Problem-solving

How To Solve the Biggest Problem with Diversity

/ Jeff Hora / Leave a comment

There was an item on the local news the other night that I found fascinating. A number of students at the university campus were holding a rally advocating for a Diversity Center as a gathering place that would acknowledge the diversity of the campus and provide a place and programs that would focus on that aspect of their identity.  Given the cash-strapped condition of higher education, my immediate thought was “re-inaugurate the Student Union as the Student Diversity Center and you’re done!”

As I let this information further settle, I began to wonder about the surface focus that our culture has taken in the intervening years between the concepts of Student Union and Student Diversity, what that says about our culture, and the dangers and opportunities this presents, both for our culture, and then, turning the thought on its side, for business.  Yeah, I have an exciting thought life….

Get the Internet to Work for Your Company

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A question I received this week was, “What is the single most important thing to do so the Internet works best for your company?”

Ask this of 5 consultants and you will likely get about 43 different answers.  That said, I put forth my answer with the caveat that the Internet is so insanely dynamic that things can change rapidly and pretty radically.  OK, then….

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Open the Box – A Fish?!

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Awhile back I was working through a visualization exercise mentioned in Steven Pressfield’s book “Do the Work”. My first post regarding this can be found here and if you search my blog you’ll a number of other visualizations that I’ve found useful using this. Let me summarize what this entails:

  • Imagine a box with a lid. Hold the box in your hand. Now open it.
  • What’s inside?
  • It might be a frog, a silk scarf, a gold coin of Persia.
  • But here’s the trick: no matter how many times you open the box, there is always something in it.

Over time I’ve found a golden table, a pressure washer, wood floors and a few others.

I hadn’t exercised my imagination in this way for a while, so I decided to give it a go and opened the box afresh. Today I found……a fish.
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Reliability and Finding the Right Expert for Your Business

/ Jeff Hora / 1 Comment

During a fruitful first meeting with a new colleague and collaborator this week, she mentioned something that really disturbed me.  She has a very healthy graphic design and publishing business and works with a broad array of customers.  She focuses on what she does very well and gives referrals, like any good business, to other businesses that she works with and trusts. However, in a couple of instances she has had to give referrals to customers for solopreneurs she didn’t know as well, particularly in the digital and social media marketing areas.

Sadly, both she and her customers “got bitten.” Although I haven’t gotten the complete story, apparently the solo businesses gladly took the referrals, promised the moon, seriously under-delivered and then disappeared. My colleague looked bad and her customers had a less than wonderful experience, as well as losing money and time.

Wow.  Just Wow….

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Now What?!

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Every business hits this wall at some time.

Whether your just starting out, ALMOST to profitability, have a “going concern” or are well-established, sooner or later something either organic (like growth of your customer base) or externally realized (your top salesperson and top delivery person get married and move out of the state), “Now What?!” happens to you.

How do you respond?

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What am I part of?

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Community
I use a lot of different tools in my work every day, as I’m sure you do. Like many computer-bound professionals, I use Microsoft Office apps like Outlook, Word, Powerpoint, and Excel (although I have had a hard time
getting used to viewing Excel more as a tool and less as an adversary, but that’s another story…). I use more than one Internet browser, since each provides different kinds of efficiencies. I use a to-do list app, a social media monitoring tool and a couple of analytics tools, and I use Evernote for all my note-taking and snippet needs…oh, and Windows Media Player for tunes (as a former pro musician, music helps me focus).

As a user of each of these, am I part of a community of experience for each of them?  Well, kind of.

Do I think of myself as a REAL card-carrying Member of these communities of experience (whatever that is….)? Not so much…until I need help or want to try something different with any of the tools.  Then I search diligently for where the associated community hangs out online and look for some guidance.

No one I know has the time to  play around with tools and services to force something. We all have timelines and milestones, and most of us want to go home at 5 PM. If someone else has done it first and better, I want to find out how they did it and model that behavior….not ‘hunt-and-peck’ around it until, hopefully, eventually, maybe I stumble across the right way to do it.

Um…..no.

