DrContrarian

It really grates when people have to qualify what they say with 'to be honest...' I reckon you should just be honest, right? I wrote a review of a book (Selling: Powerful New Strategies for Sales Success) that I bought (on Amazon ) recently. It was written by Kevin Hogan et al - someone whom I follow closely on the net, and whom I admire for subject knowledge as well as marketing savvy. I gave it 2 stars. Seventeen other reviewers averaged 5 stars. Should I have been brutally honest? (See previous post.) Is that really what is wanted in 'comments' sections? Is that the right forum? If I can't write a better book, do I have the right to criticise? How many of the 5-star comments are seeded by friends and fans and how many are genuine? Having said all of that, I thought the book did offer a few nuggets that are worth the $20 -odd bucks spent on it. But then again, I think any book on the planet represents great value, because one sentence could change your life.

I attended the ‘Presentation Day’ at my son’s primary school today. As a matter of principle I put all my children through the public school system (as opposed to private schools). There are probably 300 or so kids in the school and has reasonable ethnic diversity. It was the principal’s last presentation day – not sure where he is going but he is leaving. The cadre of female teachers appeared scarily close to 5 years from retirement. It was my first presentation day – you should know that too. I have successfully avoided any involvement with the school (from parents’ nights to fundraising events to presentation days) for the better part of 14 years now. My deal with the school is that I will educate my children (including a solid set of values) and the school can provide the schooling: call me if you have a problem, otherwise we leave each other well alone. This is not as weird as it sounds at first; but as an educator myself I feel that riding shotgun for my child while the teachers ...

Knowledge is fossilised intuition. Love is built on a foundation of fear. Your senses bring the trouble. Pornography is a mirror, Art is a window. Passion is ignorance. Enjoyment requires the temporary suspension of reality. Fun is a requisite illusion (for sanity.) Hierarchy is a circle. Nothing is more important. Personality is the projection of consensus. All invention is rediscovery. The end is radical step change. Everything is natural. Happiness is not meant to be. Consequence is the shadow of living. Poetry is the language of pain. (Pain is the language of poetry…) Feelings are over-rated electrical connections. Equality is an error of measurement. Luck is being surprised by destiny. A path offers least resistance. You can only see as far as you can think. Greed is the fuel of the universe. Process determines outcome. All people are afraid. (Because we think more than we are.) Values are anchors of insecurity. An ounce of failure weighs more than an ounce of success. All the...

The biggest killer of success is success. (The fear of failure grows in direct proportion to what you have got to lose.) This Contrarian principle has a number of corollaries: Bigger is always worse Innovation leads to less innovation Growth leads to death If you think you disagree, just add (ultimately) to the end of each of the above. Such is Life.

You must have figured out by now that I an a fan of chaos theory. (And systems thinking.) So I believe there is a KEY, a pattern to the universe that has not yet been discovered. (This image from http://aimath.org/E8/mcmullen.html) It relates to the story of Garrett Lisi (39) who has developed a theory that unifies the theories about the universe. Even if you are not interested in this stuff, it is a cool read simply to look at how he has 'positioned' himself in the world of science.

What’s not… I read a piece today that made me think about the difference and the impact of what is and what is not. The author draws a parallel between a style guide and a menu. ‘A manual of style () and a menu share one important point in common: both impose limitations. The word "menu" is from the Latin - minuere, to diminish. You can tell as much about a restaurant by what isn't on the menu as by what is: a chef doesn't try to cook everything, or to appeal to everyone's tastes. A stylebook imposes its limitations on the varieties of a written language: it's from these many acts of limitation and diminishment that a style is formed.’ Marketers are guilty of always focusing on the point of difference, the proposition, the benefit, the key feature. We often ignore what the product/ service does NOT do or offer. Just like a menu tells you about what you can eat, what is not on the menu possibly says more about the restaurant and the chef than the ...

Mandossian: " The only marketing genius is the customer." Price: "Every cent spent on marketing activities is an admission of failure."

If you are befuddled by what Web 2.0 is all about, here is a great analogy (even if I say so myself): Think... TALKBACK RADIO. Web 2.0 is that ... on the internet. (Click on the link of the title to see a cool directory of Web 2.0 sites/ applications.)

Cliches are usually/ often mocked and derided. (See list below.) My take on it is that cliches (in a business sense) is really just the art of business grappling with becoming a science, and cliches become the language of the emerging science. Cliches are not bad because they are popular sayings, they are only bad if they don't add to the clarity and understanding of a discussion. Cliches only risk being a distraction if the through overuse the familiarity means that people don't listen. I don't deny that some people go overboard - every wannabe consultant usually wants to coin and own a new buzzword that will become their point-of-difference, but that is price worth paying for progress. Where would we be without the cliches such as "point of difference" and many others? Click through to see the plexo

Check this out for a few part tricks... Alas, the mysteries of the universe ain't what it is cracked up to be...

