ORS – How Open to Random are we? How do we filter out the nirvana of progress and growth ?

Acknowledgements
Ecademy acknowledgements firstly to James Knight, who brings us the High Colours approach to understanding each other, and Penny Power, who yet again, through well observed and understood pragmatism and analysis, shows us where we are heading in the 21st century, and why we can be confident that this is the right direction.

Information Tsunami
One of the biggest problems of today is the tsunami of information we have to deal with on a daily basis. Thousands of contacts, millions of messages, many different formats and ways to communicate with others and filter or receive incoming information.

Growth Through Random Contact
Ironically, it is proven in research that Random contact helps us grow more than any other factor, but how can we find the nirvana of progress amongst the daily snow blizzard that we usually encounter ?

Choosing Our Way Forward
There are many web-based tools now available to us, a veritable snow storm of developers bringing products to market that might help us all develop, grow, focus our product offerings, find and connect with our willing audiences and colleagues, be the next big online community or visibility tool, or more prosaically help us run our businesses effectively, and ideally financially soundly.

How to choose amongst them ? All of us have an incomplete picture of what is out there, and product developers initially have little idea of our personal preferences, strengths and weaknesses. Some do not yet have the soft skills it takes to find out, and match product to business need ! And most of us object to lengthy form filling unless we have a strong understanding of the benefits that might be derived.

There are some factors to consider here, internally and externally.

Knowing & Sharing What We Want
As “customers”, how well do we know our own preferences ? It’s often only in communication with others and focusing on key areas that we learn about our own strengths and weaknesses.

And we have to be very Open with ourselves, and importantly others, if we are to move forward quickly, rather than laboriously trying to reinvent the wheel ourselves.

Suppliers Understanding Customer Requirements
Secondly, how much time and skill do others spend really understanding where we are at any given moment. Our very specific needs can well determine whether one product suits us better than another at any given point in time, and may change in a matter of months depending on which direction we take.

Personal Relationships are Still Key
It is therefore the personal factor that often determines our view of where we need to go next, and what Random contact will help us to the next level. Once we know someone we respect and admire, and they continue to listen and be responsive to our needs, then we take their contribution very seriously, and may well act on their recommendation.

Back to ORS for a moment, there is of course an anti-Random element of Selection in this approach. Whenever we apply a filter, be that human or machine based, we exclude some information that could have helped us move forward. But as humans we have to find ways to filter information successfully, because we cannot cope with the daily deluge that is in front of us. The trick, then, is to find the filters that work best for each of us, even as individuals with very different aims and priorities.

One other thing here, and here is a new suggestion.

Should We Switch Focus to “Buying” or “Sharing” ?
Whilst the significant majority of us concentrate solely on “selling” our wares, a few realise that perhaps advertising our needs and wants is a different way of moving forward. It is certainly being Open, and a good way to practice being so. It provides practice thinking about our own needs, instead of constantly thinking and fretting about “needing more sales”.

Something else we need to be Open about is that our “customers” or we ourselves may wish to work on a revenue sharing basis. If we are Open enough to new ways to earn and share income, we close fewer doors on ourselves, and expand the chance that Random contacts can be rewarding for both parties.

To summarise this aspect then, personal connections currently seem still to be the best way to navigate a way forwards in the maelstrom of information and market knowledge we face every day. Perhaps our contacts are our first and trusted port of call to point us to the information filtering tools we need.

Our Personal Buying Profiles
But we also have a responsibility ourselves to be open about our needs, and to generate development activity in our communities.

Perhaps we should ask ourselves whether it is better to have consultants, hopefully social network friends, contacting us about things that can genuinely help us move forward, or continue suppressing our needs profile to perpetuate the mass sales and spam campaigns that leave us cold, and have little or no personal interest.

Is this “revealing of needs” the next big change in the way we do business with each other ? Only time will tell ! Market places already exist, but leadership is often still needed to show the benefit of revealing our needs as well as the daily sales campaign.

Perhaps here on Ecademy there are community leaders who are interested in this, and have experience that perhaps the best way to deliver services is in fact to partake of some. Maybe these leaders might explore this with us Openly. In time it would be great to see some analysis and statistics on whether such behaviour makes us more Open, and helps us generate real business through the Know, Like, Follow path. The acid test long term will be whether Ecademy as a wide-based forum promotes this through web-based function and motivational campaigns.

