The eWorld Radar

Worker as athlete

The new normal dictates that we in the West will need to work harder to maintain our quality of life. Improving worker performance will be an ongoing exercise; much like athletes continually striving to improve their PB (Personal Best).

And what the workers will be judged on is changing as well. Intellectual capital and relationship capital will become increasingly important in the digital economy.

Thus the role of HR moves from ensuring people are sufficiently trained to be competent enough to fulfil their role to performance coaches focused on driving the work force to world class mastery.

Engagement will be a major theme. Keeping staff engaged won’t be the issue. Disengaged athletes will just be left behind and if they don’t step off the track they will get run down eventually. So that is self managing.

The challenge is how the HR function will improve its engagement with the workforce to create the intimacy needed for a coaching role and to have the influencing and technical skills to drive the ‘athletes’ towards mastery.

Sooner than you expect, you will be managing a stable of top flight athletes. All of whom are high maintenance. And given their new found discipline, when they come looking for tea and sympathy, biscuits will definitely not be an option.

Ade McCormack

Clients or relationships?

Most people think of marketing as the pre-funnel opportunity creation specialists. All initiatives lead to the sales funnel. It makes a lot of sense given that businesses need sales to survive.

Or does it?

Certainly this model of marketing worked well in the industrial era when the name of the game was to automate where possible. Seeing consumers as homogeneous, give or take a few socio-economic variables, helped in the formulation of big marketing initiatives.

But we are no longer in the industrial era. And clients, whether they are business or consumer in nature have choices and power. Thus the marketing game has changed into one that needs to be highly personalised.

The goal now is not to create an opportunity but to secure the relationship. The understanding is that sales will follow in due course. And assuming the relationship is good, ie trust and relevance are in place, the sales will keep coming and coming.

So whilst the creation of broad brush value adding marketing assets (eg. white papers, social media and events) are important, the measurement and improvement of the organisation’s relationship capital needs to be the number one priority.

Would you prefer to enter the next recession with 1,000 relationship-free transactional clients or with 100 influential individuals who personally care about your economic survival?

Ade McCormack

Tech Sector Review - March 2012

** Prepare youself for the digital revolution **

gRim reality

Blackberry maker RIM has recently had a boardroom cleanout, including their co-CEOs, COO and CTO. They will now conduct a strategic review which could see the business dismantled, refocused or reengineered. Trying to be something to everybody and trying to do it all on their own does not appear to be a recipe for success.

 

Offshore news

Corporate fraud specialists (until they were caught) Satyam and BT part-owned Tech Mahindra are merging to form what is expected to be India’s fifth largest IT service company. The combined group will be heavily dependent on telecoms business. The fact that this is not a growing market suggests the newly merged company will have to overhaul its strategy.               

 

Hactivism doesn’t pay

According to US telco Verizon, over half of electronic data record thefts were perpetrated by hacktivists. Thus ideology trumps financial gain. Anonymous and its associates were responsible for many of the high profile attacks including the CIA, Sony and Nintendo. Is the trend emerging because the people that perpetrate financial cyber crime ultimately get more personal satisfaction by, in their own minds at least, standing up for civil liberties?

 

Oracle up

Oracle dismissed its last quarter disappointment as an aberration. The latest quarter results are the first step in proving this hypothesis, with profits exceeding analyst expectations. Oracle is quite bullish about its Cloud offering with plans to give Salesforce and Sap a run for their money in the online applications arena.

 

Apple fans continue to take the tablets

Apple sold a record 3 million iPads in the first 4 days of its release. Whether this reflects the continuing ascendancy of the tablet or Apple’s ability to rev up the market and get its supply chain act together is unclear. My gut feeling is the latter, given that the most notable difference from the ‘old’ iPad is that the iPad3 is heavier.

 

Google – Play is a serious business

Google wants to take Apple’s iTunes head on by integrating Google Music and eBookstore into its Android Market offering and renaming it Google Play. Google is hot on Apple’s heels with almost as many apps as the iStore and almost as many Android platforms in circulation as the combined number of iPods, iPhones and iPads.

 

Intel - Autotrader

The automotive industry is a huge consumer of processor chips. Intel wants to fuel that demand by setting up a $100 million fund to invest in companies developing car-based technologies. It will be interesting to see whether car buyers mimic the behaviour of impressionable PC buyers and look for the Intel Inside sticker before making a purchase.

Ade McCormack

** Prepare youself for the digital revolution **