Through my association with the MGSM (as an adjunct lecturer on the MBA program) I get access to really cool stuff. Now you can too ... and don’t say I never share :-) Find out how you’d perform running an Australian company for a week by taking up the online challenge at www.ceosurvivor.com

I have been silent for a wee while. Working hard at being busy is one reason. The other is that I have started another blog and that takes up some time. (The new blog is more technical/ functional, and arguably better for business. Contrarian is just for fun.) So just for the hell of it, I thought I’d throw in a random bit about a topic du jour: car safety. Manufacturers vie for 5-star safety ratings, and as part of those desired specs you will find things like electronic stability control etc. I am all for airbags, because when the sh*t hits the fan, you wanna have cover. But I really think that ABS and ESC is resulting in fewer people learning to actually handle those near misses. Not driving the perfect car (over time) teaches you the limits of what the car can and cannot do. This is just when you need when things go wrong. Like super-safe adventure parks have turned the children away in droves (because they are no fun), super-safe cars will just be pushed harder and faster ...

In the spirit of the internet, I thought I'd share with you one of the greatest sources of free, quality writing about almost anything on the net. Click on the link above, and enjoy...

Failure to assess your own competence In many ways this related to the prior posting about inability to recognise weaknesses. But it actually goes further than that: people simply over-rate themselves. We have been fed an American diet of: over-achievement, positive thinking, self-belief, that we end up believing our own press. Capability and talent is distributed on a normal distribution curve. Half the world is below average. (Of course the readers of this blog do not fall into that half J .) But the reality is that not everybody gets to be no 1, gets to be the CEO or whatever. Because people believe they are better than they really are, they end doing poorly in jobs/ situations which they never should have let themselves get into. (May I confess that I am not exempted.) It has been documented a long time ago that there is a Peter Principle at play in the management ranks. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle ) The phenomenon of overestimating our abilities is re...

The contrarian's view of winning at office politics. Rule 1 : Make friends and shape that into a network. You need them to help you win the war. No individual can beat the whole system. (S)He with the most friends win - no matter what stunt the other person pulls. Rule 2: Make friends by GIVING and sharing and helping without an expectation of anything in return. (A paradox, I know, but that is how you do it.) You may be cynical about this, but your connections are what keep you 'connected' to the system - to state the bleeding obvious. Rule 3: Good defense will win the day. Office politics is not about being able to trample allover someone else, but more importantly it is about protecting your own turf. This is often a cliched football analogy, but it is really true: good defense wins the game. And for fun guide to OFFICE POLITICS - check this out.

This series does not cover the ‘reasons for failure’ in any particular order, but if it did, this particular malady would be very near the top of the list. Poor networking is the underlying cause of many, many failures. In any business, whether it is just you in a start-up, or whether you are part of a corporate machine, the art of networking underpins your success as a manager. The old cliché about ‘who you know’ and not what you know, is alive and well. Your network is the system that will: Alert you to a potential problem – before it becomes a problem Identify great opportunities that you would not otherwise be aware of. Provide you with resources & advice when you need it. Provide you with an ‘out’ if you get stuck in a dead-end. Give you a sense of connectedness when the madness and pressure are worst. MOST IMPORTASNTLY be the vehicle that will allow you to help other people, and so help you build your credits in the bank of recipr...

Part 5 in this short series. (Who knows how long it will be? J ). Initially I thought I’d stick to the fundamental, root causes only, but the reality is that most people will only read titbits, and not necessarily in one go, so I will simply highlight these reasons as they come to mind; whether it is primary or secondary cause… Inability to influence. Managers spend more than half their time influencing other people would be my guesstimate. Some time to do own work and some unproductive time etc. but the bulk of productive time is spent influencing people. The difference between a good manager and a poor one is directly correlated to their ability to influence others. Failure is usually a result of an inability to influence – especially an inability to exert upward influence. It is something we learnt as children, but many of us lose the knack for making people with more power do the stuff we want them, or rather need them to do. The psychology of influence is fascinating. But ...

