Muddled Communication

It is only when an organization fails to communicate effectively with its market place that problems are sometimes noticed.

The first response to a drop in sales can be an immediate call for a new identity of a new advertising campaign. Rebranding may be expensive but it can be an easier pill to swallow than brutally honest self-examination of core relationships.

Less than scrupulously honest communication companies will queue up to offload and organization’s cash if they think there is money to be made; but putting a new face on a sick organization is purely papering over the cracks.

Muddled communication has often been the first point of contact with new companies. Many companies prefer easy, con-confrontational action that they can take immediately to challenging questions and the need to may be think and behave in new ways.

Only when presented with unequivocal evidence are some companies prepared to take hard decisions, especially if it involves the agreement and support of peers—worse still—bosses.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

Imitability

If a firm is making profits from core competences, the question is, why can’t other firms imitate it and build similar competences. This takes us to one property of competences: imitability—the extent to which a competence can be duplicated by competitors.  A firm would rather have competences that are difficult to duplicate or substitute. The question is, how? If the knowledge that underpins the competences is tacit in that it is not coded but rather embedded in organizational routines and cumulatively learned over time, potential imitators have three problems. In the first place, it is difficult to know just what it is that one wants to imitate in the second place, even if a firm knew exactly what it is that it wants to imitate, the firm may not know how to go about it since competence is learned cumulatively over the years and embedded in individuals or routine of firms. In the third place, since competences take time to build, imitators may find them themselves always lagging as they spend time imitating while the original owners of the competences move on to higher levels of the competences to newer ones.

If a competitor cannot build competences, the next question is, why not buy them? One answer is that competences may not be tradable or easily moved from one firm to another. Two reasons have been advanced for why. First, because of the tacit nature of the underlying knowledge, it may be difficult to tell just what it is that one wants to trade and who has the property rights for what parts of the underlying knowledge. What is it that we will buy from Honda that allows us to build zippy engines for cars, motorcycles, lawnmovers, and marine vehicles? Who has the rights for what part of the technological knowledge that underlies this competence? Second, the underlying knowledge may be sticky in that it is too costly to transfer. Because of the tacit nature of the data, one may need to observe the seller over long periods in order to learn. This may be too complex and expensive.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

Loss of Purpose

If your organization is ploughing on regardless of an agreed direction, beware. It is amazing how many organizations are unable to articulate what their core purpose is with any crispness and in a way that differentiates them from their competition. When you come across an organization that can, the difference is amazing.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Openness to Criticism

Criticism of any decision not only reflects on the actual appropriateness of the decision itself, but also on the decision-maker as well. When making a difficult decision, it is very  tempting to quickly move past it in order to avoid the questions and doubts the disapproval causes. However, the failure to adequately engage the objection becomes its own ethical dilemma with costs to both the individual and the organization when the ethical dimension is ignored. Openness to the criticism and the lessons it contains can be a key indication that the professional is actively integrating ethics and value reflection into his or her professional life.

When one’s decisions are criticized, one needs practical tools and processes to effectively learn from the reproach and to engage the ethical issues the disapproval presents. there are four fundamental steps in such examination described per herebelow:

1. Accept the discomfort of the criticism and honestly confront the temptation to ignore it. An important incentive for this honest self-reflection is an understanding of the negative consequences of ignoring the ethics of one’s decisions and their consequences.
2. Identify personal core values, listing them and examining them in light of the criticism being encountered.
3. Cultivate openness to the ethical dimension of the business life and of business decisions. The role of the moral imagination and reflection will be examined.
4. The need for practical tools to identify and audit the core values at work in the decision-making process will be reviewed.

These elements will enable the professional to effectively engage the ethical dimension of decisions and their aftermath. Openness to criticism, developing the moral imagination, having practical tools for ethical decision-making, and understanding the need to integrate one’s values into business goals, perspectives, and decisions are fundamental ingredients in integrating both vision and reality.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Organizing

Rarely are individuals in an organization able to achieve common goals without some form of structure. Organizing is the structuring of resources and activities to accomplish objectives in an efficient and effective manner. Managers organize by reviewing plans and determining what activities are necessary to implement them; then, they divide the work into small units and assign it to specific individuals, groups, or departments. As companies reorganize for greater efficiency, more often than not, they are organizing work into teams to handle core processes such as new product development instead of organizing around traditional departments such as marketing and production.

