The Art Behind the Business

I am worried to open my browser on the evaluations website, to find out how many reviews I need to fill in. I have blocked out Friday for this, while I work from home, but we all know how planning days free of ‘work’ often works. Everywhere around me I see people going through the official adjectives list, googling some of them, figuring out what the best term is to define someone who does really well 90pct of the way but then is never able to finish. I appreciate the commitment to do it, but inevitably we all complain.  Very timely, I put myself on a management course on providing feedback and supporting career development this week. Although more focused on the actual discussion, for me it was important to go over a few techniques and I am certain it will set us all in the mindset to write better reviews.  What is a valuable review?  It has clear feedback - no dancing around the issue or vague compliments. How? ‘You did a great job well done!’ vs ‘You...

For the last two weeks, one of my team members was out. I admit that I panicked when I realised I had given her 2 weeks off rather the one I originally thought. Right in the middle of kicking off budgeting season - I started thinking that once again I oversaw business needs with being ‘nice’ to my team.   I was glad to find out that my fears were unfounded. We are a team now, so this is now possible. And it is amazing. What does it mean to work in a team? It is the typical interview question for small, medium or    large corporations. ‘Tell me when you have has a good (or bad) team experience and how that worked out for you?’ .   And some may think - well actually I work so much better on my own without the distraction of a team, how should I put this to you... At times I considered whether that was the case for me as well. I was often part of small teams in banking, with a wide gap between myself and a more senior person, which would mean I would operate aut...

Say you have launched a new business area and even planned ahead what you needed to get done across the business, who your new customers would be, where you were going to get revenues from, how you were going to acquire customers, how you would market yourself, how you would produce the goods needed. One day you wake up and something is not quite right. You still have not paid off the initial investment and it feels like this new business area is eating into your (slim) core business profitability. You thought you were investing for growth where it seems like you are getting yourself in a hole. But it is not a deep hole, and you can't quite figure out what is going on. You sit at your desk and ask, what is wrong, what did I miss. If you had no goals on paper, nothing to guide you, how do you know if you are executing to plan, how do you know if the plan is even working. Nothing tells you that your business idea is wrong, but potentially, you may just be going about it the ...

I a bit of a data freak. I like my data, preferably correct. I feel like James Bond as he approaches the bar. How do you like your data? "Accurate, not Cut". That would be me. I don't take it re-worked, re-cut or in extracts. I take it raw so I know what it is, what it means, what it tells me, what flaws it has. The problem with data is that people more often than not do not understand what they are looking at. You asked for a piece of analysis and someone sends you a chart and you take it as it is. You believe you have done the right question and the person has interpreted what you were after the write way, extracted what you intended. A whole bunch of assumptions which my time working inside an organization (other than in the client facing side of the business) has taught me are mostly flawed. When we start looking at a problem, most likely we don't really know what we are after. We feel that there is some data that illustrates our story but really ...

Everyone talks about them - large or small businesses, established or start-up companies. I had a conversation today about how some new products got established without ever having made it to paper-  so are business plans really needed? Aren’t we just adding un-necessary burdens and governance layers when we want is to be lean, fail fast and keep going? Isn’t lean the new black and business plans so 2 seasons ago? Not quite. Business plans serve different purposes in different organisations but there are commonalities in what they are able to achieve. It is not about the piece of paper or even necessarily the meeting in which they get presented if any, it is not even about the dollar forecast one puts in there. Time. Business plans create time. No, they don’t have the magic power to make a CEO day any longer, rather the reverse as most people will work on a business plan on top of their ‘day job’. But they create the most rare kind of time - time away from working IN th...

I am one of those 'non producers' that, per the name used, brings no production to the place I work for - read it no client or trading revenues. I am also called 'management' in a good day, central overhead in a bad day. With this start, why am I even talking about it? I moved into the management side, from a promising career in Investment Banking, 6.5 years ago. What originally started as an experiment because I was bored and wanted to grow, quickly became a career per se . I was astonished at the massive differential between the people producing in the business and those managing it (eg not producing). I knew then that my ability to make an impact for the Firm was beyond revenue generation and my IBD discipline and HBS critical approach were just what I needed.  Managing a business has clients and revenues at its core. But everything else around it determines its long term sustainability. The businesses that spend enough time governing themselves, measuring themselve...