I must be honest about the previous post and admit the weakness that I have fallen in love with. (Blogs should be about honesty, right? And besides, and can’t just point the finger at everyone else without acknowledging my own failures; that would be hypocritical and that is NOT one of my weaknesses.) My own weakness parading as a strength is that I can be am argumentative. This is because I believe TRUTH is paramount (at least my version of the truth). And I have been ‘truthful’ to the point of hurting people’s feelings: as long as the truth can prevail. It is not just a weakness; it is quite sadly more than that. But instead of dealing with the cause of it, I have learned to justify it to myself to the extent that I have even become proud of it and started justifying it to everyone else. It is quite easy to put truth on a pedestal; how can anyone argue against ‘honesty’ as positive attribute? But the fact is that no society can function properly without the small white lies tha...

Weaknesses parading as strengths Managers, myself included, often refuse to acknowledge that our personalities are defective; or at the very least that we have traits and attitudes (that are in essence weaknesses) but that we have become comfortable with and have grown to accept and even like. We often see this in interview when candidates are asked about their weaknesses. The response is usually to identify a weakness that can equally be perceived to be a strength; to wit: “I am sometimes too detailed orientated.” This is just another demonstration of how misguided people can sometimes be. The sad thing is, the candidate parades the ‘weakness’ only because they know some people might see that as a weakness, but deep down they do not really believe it is a weakness. I have interviewed 100s – and I am not exaggerating here – and I have NEVER met a candidate who has answered the question with anything that can remotely be considered to be a realistic and truthful representation of ...

Another reason for managerial failure is the total under-estimation of emotion; and its corollary, over-estimating the importance of the rational or intellectual. Smart people (as a group) are no more successful than any other group of people at managing. I have no research to back this up, but I would even hazard a guess that they may even be statistically under-represented. (Now there is a thesis for you…) Organisations do not tick on rational decision-making. It ticks on culture. And strategy. And innovation. But it certainly does not tick on objectivity and cold hard facts. Every meaningful decision that is made in an organisation is a compromise. (A camel is a horse designed by a committee is not just humorous – it contains more than a grain of truth.) Decisions are made based on politics and the dispersion of power. Not on who happens to be right. If you stake your career on your ability to find intelligent, rational solutions you are bound to fail. The key success factor is...

There are a host of reasons. I have studies enough, learned enough and failed enough to have some compelling arguments as to why managers fail… Over time I’ll explore a few of those. The obvious one is incompetence – but I will ignore that as a reason. Arguably that is the error of the manager’s manager more than anything, but most importantly; I don’t believe that people reading this would fall into that category. And if you are incompetent – at managing only of course - The number one reason – without any doubt in my mind is misunderstanding or underestimating the nature of POWER. Do you have power? Do you know who (else) has power? Do you know what you derive it from? Do you know why you have it? Do you know how to use it? Do you know when to use it? Do you know how it is used against you? Are you super aware of how it ebbs and flows on a daily basis, from meeting to meeting, from person to person? Are you using power ‘prem...

Read an article by an ex-executive of Shell Corporation. It reports on material and significant findings of research project ( http://www.businessweek.com/chapter/degeus.htm ) that was designed to establish which factors account for the survival of companies (for more than 500 years). Read it - its fascinating. If you are in a hurry - here is a short summary of the findings: 1. Sensitivity to the environment represents a company's ability to learn and adapt. 2. Cohesion and identity, it is now clear, are aspects of a company's innate ability to build a community and a persona for itself. 3. Tolerance and its corollary, decentralization, are both symptoms of a company's awareness of ecology: its ability to build constructive relationships with other entities, within and out-side itself. 4. Conservative financing is a very critical corporate attribute: the ability to govern its own growth and evolution effectively. As usual the research raises further questions, b...

Managing conflict Had an opportunity to do some coaching today. Now it is not my natural/ day job, but I quite enjoyed the experience. The topic du jour was as per this blog title. Later I saw a vlog ( http://blogs.bnet.com/intercom/?p=434 ) on office politics, which referred to the fact that managers spend 42% of their time on this activity (managing conflict) – but no reference to how to actually do it. So here goes the d price methodology: The pre-requisites are: 1. Is it my conflict to solve? If you are fighting someone else’s battle, you are bound to lose it. Don’t go into bat for someone else in the office. You may think you are helping, but you are trespassing. 2. Take a positive view of the conflict. Don’t see it as a negative/battle, see it as an opportunity to clear the air and to rectify misconceptions or clarify an issue. You may well be wrong so you might just learn something. It will also help reduce the tension - before you start. Then stepping into the act...

