John Caddell's blog

A Friday-afternoon rantTM

Here comes 07/07/07. A very lucky day–ask Tony and Eva or other engaged couples–no? Well, no!

What about 06/06/06? Wasn’t that supposed to be the devil’s day? No again.

When will we realize that each of the numbers that makes up a date is an arbitrary creation of man, lacking any consistency or objective meaning?

AD 2000 wasn’t 2000 years after the birth of Jesus (various sources place the date between 7 B.C. and 2 B.C.). And if you don’t follow Christianity, what meaning would that number have even if it were accurately counted from Jesus’ birth?

The month/day numbers have changed as recently as 1582, when the Gregorian calendar was adopted.

It’s time to stop worrying about what’s going to happen on a specific date. Truth is, if there are fateful dates out in the cosmos, we wouldn’t be able to pinpoint them anyway. So savor the present moment.

(Picture by shadowkill via stock.xchng)

Friday afternoon rant, dates, superstition

The new book “Firing Back: How Great Leaders Rebound After Career Disasters,” excerpted in the January Harvard Business Review, says something important about personal networks.

The book, by Professors Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale and Andrew Ward of the University of Georgia, cites a Stanford University study finding that far more job-seekers found positions though distant acquaintances (27.8%) than through close contacts (people whom they saw at least twice a week–16.7%). Distant contacts are more likely to know people new to you, and thereby able to create connections that didn’t exist already.

Meaning: you should cultivate acquaintances with people you meet who move in different circles. And you should keep in touch, at least once a year, with most everyone you’ve met (ask Keith Ferrazzi).

A lot of work? Yes. But your next job may depend on it.

relationships, networking, careers

If you’re an MVNO fan and tired of reading about Helio’s and Amp’d’s subscriber projections, today was a day to celebrate. Two very interesting MVNO announcements hit the wires today.

First, Planned Parenthood announced an MVNO running underneath Working Assets Wireless’ Sprint contract (significant because Sprint has been very reluctant to allow their MVNOs to re-resell their service).

Second, Titan Holdings bought one of the existing prepaid MVNOs, Ready Mobile, a part of a rollup strategy that might bring some clarity to the rat’s nest that is the US prepaid MVNO market–excepting Tracfone, Virgin and Boost.

wireless, mobile, marketing, MVNO

Picture this. You’re VP of sales, six months into the implementation of a new sales process, and you haven’t moved your numbers one iota, after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on systems and training and at least that much in lost productivity.

Everyone rated the classes highly, the staff uses the new lingo, the surveys indicate things are OK. But no results.

Awake late at night, by the glow of the alarm clock, you are comparing yourself to the worst sales VPs you’ve ever known, to see if you might in fact be worse than any of them.

What do you do?

First, take a deep breath. Or two, or three. Then it’s time to get the story, the real story, from the people on the front lines.

Here’s how you do it:

1. You select a diverse group of people from across the organization who in some way affect or are affected by the new sales process.
2. A team you select works with the individuals to ask them how they do their jobs, in detail, using concrete examples. The team records and transcribes the stories.
3. You get the group together. Using Anecdote’s sensemaking methodology, the group finds the motives, values and assumptions underlying the stories. From there, the group discovers the several key issues that are causing the biggest impediments to the new process.
4. You work with the group to develop interventions to help address the issues and help the new process do what it’s designed to do.
5. You put the interventions into practice. Some are big, others are small, seemingly insignificant.
6. You monitor the team’s rising performance. That sales process wasn’t such a lousy idea after all.

Getting the real story, and figuring out how to act on it, can be done. It will take some work and a willingness to try something new. Start off by taking the “Narrative Techniques in Business” workshop March 26 in Seattle or March 29 in Boston. Click here for registration information.

(Picture by drrivky via stock.xchng)

innovation, narrative, sales, management, change management

While preparing the prior post on HP, I came across this very sensible rant by Jeff Ventura on his blog Graceful Flavor. Jeff should be hired immediately by every software vendor to improve their marketing.

software, marketing