May

13

Jump on….or wait a bit (Part 3 of 3)

Inspiration / Momentum / Productivity

 

OK, so if you’ve read the previous parts of this blog (link and link) you may have started thinking about how to predict trends, and how to jump off a trend before it crashes. The key to thinking about innovation is flexibility of thought. When you’ve identified a trend, movement or technology which you think might be a great development of what you do, here are some questions to ask yourself in order to apply that:

• What is the minimum I can do which moves me towards this?
• What is the maximum extent to which I can adopt this – what would that mean?
• Is this innovation a vehicle for what I do?
• Can I do the equivalent of what this innovation achieves in my market?
• Can I amend what I do to offer new services or products for people who are early adopters of this innovation?
• Does anything I do solve a problem for people who are part of/users of this innovation?
Try to answer all the questions without pre-judging the answers. It can be surprising what comes from this exercise.

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May

06

Jump on….or wait a bit (Part 2 of 3)

Inspiration / Momentum / Productivity

 

 

In our last blog (link) we look at bit at early adoption as a route to innovating. This time we want to explain why it is as important to know when to get off the bus as to know when to jump on.

When we experience or see anything, that will trigger a series of associations in our brains. This can mean that as things become more prevalent we have more associations with them – some good, some bad, and that can affect the effectiveness of an approach.

Let’s take an example of a widespread internet approach – the “free-report and squeeze page” combo. You will probably will have experienced this one before – a site offers a free report/eBook/training course/video blog …. all you have to do to get it, is enter your email address. This approach works for a number of reasons, the first is that (provided you think there is value in the freebie) giving your email address feels like a small price to pay, and secondly it works because targeted, elegant email marketing to an interested and engaged prospect can be effective.

However…. this “innovation”, like many others has a half life. Over time, the amount of marketing email we receive as a result of signing up for freebie increases. Even if it doesn’t if the amount of spam we receive increases independently we may associate these emails with this type of marketing. Also… as the number of these approaches proliferate we have a wider number of experiences of this type of selling which we associate with it, some great, some not so great. The result is that overtime the value of the freebie needs to increase before we are willing to part with something which we now understand to be valuable (our email address).

This is a classic case of why we need to know when to get off the bus – as techniques increase in prevalence, we may need to stop using them, just to stay ahead (and protect our brands).

Which previous innovations do you think have now had their day?

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Apr

29

Jump on…. or wait a bit (Part 1 of 3)

Inspiration / Momentum / Productivity

 

We’ve been doing a lot of work with teams recently to help them increase the levels of innovation in their interactions, ideas and services. In one exercise we’ve talked about different types of innovation, and thought it might be an idea to outline 3 of the categories on here, to get you started (or keep you going) with innovating.

People often think that innovating is about inventing brand new stuff, but that is relatively rare…. so we’ll start with an easier way:

Being an Early Adopter. Some of the best, bankable innovation for businesses comes from identifying upcoming trends, new ways of operating and new types of technology. Some people are natural early adopters. But if you aren’t here are some questions to get you thinking:

1. What are the emerging trends and where will you hear about them? Read widely and subscribe to blogs and content outside your specific sphere of operation – look for ideas, technologies and approaches which start to appear regularly. Make time to find out a little bit about emerging trends and how it could affect what you do.
2. Work out what would be involved for you to respond to a trend – what would it cost in terms of time, energy and money? Is it worth a punt?
3. If you aren’t sure, work out whether there are specific advantages for being an early adopter- if you trial something while it is still in development, does that give you a useful advantage over people who come to the party later?
4. Does this innovation depend on volume? Will you get the benefits you need from it before it really takes of, or do you need other people to jump first?

What do you do to keep ahead of the latest trends?

 

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Apr

15

Why small but national businesses shouldn’t ignore FourSquare

Communication / Productivity

 

FourSquare (and similar programmes) are, on the face of it, a relatively gimmicky app, which allows people to tell others in the their social network where they’ve been. Even if you aren’t familiar with it, you may well have seen Facebook posts or tweets which say things like: “John is at Nandos, Glasgow”. Business to Consumer businesses often use it well – offering perks and freebies to users who “check in” at their premises and spread the word. Business to business users don’t use it much, if at all. However, we think some are missing a trick.

