All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Digital|Last Updated:

You heard it here first, but, he said it better, “he” being Professor Ravi Bapna of the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management; “it” being a discussion of “Two Things Companies Should Do Now to Set Up for a Post-COVID-19 Future.”

Well, okay, he actually said it first too — beat me by a week.

Professor Bapna’s recommended two things are: (1) upskilling your workforce, because “as organizations shift to an AI-first world, they need a workforce which understands the world of data, analytics, and AI”; and (2) re-thinking operations and strategy toward an “AI-first strategy.”

So let me up the ante with KJR’s Thing One and Thing Two: AI-based business modeling and anticipatory customer re-identification.

AI-based business modeling

While our pre-COVID-19 fascination with Digital transformation frequently led to little more than Digital superficialities, it did lead to one salutary change in executive thinking — recognition that increasing revenue is just as legitimate a strategic outcome as cutting costs. It didn’t, sadly, overcome the metrics obsession that’s the root cause of management’s over-reliance on cost-cutting, but it was a start.

Briefly, the issue is that connecting a cost-cutting effort to an actual cost reduction is, for the most part, pretty simple, while connecting revenue-enhancement efforts to actual increased sales is frustratingly multivariate.

What’s needed to manage effectively isn’t more and better metrics. It’s the ability to model complex cause-and-effect relationships.

Start here: For many companies, strategic change isn’t really strategic in nature. Planning is based on the unstated assumption that the business details might shift from year to year, but the basic shape of the business doesn’t change. The buttons and levers management can push and pull to make profit happen are constant.

To the extent this unstated assumption is true, it should be possible to direct the attention of machine-learning technology to a business’s inputs, outputs, and operating parameters so that, after some time has passed, the AI will be able to determine the optimal mix for achieving profitable revenue growth.

And in case you’re curious … no, I’m not remotely qualified to delve very far into the specifics of how to go about this. That would call for deep expertise, and I’m a broad-and-shallow kind of guy. I do know someone who built this sort of model the hard way, and she verified that yes, it can be done and yes, machine learning would be a promising alternative to doing it the hard way.

Anyway, while I’m a broad-and-shallow kind of guy, I’m not so shallow that I can’t suggest Thing #2, which is:

Anticipatory customer re-identification

Right now, as pointed out here a couple of weeks ago, most businesses are just trying to survive until the future gets here. And please don’t misunderstand. Succeeding at this will, for most businesses, be nothing to sneeze at (insert your own COVID-19 snark here).

But smart business leaders will take their planning to another level, and it has everything to do with their expectations regarding what the economy will be like once the crisis has passed.

My own, everything-I-know-about-economics-I-learned-on-a-street-corner expectation is that as we’re reaching Great Depression levels of unemployment we shouldn’t expect the post-COVID-19 consumer population to look just like it did before we started self-isolating.

As with the Great Depression most working-age adults will be employed, so there will be consumers to sell to. If we use the Great Depression as the benchmark of our worst-case-not-including-total-societal-collapse analysis we’ll figure about 20% unemployment as the basis for customer re-identification — my just-invented term for Figuring Out Who You Want to Sell To.

The KJR point of view: There will still be consumers and they will still be spending. Fewer and less, for sure, but still well above the zero mark. The affluent and wealthy won’t go away either, and it wouldn’t surprise me if many do quite well in the aftermath and decide this is an excellent time to buy stuff.

I’m not going to try to identify specific consumer segments here. That’s for you and your fellow strategic planners in the business to do. What I’m recommending is that business leaders shouldn’t wait to find out who will be spending what, and shouldn’t undertake their survival efforts based on an expected return to status quo ante.

Make your adjustments based on positioning the business for the consumer marketplace to come, and which segments within it you want to cater to.

And yes, that includes those businesses that don’t sell to consumers, because in the end, no matter how long the business-to-business-to-business value chain, it’s always consumer spending that pays for the steps in between.

