Valued-based Management

Valued-based Management seems to be one of those terms that consultants are notorious for coining, but it actually seems to incorporate lots of important concepts and very sensible ideals.

valuebasedmanagement.net is an odd site; odd, in these days, because it contains a huge wealth of information portrayed very basically.  It tries to explain a huge range of approaches, frameworks, ideas from a vast spread of companies — the sheer number of links on the front page is a bit overwhelming.

What can a Physicist bring?

David Potter in this month’s Physics World offers hope for us physicists [19 (8) p42] :

Back in the 19th century, studying classics was seen as good preparation for positions of leadership, but in the modern world I think physics is a wonderful training of the mind. It teaches you to apply rigour to modelling simple, even banal, problems like how an apple falls. That approach is extremely useful in business — in analysing and understanding how markets behave. Business gurus and consultants talk the fashion of the moment, which is often claptrap, so applying greater vigour is valuable. Theoretical physicists known well that out of every 10 ideas they have, nine are nonsense, even if they seem beautiful.

I hope to collect some more titbits like that over the next few weeks.

Impressions of Entrepreneurship

I was reminded on the Enviro-Entrepreneurship Summer School that I recently attended of Wilde’s Impressions of America where he claims:

“The exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.”

Remarkably, this is not the only insight of his that could arguably be truer today as in 1882:

“There is a good deal of beauty to be seen in them now and then, but only where the American has not attempted to create it.”

“One is impressed in America, but not favourably impressed, by the inordinate size of everything. The country seems to try to bully one into a belief in its power by its impressive bigness.”

Sadly, some things have changed:

“In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilisation.”

Enviro-Entrepreneur Summer School

I’ve been selected to attend the Enviro-Entrepreneur Summer School, run by QED Consulting (supported by BusinessLink and mustard.uk.com), at Keele University at the end of this month.

Hopefully it will be an excellent opportunity to further develop a wide range of range business skills and meet all kinds of interesting, motivated people.

Why They Call It Work

I’m off to Accenture this week on their Sampler Scheme so my mind has been turning once again to the World of Work, an exciting ride that Thorpe Park (see previous post) has yet to add to incorporate into their fun park.

Dutifully, I’ve therefore been catching up on my reading, as the flooding of my del.icio.us testifies, and worryingly came across this article in HBR: Why They Call It Work by E.L. Kersten [HBR, Vol. 84 Issue 2 (Feb 2006), p66-67]. It describes surveys that point to dropping job satisfaction in both the UK and US. “Robotic” seems to be an understandable descriptor.

Where the article is strangely insightful is the ‘innovative’ analysis of the reason for this decline: it can’t be that workplaces have degenerated so much in recent years (although, at least in the UK, the rise of soulless customer service centres must have had some effect on morale). Instead, Prof. Kersten suggests, it may be because employees have been taught to expect too much from their jobs. This seems to ring ridiculously true (so much that I hope it’s ironic) with Prince Charles’s ambition remarks about people having ‘ideas above their station’.

People may often have exaggerated ideas of their own achievements and worth, as mentioned in the excellent article on bounded awareness in the previous issue [M.H. Bazerman and D. Chugh, Vol. 84 Issue 1 (Jan 2006), p88-6] — ideas that I will admit on catching myself entertaining occasionally — and I believe that this may play at part in people expecting too much from their careers. We can’t all be brilliant analysts, communicators, leaders, etc. and it’s maybe only natural that we tend to more readily recognise our strengths and others’ weaknesses. And, yes, this may lead to dissatisfaction with our jobs, but I think that, managed successfully, this can be a wonderful force for the good.

If I’m happy with my job what is really striving me onwards through gruelling self-development to better myself? Is happiness — or rather ’satisfaction’ — just a manifestation of a lack of creativity and ambition?