Innovation as Brand Value

We are presenting on "Brand Me" up on the Gold Coast next week, and is my wont, I have been doing some research. I came across a blog The Buzz Machine (click on the link above) - which does not have anything to do with branding per se, but made a very interesting observation. I quote from the blog: For young people, writes [Dov] Seidman, this means understanding that your reputation in life is going to get set in stone so much earlier. More and more of what you say or do or write will end up as a digital fingerprint that never gets erased. Our generation got to screw up and none of those screw-ups appeared on our first job résumés, which we got to write. For this generation, much of what they say, do or write will be preserved online forever. Before employers even read their résumés, they’ll Google them. If you are a parent, this is pretty important to communicate to your children. Now along with the talk about condoms, drugs and not getting into strangers' cars, you also...

Which is the preferred result? Tom Peters (http://www.tompeters.com/archives.php?date=200706) reckons it is innovation that rocks the world. I agree that it rocks, but he trades it off against the notion of 'Built to Last' - another seminal publication. I disagree with the master: Survival (lasting a long time) is the ultimate testament to ongoing ingenuity and innovation on a scale that might not rock the world but it sure beats the alternative. I am happy to settle for lasting a long time as opposed to rocking a short time. The one takes smarts and the other ... could possibly just be LUCK.

Core competency? Benchmark? Key issues? Sustainability? Ask any manager and they will explain what these words mean. To the uninitiated it is buzzwords. To the literati, it is a modern day plight that will destroy the English language. X wrote The Death of Language. Y wrote. Weaselwords. Hundreds and hundreds of pages devoted to slagging management-speak. Courses on Effective Business Writing will advise strongly against using technical jargon or made-up words. These courses, of course are always run by literary types, never business people an managers. (We are way too illiterate.) Funny that. And invariably they will also tell us that of the 800,000 ordinary (non-technical words) in the Oxford English Dictionary, the average person only uses about 8,000: that is one percent of the available words. The implication of course, ‘we’ know many more. It is then followed by a joke that you should not use ‘pulchritude’ when the word ‘beautiful’ would do. Ha ha. Their strateg...

As part of the research that I am doing on a book that I am writing, I get to interview some really successful entrepreneurs. Today I conducted an interview at which I actually got a perspective on a very old concept - delegation - that I had never thought of. (Those of you who know me well, will know how rarely that happens :-)) We spoke about that hoary old notion of working IN the business vs. working ON the business. We shared a contrarian view - but he basically saw it as delegation. Then he raised the idea that when you (owner/manager) delegate a task, you are giving away a problem, but the person to whom you are delegating receives trust and respect and stature. WOW! Think about that next time...

This is a first for me- I am just going to promote another website. The quotes below are from a manifesto called "The Hughtrain" - a play on the original Cluetrain. Quote 1: Why did I leave the big world of corporations and Amex cards... The big city is an anachronism. All those skyscrapers, architecturally impressive as they are, were built to house large, tightly controlled, centralized bureaucracies within a very small area of land, geographically near the other like-minded bureaucracies with whom they did business. You wanted to work for Corporation X? You had to buy a house within commuting distance to Corporation X ’ s Central HQ. Ninety percent of the people you needed to talk to on a daily basis were within an elevator ride of your desk. Amazing how dated something so recent can seem. Now e-mail and its spawn are the new elevators. Quote 2: Why did you start a Blog - one of those things that when you are in start-up mode, is important but not urgent. HOW TO HA...

Read an article the other day (somewhere) that the war for talent is hotting up (again?). It makes sense in Australia where unemployment is just on 4% - a 30-year low. Being a newly minted entrepreneur – in Aus at least – I wonder about that. How and where will I find good people? People who will care as much as I do about my customers? I care because I know very personally that they are the people who allow me to eat and look after my family. Can any employee care as much? As soon as you are an employee, the person who feeds you is the boss – one step removed from the customer, and employees will always act accordingly: please the boss before the customer – that is only human. Even when I consider myself as an (ex-) employee, I must be honest and say… ‘I guess not!’ As much as I considered myself to be a valuable employee (no comments required on this one, thanks) I still did not care as much as I care now. And it is only when you are the owner of your own business that you get tha...

I have had cause recently to contemplate what constitutes a toxic workplace – and in particular which factor is the biggest driver of creating such a workplace. There are many obvious contenders, but I’ll reference the front runners only: Highly politicised Politics (of the corporate kind) is often seen to be and made to be ‘bad’, but I think that it is a very good mechanism for keeping people on their toes and equipping them with the communications and observational skills necessary to progress in the corporate world. Being able to play the game is a skill needed when you are the CEO/ Chairman/ MD and you operate in a sphere where everything is the proverbial grey. What better training ground than middle management? Bureaucratic Also much despised is the overly bureaucratic environment, but again it should be - for any half-decent manager – a relative cinch to operate freely in that environment. Learning which rules to break and where to go in order to get things done actually ...

