microsoft have implemented the method, it’s proven to be the wrong tool for the job of managing high skilled workforces.

    When implementing clumsy management tools like stack ranking, it’s worthwhile considering whether it’s the right tool for the job.

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  • Uber and the management dilemma

    Uber and the management dilemma

    “Uber-mania reflects a profound turn in the way the global economy is organized,” writes Fortune Magazine’s editor Alan Murray.

    That’s a bit of stretch as Uber’s simply an application of the technologies that are changing business and the economy;  those technologies are having a more profound effect on the role of managers in the modern workplace.

    Along with services like AirBnB and Task Rabbit, are the result of the new breed of cloud, mobile and big data tools that make it easier to deploy new business models which in  themselves threaten traditional industries and their executives.

    Uber’s success is in finding an industry that in much of the world has been ripe for disruption for decades; in most Western cities cab services have been regulated to protect plate holders’ incomes and often to protect corrupt local cartels.

    What Uber’s disruption shows is how those tools can be deployed against cosy incumbents.

    Probably the cosiest group of incumbents of all have been corporate managers; over the last thirty years businesses have been downsized, workers have become more productive and many functions have been outsourced or offshored.

    Management however has largely remained untouched as the need to supervise business functions has remained.

    Now those tools – particularly the smart algorithms that run companies like Google, Facebook and Uber – are coming for managers in many industries. Added to the manager’s dilemma are improved collaboration tools that allow workers and machines to communicate and make decision autonomously without the need for supervision.

    Possibly the greatest change in business over the next decade will be the disappearance of the manager as software takes over.

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  • A question of ethics

    A question of ethics

    At this week’s Australian Gartner Symposium ethics was one of the key issues flagged for CIOs and IT workers; as technology becomes more pervasive and instrusive, managers are going to have to deal with a myriad of questions about what is the moral course of action.

    So far the news isn’t good for the tech industry with many businesses failing to deal with the masses of data they are accumulating on users, suppliers and competitors.

    A failure of transparency

    One case in point is that of online ride service, Uber. One of Uber’s supposed strengths is its accountability and transparancy; the service can track passengers and drivers through their journey which should, in theory, make the trip safer for everybody.

    In reality the tracking doesn’t do a great job of protecting riders and drivers, mainly because Uber has Silicon Valley’s Soviet attitude to customer service. That tracking also creates an ethical issue for the company’s management and one that isn’t being dealt with well.

    Compounding Uber’s ethical problem is the attitude of its managers, when a Senior Vice President suggests smearing a journalist who writes critical stories then its clear the company has a problem and the question for users has to be ‘can we trust these people with our personal data?’

    With Uber we may be seeing the first company where data management and misuse results in senior management, and possibly the founder, falling on their sword.

    Journalists’ ethics

    Another aspect of the latest Uber story is the question of journalistic ethics; indeed the apologists for Uber counter that because some journalists are corrupt that justifies underhand tactics from companies subject to critical articles.

    That argument is deeply flawed with little merit and tells us more about the people making it than any journalist’s ethical compass, however there is a discussion to be had about the behaviour of many reporters.

    As someone who regularly receives corporate largess — I attended the Gartner Symposium as a guest of BlackBerry and will be going to an Acer event tomorrow night — this is something I regularly grapple with; my answer (or rationalisation) is that I disclose that largess and let the reader make up their own mind.

    However one thing is clear at these events; everything is on the record unless explicitly stated by the other party. This makes Michael Wolff’s criticism of Ben Smith’s original Uber story in Buzz Feed pretty hollow and gives us many pointers on Wolff’s own moral compass as he invites other writers to ‘privileged’ dinners where the default attitude is that everything is off the record.

    Playing an insider game

    Ultimately we’re seeing an insider game being played, where journalists like Wolff put their own egos above their job of telling their audience what is happening; Jay Rosen highlighted this problem with political coverage but in many respects it’s worse in tech, business and startup journalism.

    It’s not surprising when a game is being played by insiders that they take offense at outsiders criticizing them.

    Once the customers become outsiders though, the game is drawing to an end. That’s the fate Uber, and much of the tech industry, desperately want to avoid.

    Uber in particular has many powerful enemies around the world and clumsy management mis-steps only play into the hands of those who see the company as a threat to their cosy cartels. It would be a shame if Uber’s disruption of the many dysfunctional taxi markets was derailed due to the company’s paranoia and arrogance.

    Eventually ethics matter. It’s something that both the insular tech industry and those who write on it should remind themselves.

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  • Developing digital leadership

    Developing digital leadership

    Technology and talent are the biggest worries for CEOs today says Peter Sondergaard, Gartner’s Senior Vice President for Global Research, however those challenges are part of a much greater shift in business.

    In an interview at the Australian Gartner Symposium on Queensland’s Gold Coast, Sondergaard discussed how businesses and their senior management have limited time to adjust to a rapidly evolving marketplace.

    Sondergaard believes that companies have 24 months to face the changes which academic and futurist Andrew McAfee forecasts is going to overwhelm businesses and society in the near future.

    In this environment IT workers have a unique position in being responsible for implementing technologies within organisations, however according to Gartner’s research only 15% of CEOs see their tech teams as leading change within the organisation.

    “The transformation that a lot of people are grappling with is ‘how do I translate this into action in leaders?’” Sondergaard suggests. “Organisations have leaders in financial backgrounds and people who understand people management, leadership and customer facing activities.”

    “Businesses expect this in every senior leader hired in the organisation but somehow it’s okay to accept those people have their son or daughter do everything technology wise. In the future you can’t have that.”

    “Digital leadership is at par with all other assumed skills in what is a fully rounded business leader.”

    A generation change

    Sondergaard sees a generational change happening in senior management as the new guard are more comfortable with technology, having had to deal with the 1990s PC boom as well as the internet during their working lives.

    “The change generally happens when you switch CEO, it’s very funny to watch right now how new CEOs that come in, change the strategy completely and focus on digitalisation.”

    For many companies, this is a dramatic change in business practices and one that doesn’t come without resistance within the organisation, although the marketplace may force these reforms as margins fall.

    Changing focus as margins fall

    A problem facing managers that Sondergaard sees is the falling margins faced by businesses as new competitors unencumbered by legacy systems enter the marketplace.

    Most of these competitors bring the ‘startup ethos’ into their industries — with no fixed overheads the new entrants are far more flexible than the incumbent businesses.

    Stock markets are also making the problem worse with older businesses being held to different benchmarks than the new players.

    To illustrate this Sondergaard cites Amazon and IBM where are both staking their futures on cloud services that are barely profitable; for this IBM is punished by investors while Amazon continues to get stock market support.

    Owning the ethical risks

    Another challenge facing businesses in going digital are the ethical considerations, this is a complex and multifaceted area that is going to test managers throughout organisations as new technologies give rise to unforseen risks.

    “What does your brand want to stand for in a digital world?” Sondergaard asks, “I think we will need people who articulate the brand, and what we do from a technology perspective.”

    “Ethics in this is a very part of the user experience which becomes very complex very fast. If you don’t have someone who owns this from a co-ordination perspective I would say you get an element of risk that you don’t want.”

    For managers across all industries the challenge is to deal with the disruption that is happening now and the greater changes that are looming, Sondergaard believes this requires a ‘bimodal’ way of doing business that balances the needs of existing markets with the demands of a much more complex fast moving developing digital marketplace.

    This is a big task for managers and one that many will struggle with. Those who don’t succeed are going to struggle in a very turbulent business world.

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