time orientation

Love both idea and the graphics!

health and sales

I love the idea both for healthy food promotion and sales increase!

Lunch Line Redesign by the New York Times.

bad bosses' classes

I'm now in reading deeply to compensate the reality imperfet conditions by ideas of how grat this reality can be and what should i do to change it. This is very much aboout Covi's book. And from ChangingMinds I've got a good article.

1. A bad boss can be a walking textbook on behavioral psychology. Working with a bad boss is your golden chance to learn the "do's and don'ts" of management. In all probability you can learn more about people management working with a bad boss in six months time than working with a good boss for five years.
2. Bad bosses help you learn harsh realities of human nature and make you better prepared in life's countless encounters. You swim better when you learn swimming in a rough river or sea, rather than in a calm swimming pool.
3. Every growl, rude remark, goof up, threat, cover up, charm switching, etc., can be a good lesson that is going to pay rich dividends to you at a later stage. They help you become a better manager at a later stage, because you will now have a rich experience in the pitfalls of bad management. It helps you to instantly remember and avoid the wrong things when faced with similar or equivalent situations.
4. And bad bosses help you in many other ways if you study their lives carefully. For example, it will help you understand how and why many employees erupt like a volcano at home due to work related problems.
5. Worldwide many ordinary people have become great leaders because they were subject to various degrees of insults or extreme forms of harassment by someone. So, directly or indirectly, every great leader will have to thank their tormentors for their current greatness. Similarly it can also perhaps make you great someday.

This is more self-comforting. I prohibited myself to complain about the work situation until I do the most I can. And the goal is to implement all my projects to be proud when leaving for a better company or for my own business.

I really like the straihtforward message of the song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTFNPHb71Z4

consistency

People have a deep need for consistency, and when they do something they need to have consistency and alignment between their actions and their beliefs. When there is inconsistency, they must either change what they are doing or what they belief in order to restore consistency. If they have already started doing something, then they cannot change what has been done, so they must change what they believe, particularly 'Why I am doing this'.

Source

advice vs implementation

I can see the same pattern in behavior of any business that seeks for a consultant advice - they all whant to know what to do and they all want to do nothing with that.

Consultancy companies provide the solution - implementation part is up to the client. And the very implrementation part makes the difference between a successful company and a loser.

Well, I vote for implementation. Still having the consultant career in mind.

crisis behavior strategy

It's almost official - we're in crisis. At least now we can feel it by reconsidering payment periods for our clients, managing cashflows and thinking out our future possibilities in terms of both personal salaries and marketing budgets.

Now we have several possible behavioral patterns.
1. Making efforts to act if there's no crisis at all. Painfull and we're not sure if we have enough resources.
2. Doing nothing hoping to survive somehow until better time.
3. Reconsider our marketing policy, take our time to create all we can create by ourselves, communicate with our clients, choose strategy to do our best in terms of maket activity without spending much money - and get it all when economics gets out of recession.

We can use low-cost marketing still to ensure our clients to get enough attention.
We do.

promises

Am I totally wrong being against the practice of producers of putting advertizing of products which are not included in the catalog?

My perspective is the following:
- We put advertizing with the product which is not included in the assortment of a company.
- The customer sees it, wants it, asks it.
- We can't provide the customer with the desired product.
- The client needs to search another way to get the product.
- The client is disappointed by the company.

salestaff motivation

I'm having a chat with my client now aboput sales staff motivation. It is normal for sales people to claim for more clients and more clients' satisfaction. Normally sales compensation is a percentage of sales to motivate people sell more and to give the opportunity to be paid on the basis of their efforts. Well, I understand that effort doesn't mean sale or result, but th classical payment system is more or less adequate.

What do we have now in Russia? The only lesson on career build-up process young graduates know is to get a good payment. They've been told that companies have money, that salaries are high and the higher starting salary is the better for you - you will get dramatical rise only if you change a job. Which is true in most cases.

But for fix salaries.

Young sales people here in Russia normally ask for high fix salary. Which means that they don't want to work. And that is not the right person for a salesteam.

i like it

We have a bonus collecting system called Mnogo.ru. If you buy with their partners, you receive virtual bonuses you can convert to gifts (provided by partners). The more you collect the more you can get. I use this occasionaly collecting bonuses for buying books with boffo.ru and paying for mobile services and transform them into aeroflot miles to get free ticket.