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Disruption, recovery and space

/ Jeff Hora / 1 Comment

While completing my Masters degree I was vicariously introduced to Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School and his many works (a sample) concerning disruptive innovation.   Greatly interesting stuff and

Disruption

Disruption (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

required reading for anyone in business or those who are creative and wish to understand the business world’s take on how this is perceived and understood, as well as the potential effects thereof.

That said, disruption and innovation as buzzwords have become less exciting through overuse and misunderstanding by some technologists and businesses, particularly as they apply to their organizations.  While, as Bill Gates has said, today’s business goes “at the speed of thought”, and agility is critical, there seems to be a lack of understanding concerning the fragility of organizations consisting of people executing on previous editions of goals, commitments, hierarchies and business models.  There are degrees of change that can be accomplished that help alter the direction of a business, a ‘mid-course correction’ on company strategy, if you will.  There are also methods and timings of rolling out these changes, or more radical degrees or types of change that will break an organization.
When considering disruptive change within a company, several areas should be considered. Along side the change, whether to strategy, execution or model, leadership should realistically assess:
(A) How long has it been since the last disruptive change to the organization?
(B) How long it will take to affect the change completely?
(C) How long will the ‘after change stabilization’ take?
(D) How much lost productivity can the organization withstand while the stabilization takes place and the company can begin executing effectively on the new direction?
(E) How clearly do the members of the organization understand the reasoning driving the disruption and can they clearly see the value of the strategy?
(F) What is the degree of ambiguity this will create for all interested parties – customers, partners, shareholders, communities…..everyone….and what is required to manage it through the disruption?

Comfortable with Ambiguity?

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English: Diagram of Schrodinger's cat theory. ...

English: Diagram of Schrodinger’s cat theory. Roughly based on Image:Schroedingerscat3.jpg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Acceptance of ambiguity is a by-word in corporate America today, if job descriptions are any indication. Not just acceptance but whole-hearted embrace seems to be the price of admission.  I find this call interesting, if only because of its own ambiguous nature.

A bit of research into the history of the word yields the Latin ambiguus, meaning “moving from side to side” or “of doubtful nature”. Yet, while demanding a comfort level with uncertainty, we are also asked to drive clarity, provide forecasts, deliver cohesive plans, and prove ROI on all the above.  No small task if the very nature of life, let alone business, is unstable.

It occurred to me that there is a dual view to take in considering ambiguity. One is by science and the other by faith.

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Fail and Win

/ Jeff Hora / 3 Comments
Wattenberg chess visualization 050421

Image via Wikipedia

I have been thinking about a post by Tac Anderson on his NewCommBiz blog about making mistakes, crisis-based decision making and how we learn.  It specifically got me thinking about organizations that learn and those that don’t really, or at least not very well (or easily).

Things move terribly fast in today’s marketplace and the halls of business. We blame it on the Internet, on the 24-hour news cycle, on our growing propensity for being “always on and connected” and on “everyone else.”  There have been countless barrels of ink spilled on the importance of failure for learning, both as individuals and organizations.  Even just thinking about how you learn personally will confront you with the first attempt at doing something, assessing how well that went, tweaking, trying again, etc.

So why do we not get it?  I’m not saying we drive for failure (although that seems to be the direction of some I’ve noticed….), but, short of life-and-death, why do we not accept that failing is at least as important as not failing?

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Movin’ on up…

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Wheelbarrow

Image by wayne’s eye view via Flickr

My Dad had two primary refuges from work and my brother and me.  In the winter it was his shop in the garage and in the summer it was the yard and the garden.  He had apparently inherited the ability to grow almost anything from my grandmother.  She could take a fallen, brown leaf from a plant and nurture it into full health in the space of a year or two…..amazing.

One of the things I used to kid him about was his penchant for regularly moving shrubs, bushes and sometimes trees from one spot to another around our yard.  We used to joke that he was never happy with where God put them and was trying to improve the arrangement.  The moved item always seemed to thrive anew, regardless of where he planted it.  Now I see what he was doing in a different light.

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