When I registered to the event in early February, I contemplated the decision to go, as I hadn’t had really looked hard into Mr. Peters’ material (shame on me) before and the attendance fee was fairly large. During the week, I listened through Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age, Peters’ latest ground-breaking book, to get acquainted with his ideas and thinking, preparing myself for Friday. By 10 o’clock Friday morning, I knew that I’d made the right investment and the decision to attend.

Mr. Peters delivered a stunning performance that hit home on so many levels. First of all, his facts, opinions and insights validated a lot of my own thinking about business and especially the necessity of becoming a true PSF (Professional Service Firm) in order to survive in the current and coming times. Then he convinced me of the “new” markets – women and adults over 50+ years. And I think I knew a great deal more about women after the seminar though I’ve been married for eight years. It’s funny, didn’t expect to learn things about my significant other from an American business consultant.

Among the topics were also some 25 or so ideas on how to differentiate oneself from competition, 44 secrets and clever strategies for dealing with the recession and much much more.

Tom also went ahead and dispelled (or at least tried to) the myth that Finland and other smaller countries are too small markets and have too few people to be worth of anything else than perhaps a laboratory for a business idea, model, new product or service. The audience was told to get the chip off the shoulder and get to work, try a gazillion things and pursue the excellence. Little was the (new) BIG in many of his insights and ideas.

Later on, as the slides of the presentation came online, I downloaded the deck and went through the whole thing again, whopping 308 slides. And I found even more valuable content as Tom did skip a few sections here and there, presumably because of time constraints.

Here are a few of the best insights or quotes that Tom had in his deck:

Remember to tuck the shower curtain inside the bathtub.

Quote from Conrad Hilton. This one might need a bit explanation. Check out the slides and if you can figure this one out, you’ll be amazed by the insight.

Execution IS strategy.

Great one by Tom’s old boss, Fred Malek.

Forget China, India and the Internet: Economic Growth Is Driven By WOMEN

This came along the way of discovering the “new” market. A headline in Economist.

We have a ’strategic plan.’ It’s called doing things

Funny and down to earth quote from Herb Kelleher, co-founder of Southwest Airlines. Check out the slide deck for more, you won’t be disappointed.

Tom said right before lunch that if six people out of the audience took his ideas and thinking seriously, his trip across two ponds – Atlantic and Gulf of Finland – was worth it. Well, count me along those six (or more) people. As Jim Rohn has said, one has to go to many (training) events and seminars, and every once in a while one of them will turn out to be life-changing. This Friday in late March, 2009 went on that short list.

Thank you, Tom!

However, I’ve pulled out the year 2005 issues of Harvard Business Review for coffee table reading material and I’m anxious to finish my Sun Tzu series so I’ll be back as soon as I can.

Meanwhile, you might want to check some coverage on Twitter and its adoption in Nordic countries.

Twitter catches up to Digg (in web site traffic)

European companies don’t like Twitter. Should they?

Twitter hitting mainstream in Sweden

Finnish companies using Twitter

Should Finnish companies use Twitter?(poll)

I have recently often picked up the book on hardball business strategies as I’ve researched for my Sun Tzu series. In the latest stratagem piece I talked about two hardball strategies. In the book sandwiched (literally) between them was another interesting hardball strategy, Take It and Make It Your Own.

Take It and Make It Your Own

Take It and Make It Your Own means that you recognize the value of an existing idea, practice or business model and make it your own, improve and strengthen the concept and run with it. If you are a hardball player, you are always on the lookout for ideas that you can adopt or adapt to your own business.

This means that you are an avid student of trade practices, pricing schemes, technologies, marketing and selling methods, customer service programs and other facets of business that are better than your own not just in your own industry and among competitors, but across industries and markets. Often new radical business innovations in a particular market are actually imported and adapted from another industry where they have been staple practice for years or even decades.

Meanwhile in the real world, Kisko Labs has gotten involved in two business development projects where we would be playing our own version of this hardball strategy with existing players in the market should the projects go forward as anticipated and planned. Here’s a couple of tips from the book and a few personal thoughts how to adapt an idea to your business and make it flourish.

Practices and pitfalls

Stalk and Lachenauer offer four points in their book on how to go about adapting an idea from a competitor of a company in a different industry.

Copy only when it will enable you to gain leadership^[1]
If you go ahead and adapt an idea, a practice or a business model from your competition, you must use the borrowed idea to become a leader in the market, especially when compared to the competitor from whom you adapted the idea. You need to gain a distinctive competitive advantage from the idea to become the new number one or you need to redefine the market and your position in it in a way that you’ll be seen as the top dog. It’s not worth copying if all you get is a second or third place and you are seen as a knock-off who couldn’t even get it right.

Borrow when it will facilitate the indirect attack^[2]
Try to avoid direct competition with the company you adapted the idea from. Instead, aim for an indirect attack so that you are not necessarily seen as a major threat to your competitors but as another player in the market. Better yet, your competition might not think of you as a direct competitor to them and might even ignore you until it’s too late. Case in point, Ricoh and the copier market. Ricoh copied Xerox’s machine but sold them mainly to small businesses through small distributors. Xerox thought the big machines and service orientation would give them competitive advantage, but when the leases on Xerox’s machines ended, they lost a lot of business to Ricoh.

Copy completely, commit fully^[3]
The most common way to go astray is to copy an idea or a model incompletely and not fully commit to it. Southwest Airlines is often imitated but never truly successfully replicated. Many airlines have tried to answer to Southwest’s winning formula but have failed miserably because they have adapted the face of Southwest but failed to transplant the heart of its business model.

Make the copy your own^[4]
Hardball competitors seize on a good idea when they see one and then they add something to the model – improve, adapt or interpret it. It is possibly to completely copy a successful model and sprinkle your own flavor on the top to give your version its own distinct identity.

Insights from the trenches

Here are a couple of thoughts and ideas I’ve found true, valuable and inspirational when working on creating new business for ourselves at Kisko Labs and our customers, especially in the realm of adapting proven good ideas from others – the competitors in the market or players in other industries.

You need to value innovate
Introducing more-of-the-same in a different package won’t entice the market to suddenly start buying from you instead of established players. As the authors said, you have to make the copy your own and introduce distinctive characteristics to make your product or service stand out from the pack. Offer your customers a huge leap in value, and that will give rise to new markets.

Make the competition irrelevant
Value innovation helps you to redefine the market you have entered and make the competition more or less irrelevant. Redefining the market and capturing the leadership position in it will push your competitors to react and make them to respond to the new relevant market leader, you.

Use inexperience as your advantage
Being a novice or a newcomer isn’t always bad at all. In fact, it may be an advantage as the established practice and the-ways-it’s-always-been-done aren’t hindering you and won’t prevent you from doing even the radical innovations in business models or practices. Also, chances are that you won’t have the same resource, capacity, personnel or capital burden that the existing players or implementors of an idea have. This enables you to pull off game-changing innovation moves.

Jump to the next curve
Don’t get stuck battling in the same curve and ballpark as the competition. Don’t try lower the price by 5% or 10%, redefine the product or the service altogether. As Guy Kawasaki says, jump to the next curve.

Question of the day: Have you used this hardball strategy and if you have, what were your experiences and takeaways from using it? Leave the answer as a comment.

The 737 on the runway image courtesy of Creative Commons and Flickr user brentdanley

References

1. Stalk, Lachenauer, Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win, p. 82
2. Ibid., p. 83
3. Ibid., p. 83
4. Ibid., p. 84

I’m doing an exception from one stratagem per post convention. I wanted to stick with it, but the more I researched and contemplated about Surprise and Deception & deceit, the more it made sense to combine them into a single article.

Stratagems #4 and #5: Surprise, deception and deceit

Boy, do these stratagems ever get a lot of love from Sun Tzu. Where to start, right? The Art of War is full of strategies and insights that include elements of surprise, deception and deceit. From doing battle and planning a siege to maneuvering armies, surprise and deception appear everywhere in Sun Tzu’s thinking.

To Sun Tzu, all warfare is based on deception:

A military operation involves deception. Even though you are competent, appear to be incompetent. Though effective, appear to be ineffective.^[1]

When you are going to attack nearby, make it look as if you are going to go a long way; when you are going to attack far away, make it look as if you are going just a short distance.^[2]

Draw them in with the prospect of gain, take them by confusion.^[3] — Sun Tzu

A wise military leadership understands the value of intelligence and uses disinformation campaigns to deceive the enemy.

Dead spies transmit false intelligence to enemy spies.^[4] — Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu emphasises surprise by advising on not divulging the formation of one’s forces and tactics beforehand and attacking when they are unprepared.

Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.^[5]

The formation and procedure used by the military should not be divulged beforehand.^[6]

Attack when they are unprepared, make your move when they do not expect it.^[7] — Sun Tzu

How does one utilize surprise to the point that opponent is in constant reactive mode? One has to fight according to the enemy, with rapid OODA loop cycle, constantly reorienting and acting faster than the opponent. Therefore you can be making one, two, three or five decisions and take necessary actions on those decisions while your opponent is responding to your first move.

Surprise is the essence of victory. In battle, confrontation is done directly, victory is gained by surprise^[8].

All right, we’ve hopefully established that surprise and deception are important elements of the battle when the bullets fly for real. How about when we compete for monetary units and markets?

Businesses hate surprises

I’m telling you a little secret: people don’t like surprises. Sure, they might tell you that they do like them, but the ones they like are the ones they want. The surprises people do not want are called problems or challenges^[9]. Businesses hate them, because a surprise immediately represents a challenge, a call to action or a need for change to their existing business model, offering, market situation.

And since businesses are run by people, people hate surprises. It’s one thing being surprised on a personal level – let’s say your significant other suddenly fells ill and you can’t make the weekend trip – and completely another being surprised on corporate level, where entire staff’s economic livelihood might be jeopardized when competitors suddenly merge to create even larger rival and threat to your business. If the personal level situation just irritates you, the other one might strike a fear of losing the job to the whole company, thus hampering company performance or maybe even paralyzing the personnel.

Of course, it is a completely different ballgame and mindset when you are the one business surprising the competition and the markets. You’ll love being on introducing game-changing surprises to the economic battlefield because it positions you advantageously compared to your competition.

Ethical deception and deceit in business

Wow, quite a loaded headline: ethical deception and deceit in business. Is there such a concept as ethical deception and deceit? Everybody can probably think illegal and unethical deception tactics, recently unearthed the world-famous Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme comes quickly to my mind as an example.

However, I think that words ethical and deception can co-exist together in a context, kind of. When I talk about ethical deception in business, what I mean is that a business keeps its cards close together its chest, its appearance to competitors seem to be different what it really is or what it wants and its actions seem like trivial ones until it’s too late for the competitors to know what hit them.

Example uses of this stratagem can be found in an excellent book Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win by George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer. The authors talk about two hardball strategies called Threaten Your Competitor’s Profit Sanctuaries^[10] and Enticing Your Competitor To Retreat^[11]. The first one means that one determines its competitor’s areas of business that generate the largest profits for the competitor and attacks those areas and key accounts with aggressive pricing, expanded product or service offerings, or combination of these. The intent is to choke the cashflow of the competitor and therefore forcing a change in competitor’s practices on perhaps one’s own profit sanctuaries.

Japanese car manufacturers play hardball with the Big Three

An example shown in the book described how Japanese automakers attacked the Big Three automakers’ (GM, Chrysler, Ford) profit sanctuary – minivans, light trucks and SUVs. By the late 1990s, the Big Three sold more light trucks in North America than they did cars. These light trucks could bring in $10.000 or more in profits per vehicle sold. However, in early 2000s, this profit sanctuary was almost completely financing the rest of the companies as the other business units were eating the profits.

With their superior knowledge of costs and production systems producing high quality cars, Japanese automakers such as Toyota and Honda began an onslaught by offering their vehicles on very competitive prices while high quality assured higher resale value of the vehicles. Gradually over time they gained market share and began on chipping away the profits the Big Three was and had been enjoying for quite some time. This obviously hit hard on the Big Three and threatened to choke the cashflow of the companies. They tried to fight back with the same weapons that they were successfully attacked with, lower prices and increased quality. But feeble was their attempt to strike back as they weren’t able to recapture the lost market share and profits that the competitors had significantly pushed down with their actions.

In retrospective, this is probably one of the main reasons why the car companies have now been pleading for bailout from the U.S. Congress. Toyota, Honda and Nissan have indirectly controlled the cash faucets of the Big Three and forced them to eat away their capital in the fierce fight to retain the positions in the market. Now that the vaults are empty, they’re desperately looking for American taxpayers to bail them out for bad business practices.

But why did Japanese automakers attack this profit sanctuary, other than choking the cashflow? Well, they had free reign in lower end spectrum of the vehicle market. They could quietly continuously innovate and take over more market share as the Big Three were keeping their smaller car lines in the market mostly just to meet U.S. regulations of corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) for their whole product line. The vehicles in profit sanctuary were gas guzzlers and smaller, fuel-efficient cars were offsetting fuel-wise inefficient product lines. The Big Three were also too busy trying to counter the punches in high-end market to pay attention to the low-end and changing business and regulatory environment – poor Observation and Orientation. To Toyota, Honda and Nissan, the attack on profit sanctuary was a Nebenpunkt while the takeover of low-end market and choking the cashflow were the Schwerpunkt of the hardball strategy.

Rounding out the attack with a push to retreat

Enticing Your Competitor To Retreat can be seen as both a counter-move to the threat or attack on profit sanctuaries or a complementary move to one’s own attack. In this strategy, one wants to lure a competitor out of a profitable business area into a different, less important and profitable one by leveraging the superior knowledge of one’s business activities.

Well, this is exactly what Japanese automakers did in the low-end market while attacking the profit sanctuary of the Big Three. With relentless focus on lowering the production costs and pushing the quality even higher, Toyota and the others made the Big Three to gradually abandon one by one all low-end and eventually middle market segments by making it more attractive and profitable to fight on the high-end market. Once a credible competitive threat was out of each market and only the fuel regulation window dressings remained, Toyota and the others could focus on capturing the market which would be nicely profitable when a certain high volume had been reached.

Gradually, the quality of Japanese vehicles have raised the demands and expectations of customers. Customers got accustomed to high quality cars that were fuel-efficient and affordable. That’s why sales numbers for the Big Three have been dropping like a rock when customers have been rejecting the vehicles that Detroit is pushing out of its factories. Adding to the insult was the “Great Speculation of the Oil Market”, the price hike that from 2006 to 2008 took the price of oil to some $150 per barrel and gas prices to over $4 a gallon at the pump. American vehicles had lousy fuel economy in every class while Japanese automakers could brag and boast with their energy-efficient vehicles such as Toyota Prius, capturing ever more market share.

Epilogue

Combining hardball strategies such as Threaten Your Competitor’s Profit Sanctuaries and Enticing Your Competitor To Retreat in deceptive manner can lead to devastating effects on competition as this Japanese automakers vs. the Big Three example shows. While these strategies are not easy to pull off as they require deep knowledge of the business activities and their costs, you can always start looking into using them by at least identifying the profit sanctuaries for both your business and most important competitors. Once you’ve done that, I’m sure you already have a leg-up on the competition and can start plotting ways to take advantage of these strategies.

Next up, formlessness and being unfathomable.

References

1. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, p. 67
2. Ibid., p. 68
3. Ibid., p. 69
4. Ibid., p. 219
5. Ibid., p. 137
6. Ibid., p. 74
7. Ibid., p. 74
8. Ibid., p. 124
9. Anthony Robbins, TED talk at TED 2006
10. George Stalk, Rob Lachenauer, Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win, p. 55
11. Ibid., p. 87

Of course, I’m talking about screen name squatters, people who reserve brand names, real names, anything more valuable than their own sorry behinds.

Victims of Twitter screen name squatting include Britney Spears (although she has “reclaimed” britneyspears), Shaquille O’Neal (nowadays tweets as THE_REAL_SHAQ), Google and Apple.

Today I was working on a new business venture idea and compiled a short-list of possible partners that I’d like to work on this idea should I ever go forward with it. As I’ve been using Twitter quite a bit recently, I decided to check whether this brand had a presence on Twitter, just for kicks.

I was shocked to find out the the brand name and its variation had already been reserved as screen names. The reason I was a bit shocked was that this brand isn’t quite a mainstream brand. Sure, a well-known one but still relatively a niche brand I would say. And when I mined this brand category further down, I discovered that some of the way more obscure brands than this first one were also taken.

Well, as this kind of behaviour is too well known in the domain name circles, I already knew what the picture would look like for the big boys. Intrigued, I pulled out a list of best global brands for 2008 and started checking whether the companies on the list had a presence on Twitter. The results were exactly like I thought they would be, but they also contained a surprise.

87 out of 100 best global brands had their immediate brand name (and in some cases, even variations of it) already taken as a screen name by someone else on Twitter. The owners were either squatters, real people or websites and services promoting themselves.

Ten companies had been either wise enough to reserve the screen name in advance, lucky enough to have obscure name that they could get to before the squatters started gathering them or had already sucked up and bought the presence from a squatter.

Two companies (SAP and UBS) didn’t have account pages up at twitter.com/sap and twitter.com/ubs respectively, but the screen names weren’t registrable through Join Twitter form (not that I would’ve personally squatted them). One company (Amazon) has its immediate brand name owned by a geek who runs a service on Twitter that uses Amazon Web Services to retrieve prices of books.