I look forward to seeing if or how this develops, and welcome your contributions.

Regards,

Peter Jones
Blue Oyster Product Development

ORS – The Battle to Convince

The ORS debate
There is considerable debate taking place at the moment, about a concept called Open Random & Supportive, or ORS for short. It appears there is also some frustration that small businesses are not quite getting the idea, and gearing up their loins to tackle it. We argue here that it is again the age-old story, that people are often frightened of the new, and much more comfortable with the old. But the new is coming, its unstoppable, and we’d better get on the train before it leaves the station without us.

Briefly, it’s proposed that businesses small and large need to be Open to new ideas, Supportive of others, and particularly to cherish Random contact as a means of growing and learning.

This is seen as a natural development from the “old” business model of Closed, Selective & Controlling, or CSC. Closed, in that relatively few new ideas of market entrants are considered viable, Selective in the idea that audiences should be a designated target market, and Controlling in that workers in a large firm have little scope to display creativity in their roles, having far more of a “mechanical” function.

Local economies
There is a particular area of opportunity to look at here: where the small business presents itself to a large business, showing the benefits they can bring each other.

Taking elements individually, being Open is essential to growth for small businesses, and can be an exciting roller coaster. However, too many small businesses are more than happy to keep doing what they have always done. This is despite the spectre of massive competition from China, and of Chinese immigrants who, if they decide to travel en masse would be very well skilled and trained, and prepared to work for a fraction of the cost of indigenous native populations.

Looking at Supportive next, it is also true that collaboration means small businesses can punch considerably above their weight, if they can find a sustainable rewards model that works for all participants.

Both growth and collaboration are necessary for small businesses to overcome the extremely high UK rate of failures in business start-ups, around 90% fail after 2 years, and 99% after 10 years.

The final element is the one which is hardest to pin down. How do we identify and harness benefits from “Random” contacts. This is the word that today’s UK youth use to describe something “weird” or “silly”.

Research though identifies random contacts as providing the greatest growth opportunities. A fact that larger businesses would do well to consider and then factor into day to day operational process. This is also being recognised at the top-level in many UK FTSE companies, as CEOs are brought in from outside the market to provide a “breath of fresh air”, bringing in leading business practice from outside an existing sector, to ensure innovation doesn’t “get stale”. (Shame this didn’t happen in time in the financial investment sector before the dot.com and sub-prime crashes.)

But change is scary, unknown and seemingly risky. And culturally Brits don’t do risk management, only risk avoidance.

Those who decide early on that the “change” arena is too scary are destined not to be agile, and therefore often exclude themselves from big corporate thinking unless they can provide an outsourced function more cost-effectively than an in-house team.

Outsourcing is still an important support activity for SMEs locally, and it is often the case that cost savings can be made using local outsourcing as empire building is still an un-stated element of standard corporate CVs. In fact the corporate ability to devolve function should be much more highly regarded, and there is much value to be had by connecting with suppliers in the local or national community.

Once again, though, UK SMEs lack of creativity means that they are not attacking cost bases with innovative new solutions in the way they need to, so as to compete with the sheer size of workforce and low costs available in India and China.

It seems the evidence that UK SMEs need to change is stacked sky-high, yet that equally inertia and lack of ambition may ensure the high fallout rate continues or accelerates.

Some facts are in order to back the statement of need, which should be the UK fear behind the driver of change:

PWC forecast for purchasing power between 2005 and 2050:

1) China grows from 76% of the US total to 149%
2) India grows from 58% of the US total to 100%

Given how long it took USA to get to its pre-eminent position, these are very quick growth timeframes indeed, and indicate a dramatic shift in focus from the West to the East over the next 40 years.

Personnel Today confirms there could well be a flood of talent available from China and India at significantly lower cost:

1) 800,000 new science and engineering graduates every year
2) Over-supply of graduates in China is already a problem
3) Western salaries carry a considerable premium over Chinese salaries

It also focuses rather on the HR sector and a predicted outsourcing of some 170,000 EU HR staff. Whither it’s readership, and what price strong connections with China and India?

UNESCO reports on page 12, for students enrolling in tertiary or higher level education:

2005: East Asia & Pacific numbers passed N America and W Europe

In these surveys PWC take the view this all means there are enhanced trading opportunities. Personnel Today suggest that unions will re-emerge as global, ready to take on Trans-National companies, and fight for the cause of European workers, who will themselves have to become more flexible, more work-oriented, more prepared to travel.

