There were some really interesting insights to be found at Measurement Camp yesterday: I would recommend keeping an eye on the events for the the next one.
A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend an excellent lecture by Sir Terry Leahy, the CEO of Tesco, at the Saïd Business School. Amoung his many observations, the one that particularly struck me is the assertion that there are two reasons that Tesco have been able to maintain high profit margins compared to its competitors. These are Moore’s law and though a drive to increase productivity by simpliflying business processes because, he proposed, companies can only make their services better and cheaper by making them simpler.
Inspired by this, I’ve been thinking about how I can take this lesson and apply it to my own work. One things I’ve tried is sketching flow diagrams to capture different aspects of my job, which has been a real revelation. I found that even tasks which should be simple had many steps associated with them and so as I’ve recorded what I’ve done in the past, I’ve immediately been able to spot potential productivity improvements and shortcuts.
There are a few obvious ways forward from my current position, all of which I intend to follow through with: I can share the processes that I have captured with colleagues to turn my experience from being individual to institutional knowledge. Secondly, I can start to automate some of the tasks, either by producing standard forms and templates which I can handle more easily or by writing little programmes to do some of the more tedious actions automatically. However, before I make this investment in time in writing these programmes, seeing the whole process in front of me will allow me to pick off low hanging fruit before deciding whether to tackle the harder parts. In the past, I’ve often found that it’s easy to add some automation but very difficult to make something completely automatic.
On a final note, Sir Terry said that it was a failure to capture processes in this matter that was a major cause of the NHS’s problems with IT. As someone who likes to dive into the technology, the reminder to think strategically was a timely one.
Last week, I was lucky enough to visit Cromford Mill, which is the site of a cotton mill that is considered by many to be the first example of a factory. The site, which unfortunately doesn’t contain any of the original machinery and only half of the original buildings, was brought alive by an excellent guided tour which included a very interesting (and detailed) description of the technological breakthroughs that Richard Arkwright made (and his legal battles to protect and extend his patents), his early life and his career as a businessman. We then went outside to see the buildings: I was very pleased to hear that some of the money for the ongoing restoration of the mill is coming from renting some of the buildings, which were originally designed with lots of windows in order to control the temperature, to local small businesses.
What struck me most about the talk was the fact that, while clearly possessing business acumen by the boat-load (or should that be barge-load as canals were the main way of transporting goods in the 1770’s), Arkwright’s honesty, integrity and concern for the welfare of his workers. Few specific examples of first two were given, but that’s not that surprising given that these two traits are ones that need to be present all the time. More details were given to Arkwright’s kindness to his workers, although very few of the measures he put in place were completely altruistic. For example, if a worker sent word that he or she was ill, then a doctor would be sent, not only to prescribe a cure but also to ensure that the illness was genuine: workers were given half pay when they were sick, not only because that’s “the right thing to do” but also that many of Arkwrights staff were trained in the use of the machinery and it cost money and time to find replacement workers if the ill didn’t return to work. Apart from providing jobs for the local population in the mill at higher rates-of-pay than a typical labourer would get, he also planted many tree and embarked on building programs (many for his own workers) to further create jobs locally. These measures, along with many other such as savings accounts which were introduced by his son, helped to ensure loyalty in an industry in which industrial sabotage was a huge problem, a commodity that still holds it’s value today.
I haven’t done any web analytics for a little while, so I thought I’d ease myself into my research by watching Avinash Kaushik’s video. The author of “Web Analytics: An hour a day” gives a really nice general introduction to web analytics here (see my identi.ca stream for my notes as I went along). I’m not going to do an introductory post on web analytics here: for that the best place seems to be Avinash’s blog. Often when I go to talks and lectures, the most interesting part is the questions, and this again proved to be the case here. The four questions I noted down were (see the video for the answers):
Can you use internal site search to find out what people want?
What tools can you use to analyse open ended responses?
How do you segment customers in demographics groups?
Do you have any advice for doing web analytics on customer support websites?
In my spare time, I enjoying singing in my two choirs Schola Cantorum of Oxford and Wadham College Chapel Choir. Because buying music for a whole choir is very expensive as even if each score is one or two pounds the cost gets multiplied by twenty or thirty, I often find myself singing free scores of out-of-copyright works, mainly from the Choral Public Domain Library. Although better than nothing, the quality is variable, in terms of the accuracy and typography. I have been aware of a program called Lilypond for a while, which outputs, typographically, very good scores so I thought I’d give it a go. Although a little difficult at first, I think the final result was pretty good. What do you think?
Today, I attended a Building a Business lecture by Paul Fisher of Advent Ventures (who blogs at www.thecoffeeshopsofmayfair.com) on raising capital, which was the last Building a Business lecture before the Christmas break. As always, here are the lecturer’s slides:
VC is good for some firms and bad for others
success e.g. Skype
highly disruptive business.
binary proposition
rising market
not a success if
not the right type of business
not the correct risk appetite
you don’t want dilution
the cost of raising money for business are, in order of cost,
cash flow
debt
equity
and the most expensive type of equity is VC
by accepting VC, you are committing yourself to the VC’s risk profile – i.e. high risk.
more and more VC are seeing the attractions of “growth capital” - principally being driven by the recession.
VC’s look for
10x return
scalable business model
an exit within 5 years
a great team
a potential market which is large and high growth
an unfair advantage
a commercial lead
a cracking product
a robust IPR
confidence – in what you want, knowledge of the business.
Business plans aren’t important – back of the envelope will do.
NEVER cold call or cold mail!
Run investor conversations in parallel not in series
Tonight I attended the third lecture of the Building a Business Series, this time on negotiating skills given by Owen Darbishire, the Rhodes Trust University Lecturer in Management Studies at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. I’ve typed up my notes and posted them here, which you can use in addition to the lecturer’s slides:
Escalation of commitment: people are committed to decision in the past, even if objectively it was a bad one
Auctions: winner’s curse
e.g. 3G auctions.
70-75% of acquiring companies loose money in M & A activity.
“Process of potentially opportunistic interaction by which two or more parties, with some apparent conflict, seek to do better through jointly decided action than they could otherwise.”
first think about the “best alternative to negotiated agreement”.
recognise that sometimes an agreement is not possible.
the more information you acquire, the more options you will have and so you will get better results.
think about what your interests are versus a particular position.
use creative solutions: contingent contracts can increase expected value for both parties.
a mythical fixed pie often exists where it need not.
People negotiate around a number – set it to your advantage.
presentation of situation (price labels in used car salesrooms)
“The Manager as Negotiator” by Lax & Sebenius.
“Thinking Strategically” by Dixit & Nalebuff.
“Evolution of Cooperation” by Axelrod.