Organizing is important for several reasons. It helps create synergy, whereby the effect of a whole system equals more than that of its parts. It also establishes lines of authority, improves communication, helps avoid the duplication of resources, and can improve competitiveness by speeding up decision making.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Designing an Operations Strategy

A business strategy gives the aims of your whole business. Each of the core functions without the business has its own functional strategy. Operations are the activities which are directly concerned with making a product, and the related long-term decisions form the operations strategy.

The operations strategy gives the link between more abstract business plans and final products. The business strategy describes general aims, while the operations strategy looks at the products and processes which will achieve these.

The operations strategy is concerned with matching what the organization is good at with what the customer wants. It answers questions like:

• What type of products do we make?
• How wide a range of products do we offer?
• What types of process do we use?
• What technology do we use?
• How do we maintain high quality?
• What geographical areas do we work in?
• How can we plan capacity and get economies of scale?

Other core functions have their own strategies, these must be coordinated to contribute to the overall business strategy. An operations strategy of mass production, for example, must have an associated marketing strategy of mass sales, and a finance strategy of heavy capital investment.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Great Managers: Ask yourself six Questions

Great Managers know that the core of a strong and vibrant workplace can be found in the six questions:

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?
5. Does my superior, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

Securing 5’s to these questions is one of your most important responsibilities. And as many managers discover, getting all 5’s from your employees is far from easy. To secure 5’s to all of the questions you have to reconcile responsibilities that, at first sight, appear contradictory. You have to be able to set consistent expectations for all your people yet at the same time treat each person differently. You have to be able to make each person feel as though he is in a role that uses his talents, while simultaneously challenging him to grow. You have to care about each person, praise each person, and, if necessary, terminate a person you have cared about and praised.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Virtual Corporation

As more and more companies are outsourcing various organizational functions and are paring together down to their core competencies, they might not be able to perform all the tasks required to complete a project. However, they certainly can perform their own highly specialized part of it very well. Now, if you put together several organizations whose competencies compliment each other and have them work together on a special project, you’d have a very strong group of collaborators. This is the idea behind an organizational arrangement that is growing in popularity—the virtual corporation. A virtual corporation is highly flexible, temporary organization formed by a group of companies that join forces to exploit a specific opportunity.

Technologies are changing so rapidly and skills are becoming so specialized these days that no one company can do everything by itself. And so, they join forces temporarily to form virtual corporations—not permanent organizations but temporary ones without their own offices or organizational charts. Although virtual corporations are not yet common, experts expect them to grow in popularity in the years ahead.

My Coultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Lectures, Line of Sight

Rationale for Innovation

Understanding the rationale for an innovation consists of determining just what the components (and the core concepts underlying them) that go into the product are, and how they are linked together to deliver the new low-cost or differentiated features to consumers. For a firm facing an innovation, understanding the rationale behind it may involve asking the question: can the new mousetrap be built using the new knowledge?

When the idea of building an electronic cash register first surfaced in 1960s, the question was: can a firm actually build a cash register using transistors instead of the gears, levers, ratchets, and motors that have been used all these years? How do transistors work, and how does linking them result in calculations? Would such a register actually get people through a supermarket line faster than existing ones? What will it take to build and deliver the new product to customers?  What kind of service do customers want?

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Lectures, Line of Sight

Simple Language, Smart Thinking

If you know the difference between skills, knowledge, and talents, you can use these terms to throw light on all the other words used to describe human behavior—words like “competencies,” “habits,” “attitude,” and “drive.” At present many of us assume that they all mean virtually the same thing. We use phrases like “inter-personal skills,” “skill set,” “work habits,” or “core competencies” so naturally that we rarely question their true meaning.

This isn’t just careless language. It’s careless thinking, it leads managers astray. It leads them to waste precious time, effort, and  money trying, with the best of intentions, to train characteristics that are fundamentally untrainable.

So let’s look more closely at competencies, habits, attitude, and drive. Which of these are skills, or knowledge, and therefore can be changed in a person? And which are talents and therefore cannot?

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight