Lessons in Management: McDonald’s During the 1970’s

Posted by Jesse Kliza in Business, Leadership, Management

Late last week I had the privilege of talking with someone that opened and ran numerous McDonald’s in the 1970′s.Two things he said really stuck out to me.  One speaks of his own innovative management practices and the other of the leadership of McDonald’s CEO at that time (Fred Turner).

He told me about one McDonald’s he ran in particular, and how he had problems in that area with many of the younger employees.  He came up with a hiring strategy in which he would hire half younger/teenage employees, and half nannies.  What he found was that the nannies would naturally organize, and manage the younger employees.  He said it was so successful that he rarely had to deal with disputes, or really run the store himself.  He would come out of his office, and the nannies that were working would immediately tell him to relax, and assure him that they had everything under control!

What an innovative management strategy!

He also told me something that Fred Turner said to him, and the other 48 managers at the time that were out in the field, growing the McDonald’s business, and opening stores all over the world.  He told them: “When you guys are out in the field, you are the CEO. You make the decisions, and you’ll be right 75% of the time.  And that’s the best rate in the industry.”

Fred empowered his employees to make decisions and he encouraged and inspired them to be the best.

I love hearing stories like these.

RivalMap – Time to start managing your competitive information!

Posted by Jesse Kliza in Business, Collaboration, Management

Last week RivalSoft launched RivalMap, a collaborative web based solution for managing competitive information.

I’ve used Competitious on and off over the past year, and it’s a great tool. Though, as stated in this Competitious blog post,”Competitious is a great way to quickly list your competition, and start finding news and traffic stats about them, but RivalMap is focused on what happens next.”

RivalMap is definitely a much more robust and feature rich solution. It has a beautiful user interface, and it maintains the same level of excellent usability and simplicity amidst a great deal more features. Anyone familiar with Basecamp will be right at home with RivalMap, as it has a very similar look and feel.

The beauty of RivalMap is that is provides your team a central place for MANAGING competitive information, not just storing it. I’ve seen companies “manage” their competitive information by sending around emails of press releases to different people throughout the organization, or creating a wiki, or at the most sophisticated level, by setting up a project within their internal project management system where they post information about competitors. However, all of these approaches fall FAR short of what RivalMap allows you to do.

RivalMap serves as that central place for all competitive info, but it also provides you with the tools to actually organize, and manage competitive information and begin to formulate strategies to address competitive threats. It allows you to build comparison grids (company and product comparison), easily associate links to news articles, build out a full SWOT analysis, and lots more. It even lets you segment out the distinct verticals in which you compete, and track all the way down to your competitors’ individual customers!

The one thing I was disapointed to see missing was the ability for the software to search for, and suggest links and articles, that are related to ones competitors. This was a very nice feature of competitious. However, it was mentioned in the competitious blog that they are planning on adding a similar feature to RivalMap, and potentially integration with third-party information services.

I would also like to have the ability to have my google alerts and similar services automatically parsed, and applied to the appropriate competitor’s profile.

All in all, I’m VERY impressed.

Their website is also very good in terms of clearly stating the benefits and features of the product, and with a completely free account for up to 3 users, it’s a no brainer to at least try it out.

You can also check out the RivalMap blog, and there is a great discussion over at TechCrunch as well.

Keep up the great work RivalSoft!

Infiltrating your competitor’s decision loop

Posted by Jesse Kliza in Business, Leadership, Management

I read a great quote today by Bob Warfield regarding business competition:

“…business competition has a lot in common with an aerial dogfight: the other guys have talent (and often more resources) and the stakes are frighteningly high. If you can “get inside” your opponent’s decision cycle, you are in the driver’s seat. They are responding to your initiatives and this is an advantage that’s hard to overcome. When you are inside the decision loop of a competitor, it’s a huge tactical advantage. Google got inside Facebook’s decision loop with Open Social. Apple got inside the cell phone industry’s decision loop with the iPhone. When you get inside the market’s decision loop, it is an enormous strategic advantage. If you are lucky enough to be right, and lucky enough that a major market heads right to where your fighter plane’s guns are already aimed, you get the big success.”

I never really saw this in Google and Apple’s recent plays, but they have done exactly that. They have infiltrated the competition’s decision loops.

Apple was seeing the market for the iPod being encroached upon by cell phone companies via digital music player enabled phones – along comes the iPhone.

