Digital Business

“The economy’s central problem isn’t a lack of demand, or a lack of supply — but a lack of purpose“, according to Umair Haque at the Harvard Business Review.

It’s an interesting statement but what does it mean? His article talks about the two arguments in play at the moment on the economy where one says ‘cut’ and the other says ‘spend’. His argument is that this is the old way of thinking about the economy, an economy founded on an industrial past which the developed countries no longer have and which the developing countries are experiencing.

How do the developed economies compete in a world which has changed so rapidly? More than focusing on just products and supporting old industries which have failed (e.g. the car industry), he suggests we rethink our approach to living in a post-crash society and we take , a more creative approach to building our futures.

He has got a point.

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If you like change, then it is as good a time to be alive now as it has been for a long time.

For instance, in politics this time last year we had a Labour Party government. This year, the British electorate decided that it wanted a coalition government to run the country which is the first time in generations that this has occurred.

In sport, the most highly played football players in the world have been humbled by their less famous and worse off competitors.

In business, with the recession hitting hard, people questioned why bankers were getting paid so much money when their risky investments created so little value.

In the media, the BBC is going to be more open about the pay of the top earners in the organisation.

Now, with government data being made publicly available (search for ‘Spotlight on Spend‘ on the web to see what I mean), we should soon be able question how our money is being spent by our local governments.

There really has been a change in the way that we think about people, practices, institutions and values over the last two years compared to the previous twenty years. We are not only becoming much better at questioning what we took for granted before, but at actually being able to understand more about the reasons for the previous practices or policies by having better information.

However, some things have not changed. Traffic jams and poor train services are just two that are still terrible. But, I have a solution to those hassles. I have a Honda Silver Wing and, unlike Red Bull, it does give me wings.

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I can quite see why Apple has sold over a million of them since March.

By chance, yesterday I had the chance to play with an Apple iPad. A colleague from the USA had bought one for himself and had it with him when he had flown over for an important meeting in London. Funnily enough, he said “I have good reason for justifying why I spent over $700 on the iPad, but I’m glad I did”. His version was the 32GB version with Wi-Fi and 3G.

My first impression of the iPad was the size. It was slightly smaller than I had expected. It’s more compact than a netbook and it is larger than a Sony Reader. The next thing I noticed that it has looks of simple elegance. The screen is clear and sharp.

When I handled the iPad it was heavier than expected but that was reassuring in so much as that it is well made and it would appear to have some ‘good kit’ inside the casing. Not being an iPhone owner (yet) I was not used to the ease at which you can navigate around it through the apps and in the apps.

The on-screen keyboard was a lot bigger than I had expected too. It is certainly usable. The only challenge is the angle at which you type compared to seeing what you are typing. Because it is flat, you will either need the purpose-made case to enable you to put it at an angle so you can see what you are typing, or you will need to lean the iPad up against a book!

The applications I was very interested to see were the book apps. The iBook app is slick, easy to navigate and a clear reading experience. The Kindle app was as easy to read and use but you can’t have two pages open side by side like a paper book. A small concession. However, the Kindle syncs between the Kindle app on your iPhone and your iPad so it knows where you were last time you were reading between the devices. Clever.

The next impressive application is the built-in calendar. It synchronises with your work calendar or your Google calendar and it is beautifully laid out so you can see your schedule in detail and in general on the same page. You can also synchronise your work email (and personal email) through Microsoft Exchange too.

Overall, I was impressed with the iPad. It is pricey but I know it would be incredibly useful. It’s not something on which you would do a lot of hard-core office work on, but it is something I can quite see that I would have with me for much of the day, whether for reading books, watching films, listening to music or catching up on my emails and schedule.

I can quite see why Apple has sold over a million of them since March.

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When should you be honest?

Looking up virtues on Wikipedia gives you an impression of just how many virtues there are. Honesty is a virtue.  Honesty is slap-bang in the middle of the table, below helpfulness and above honour. To the left of it is consideration. To the right is patience.

And yet, as virtuous as it is, honesty is something which is tricky. Being honest can make you friends and lose you friends equally quickly. Here’s a story about honesty which I hope will show, at least, when not to be honest.