Drove my son to the football training yesterday. As we passed a bus, he asked me whether they earned a lot of money. "About $20 per hour", I ventured. He was impressed. (He is 9.) I then proceeded to tell him that it wasn't that much - not with a mortgage and such. Then came the million dollar question: "How much did you make today?" The truthful answer was ... "nothing". He did not seem to really get that tomorrow or next week I might make$10k or $20k, which makes up for the all the 'nothing' days. "I am never going to go into business," he ventured. "I am going to be a sport star or an actor or a musician or something like that." I might not have made any money yesterday, or even the day before; but I got to drive my son to the football, AND sit and watch him play. Priceless - as they say in the ads. The joys of being an entrepreneur. (No footy pic on this computer...)

As an entrepreneur/ consultant/ author, you are always interested in finding a new angle to write about. As a free tool, I have created a marketing buzz-generator – for all to use… Pick-and-Mix one word from each of these tables, combine…. and off you go: Integrated Brand System Connected Market(ing) Solution Authentic Customer Theory Sustainable Consumer Framework Collaborative Value Platform Dynamic Communications Proposition Strategic Community Outcome(s) (Just don’t expect me to buy the book L )

The last word about Marketing I am one of those people you see in the bookshops, browsing through magazines and books. (The kind of people that annoy even me.) There are a number of reasons why I do this, and it isn’t about money. I find ‘topical’ magazines to offer very little value, but like an addict I keep going back to look. There are several magazines on marketing (and every now and then even a runaway best seller) that propagate a new buzzword and makes amazing claims about a wonderful insight the author has. (I actually created a table that allows you to create your own NEW theory in 5 seconds flat – more about in the next blog.) I thought about the discipline of marketing quite long and hard, because quite frankly, I am struggling to see how marketing (as it is practiced today) will retain its relevance over a long period. I have come up with these 7 immutable laws of Marketing. The Contrarian 1-2-3 of Marketing: 1 Law of Process CONSISTENCY 2 Laws of Product/Off...

Of all the tings I don’t get in this world, this particular (myth) confounds more than most. What is time? And can you really ‘manage’ it? Of course time cannot be managed. It cannot even be properly understood. We perceive it to be and record it as a linear experience that somehow passes us by with supreme consistency. It is how we measure everything, even our lives; yet the great philosophers and the great scientists still grapple with the concept. We all labour under serious fallacies when it comes to the concept of time, but when a Manager pronounces that a certain individual cannot manage ‘time’ we nod sagely and thankfully – glad that it is not us. Nobody can manage time. Some people might struggle to prioritise – but in the absence of some great Ultimate Truth that definitively determines that one task is more important than another – not many people can point a finger at those who get it wrong. Others simply work more slowly, but that is no sin eit...

Too often I am asked about how one goes about building trust or winning someone’s trust. I then proceed to give advice, but to be perfectly truthful; I find it hard to trust anybody outside of my very immediate circle. Nobody knows you and nobody owes you. Andy Grove was famous for his paranoia about the competition – even when Intel had ridiculous market shares of 80%. You have always been a little suspicious. Maybe you have even known it, but were too afraid to admit to yourself. That little voice inside your head has become a chorus that you can no longer ignore. Management is played by a set of rules that you are not always privy too. Have you wondered why you don’t get ahead faster, why you don’t get the plum projects or why the new guy seemed to fit in better than you did? You have a sneaky suspicion that some other guy – or gal – who is doing the same job, earns more money than you do. You may have sought some answers from your manager. Or you may have blamed your inexperien...

Happy Birthday to Moonyeen. Blessed with a glorious day & some great friends for company, it was a great celebration today of the miracle that is Moonyeen, born 44 years ago!

People usually take pride in saying that they are ‘not good with the detail’ but they really ‘get the big picture’. The uninitiated managers suffer from the misguided belief that it is somehow admirable to admit to being a ‘big picture’ thinker. They believe of course that the big picture is more conceptual, more strategic and more important. The Brotherhood of Management knows better. There are only a handful of people in any organisation who need to get the big picture – and you are almost certainly not one of them. Brothers should never admit to being better at the detail than the conceptual, for it is necessary that not all workers pay attention to the detail. It suits the Brotherhood if workers are concerned with the big picture items because it is in the detail where we can lay the landmines that trip up the unsuspecting. Nothing could be further from the truth that you should not sweat the small stuff. It is all about the small stuff. The devil is truly in the detail and if you ...