Happy Holidays - S Curve yourself, 60s Rock Bands, Meetings and a new book - The Manager
Cultivated Management
Newsletter
Edition 12 - S Curve yourself, 60s Rock Bands, Meetings, Free Book!
Hi,
Hope you're all set for the Holiday Period. I'm very much looking forward to spending time with my family and catching up on some photography. Might also try and get some more writing done too!
As it's the festive period I'd love you to have a free gift from me. It's a pre-published copy of my latest book - How to hire and onboard - a Blazingly Simple Guide.
It started out as a blog post but before I knew it I'd written 15k words. I then extended it a little more and added in a chapter of pre-existing content and I was at 24k words - a very respectable length for a book.
The book will be launched in January on Amazon and will be priced pretty cheap given it's only a short one by book standards! I'd love to hear your feedback about the book and whether it's been helpful.
You can grab the book here - http://cultivatedmanagement.com/hiring-free-copy/
This will be the last newsletter until January. Next year there's some pretty exciting collaborations and new books and products launching!
With that I wish all the best for the festive period and I look forward to more engagement next year.
In the meantime, if you want to let me know what you'd like to read more of in these newsletters, don't hesitate to hit reply - I do reply to every email and your insights will help make this newsletter better.
Thanks
Rob..
S-Curve yourself
In the tech world the S-Curve is a description of how a new innovation takes of.
Imagine the letter S.
As a company innovates around a new project or idea it costs time and money to get it off the ground. So at the bottom of the S is a dip, as time and money are invested to make this idea a reality. Consider this a new project at your company that doesn't yet have customers. It's going to require investment.
As investment comes in your product or service starts to launch and essentially this is the rising point in the letter S. It goes up and keeps going up as more customers use it and a market starts to form. This could last for years and sustain amazing growth. But eventually the competition move in or demand for the product or service declines as customer's demands shift.
Remember - those who own the customer demand win - not those with the shiniest tech. A hard lesson for many technologists.
So decline starts to happen - the top part of a letter S. Some companies only have one product though, so during the decline there is a great loss of market and revenue. You see this often - companies losing ground and unable to innovate quickly enough. Their single product is no longer relevant. Kodak? Blockbusters?
Innovation and renewal takes time. This is exactly why companies invest in multiple new products, ideas or strategies to see which ones takes off and creates the next S curve. Another S running at the same time, or slightly overlapping the last S keeps them alive.
This is represented in the image (if you've enabled them in the email client) by the I in a circle. A new innovation - it fuels the next S.
Some companies may run several different streams and kill the ones that don't add value. I think 6-10 initiatives all running should yield one or two that become new products and give you the next few years of growth.
Think about how Google keep killing projects - they don't resonate, there is no market, so get rid.
You cannot innovate out of decline though - Jim Collins teaches us this lesson in How The Mighty Fall. Some companies go in to decline despite having lots of innovations, but the reason is most likely because they innovated too late, and the innovations weren't good enough to sustain the next period of growth.
What's this got to do with you and management? A few things:
If you're in tech and your company are not experimenting and innovating you'll be bypassed at some point. Speak to product teams, execs etc and encourage them to try new innovations. Harder than it seems to convince short term thinking though.
Innovation is a buzz word yet few people know how to stir it up. Your job, as a manager, is to create a safe place for people to experiment. I'll be writing more about how to do this next year.
Innovation is a creative process. This cannot be achieved by measuring costs, controlling people or running meetings. Managers must fight this and create places for innovation to happen.
Most importantly though - you should be applying this concept to your own career.
Are your current skills in decline as the market shifts and the competition increases? We must keep adding new skills and experiences to our own careers to remain relevant to the next wave of demand from employees and customers alike.
This might be coding skills, new tech, better communication skills or shifting to a whole new sector.
This is why I moved from Tester to Agile Coach to Engineering Manager to HR. HR is big now and it's technology driven. A perfect sector to move in to for myself. I'm able to work across all of those functions and lead these sorts of teams. Your path will be different, but think about where your industry is going and what your peers are doing and what interests you.
Should you be finding your next experiment to create a new S?
I think so.
Communication Workshop
As you may know by now I'm running my award winning Communication Workshop in Winchester, UK next year. It's a blast to run and attendees leave with knowledge about the science of communication, how to write effectively, how to do an awesome presentation and many other scenario based communication Super Powers.
Book of the Week
This week's book of the week is an oddball one. It's called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead!
The Grateful Dead are a band who formed in the 60s and broke almost every rule of the record industry. They made their money from touring rather than record sales. They gave away their products for free. They allowed people to "tape" their performances and share them for free in the community. They were one of the first bands to create a "mailing list". They built a community and a group of raving fans. They encouraged their community to design artwork for the band. And they played a different set each and every night, sometimes making mistakes and having to end songs midway - they were human, like us all.
Does any of this sound familiar? It's modern marketing and branding.
This book is brilliant. It's short and has some powerful lessons for anyone building a brand (ahem - it's the same for a personal brand too). It's a fun little read and it's amazing to read about how each of these "breaking the rules" lead to a career spanning decades and a following of fans anyone would be wowed by.
There are lessons for management too. Each of these lessons is essentially a lesson in how to manage a team.
Ignore what the "industry" think you should do as a manager - do what is right and needed
Loosen up your brand - no need for management to be the formal directive approach - it's more about coaching and training and helping others
Let your team decide on the direction and contribute to success - no need for command and control
Create regular communication opportunities. Double what you think you're doing - then double it again - and again.
Take people on a journey with you and the business - very important - if people don't see the journey, don't buy in to it - then they'll be resistant to join you and your team. Storytelling is super important in management and leadership. Super important.
No doubt you'll get some more lessons from the book. If you're interesting in branding, marketing, music, or community driven businesses - this book will likely inspire you.
Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead!
Articles of the week
This week's articles are:
Move slowly and fix things - A call to arms for technologists to think about the impact they have on the world and why they should invest in getting the products fit for purpose.
An introduction to Epigenetics - If you've been on the Communication Skills Workshop you'll know I talk a lot about hacking yourself and your environment. Good communicators are able to change themselves - epigenetic is a fascinating new field of discovery which essentially says your health is not pre-determined but affected by your surroundings. You can regrow new DNA based on good food, air, exercise and positive thinking. Powerful new field.
Ray Bradbury on Writing - I love Brain Pickings - such a brilliant site full of wonderful insights.
Performance Management is a partnership - performance management is about a partnership between management and directs. AGREED!!
How Digital Finance is transforming agriculture - Good article about how tech is changing the way agriculture works in Africa.
Pay Equity is a new requirement for HR - About time. It will give you some idea about how seriously your executive team take pay equity with the new legal requirement in the UK to publish your companies pay gap. Publishing it, and actioning change to it are two different things though. One is a requirement and lip service - the other is action. Actions speak louder than words.
There is a gender gap in Internet usage - interesting article about the gap between men and women's use on the Internet.
This week on Cultivated Management
This week on the blog:
How to run amazing meetings - A Blazingly Simple Guide - if you run meetings, which I suspect you do, here's an in-depth guide on how to make them rock - straight out of the communication workshop - missing of course the embarrassing nonverbal demonstrations by myself!
Thank you for reading The Manager.
Have a wonderful Festive Break. See you Next Year.
Rob..
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