Managing ⁽¹⁹⁾

Matt Mayfield 18 Oct 2011

Client Message And Your Message Collision

When selling services to other companies, you need to re-consider your key website messages.

Recently I came across a »corner case« of web site design. Two clients were providing services to other businesses (B2B), but in entirely different industries. Both struggled to create websites and key clients gave negative indications. The problem and the solution for both was the same....

Let's imagine a simple outsourcing relationship to better understand the problem. Outsourcing is likely to be promoted based on a critical knowledge, price, location, language, or other advantage that the supplier ("SmallCorp") has over their client's ("BigCorp") internal resources. However, BigCorp is selling to their customer's with a message that they are uniquely qualified to solve a specific problem. The SmallCorp's message, if ever exposed, is completely incompatible with their cleint (BigCorp's) message. In an age where nearly anyone is potentially exposed to end customer-facing communications, it is high risk that an outsourced person could expose his name to an end client. Once exposed, social networks (linkedin, facebook,etc) quickly expose SmallCorp – including which company this person works for and what “priorities” his company has. The result—client message collision.

The solution, is to... Continue reading...

Matt Mayfield 11 Jan 2011

Managing Salesmen

With salesmen, you pay for results through commission. What is there to manage?

I made the transition to management while an engineer. At that same time, my main outside activity, sailboat racing, also made a transition from racing crew with a small role to starting my boat and taking on captain responsibilities. With both, I made lots of mistakes. Later, I started to educate myself in less damaging ways through reading and classes. One surprise, was that the problems I was facing on the job, were nearly the same that I was facing with my unpaid racing crew, and even more remarkable was that the management books would often describe the techniques that I discovered through painful trial and error. Engineers and volunteer sailors are difficult groups of people to manage effectively, but far easier, in my experience, than managing salesmen.

We pay salesmen almost exclusively based on results (not effort), yet they do not control markets, don't make the products they sell, and have few control points within the customer. Continue reading...

Matt Mayfield 21 Nov 2010

Scaling down multi-company corproate structures

Scaling Down Multi-Company Corporate Structures

I have noticed a relatively new trend within smaller companies in that they seem to be more willing to experiment with ever more complex ownership and legal structures. I imagine that this is partly a fashion thing associated with the recent "Decade of the Banker". Another influence is the European tax optimization tradition that encourages more complex legal and cross boarder structures, and finally Silicon Valley stock options and shared ownership have been a model for how to motivate the latest generation technical talent. The consequences of such complexity are often not felt until many years later.

Matt Mayfield 20 Aug 2010

Transitioning Corporate Organizations

Why good organizations don't guarantee success, and sub optimal organizations can still deliver....

In a previous post, I discussed the three basic organization structures for most companies, but I did not discuss how to change to a more optimal structure. The bad news, is that the change is almost always more damaging than the improvement of a more optimal organization.

Almost every study on reorganization suggests that there is an efficiency loss for at least six month, and often well more than a year. While you can evaluate how the transition is progressing relatively quickly, you cannot determine if the overall new structure is indeed superior to the former for more than a year. Another note is that the reduced efficiency starts the moment that rumors of the change emerge and that the 6 month period needed for stabilization only starts when the org changes stop. In far too many companies, managers hope to minimize the transition by announcing the plan well in advance. They also hope to improve the results by making a "mid course correction". Both are hugely damaging since they extend the inefficiency window. As a result, a reorganization is a major commitment for several years to come and managers need to take into consideration their ability to provide this critical settling period before they even open the discussion of change.

Matt Mayfield 22 May 2010

Surviving Corporate Acquisitions

There is the right way, the wrong way, and the new company's way....

Many years ago, a company I worked for was purchased by another company and then that company was purchased by Honeywell a year later . One of my new colleagues (from the acquiring company of a year previous) explained the three rules of an acquisition:

Rule 1: Don't forget who bought who.
Rule 2: There is no such thing as a merger. Refer to Rule 1.
Rule 3: Don't forget rules 1 & 2.

I have been through numerous acquisitions since -- from both the buying side and selling side -- and these three rules have served me well