41 out of 87 already reserved screen names were obviously or quite probably reserved and parked by a squatter. Many of them were offering a contact email address either in the profile or in a tweet for a brand owner to contact to if or when one decides to purchase back their brand presence.

While it was expected that squatters had exploited the big brands, I didn’t quite expect that brand name hoarding had already started in medium-sized and niche business categories, too.

Now that businesses are looking more and more into using Twitter, that some have predicted Twitter entering mainstream in 2009 and others arguing why the brands should belong to Twitter, it’s about time to protect your brand names by reserving respective screen names on Twitter, whether you plan on using them or not.

If you’re a Finn, you are in charge of your company’s marketing efforts and would like to learn how to use Twitter in your business, Kisko Labs is hosting a seminar about Twitter in February.

Photo credit: My Brand Exhibition

Olimme velipojan kanssa yhtä mieltä siitä, että arkkitehdillä on markkinointiongelma. Ennakkoluulot arkkitehdin työtä kohtaan ovat kovia: arkkitehdin käyttö suunnittelussa on työlästä ja kallista; suunnitteluprosessi on pitkä, hankala ja läpinäkymätön. Jälkimmäisessä voi olla jotain perääkin, mutta näistä ennakkoluuloista pitäisi päästä eroon tai ne pitäisi käsitellä. Ehkä palvelujakin voisi vähän avata maan matosille, jotta he ymmärtäisivät, mitä norsunluutorneissa tapahtuu.

Helsingin Sanomien toimittaja Samuli Laita kirjoitti maaliskuussa 2006, että omakotitalojen suunnittelun hinta pitäisi julkistaa. Harva omakotitalon rakennuttaja tietää, kuinka paljon suunnittelu maksaa. Arkkitehdit perustelevat omien palvelujensa tarpeellisuutta sillä, kuinka paljon rakennuttaja voi hyvällä suunnittelulla säästää. Kun arkkitehti piirtää tehokkaita neliöitä ja tekee edullisia, mutta laadukkaita ratkaisuja eri puolille rakennusta, arkkitehti maksaa helposti oman  palkkansa.

Kun tämän palkan tai palkkion määrää yrittää tiedustella, sitä vastausta ei juuri koskaan saa, ainakaan heti. Hinnan määrittely on suoralta kädeltä kuulemma ihan mahdotonta, koska jokainen rakennettava talo, tontti ja sopimus on yksilöllinen. Vierailu puolen tusinan arkkitehtitoimiston kotisivuille paljasti, että kukaan ei listaa mitään hintoja missään. Asiakas ei näin ollen alkuun voi turvautua mihinkään muuhun kuin puskaradioon hintahaarukkaa tiedustellessaan.

Laita oli tehnyt tuolloin pientä hintatiedustelua ja saanut selville, että yksilöllisten, mutta tavallisin keinoin toteutettujen talojen pääpiirustukset maksavat 3000 eurosta ylöspäin. Velipoika myönteli, että tähänkin hintaan palveluja varmaan saa, mutta tuomitsi hinnan halvaksi ja epäili sen sisältävän vain osan tarvittavista kuvista ja luvista. Yhdeksi alalla käytettäväksi palkkiomalliksi paljastui 3% osuus rakennuskustannuksista, joka sinällään on paradoksaalinen. Arkkitehti haluaisi mahdollisimman hyvän hinnan suunnittelutyöstä, mutta yrittää tehdä sellaisia ratkaisuja, joilla kokonaiskustannuksia voitaisiin painaa mahdollisimman alas.

Jari Parantainen käsitteli arkkitehtien hintaongelmia omassa blogissaan ja kirjoitti nasevasti:

Riviarkkitehdit myyvät tuntejaan, jotka näyttävät ostajan näkökulmasta aina keskenään samanlaisilta. Yhden arkkitehdin tunti ei erotu toisesta millään olellisella tavalla. Kun kilpailevien myyjien tuotteet ovat identtisiä, ainoaksi keskustelun aiheeksi jää hinta. Ja kun asiakas alkaa keskustella hinnasta, hän ei suinkaan ala pumpata sitä ylös. Päinvastoin, laskun loppusummalla on sen jälkeen vain yksi suunta. Se on etelä.

Näinhän se on. Siksipä asialle pitäisi tehdä jotain. Anteliaana ihmisenä annan näin joulun kunniaksi arkkitehtitoimistoille ilmaisen tuotteistuksen, jota viilaamalla voi ehkä alkaa erottua edukseen muista samaa palvelua halvemmalla myyvistä putiikeista.

