What Does Your Customer Need? “Your customer doesn’t want a drill. He wants a hole.” You have no doubt heard that one before. Working through customer requirements is difficult, particularly when customers don’t know what they want. Do Customers Want Cameras? I found a story in an old 1990s textbook (The Leader’s Handbook). It goes […]
Rewarding Failure
Should you reward success? Rewarding success is the obvious thing to do. Slaps on the back, public praise, bonuses and honours come easily to us. People expect to be rewarded for good performance. If you reward success then people will strive to give you more of it. It would be madness to reward failure, or […]
Brilliance Alone Won’t Take You Far
The land grab In the 17th and 18th centuries the European superpowers; Britain, Spain, France, Portugal and the Netherlands were racing to conquer the world. They were hell bent on colonising the Americas, Africa and Asia for themselves. The Europeans were engage in a land grab of monumental proportions. The colonies were dependant on the […]
How to Turn a Supertanker
Leverage There is a management metaphor that changing the direction of an organisation is a bit like changing the direction of a supertanker. It can be done, but organisations are big, cumbersome and it takes a lot of time to push them onto another course. A flawed analogy It is a nice analogy, but a […]
It Stands to Reason…
Books or concrete? Imagine you are on the board of an educational charity. You are trying to improve the standard of education in Sub-Saharan Africa. How should you invest the charitable donations? What would be the most effective way to spend the money? In his book Adapt, Tim Harford tells the story of the Dutch […]
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