So, Mnogo.ru has a promotional quizes. You can pass it, receive 20-50 bonuses (the prizes cost more - 800 bonuses for DVD, 1050 bonuses for a jar of coffee)and if you pass it successfully, you can try to get a prize from a partner. So, typical staff - answering simple questionary, you get your bonuses and think for a couple of times about Mnogo.ru itself and its partner.

But let's look deeply. The questions are posted in a way you can easily get an answer (with a link provided to a site you can check info). And that is a great trick - if you can easily increase your chances for grand-prix, you most probably will go for it and check. And get more information about the company.

E.g. What is the price for a model XXX (link to a model)? Of course, you will realize that the price is low and will have more incentives to buy the product.

Or: what is the color of a t-shirt XXX (item nr) at a website (link). You will go, see a t-shirt and may be continue browsing the catalog.

And all it for 2.5% of a DVD!!!

I like it!

self promotion

Seth Godin's post about different approaches of self promotion: me-centric vs. client/customer/audience centric.

I published a book so I need you to read it
vs.
There’s something you need to read, so I wrote about it.

wants vs stopper

I have just read Wad's wonderful sketch (in Russian) about wants and their limitations. He formulated a simple process of getting from wants to consumption.

1. Space-hold.
2. External irritant activates The Want part, showing assosications with pleasant emotions.
3. The Want starts working, but the rational part knows that pleasant emotions should be paid, the Stopper activates.
4. To get the Want to win over the Stopper, the irritant needs to show the idea of acessibility.
5. There's no reason to retrain the consumption.

Therefore, if the irritant (the producer or distributor) wants to increase demand, he needs to show the consumer, that it is possible to acquire the good or service. And vice-versa - if you want to resist the temptation of consuming something, just create the idea of full impossibility to get.

Nice thoughts.

it is easy to miss something you're not looking for

Lovely!

Change management, Peter Gil.

Money is the margin you can make on the top of existing technology.

The window of opportunity is opened for a limited time. It's not enough to see the window, you need to know the way how to convert this opportunity to money quickly.

S-curve of product/team life cycle: there's no natural travel along the curve. Crisises are inevitable. But you can make proactive change to reduce initial investment stage and have a smaller payback period.

Teams roles: there are different models for group behavior description. One of them position individuals into 4 basic group according to their preferenses - explorers, organosers, controllers, advisers (tecnique developped by TMS). Positining yourself into this map means that 75% of people around you are different and perceive reality and make suggestions different.

Any strength taken into extreme is a weakness. Any strength you don't take advantage of is a weakness.


ps. Peter Gil is the owner of MDT (www.mdt.es)

more quotations from different classes

No classification. Just a list.

• Negotiation class: Education is complicating your life to make one of the others better.
• Ianna Contardo, Strategy: Drop your tools! (the resume of "Collapse of sensemaking in organizations: Mann Gulch case").
• Jacob Hornik: "Competition is running faster than competitor."
• Free markets online case (IS class?): ...without people who can sell a concept, ask for money and close deals, you are dead.
• InfoSystems (guest speaker): News evolutioned to entertainment. Funny or horror, it is now no more than a way to amuse people. We're going to have news we'd like to hear. (Look at your friend-feed or remember last time you decided to maintain frendocite - F). It's scaring - to have only news you like. And boring most of times.
• Cost accounting brain-washing (again, thanx for sharp eye of Mauricio): Normal costing is a costing system that traces direct costs to a cost object by using the actual quantities of direct-cost inputs and that allocates indirect costs based on budgeted indirect-costs rates times the actual quantities of the cost-allocation bases.
• Org.behavior (Pino Bethencour): Leadership is a hard work. The price leader often pays is lonlyness.
• Own note after 1st term: Perfectionism hurts.
• All classes: tree main concepts: added value, CSR (in all aspects) and 'It depends' (as an answer to any questions).
• OB: Gentelmen, that's a sad thing to mean nothing. Old Man, 12 angry men.
• Marketing (first awful professor on this subject): Sales are the people implementing marketing hopes and dreams into reality. That's how it should be.