Google saw their position as the gateway to the web so to speak, and their value as the means of connecting people with information being threatened by Facebook – hello OpenSocial.

So what does Google’s Android move do? It infiltrates Apple AND Microsoft’s decision loops.

Whose decision loop can you inject yourself into now, that will put YOU in the driver seat?

Creating a Culture of Innovation: Is YOUR Company Serious About Innovation?

Posted by Jesse Kliza in Business, Leadership, Management

As part of my series entitled “Creating A Culture Of Innovation”, I highlighted an approach back in August, that I’ve come up with to begin doing just that.

Here’s a great list of questions to ask the first line employees in your organization, to determine whether your organization is really serious about innovation being part of it’s culture. These questions are slightly modified versions of the questions outlined by Gary Hamel in the recent interview with McKinsey and Co.

1) “How have you been trained as a business innovator? What investment has the company made in teaching you how to innovate?”

Yes, this should be filtered down all the way to your companies lowest level employee.

2) “If you have an idea, how much bureaucracy do you have to go through to experiment with it? How long is it going to take for you to get a small percentage of your time and/or a relatively small amount of experimental capital to test your idea? Is it a matter of months, or is it very easy for that to happen?”

This falls in line with the “Nurture” step in my SANE approach. Companies that are serious about innovation being a part of their culture have systems, and processes in place to help nurture ideas. The build it into their budgets, and strategic plans.

3) “Are you actually being measured on your innovation performance, or your team’s innovation? Does it influence your compensation?”

“Put your money where your mouth is”. Companies that are serious about innovation will find ways to compensate employees for their innovative contributions, and provide incentives for continued innovation.

4) “As you look at the management process in your company, do they tend to help you work as an innovator or get in the way?”

This falls in line with the “Execute” step in my SANE approach.

Getting in the way doesn’t just mean getting involved and complicating things. It also means simply not doing everything possible to help innovative ideas that have been supported be brought to life.

Innovative Management: A conversation with Gary Hamel and Lowell Bryan

Posted by Jesse Kliza in Business, Collaboration, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Management

I read an amazing interview with Gary Hamel and Lowell Bryan yesterday. It was one of those articles where I was constantly saying to myself things like: exactly!, that’s amazing!, thats exactly what I said to _______!, etc.

Reading it made me really excited. So much so that I immediately started talking to, and calling friends of mine, probably babbling because I was so taken up by it. I sat at home last night reading parts of the interview to my wife as we sat trying to relax in our living room.

It made me really excited because this is something I am very passionate about. It’s something that I have very strong feelings about, and in this interview I saw my own passions and positions clearly shared by others that are truly thought leaders in the space of management.

Innovative Management: A conversation with Gary Hamel and Lowell Bryan

Please, take the time to read this interview and share with me your thoughts. If you aren’t a member at the McKinsey Quarterly this is more than enough reason to join. (IT’S FREE!)

The basic premise of the discussion is that there is an ever growing need for a new managerial model, that merits the gifts of creativity, passion, and initiative and leverages those gifts in each and every employee.

Here’s just a small sample:

“In terms of managing creative-thinking people, you have to separate the work of managing from the notion of managers as a distinct and privileged class of employees. Highly talented people don’t need, and are unlikely to put up with, an overtly hierarchical management model.

Increasingly, the work of management won’t be done by managers. It will be pushed out to the periphery. It will be embedded in systems. I think we’re on the verge of what I would call a postmanagerial society. The idea that you mobilize human labor through a hierarchy of overseers and bureaucrats and administrators is going to look extraordinarily antiquated a decade or two from now.”

Also, if you haven’t read my post from a few months back entitled: Creating a Culture of Innovation: The SANE Approach, I’m sure you will see many parallels.

John Moore posted a great overview of Gary Hamel’s new book, The Future of Management.

Tory Gattis of OpenTeams also posted some additional excerpts from the interview here as well.

Palm’s New Focus

Posted by Jesse Kliza in Business, Management

Ed Colligan, Palm’s CEO posted this message on the company’s official blog yesterday, regarding their decision to cancel the release of their Foleo product in its current form, and focus on their next generation platform.

Om Malik has a good write up here.

You can also read more about the announcement (with some good discussion) here at Gizmodo.

I mention this here because I thought it was a good example of a company making a difficult decision (taking a 10 million hit), in order to focus on their longterm success. I also think Palm’s post does a good job of explaining the reasons behind the decision as well.