Years ago, a friend was going out with someone who worked in a well known advertising agency. She was in charge of their account with an equally recognisable international brewery. They were launching a new beer which was a bit different in that it was supposed to appeal to different types of male beer drinkers. In fact, the beer was trying to attract people who wanted a good pint of bitter in the winter, which was also appealing to lager drinkers, and those who wanted something to drink with food. Ridiculous, right? It sounded like a Swiss Army knife in what it was trying to achieve. A beer just cannot do that.

The advertisement was on TV and showed a man moving through three different rooms each of which met the atmosphere to match when they were likely to drink the beer. It was a nice advertisement and must have taken hours to pull together.

The advertising executive asked me what I thought of her advertisement. I was honest. I didn’t like it because the beer did not appeal to me. I am not really a lager drinker and I don’t often drink beer with food. Her face dropped.

In retrospect, I should have said it was great because it did not really matter what I thought of the beer. She was going out with my pal (and eventually they married) and it was more important to be friends with them than what I thought about her advertisement. I should have lied.

Another time, I was running my own online delicatessen and selling hampers. They were good hampers and not the standard stuff that is turned out in volume by the big companies. A customer found my site and rang me up to say he loved what he saw on my site and I could I do him sixty hampers. I was honest. I did not have enough stock to be able to fulfill the order at the time. I should have lied. I should have said ‘yes’ and worked out how the hell I was going to get the stock in and out on time.

On other occasions, particularly in business, I have found that being honest saves a huge amount of time and builds relationships that are strong and beneficial. Too often I have been in meetings when I was honest with a client about whether we could help them or not only to be rebuked by a colleague afterwards. Or I was honest about the reality and that we were unlikely to deliver on time because I knew the dire situation with our resources to be able to help them.

In my experience, clients like to know where they stand because people don’t like surprises. People like to know so they can plan for the change in expectations. People respect honesty. But being honest can lose you opportunities too. You just have to use your judgement  whether you need to be honest or charming. You need to consider whether you are honest and pass by some luck or whether you take a risk and grab an opportunity by less than frank.

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It's not restful at the time

Moving house this week reminded me that it is not for the faint hearted. It really is one of the most stressful events in life. Not only is it expensive, it is all-consuming. My wife and I were about to instruct our estate agents to pull the house off the market four months after eighteen months of no success in selling it. We had the usual trail of people viewing it, albeit a handful of people.

For each viewing, we would tidy up and ‘dress’ the house to attempt to make it as appealing as possible to the viewers. Sometimes, the viewers didn’t turn up. Sometimes, they were just nosey. But the day we rang the agents to take it off the market, they said they had a couple who wanted to view the house and they were ‘hot’ prospects.

We duly tidied up the evening before their appointment with a coolness towards the prospective buyers. They arrived the next morning and they seemed to like it. They left to see the rest of the houses on their itinerary.

In short, they loved our house and offered a good price for it. We accepted. Four months later, after the ups and downs of dealing with ‘official vlauers’ who valued it lower than the offer price, arranging mortgages and coordinating the day of the move, we exchanged contracts and completed the deal on our house and the house we now live in.

After eight years of living in an English country cottage, my family and I moved out of the countryside and into our local town. We spent two weeks packing boxes, throwing out unwanted items and wondering how we had accumulated so much stuff.

Last Monday, the removal men arrived and cleared out our house while we cleaned the house to make it presentable. We said ‘au revoir’ to our neighbours and drove the five miles to our new place, only to see that our new house still occupied by its previous owner who was refusing to leave the now empty house until she had the keys to her new house. “Would you leave your home in the knowledge that you had no home to go to?” was her reasoning. I politely reminded her that we had just done that and that she was now in my home. She left fifteen minutes later.

Soon after, the removal men emptied their lorry of our goods and into the new house. By 5-30pm, they had finished the heavy lifting and left with a tip from us for doing a good job. Emptying boxes and finding new places to put items continues and will do so for a while. At 10-30pm, we collapsed into bed, shattered. The emotional and physical pressure had been immense, lightened during the day by family helping, friends visiting to welcome us to our new home and offers of help from our pals.

We have started new routines in the house and we are feeling the benefits of the new environment including being able to walk into town, and our children can walk to school or take the bus. Financially, we are now better off for having downsized our mortgage and moved into a house which is cheaper to run. We know it was a good thing to do, despite the feeling that perhaps this move could be seen by us as a negative step.

Our perceptions before moving into town were that it would be noisy compared to our village house. We were wrong. We thought the house would feel smaller. We were wrong, it feels no bigger or smaller than our old home, but the space is better used and designed.

