The innovation blog
Fresh insights into the challenges that face your business
The Maine attraction
You’d like to put your business on a more sustainable footing, but who has the time and the money?With pressure on prices, time and cash flow, it’s easy to be deterred by rules and regulations and decide that becoming greener is just too difficult. The experience of Portland Color, a wide-format printer in Maine, New England, certainly suggests there is no quick or easy fix (http://blogs.whattheythink.com/going-green/2010/08/learn-from-the-winners-portland-color) but the company is saving serious money on waste disposal and shipping costs and has much stronger bonds with the local community. Portland’s environmental credibility helped it win a prestigious valuable deal with retailer Bloomingdale’s.
Portland Colour (http://portlandcolor.com/) has only 20 staff and founder Andy Graham (www.themainemag.com/people/profiles/1302-andy-graham.html) has thought innovatively about the right management structure for business. He rejects the traditional hierarchy arguing: “Decision making in the moment should rest with the best and most important information about the question, not a boss. I want to imbue each person with a strong sense of personal responsibility for their role in the organisation.”
Creative tensions
Every managing director secretly wishes their senior managers were more creative. Yet Jeffrey Baumgeitner, who runs his own innovation consultancy, argues that this creativity gap (www.jpb.com/creative/cps.php) isn’t due to a failing of character, but a failure to understand where creative ideas come from and how they are generated: “Geniuses like Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison do not wait for creative ideas to strike them. They focus on trying to solve a clearly stated – at least in their own minds – problem.”
What Baumgeitner calls “creative problem solving” has eight steps: identify the problem, research it, formulate the creative challenges, identify insights, generate ideas, combine and evaluate ideas, draw up an action plan and do it. Sounds simple but too many businesses in haste or desperation ignore some of those stages and fail to develop the idea that could transform their performance.
Repeat business
Michigan wide-format printer Pictura Graphics (www.picturagraphics.com) has launched a proprietary online archive for customers to store their images. To use the service, called Pixlport, customers just need a user name and password to review past images, add new ones, order reprints or modify archived images. Pictura has also launched a job status tracker for clients via its website. Since Paul Lilenthal bought the company in 2003, the business has diversified into vehicle wraps and retail displays and launched an Ecoimages line of signs with recycled or recyclable materials and inks that don’t use volatile organic compounds.
The trouble with sales
Every boss also suspects that his sales force could do better. This is especially true if the managing director used to run sales. Despite a global investment in sales training, the typical sales force hasn’t got much better at closing the right deals. To understand the gap between investment and performance, researchers Lynette Ryals and Iain Davies monitored 800 sales people (http://hbr.org/web/extras/the-trouble-with-salespeople/1-slide) and grouped them into seven behaviour groups: experts, closers, consultants, storytellers, focusers, narrators, aggressors and socialisers. Of these seven, only three – experts, closers and consultants – were consistently effective in meeting after meeting. How well does your sales force fit this model?
Best not biggest
The irrepressible management guru Tom Peters offers a free download (http://www.tompeters.com/docs/Independent_Retailer_Edge.post-FINAL.0910.13sd.pdf) of his presentation to America’s independent retailers. The advice was prompted by a study of this sector’s troubles but Peters’ recommendations will resonate with any small company in any industry. One of Peters’ most powerful insights is that too many small businesses waste the one advantage they have: that an “intimate relationship with their customer” – something bigger firms are too busy or distracted to create – guarantees repeat business.