Neither of these two publications take account of the small business, looking only at the view from the large corporate, niche skill and global perspectives. Can the UK harness it’s creative and design heritage into new products that can challenge and lead the world, and generate the much-needed local economy jobs that will be needed to support the UK population over these years?

Finally, the UK market has had this scare before, when 1970s Japan threatened to take on the world and consume it. And now Japan languishes way down on most growth tables. So what lessons can we learn from the Japan model, and do we always go back to believing that at the end of every boom, there will be a decline of some sort?

There is still much to be understood, and many variable factors that mean that crystal ball gazing is as uncertain as it ever was.

My hunch for the UK is that Brits are always at their best with their backs to the wall. There is one other factor we should add in here, and that is that the UK still has one the deepest penetrations of its education system, with the UNESCO report P14 showing N America & W Europe leading enrolment levels at 71% of the gross eligible population, compared with 26% in Eastern Asia & Pacific. It may be this factor plus traditional grit that might allow the UK to galvanise the wider population at a time of severe economic need. As ever, though, it may take a heck of a leader to show us the way forward this next time around.

8 Steps to Success

Here is a three-minute guide to success. Priceless !

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/70.

Using Complaints to Improve Service

Encounters With Poor Service
I called the UK tax office this morning. Jolly old HMRC. A bit like an early morning visit to a dentist !

The reason ? I had failed (yet again) to get through the impenetrable security levels set up to allow businesses access to submitting their VAT returns online.

The Problem
Now, being very busy, I got rather behind with my VAT returns over many recent months, and wanted to submit returns online to ensure speed, accuracy and support green record keeping. So I have a backlog to get through.

Yet there is a confusion between HMRC, whose website is more usable, and the Government Gateway, who issue different style log ins.

Now the difference in function was not at all clear on the Government Gateway letter. Their website was also dysfunctional when it came to trying to retrieve a forgotten password, or indeed recognising their own User ID !

Getting Help
So of course I had to incur the cost of calling the 0845 number for help. And pleasingly, things then started to improve.

A very helpful young lady explained what I needed to do on the HMRC website, and basically to ignore the Gateway site for the time being. The latter is in fact only useful for changing business registration details, the former is where the actual VAT Returns can be submitted.

Pointing Out the Problems – Providing Feedback
Of course, I had to provide some feedback about how confusing this was for users of the system. How it would be better to have things in one place, clear instructions as to what to do, and hopefully everything working properly. This the nice young lady agreed.

More importantly was the COST incurred to HMRC.

Yes, there is the cost of employing staff to explain what to do with a system that should be self-explanatory and self-governing. We’ve been doing this stuff a good number of years now, and other practitioners don’t seem to have these recurring problems any more.

But what about the failure of HMRC to actually collect tax owed due to the barriers their systems are creating !

One complaint, two unnecessary costs identified !

The Value of a Complaint
So a complaint actually has considerable value in its own right to an organisation, be that public or private sector.

Now for a government service, we citizens don’t have a choice (although if there were one we might prefer it sometimes). Perhaps the UK “Big Society” might actually offer us some better choices, with social enterprises offering us services that are easier to access, and easy to use.

For a private company, failure to address issues can lead to loss of custom, i.e a LOSS OF REVENUE. And once gone, customers may never return. Handling complaints is an essential part of customer service. Handling them well actually means INCREASED customer loyalty. Why ? Because customers get the feeling they are CARED for. Essential in this age where intimacy and personal relations are now so visibly important.

Growth, Change & Competition
For any organisation to grow, it has to embrace change. Scary? Only if we decide to be scared of change! If we genuinely do embrace change, we can see it helps us improve. Where’s the evidence ? Perhaps we can see this most clearly in the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and today the information and communication revolution.

And the complaint is an indicator that change is needed. In life, many life counsellors advise that our personal pain tells us we need to change and grow. Businesses, our babies, are just as organic, and business pain also tells us that the business needs to change and to grow.

Complaints are a Business Friend
So all ethical businesses realise that complaints, customer feedback, customer suggestions, are actually their friend, because it’s an opportunity to improve their business.

How are you encouraging customers to get in touch and ask for improvements ?