Omakotitalon yksilöllinen suunnittelu 149 € per m²

Luit oikein, asiakas maksaisi talon suunnittelusta siihen tulevien neliöiden mukaan. Arkkitehti (ja hänen taustajoukkonsa) vastaisivat talon suunnittelusta alusta loppuun, hoitaisivat kaikki lupa-asiat ja -hakemukset niiltä osin kun ne voidaan tehdä rakennuttajan puolesta, ynnä muut tehtävät, jotka arkkitehdin on talorakennusprojektin onnistumiseksi hoidettava ja joihin hän on paras asiantuntija.

Projektit rakennuttajan kanssa lähtisivät liikkeelle esim. viimeksi ehdottamistani piirustuspajoista, joita voitaisiin pitää muutama suunnittelun edetessä. Kun mielikuva on valmis, ryhdytään työstämään valmiita kuvia. Kun kuvat ovat valmiit, haetaan luvat. Kun luvat ovat takataskussa, arkkitehti voi ehdottaa tai arvioida eri urakoitsijoita ym. toimittajia. Rakentamisen edetessä voisi olla muutama tarkistuspalaveri, jossa katsottaisiin, että mennään oikeaan suuntaan. Lopuksi arkkitehti voi olla mukana lopullisissa tarkastuksissa ym. kiemuroissa.

Uhraamalla hiukan aikaa ja vaivaa tästä prosessista saa työstettyä palvelun, jossa on selkeät vaiheet, toimintatavat, virstanpylväät ja hyväksymiskriteerit. Asiakkaalle tulee selväksi, mitä prosessin aikana tapahtuu, mitä hän saa missäkin vaiheessa ja ennen kaikkea, mitä rakennuksen suunnittelu tulee maksamaan hänelle.

Samaan pakettiin voisi harkita myös koko rakentamisen projektijohtamisen sisällyttämistä, joko lisähinnalla tai ilman. Laita kirjoitti Helsingin Sanomiin, kuinka projektijohtajan palkkaus kannatti. Jos tämä työ ei kuulu arkkitehdille tai ei kiinnosta häntä, hommaan voisi palkata jonkin luotetun vastaavan mestarin.

Pakettiin voisi kuulua esim. seuraavia palveluja:

Rakennuttaja tietää heti suunnittelemansa rakennuksen kustannukset ja pystyy budjetoimaan tämän osaksi rakennuskustannuksia jo haaveilu- ja suunnitteluvaiheissa.

Itse ostajana olisin välittömästi kiinnostunut tällaisesta palvelusta, varsinkin jos saamani palvelut ja tulokset ovat hyvin ja selkeästi kuvattuna.

Velipoika piipahti perjantaina kylässä ollessaan paluumatkalla kertausharjoituksista kohti Oulua, jossa hän opiskelee arkkitehdiksi Oulun yliopistolla. Kahvimukien ääressä virisi keskustelu arkkitehdin työstä ja omakotitalon suunnittelun ostamisesta arkkitehdiltä.

Ollessani lokakuussa Suomen Yrittäjien järjestämällä Johtaminen ja markkinointi -risteilyllä tapasin laivalla erään kokkolalaisen arkkitehdin ja keskustelin hänen kanssaan arkkitehtitoimiston myynti- ja asiakashankintaprosesseista. Hän paljasti, että joistakin töistä – eritoten omakotitalojen suunnittelusta – joutuu kieltäytymään aikataulusyistä, kun asiakkaat ovat “liian myöhään liikkeellä” eli ovat tehneet ostopäätöksen ja odottavat valmiita kuvia ensi viikolle tietämättä, kuinka pitkä prosessi esim. omakotitalon suunnittelu on. Yritimme sitten pohtia keinoja, joilla asiakkaan saisi aikaisemmin ottamaan yhteyttä arkkitehtitoimistoon ja ajoissa mukaan suunnitteluprosessiin.

Otinpa sitten tämän kohtaamisen puheeksi velipojan kanssa ja kyselin, mitä mieltä hän oli tästä. Hän oli arkkitehdin kanssa samaa mieltä siitä, että suunnittelutyöhön kuluvaa aikaa ei juurikaan voi supistaa, eli asiakkaan pitäisi osata ottaa huomioon varsinaisen luomis- sekä laskentatyön ja eri lupaprosessien kesto. Väitin kuitenkin itsepäisesti, että jotain kehitettävää tässä kuviossa on ja rustasin paperille suunnilleen seuraavanlaisen kuvan ajattelun selventämiseksi.

