February, 2010
Feb 25

Is your strategy working?
Reflect No Comments

Finding a taxi around Elephant and Castle in south London has often proved hard.

Until yesterday, when one came along the road as I stepped out of a meeting. Chatting to the driver, I mentioned the challenge of finding a cab there. He said he went up that road regularly every day. Having dropped a passenger in central London or the City, his strategy is to return to the King’s Road in west London via Blackfriars bridge and Lambeth. And it works. He never has any problem “making his money”. Other cabbies, he said, often sit on ranks in the City for half an hour waiting for a fare to come along.

Everyone needs a strategy. If you are a high-tech company, are you going to licence your IP, provide a service or become a product company? If you are a hospital, how are you going to continue making life better for patients in the face of funding pressures?

Without a strategy, achieving your goals is just luck. How is your strategy working?

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Feb 13

Great design – functional as well as beautiful
Think No Comments

Steps

Around London, there are fancy developments with steps like these…funky, nice looking BUT functional?

Great design is a combination of beauty and ease.  Think about your favourite home appliance or piece of furniture.

Here, the interesting angles and absence of lots of hand rails looks good but is tricky for the visually impaired and the infirm. 

In business, where do things that appear nice make things harder?  That paper on a tricky topic?  That set piece meeting or conference?

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Feb 9

Get it done this week
Do No Comments

We all know the challenge: we have something important on the ‘to do’ list but we don’t get it done. It hangs over us.  We worry about it. We set time aside to crack it but those hours come and go and we seem to have filled them with other things.

Try this to break that pattern: 

- focus on the one thing that you really need to get done. Force yourself to prioritise and be ruthless about rescheduling everything else to fit around that.

- energise yourself by meeting with the right people. Involving others in the thinking is a great way to get your mind moving. The right people are those that can contribute the necessary perspectives and constructive ideas.

- find the right space to work in for the bits you need to do by yourself (hint: it might not be the office nor home – try a cafe, the botanic gardens, a walk).

- shut off (or switch off) the activities that distract and fill the time. Email is the worst. At its best, the mind gets into a flow, as when you are effortlessly doing something you enjoy like gardening, crosswords or playing music (and the hours fly by). You need to give it some time to get into this.

Got something important to do? Why not get it done this week?

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Feb 4

Make sure your change is an improvement
Plan No Comments

Every improvement involves change but not every change is an improvement.

Travelling a lot by train, the national rail enquiries website is an invaluable source of train time information. The simple interface worked well and with a few clicks you had all the details you needed.

Now they’ve changed it as part of a revamp to the site. The result? It may look a bit better (can a train timetable site ever look cool?) but it’s clunkier as the text in the search boxes isn’t automatically over-typed, the drop down menus are slower and it’s not as easy just to get train times for today.

Why make life harder for customers? At the very least, make sure some of the team/web designers/public compare how it works before and after to be absolutely sure it’s as good as before.

Contrast that with Ocado online shopping. They make regular tweaks to the site and every one manages to make it easier and more satisfying to shop with them.

It’s a lesson for us all. Whatever the reasons you embark on making a change, make sure it ends up as something customers will agree is an improvement.

I’m off now to get the 0943.

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