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|In: Organizational Effectiveness|Last Updated:

Not everything has changed.

Before Covid-19, conference room meetings consisted of attendees in oval formation, the backs of their laptop screens forming a socially impenetrable barrier. Many of the attendees pretended to be taking notes while actually checking email and otherwise disengaging.

It wasn’t exactly social distancing, but compare this room chemistry with old-fashioned note taking on a pad of paper: No spite fence, no suspicion that half the room is, while physically present, engaged in astral projection, and, for that matter, less temptation to engage in astral projection.

Now we have virtual conference rooms, where many of those attending “multitask” without even having to pretend they’re interested in the conversation. They can just mute their phones and go about answering email and otherwise disengaging while satisfying the need for their presence, which is, as before, more political than essential.

They were invited, they showed up, and so their silo was represented.

What’s the solution? Decide in advance if you’re going to participate. If you are, show up and participate. If you aren’t, Reply All to the invitation list, sending this message: “I have little or nothing to add given the expertise that will already be represented. I trust you to make the best decisions and I promise not to second-guess.”

Or, if you’re the meeting host because you needed it to happen, but don’t have content to contribute from that point forward, let everyone know that your plan is to host but not participate once the pre-meeting schmoozing has finished.

It’s a lot less embarrassing than being asked a question when your mind is exploring an entirely different region of cyberspace.

As long as we’re on the subject, here’s another virtual meeting tip: If you’re the one who’s screen-sharing, make sure the screen you’re sharing isn’t the screen incoming instant messages pop up on. Even by email standards, instant messages tend to be … unfiltered.

And one more: If screen-sharing isn’t important for much of the call, have the designated note-taker share their screen when nobody else needs to share theirs so everyone can see the notes that are being taken in real time.

I’ve been a “remote employee” for the past seven years now. In that time, the phrase has evolved from polite euphemism, to pre-Covid-19 nothing-out-of-the-ordinary, to Covid-19-era new normal.

And yet, not all managers have adapted to the difference between leading and managing a physically present and virtual workforce.

Perhaps you or the managers who report to you are among them. To that end, here are a few more notions to explore:

Out of sight, out of mind. With a physical workforce this was metaphorical. Now it’s literal, too. Not the out-of-mind as in loss-of-sanity-from bouncing-off-the-walls out of mind. Out of mind as in interactions become transactional. The casual conversations needed to build and maintain working relationships easily fall by the wayside when contact has to be intentional because you don’t bump into the people who report to you just by walking around.

The rules of organizational change management (OCM) apply in spades. Especially, every manager should perform a stakeholder analysis to understand how different staff members and groups are likely to be reacting to the steps the business is taking to make it through.

The point of stakeholder analysis is very much the same as the point of personalized marketing messaging: If you understand each person who will receive your messages, you can craft your messages for maximum effectiveness.

Marketers are rarely in a position to truly personalize their messages. The best they can do is divide their audience into groups with similar demographic and psychographic profiles.

That’s true for you if you’re the CEO communicating with the employees of a large enterprise. But if you know every member of the teams that report to you, personalization … or, failing that, being sensitive to how each member will react to what you have to say … is certainly within your grasp.

A final suggestion: Start sending the managers and supervisors who report to you a tip ‘o the week for managing a remote workforce, and especially remote teams.

Some of the above might be useful for getting started.

The answer to the question you undoubtedly want to ask is, of course you can use the above as a starting point. KJR isn’t supposed to be a secret.

# # #

Are you still employed? Has your personal pittance failed to entirely lose its value over the past couple of months?

Us too. Sharon and I decided it’s time to think about those less fortunate than us, which, we concluded, is nearly everyone.

I’m not going to even give hints as to which charities you should donate to. I’ll just say that if you’re like us, little of COVID-19’s personal impact has crossed the threshold separating problems from inconveniences.

If you have been personally affected, I can’t do much more than offer my sympathy. If you haven’t, consider donating somewhere to help those who have.

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