Rooleissa ovat omakotitalon rakentaja ja arkkitehti. Rakentaja käy läpi kolme vaihetta, ennenkuin hankittava talo tai mielikuva siitä on kirkkaana mielessä ja hän on valmis artikuloimaan tarpeensa arkkitehdille. Arkkitehti tämän jälkeen aloittaa suunnittelutyön ensin luonnosten kautta ja työstää sen yhdessä rakentajan kanssa lupakuviin asti. (Tässä vaiheessa täytyy tunnustaa, etten toistaiseksi tiedä arkkitehdin prosesseista juuri mitään, joten jos olet asiasta paremmin perillä, voit rauhassa naureskella tietämättömyydelleni.)

Rakentaja ja arkkitehti olivat kuitenkin kovin kaukana toisistaan prosessin alussa. Rakentaja pyörittelee ajatuksia ja ideoita päässään ilman pallottelukaveria siihen asti kunnes on tehnyt päätöksen rakentamisesta ja ottaa yhteyttä arkkitehtitoimistoon, kun “jonkun pitäis varmaan nää kuvat piirtää tästä mökistä.” Eikö arkkitehti ole rakennusdesignin ja -suunnittelun ammattilainen, jonka kannattaisi pitää rakentajaa kädestä kiinni aina haaveilusta asti? Yritinkin tällä argumentilla tyrkyttää velipojalle seuraavaa kuvaa kurkusta alas.

Ehdotin, että arkkitehti voisi tarjota rakentajalle “piirustuspajoja”, joita rakentaja voisi ostaa omakotitalonsa suunnitteluun haaveilu- ja ideatasolla. Pajan tuloksina olisi iso nippu viiden minuutin luonnoksia talosta, parvekkeista, ikkunanpielistä ynnä muista yksityiskohdista ja ideoista, joita arkkitehti ja rakentaja yhdessä keksivät. Osa näistä luonnoksista päätyy roskakoriin, osa kulkee mukana suunnitteluprosessin ajan, osa jopa päätyy uuden asunnon seinälle muistoksi koko prosessista. Piirustuspajaa voisi myydä ensiaskeleena talon rakentamiseen ja että rakentajan ei tarvitse vielä sitoutua koko projektiin kyseisen arkkitehdin kanssa, vaan hän voi pajan avulla tutustua arkkitehdin tyyliin ja työtapoihin ennen päätöksen tekemistä.

Uskoisin, että tämä voisi olla arkkitehdillekin mukavaa ja hyväkatteista hommaa, varsinkin jos tykkää skissauksesta ja piirtämisestä. Velipoika oli kuitenkin vielä hiukan epäileväinen, että tästä olisi mihinkään. Yritin tolkuttaa, että arkkitehtiopiskelijallekin voisi olla hyvä nakki ja harjoite piirtää ihmisten haaveita paperille 100 EUR tuntihintaan.

Tähän mennessä ensimmäinen kahvipannu oli juotu ja varsinainen palveluinnovaatio (omasta mielestäni tietenkin) alkoi hahmottua. Palataan siihen ensi kerralla.

I’ll be back soon after we resume the normal operations in our household.

If financial state of USA is shrouded with mystery to you, please watch this (30 minutes). After you’ve watched the movie, read this Bloomberg article. It might give you an idea what is or might be coming up in the next six months or so.

Via Robert Paterson

Stratagem #3: Cohesion

Cohesion – it’s an essential ingredient of any successful team, group, unit or formation. Without cohesion, no group of people can effectively and efficiently function and work towards a common goal. Therefore, building and maintaining cohesion is one of the most important tasks of a leader.

Cohesion can have many a form and mean different things. It can mean morale of the troops, trust between the members of a unit and its leader (Einheit), the integrity of a team. A well-disciplined team has strong cohesion, so does a squad with high esprit de corps. As with foreknowledge, it has different levels of detail and the meaning varies from aspect to another.

If a commander can command and control his troops as if commanding a one man, then the troops and the leader have a strong cohesion. And strong cohesion leads to victory as Sun Tzu says, those whose upper and lower ranks have the same desire are victorious^[1]; and if you presume on order, disorder will arise^[2], meaning that when one’s unit is cohesive, it can create artificial disorder amongst the enemy. As I mentioned in the last post about foreknowledge when talking about the five things one must evaluate before crossing the sabres, the leaders and the people must share the way, a common goal or purpose in order to be successful in war.