The question in the title of this entry is a cliché, but I asked it anyway. The fact is that change is hard work, stressful and tiring. Our house move is a sign of the times in that we had to move to make sure that our family finances went from sliding into the red to being in the black. We have gained so much and we have only lost some misconceived perception that the move was a result of failure in a business venture last year. The change has enabled us more choices and control over our immediate lives and what we want to do in the future.

It has been worth it despite the cost and the stress. Change is not restful at all. What happens after the change is what we focused upon. We are now leaner as a household and more nimble. The family finances are showing a surplus already which is the first time in a long while. I now need a holiday.

Our recent move feels like a mini version of the world we are in now. Climate change, downturn and adjustment. It is painful for people to change but you do come out of it with renewed vigour, purpose and ability.

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XML - Heaven or Hell?

Last week was eye-opening in several ways. I attended two conferences in London. The second one I attended was about online PR and reputation management. If you ever wonder or care about what people are saying about you, your company, your brand or your products, and how that affects the future of them all, then the lessons from this seminar are something about which you should learn.

On Wednesday, I went to the ‘StartWithXML‘ conference which might sound like a tedious affair but it was quite the contrary. This three letter acronym (XML) signifies how the publishing industry is changing from a printed world which has, to a large degree, an attitude of “We publish and sell books” to a digital publishing world whose attitude is “We are distributors of information”.

To quickly explain the benefits of XML, if a publisher starts the book publishing process when they receive a manuscript from an author in Microsoft Word or as an XML document, the ability for the publisher to efficiently turn that into not just a printed book but other products like an eBook, or an online reference tool (if it is guide, for example), is greatly increased. Not only that, the publisher can make the book searchable so that potential customers can find it and read about it in more detail before they buy it.

The benefits of starting the publishing process with a book in XML format are not only good for the publisher, they are good for the customers and the authors. Customers will buy more products and authors will get more royalties.

Most of the large publishing houses are fully aware of the benefits of XML to their businesses. They are in the process of getting their production teams skilled in XML and digital publishing. But it’s the smaller publishers that really need XML. By starting their publishing process with their manuscripts in XML, they can become extremely efficient and competitive in a crowded market.

For example, Snowbooks is a “feisty” publisher made up of three people. They produce all of their books using XML which are held on a database. Each book has all of the information about the title held in XML as well as the book in digital format so that, literally, at the click of a button, they can produce 48-page catalogues about their lists, feed their web site and make versions of each book in different formats. Anyone who has ever tried to put together a catalogue in a conventional way will know that it can take weeks and weeks to do this.

So, if you are in publishing and in production and you don’t know about XML, then you might be thinking it sounds like hell. But, if you do know about XML and its benefits then you could be about to secure your job. You role may well move from the production team into the IT team but, as they say, “if you don’t like change, then see how you feel about irrelevance”.

For more details from the StartwithXML conference, you can see the slide decks used by the speakers here.

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These really did change the world.

Ten photographs that changed the world – Telegraph http://ow.ly/osTa

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Spotify has thousands of new subscribers per month but fewer paying subscribers.

You would think not based upon all of the online companies, such as YouTube and Spotify, who seem to be heading towards a business built on burning money rather than making it. Rupert Murdoch is trying to change his business which is also in the middle of seeing ‘printed pounds’ turn into ‘digital pennies’ in many of his publications. He wants to charge for people for online publications. Any why not?

This is an interesting article about the huge debate which is happening now in the publishing world.

Is free content really the iron law of the internet? – Telegraph http://ow.ly/kihI

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Generation M wants to be great at doing stuff that matters

Before you get upset by my heading, I really do mean this as a personal comment. I know several people, including friends, who have been badly affected by the recession in their businesses. I too have had a couple of tough years, most of which came from starting a business at the beginning of 2008 which is still going but for which I am no longer working on.

Bad timing, perhaps, and the recession did not help. The business strategy was ambitious. We were taking a new product to markets we thought we knew well but the clients were cautious and they did not buy as much as we thought despite the benefits available to them. I have learnt a lot in the last two years of my business life and my home life.

One of the main consequences of the business last year is that I have had to look through my personal finances to adjust my lifestyle according to my funds. And it has been a valuable exercise in highlighting how inefficient my household had been in the last ten years with the way we were spending money.