For me that’s key: I think I can be happy in a job while being totally disatisfied, and long may I always be…

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p.s. When I just hit ‘publish’ and the title of this blog appeared on the screen, it finally dawned on me: who is the ultimate example of satisfaction? Grossmith’s Charles Pooter. He may do his job very competantly, but the book doesn’t describe any way in which he is singularly helping the company except when his son is fired, he worries about his own future, and he is really driven to extraordinary lengths to secure the custom of Mr Huttle’s American never-named friend.

AllPeers: BitTorrent for Firefox

AllPeers is an exciting venture based locally in Oxford (although run in Prague, it seems) that was mentioned on TechCrunch a few months backas the Firefox “killer app”.

It basically seems to be a Firefox extension offerring a BitTorrent client that allows people who might not have shared material before to “exchange photos and home movies” with friends and family. In the future, AllPeers will also allow public sharing (mostly probably with restrictions to control copyright violations). Messenging and VOIP are also logical additions that they should include.

Strangely, it will not be advertising funded. Instead, there are suggestions that ‘monitization’ (a horrid word that is never far from any Web2.0 article) will be achieved through paid content. This must be feasible, since they recently got VC funding from the original backers of Skype.

There is no public beta yet, but it must only be a matter of time.

RocketBoom have a nice interview with the founders of AllPeers.

Carbon-Market.com

Matt Prescott and Carbon-Market.com did very well winning the runner-up prize (£2000) in the social entrepreneurship part of Oxford Entrepreneur’s Ideal Idol competition.

He seemed very knowledgable and extremely keen during his ‘elevator pitch’ to the judges, but doesn’t seem to have taken the project further in the two weeks since taking the money. The website remains to be a blog (with two posts) on blogspot that he admitted making in an evening.

I hope he hasn’t taken OE’s cash and fled on a CO2-poluting flight to the tropics.

Idea Idol ‘Finale’

The mash-up of two popular tv shows Dragon's Den and Pop Idol that was the 'Finale' of Idea Idol rocked Oxford last night for the third year running.

This event set eight finalists — six commercial enterprises and two charitable organisations — in head-to-head 'elevator pitches' to a panel of four judges for a total prize money of £12,000.

The selected ideas were pretty varied, ranging from designer cast covers and slings (the eventual winner) through a student betting website and feedback-responsive keyboards to grand visions of private initiative overhauls of NHS blood analysis. Refreshingly there was a complete lack of web2.0 ideas (blogging, IM, and podcasting still yet to be moulded into commercial ideas it seems, Yahoo buyouts excluded), the betting website being perhaps the only idea verging on the vacuous, and the word 'synergy' was mentioned only once (yes, by an MBA student).

Sadly, but maybe predictably, the use of Powerpoint slides by practically all of the contestants was shocking: some fell into the trap of having slides and slides of detailed bullets (unforgivable really in a five minute pitch) and others seem to be taking the new web2.0 wave of clear bold colourful designs to new levels (or had they just made their slides in a shorter time than it took to give their presentation). Over all, one presenter had no graphic aids, one team just had a map, and four pitches used one overhead with just title.

Perhaps disappointing too was the number of MBA business development projects in the final. These were obviously team efforts directed towards developing full business plans, and all certainly gave the most polished and best directed talks. But I thought these went against the nature of the Idea Idol competition of giving people with little business background the chance to consider their mettle and pitch. There were apparently 75 entries altogether and it would have been nice to see some more promising undergraduates up there (the blood analysis and casino guys were the only UGs, if I remember correctly). A little nurturing of the contestants, if possible, could have dramatically improved their pitches and everyone's take-home experience of the contest. Even if the organisers had just sent a five minute email to all the entrants — or just finalists — explaining the sort of process that might be successful, then great ideas, such as feedback keyboard, could have been given much better wings to fly on. In these respects the contest was very different to last year, which I'm sure had a number of great pitches from undergraduates, e.g., BOSO, who won that year.

