Ola Sundvall

Tag: Marketing

  • You must transform to the future of work!! – or do you…?

    You must transform to the future of work!! – or do you…?

    AND I CAN SHOW YOU HOW!! – or can I?

    The trend is strong, there is a career advisor (or COACH – how I have come to dislike this word more and more) behind every corner, eager to sell you his or her advice. The only thing that seem to differ is the price tag – some are selling a fairly cheap bullet list for you to check, step by step, and thy future shall be bright and prosperous. Others sell qualified courses and programs for more or less hefty sums which in themselves can act as a strong motivator for you to actually do something for yourself, eg. for gods sake, use the expensive toolbox you just bought. And of course, there is a myriad of levels and variants in between these extremes.

    I must emphasize that I have the deepest respect for these people (well, most of them) that are getting themselves out of their comfort zones, and I think it is fascinating how many of them who seem to succeed (of course, the less successful majority is sorted out by the algorithms, but anyway, er).

    The pattern I see in this I find interesting, but it’s nothing new. It is that business areas that are the most prosperous ones are those which are selling hope. We have entered at stage in history (yet again maybe) where the pot filled with gold at the end of the rainbow is the most grateful or easy thing to start selling, which means that being a coach who sells prosperity recipes becomes some sort of meta-coaching, since supporting the marketeers marketing is very common these days when every one needs to (or do they?) start their own business, thus being in the need for advice, right?

    This pattern is common in dire times with lay-offs and distrust in growth forecasts, and it is probably virtously reinforced by the SoMe penetration into our very genomes.

    My problem in this, without making this to a cry baby post, is that I am doing my thing in a high-competition market, where thousands and thousands of skilled people are offering the same thing as me – high-end (er…) consulting services, preferably to more or less large public adminstrations and private enterprises, and this market is owned by them brokers who are offering their customers a filter function in order to push prices down and to cut a nice commission on just being a – broker.
    This, in combination with me having my imposter syndrome, and a not clearly niched competence profile. makes it hard find someone who actually can give me a clear path ahead where I can get prosperous and get an even and nicely leveled revenue stream. So, my analysis of the flourishing coaching market is: it’s not for every one, it’s more for the seller than the buyer, and I’m not one of these.

    Another problem I have with this is a severe bias towards doubt when it comes to salability – my thoughts most often revolves around “nobody can buy that, so stupid can’t anyone be“, about offerings I stumble over, but the fact remains – people buy crap, and they’re happy with it! So why shouldn’t I be able to sell my own value, but towards totally different markets and through totally different channels I’m used to?

    THAT is my challenge ahead, and now I have time to do something about it, before I pop out in a new period of fighting for a (too poorly) paid assignment. I must just find out how my track record can be converted into an offer you can’t refuse, owned by me, giving you maximum value. Time for a change, and to actually start doing it. Stay tuned.

  • Everything is production, really

    Everything is production, really

    If I should summarize my work life so far, the common denominator for everything I have been in, made, or contributed to is

    Production

    How can that be?

    It might sound far fetched, but I can (actually) argue for this. If we look at value creation which could be another term to compete with production, I see that the process (or processes) that we draw to describe flow of value are similar – so similar so it’s more of a matter of self-identification that make you feel what sort of work you do – though I would say that you produce something in any case, because production without creation of value is non-existent (though some organizations surely do it, unfortunately).

    I will put up some theses to prove my point:

    1. Input and output (or outcome if you prefer to look at the bigger picture simultaneously)

    When we produce stuff, for instance in different industries, we need to put in raw material, instructions for how to treat these, and specifications for how we want the end result to look like.

    Value creation is more geared towards input of for instance customer needs, which isn’t necessarily tangible as some sort of hardware items – it could be totally immaterial. But there is an uncountable amount of needs through history that is fulfilled with some sort of tangible item.

    2. Resource assessment

    Both value creation and “pure production” can’t be performed without resources. The resources can be human’s time and skills, an AI prompt, machines and tools along a production line, software tools and platforms, code languages and so forth.
    Regardless of what you are about to accomplish, you need to assess what resources you need, how many you need (if the resource type is limited in it’s output per resource) and what pace you can expect from the setup you are planning.

    The exact same type of preparation is fundamental for creating value (though you rather shy for these dry and boring realities in the value creation context because value creation is something totally different and much more coomplicateed…)

    3. Manage and control (or orchestration and follow-up if you prefer)

    For production in the industry there is a lot of different and established, often branch-specific frameworks that is implemented quite well and also well taken care of, since product certifications, branch standards, CE markings and regulations require this.

    In the value creation realm things can be much less specified, depending on what type of business you’re in. It can of course be weighed down by really tough regulations and branch-specific requirements, whereas the value creation becomes constrained due to the circumstances and hopefully evaluated with that in mind.

    Finally

    To conclude this we can quite clearly see that value creation and production is just about same thing, different name.

    BUT – the value creation as a term always contains production, since folks working with production too often just see their own discipline as the almighty thing to do, where the need for customer focus, understanding and orientation etc, is overlooked.
    In these cases, there are a number of process owners and managers and so forth who constantly run around the production team and maintain customer focus for the ones refusing to adapt customer focus themselves. To defend the staff, many hardware work steps can be quite abstract to directly connect to a customer value, though they are unavoidably interconnected with an end result, which also is – an outcome.

    In for instance software businesses or IT-organizations on the other hand, we tend to push customer awareness and the need for creating customer values, not only outputs, onto the teams and resources directly. This is of course necessary and in fact fundamental in times of fierce competition and ever-evolving rapid development.
    The problem is that there are so many tasks necessary to perform, which are more of output nature and doesn’t fit in the outcome bubble since they are just secondary and more of enabling characteristics than direct wo-ho effects for the end user.
    Yet a lot, if not the most, in the immaterial producing business is about the same repetitive tasks that need to be performed, over and over again, without deviations – just like in any sort of industry… at least when we are looking at operations, which most often is overlooked since development is so much more fun to discuss.

    Meta-reflections:

    If we regard production as a subordinated process residing within a value creation – value, framework, wrapping, don’t really know what to call this entity – then marketing and sales also are subordinated processes residing alongside the production process. These are kind of production processes as well, where marketing’s output should be an irresistible urge to buy, and sales refines interested, so called prospects or leads, into buying customers.

    And existing or won customers are in turn refined to come into retention state – room for another production process… is this maybe called CRM…?