If you are a large, national brand, people will assume that your product and service are available everywhere. However, if you are a small brand, but one which is still operating nationally, people may not be aware of your reach. It can feel fake, egotistical or even showy-off to check in, in the places you visit as part of your working week, sometimes it might be all of those things. However, our experience, and the experience of clients we’ve been working with recently is that these little reminders of where you are delivering your service, can create new opportunities for our business.

In recent weeks we’ve picked up new clients in Newcastle, Wolverhampton and Glasgow, simply by “checking in” at venues where we are working. All of these leads have come about through a conversation a bit like this:

RubyStar has checked in at Conference Centre, Glasgow.

Hey RubyStar- I didn’t know you worked in Glasgow – you here often?

Hi, yes we have a couple of clients up here.

Give us a shout next time you are up – let’s have coffee

Clients who’ve moved to using a similar approach have also had great results. It’s a simple thing to do – and if you are looking for more work in the places you travel to, might be worth a try.

What do you think? Love it, loathe it? Use it?

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Mar

22

Abundant thinking.

Communication / Inspiration / Productivity

 

Abundance is one of our values at Ruby Star Associates – for us it means giving generously of our time, sharing ideas and knowledge openly, being collaborative and investing time and energy in helping people to make important things happen. Our experience and data suggest that this investment is more than worth it, and working in a protectionist, minute-counting or suspicious way doesn’t really float our boat.

This week I was reminded of a slightly different definition of Abundance, the one proposed by Daniel Pink in A Whole New Mind. He talks about abundance in terms of the relative material abundance that we all experience – the massive availability, accessibility and affordability of huge quantities of stuff which is a feature of the modern world. He argues, (as ever, very convincingly, if you aren’t already a fan, check out some of his work… start with Drive) that this abundance has an impact on how we should shape our organisations. In brief, with so much “stuff” out there, in order to differentiate what you do or sell you need to have more than just something which is effective and affordable – you need to appeal to a higher purpose: aesthetics, spirituality, meaning, even joy. Whilst this definition is different from the one we use, the intention is completely aligned.

Like many other businesses we’ve found that through our pro-bono activities, our exploratory conversations and our investment in the missions and ideas of the great people we’ve met, we’ve learnt loads, made great connections and come across some of the most exciting commercial opportunities. It’s all about balance after all… otherwise it’s just a job. No?

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Mar

11

Getting some balance about work life balance

Career / Communication / Momentum / Productivity

 

This week there have been a slew of stories, like this one: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21588760, about Yahoo’s decision to put an end to homeworking. Given that as a team we all operate remotely at Ruby Star, but that much of our client work is about bringing teams together to collaborate and innovate, we thought we’d throw in our tuppence worth to anyone who’s listening.

And our position is one of being slightly baffled by the debate we’ve seen on social media and on blogs – with two polarised sides advocating either total office-based teams or 100% flexible and remote working. We can’t be the only ones who’d like to see a bit more balance here. We’d no more advocate that teams need to be together all day every day in order to operate and innovate than we’d advocate entirely remote working. Here are some of the reasons why we are big fans of balance:

1. Working remotely, when done well and for the right reasons allows people to work more flexibly, expands the diversity of the available team and allows people to focus and deliver in the way that produces the best results for them.
2. Lazy, unproductive home working is a result of flawed intrinsic motivation systems in a team – not a flaw in the concept itself.
3. Innovation and ideas develop best when teams spend time together, and that includes both focussed and unfocussed time together – teams need plenty of this.
4. Our experience of working with teams who are mostly remote who don’t have sufficient opportunities to meet and get together is that in the limited times when the team is together it can be impossible to address both the need for social contract, general catch up and focussed development: More time together is part of the solution to this.
5. Most productive teams are made up of people who work well individually, are experienced and comfortable working as a team, and are also capable of working in small, temporary teams to address specific challenges.
6. It’s easier than ever for people to work remotely – but that doesn’t mean we should do it all the time.