Full round-up

Commercial Enterprise Winner: Medical Style LLC [Jennifer Segal et al.] (£5000 prize)
Commercial Enterprise Runner-up: Carbon-Market.com (£2000)
Social Enterprise Winner: 'HIV & AIDS Prevention' (£3000).
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Update: A news article on the Said Business School website gives more details of other entries:

Submissions included: ‘club-guru.com’ – an internet service to organize your nightlife; ‘The Parking Space and Vehicle Finder’ – to help find the last available parking spot and remind us of where we parked on our return; ‘The Throne’ – a revolutionary portable lavatory; ‘Do-it-yourself Garage’ with tools, mechanics and refreshments on tap; ‘Virtual Boycott’ for those with a great deal to get off their chests; and ‘Oops I drank too much’ – a miracle cure to get you back in the game after over-indulgence.

Game Changer: Anita Roddick – Business as Unusual

Anita Roddick spoke yesterday at Said Business School as part of Oxford Entrepreneur’s Game Changers series.

In a very different occasion to Alan Sugar’s appearance earlier this term, she gave a polished empassionated talk, as might be expected, as this event appeared to be part of her latest book tour.

She started by very fairly turning on the OE’s obsession with the term ‘entrepreneur’. Describing herself as an activist and agitator, she talked of the media’s unbounded obsession with the phrase, the success of which only seems to be measured by profit alone. People were confusing entrepreneurship with opportunism, and success was inflated and depressing.

Challenge Everything

Dame Anita is trying to help the World enter a new era where money is not the end. An entrepreneur, as she sees them, should be more of a social change agent than a business person; following a calling, not a career. They should be like a crazy person and believe the idea so passionately that they talk about it in the present tense; they will it into existence with the zealousness of a religious convert. She admitted that she has learnt a lot from Quaker business models.

The four key things are:
1) Idea
2) Self
3) Money is necessary to make it happen, but should not be the motivator; it is more about freedom [although not as we learnt later in her case with Body Shop's public floatation]
4) INTEGRITY

Critical is the belief that anything is possible; essentially patholigically creative; vomitting ideas.

Bravely she dismissed society’s love of business schools, which she saw as being controlling and obsessed with the status quo. What she wanted was a marketplace for feedback and ideas. Her idea: being twenty times bigger is not a goal; being better by being values-led is. This is why the Body Shop, for her at least, was a conduit for areas and issues she believed in.

Talking about the Body Shop, she told us of its beginnings: her husband, Gordon, was about to leave to travel through America on a donkey, and founding the business was a way of securing financial well-being for her family. The first shop was in Brighton, in an out of the way location, but drew a committed customer-base: it had to, as it was on a road full of undertakers (apparently). Her early — and continued — success is in part due to her uncoventional, inexpensive, eye-catching marketing techniques, what she describes as guerilla marketing. She saw standard marketing as ineffective: we are all nowadays very over-marketed too, and thus have become very cynical. However, working with NGOs she was able to target an idealistic sort of consumer. She described the best marketing as the one that your competitions is either unwilling or unable to follow.

“We were searching for employees but people turned up instead.”

But it is clear that her consumers are not the most important people in all this to her. It’s her employees. She expressed sadness that businesses are no longer about job creation, only wealth creation. The Body Shop seems to be a conduit not just for her, but she thinks that it’s critical to empower her employees; nothing being more motivating as the chance to express their idealism.

Then it came down to her leadership style.

Leadership is Communication

There is no more powerful an institution than business; so it has to assume a moral leadership. It’s most effective tool is communication, integral to which is the language of leadership: community involvement and social justice. Activism, she claimed, is the price we pay for being on this planet.

UPDATE: The Independent on Sunday has an interesting profile of Dame Anita in light of l’Oreal’s rumoured bid for the Body Shop.
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Music-Podcasting

This idea may be unoriginal but what about a podcasting service for unsigned bands? Wouldn’t people subscribe to a daily podcast of new and interesting music from exciting fresh bands?

With feedback about what previous tunes you liked, a tivo-esque podcast suited to your tastes could be built up.

That could be podmusic.us.
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