Me Workshopper

Tag: Marketing

  • It’s inevitable – I need to write about AI

    It’s inevitable – I need to write about AI

    And true to my habits, it’s going to be from a “is it just me” perspective.

    I recently decided to make use of Claude (on a free plan so far) to act as my business advisor, since my so-called transition from my former (still being?) consultant approach to more of a peer is stalling. Inspired by the explosion of AI agent postings in all feeds everywhere, I thought I should start to build my own team in order to start a marketing campaign or something similar, maybe at least get some momentum in daily marketing work.

    I got some advice that I didn’t like so much from the bot, since it required me structuring my archives in order to feed the agent with information about me so that we should be somewhat qualitative. I then turned my question over to more of what I am (or should be) and how to act. The prompt looks like this:

    “With the background I presented initially and the file I just uploaded, I need some help with ideation. I’m struggling with two huge questions: What do I want to do? What could be a market where my experiences are valuable and I would have a good chance to really stick out and “stick” with prospective customers and what value should I bring to them? I have so hard to change route from the old-school consultant that I have been and maybe not been good enough as. I also have an idea about putting together a team of diversely skilled AI agents in order to get some momentum in an ideation process, but I don’t know if it’s worth the costs and effort.”

    Now things started to turn in more interesting directions. To this text, I had attached my profile or CV in English, and Claude told me that I possibly undersold myself and we started to elaborate on this, putting the whole agent project aside for a while, since this wasn’t of importance right now.

    I got a couple of alternatives of how to present myself and I picked one with, stated by Claude, more niche and possible higher risk, but speaking to the “curious and analytically minded” (that understand what I actually offer?).

    I reasoned that it’s worth taking the risk of not being understood by all. The ones who do are probably more worthy to approach anyway. And since I gave Claude the link to my website, it was hard to avoid a rebuild in the direction we had been taken on this.

    So, the web page was radically rebuilt from my earlier radical rebuild, and it felt okay.

    The next step was to dig into my LinkedIn profile, where I recently made a shift towards being a facilitator. The business for facilitators has recently started to erode, since AI tools can do a good portion of the work facilitators have done until now (this can be a bit exaggerated since very many organizations are far behind the ones that strive for real digitalization, but one cannot shy away from it entirely).

    This is where I was forced to halt and think things over. I was in an earlier stage given a tagline and a text for the “about” section on LI, and I took the tagline and pasted it as it was, looked okay. Then I asked Claude to give me a new draft for the about section, looked okay and I pasted it. Those two elements are the ones that are there now at the time for writing this, but what came next?

    I got a recommendation to write a post about me describing my skills and add this to the “Featured section on my LI page”, and so I asked Claude to give me a draft (at this point I was so accustomed to Claude doing stuff for me so it felt just natural). But – it didn’t feel good. The post is here, as-is:

    “Most organizational problems aren’t people problems

    When a team underperforms, the diagnosis is almost always the same: wrong people, bad attitude, poor leadership.

    It’s usually wrong.

    In 25 years of working inside organizations — defense, healthcare, manufacturing, retail tech — I’ve seen the same pattern repeat across sectors, sizes, and cultures. The people are capable. Often experienced. Frequently aware that something isn’t working.

    What’s broken is the design around them.

    Three structural flaws show up more than any others:

    Unclear mandate. The team doesn’t have a shared, explicit understanding of what they’re actually responsible for — and what they’re not. So they absorb work that isn’t theirs, fail to deliver what is, and gradually lose confidence in their own judgment.

    Uncontrolled intake. Work arrives from everywhere, in every form, with no triage. The team is perpetually reactive. Nothing gets finished properly because something more urgent always appears. The list grows. Meetings multiply.

    Invisible technical debt. Infrastructure, tools, and processes that nobody owns and nobody has a plan to maintain. Everyone knows it’s a problem. Nobody has the mandate — or the budget line — to fix it.

    None of these are HR problems. They’re design problems. And they won’t be solved by a team-building day, a new manager, or a strategy offsite.

    They’re solved by looking at the structure honestly, naming what’s broken, and building interventions that hold.

    That’s what a business architect does.

    If you recognize this situation — in your team, your organization, or somewhere you’ve been — I’d be interested to hear which of the three it was.

    I just felt that this is maybe not me anyway – this is an opinion coming from an engine that I have fed with possible exaggerations and descriptions of who I have wanted to be somewhere in time, but does it align with what I want to be nowadays? I honestly can’t tell and I haven’t been able to tell for the last three or so decades, so how could an AI that I have known for just a couple of days and given a thin slice of myself know? The text is valid for sure, but this is more of an alias I have strived for in a period of my life. I have also noticed the many solopreneurs out here present an identity they want to be while actually working lower in the value chains, and it’s kind of sad.

    This made me realize that building myself is a job I must do myself and I need to carve out the real me, what I want to do, and why. This is in a time when delivering advice as a service is so (possibly temporarily) disrupted and so many are both searching for solutions and so many searching for the next gig. Being authentic is the most important thing, but which authenticity should I choose? And in what way does this make me stand out from the crowd? There are a dime a dozen like me fighting for being seen, is it really meaningful, or should I continue experimenting with Claude and see how far it can go?

  • 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 the ones 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 ordinate 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 (hopefully becoming) 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…?