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Do more with less!

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Posted by Jan Madsen on Thursday November 17th, 2011 – 12:42 PM
Filed under Management

The management challenge for the coming decade or two is to improve performance of knowledge work. To do more with less!

During the 20th century the performance of manual work has improved plenty fold. Through management techniques and procedures the efficiency of manual work increased. Now, well into the era where knowledge is the central resource, the challenge is to repeat that success and improve the performance of knowledge work in a similar magnitude.

How to do that?
There is a fundamental difference between what should be the core management focus point:

Manual work
Manual work puts the work process in the centre. The subject of management focus is the work process itself which can be analysed in detail. The whole is the sum of the parts and by breaking the process into parts, the bits and pieces can be put together in the right order. Thus, it is possible to program human effort accordingly.

Knowledge work
Knowledge work puts the person in the centre. Knowledge is not impersonal. It does not reside in a database or in some papers. It is always embodied in a person, carried by, improved by, used (or misused) by a person.

What this means to management
The subject of management focus has to be changed dramatically. Because knowledge is linked to humans it is about perception, the process by which we create an understanding of our environment by organising and interpreting information. This process is not a passive one, rather it is influenced by memory, learning and expectation.

Thus, to increase the performance of knowledge work, management need to focus on how humans perceive information and subsequently how humans make decisions based on these perceptions. Contemporary digital data collecting techniques make the amount of data (information) abundant, but many former well working management techniques become obsolete and incapable of getting any useful knowledge out of the cloud of information.

Must more attention needs to be given to the emotional and irrational sides of human perception and decision making. Luckily, the past two decades have provided excellent evidence-based facts on these topics. A very good place to start is to have a look at Behavioral Economics. This is a discipline that can contribute with useful and workable solutions to management challenges.

See you out there in the real world.
Jan

Why cold calls doesn’t work

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Posted by Jan Madsen on Thursday November 3rd, 2011 – 03:47 PM
Filed under Business Development, Sales

I doubt the effectiveness of cold calling for at least two reasons:

The first reason - cold calling destroys your ability later on to act as a business equal. One very important part of selling projects is to act as a trusted advisor. Thus very often such sales people are not considered “sales†people, but are rather Key Account Managers. Cold calling represents everything the potential client hates about being sold to and immediately establishes a relationship, where the calling person is submissive.

The second reason - when doing cold calling, you spend most of your time on non-clients, hence the term “sales is a numbers gameâ€. This is not effective! By far, most of the people you call are not interested, do not want to talk to you or are plain rude.

So, for at least these two reasons cold calling is not the right approach to expand your client base. I will later come back to other ideas that can replace cold calling and that I find much more effective.

See you out there in the real world
Jan