The Way means inducing the people to have the same aim as the leadership, so that they will share death and share life, without fear of danger. — Sun Tzu^[3]

Morale is one aspect of cohesion. One should attack, when enemy ch’i, or energy flow is low but only if and when one’s own ch’i high^[4]. Good warriors know that the time to fight is when it is easy to prevail; when the capacity of the troops to pull together persistently and consistently in pursuit of a common purpose, the victory, is high; when the troops are well supplied and have received quality training; when the leadership can effectively harness the potential of the troops and use it wisely and not attrite it in the heat of the battle. When troop morale is high, the leaders do not deplete it and the enemy is in position where its morale and energy flow is low (no supplies for last five days, poor or no communication between dispersed units, unable to mobilize and mount any counter-strike, etc.), the cohesive unit is ready to strike and win the battle.

Therefore the victories of good warriors are not noted for cleverness or bravery. Therefore their victories in battle are not flukes. Their victories are not flukes because they position themselves where they will surely win, prevailing over those who have already lost. — Sun Tzu^[5]

Discipline is an another aspect of cohesion. A well-disciplined force does not fear the battle. As it is said, “If soldiers do not practice day to day, on the front lines they will be fearful and hesitant. If generals do not practice day to day, on the front lines they will not know how to adapt.”^[6] When one practices the fundamentals daily, one will be agile, swift, precise and lethal when the battle arrives, and not sloppy, slow and clumsy.

A cohesive team has high esprit de corps, the fighting spirit and pride in their unit. It is not easily distressed by the enemy, the situation on the battleground or the environment as it possesses high morale, its members have mutual trust or Einheit and is well-disciplined with sharp skills and high adaptability, ready for battle.

Cohesive teams and business units

How do we describe such an elite military unit in business world or any other organizational context? Let’s try to examine some of the aspects of cohesion and what high cohesion might mean in each aspect.

Team morale
When morale of a team (eg. software development or sales team) is high, the individuals on the team tend to persistently and consistently support each other in pursuit of a team objective. Team members are more eagerly willing to work together, they feel that their contribution is valuable to the team, the organization and their client or society as a whole, and the team composition appeals to the members.

Trust between leadership and people who make things happen
High trust between leadership and people is built (or destroyed) through common experiences. People trust that the leaders make the right choices and decisions for the well-being of the people and the company. Leaders trust that people buy into their causes and carry out their decisions the right way. All parties have a common outlook towards business problems that the company faces. Leaders feel that they have a good Fingerspitzengefühl or fingertip control at the organizational level.

Integrity inside an organization
Organization with high integrity cares and strives to do the right thing for all stakeholders. Such an organization often aims to be transparent in its actions and motives, and speaks honestly about issues to all stakeholders. Members of the organization don’t drop the ball on issues that are important and carry out their responsibility on all levels of taking care of customers of the organization, whoever they might be.

Disciplined teams
Disciplined teams accept accountability for results. They do not perform sloppy work and pride themselves of delivering great work to the next actor in a process even if they received a sloppy input. They work on correcting the root causes, not the symptoms of a failed or broken process. Disciplined teams often embrace the idea of kaizen, continuous improvement, and strive to eliminate waste from their processes in order to work ever more efficiently.

Teams with high esprit de corps
When the spirit of a team is high, the working environment is usually open and the members feel that the environment is fun to work in. Job security and the business outlook of the company often contribute to the high esprit de corps. During tougher times it’s essential to keep the spirit up so that the company is hitting on all cylinders no matter what the times are.

Epilogue

As we’ve examined cohesion, it is apparent that cohesion of any sized unit, team, group or formation effectively determines how well it performs under any circumstance and is an essential ingredient in team performance.

I did not purposefully give or propose any answers or thoughts on how to boost team morale or develop disciplined business units, because either I do not have the answers on a particular issue or the “right way” depends entirely on the composition of the team, the work culture of an organization and many other factors. Later on, I might elaborate on how we intend to achieve these lofty goals at Kisko Labs and hopefully then give some insights or ideas to think about applying in your own organizations.

Hopefully this gave you some new insights or points of view. I’m myself enjoying these reflections very much as they help me to clarify my own thinking, concepts and ideas.

Tomorrow’s the day of Surprise.

References

1. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, p. 106
2. Ibid., p. 128
3. Ibid., p. 62
4. Frans P.B. Osinga, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, p. 39
5. Sun Tzu, p. 117
6. Ibid., p. 65