For example, we had borrowed money to extend our current house in a modest way. It improved the house, for sure, but the house has a limit to what people were prepared to pay for it and the growth in the equity has not improved enough to have made it worthwhile. We are selling our house and moving, hopefully, into a new town house which has energy bills half that of our current house. We will drop our mortgage by £100,000 by moving into the new house and it feels good.

Furthermore, it will save us having to drive our children from our current village house to school in town. The children can now walk to school and we save a lot of money on petrol.

Also, I have downsized my car to a car which does 70 miles per gallon (mpg) and 80 mpg if I drive a little more carefully. What was I doing beforehand in a car which only managed 25 mpg? Also, the tax on it is much lower than the previous car.

I admit that I am now becoming a bit obsessive about what I use day to day and I question even the humblest products and their value. For instance, why the heck do I need a razor which has five blades? How close can a razor get before it starts taking your face off anyway? Two blades are fine and the shaving foam I use now is a supermarket brand which is a third of the price of the branded equivalent and just as good. I don’t seem to be the only one either who is changing their ways either. Caroline Eveleigh at Anatec Software and Systems is doing the same with her lighting.

The main point is that we will soon have a great deal more ‘disposable income’ so that our family can invest in the really valuable things in life such as giving our children the best education we can, investing money for the long term, and actually having some fun.

And this is what we are doing in our business, of which I am now a part, too. We question the value of all of our investments very closely. We are investing in the skills of the team. We are investing in building relationships with our new and existing clients. We are making sure we have some fun as business too.

And as the tough conditions continue for businesses and people alike, it seems like their is change in the atmosphere in how people perceive their environment. Umair Haque wrote a very interesting article where he pointed out a change in society in a group which he calls ‘Generation M‘. Generation M is searching for greater meaning in a world which is “full of big, fat, lazy business” but which is seeking “small, responsive, micro-scale commerce“.

I am part of Generation M. I have moved out of big business and into small business where I can make a difference. I am glad that I am downsizing so I am no longer burdened with an oppressive mortgage. I don’t buy products which purport to make me a better human being because the brand tells me so. I am buying products which do a good job and no more. I am getting my life back and getting some meaning into it so that I can enjoy what I do, spend time with my family and friends and just enjoy a simpler life.

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How does your business feel?

A few businesses appear as though they are instant winners. Some take a while to build themselves up to success. Some start with a great idea but burn out quickly as the idea does not translate itself into a commercially viable product or service (I remember meeting someone in a pub in the late ’90′s who was setting up dotcom company which was delivering a clean shirt, pants, socks, a razor and toothbrush to a customer’s office after a night on the town).

I spent some time with a business this evening which had got the ingredients right on its product. One of the keys for this business to get right was how it felt when you walked in through the front door. It felt right. It felt relaxed, welcoming, warm but not hot. It smelt right and you felt as though you were completely welcome. The business is a spa, The Grange Spa, in Lincolnshire.

It is an oasis in this very rural county. The nearest competition is about an hour away. The couple that own it, Matt & Emma Craven, are warm and welcoming. Behind their friendly exteriors are sharp marketing minds that know exactly who they are aiming at as ideal customers. Matt told me precise socio-demographic characteristics of each segment of the population they are targeting.

They started in April 2009 and “footfall” is starting to increase through their doors, finally. It’s tough but it is starting to work. Clients were walking in as we spoke having treatments, using the gym and swimming in their gorgeous pool. Matt uses Twitter and Facebook to help him reach out to potential clients.

But, these social media tools are not necessarily being used by some of their ideal customers. Nevertheless, many of their prospective customers network socially albeit not through the internet but at book clubs. Women with children in their mid to late thirties.

So, Matt and I got chatting about the possibility of combining their spa with women’s book clubs. The spa has beautiful furniture and private areas where a women’s book club could meet to talk about this month’s book, chat and then spend an hour using the spa. We then talked about the joy of using Google Chrome which is when Emma seemed to switch off for some reason.

But more, importantly, take a look at The Grange Spa’s web site and see for yourself at what this oasis offers and how it feels. If you get a chance, swing by and say hello to Matt, Emma or any of their friendly staff to sense for yourself just how good their business feels. If you have your own business, then ask yourself how it feels. Does it feel right? If not, make some changes. It’s important for your customers.

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