So… far be it from us to disagree with Yahoo….. but we disagree with Yahoo.
A mix of team together time and individual working (remotely or otherwise) aren’t any barrier to effective innovative time…….. but cultural issues and a lack of intrinsic motivators can be.

What’s your view?

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Feb

25

Decoupling

Business Development / Process / Productivity

 

In February the book of the month for our free online business book club was Adapt by Tim Harford (Bookworms). This book applies evolutionary thinking to how organisations and other systems develop. The author makes a distinction between the circumstances in which trial and error is an effective and useful solution, and those where it can be dangerous. This second category, as you may guess, includes situations where the risks of error are too great for the system to survive. He defines these situations as ones which are both complex and highly interdependent.

Most of the examples in the book are of large systems, institutions and organisations, but we wanted to draw some specific learning from the book for those of you who work in smaller organisations:

• (Controlled) trial and error is important – not news for regular readers but we are a big fan of trying things out, keeping data and analysing it in order to determine the best course of action.

• Build a new control tower – in his examples of interdependent (coupled) systems he talks about oil rig disasters where an early explosion took out the control tower. This meant that other safety systems couldn’t then be activated. In a small business you may well be the control tower. What happens if you are out of action (flu, car crash, snowed in). If you can’t work for a day, 2 days, 3 days what would happen? Would someone know how to access your diary and reschedule your engagements? Would invoices still go out on time? Who would your family need to phone to keep the wheels turning at work?

• Write the book – In some of the examples in the book someone else had to wade into an organisation and try and work it out from within – some of these had process/systems manuals, some didn’t. Can you guess which ones were easier to save? If you needed someone else to get to know how you do things…… and fast? Where would they start? This doesn’t need to be a long complex document, just a brief, update guide to the main important stuff – who is authorised to use the bank account, does anyone else have passwords for key systems, where are client contact details kept?
Have you got all of these things in place? What do you do in your organisation to keep evolving, without creating unnecessary risk?

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Nov

23

Telephones…

Communication / Featured / Productivity

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Nov

19

A visit from Science Monster – Be Afraid.

Process / Productivity

We know we bang on about evidence and research a lot. It’s for your own good, honestly. We are also aware that we can be a bit of a stuck record when it comes to advising you to keep data in your own business – it’s not hard to do and it helps you make better decisions. At a very basic level, in many organisations the two main things which you can control are how to spend your time and how you spend your money; and yet many businesses have no real method of systematically collecting and analysing this vital data in order to see what works, and what doesn’t.

We did consider writing a rant-y blog about this, but we didn’t think you’d listen. We’ve decided the time has come to call in the big guns.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Science Monster usually hangs out here: elodieunderglass.wordpress.com although she did also pop up recently here: kirstyevidence.wordpress.com. We love both these blogs, so we are very pleased that Science Monster found time in her busy schedule to nip over here to emotionally manipulate you into keeping better data.

If the monster visit has worked, and you are committing to keep better records, we have a great, simple template which works really well for collecting data about what works for you in selling/business development.

If you’d like a free copy, drop us a line at tellMeMore@rubystarassociates.co.uk

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Nov

16

Get Over your What-if-itis

Communication / General / Goals / Productivity

How do you feel when you spot a missed call on your phone? Do you feel a sense of rising panic – do you call back straight away even if (or especially if) you don’t recognise the number? One of the challenges that most businesses, but especially those who sell services Business-to-business, face is prioritising leads and actions. When any call can be the next big thing it can feel impossible to turn down any potential meeting, and every email can feel urgent. Here are tips on how to get it back in check:

1. Start collecting data – when you are dealing with a small number of leads or you are the only person involved with them it can be hard to persuade yourself that you need to keep written records, but as things change and develop knowing which leads were the most profitable and what the average conversion time was will help you make better decisions.
2. Don’t overestimate your own importance! If you can email and call everyone back straight away that’s fabulous, but if that isn’t manageable, it many cases it is acceptable to send a holding email saying you’ll call tomorrow. It’s better to let people know that you want to have a real conversation with them than to rush through a quick transactional exchange just to get them off your to-do list.
3. Ask better questions. It’s OK to ask potential clients what they want and want they might want it.
Honestly.

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