Economic Upturn – Planning for Fact or Fantasy?

Planning for the future in uncertain Times…

Whether you are a multinational or a private citizen, what planning direction to go in after nearly a decade of economic and financial turmoil is a real challenge! The narrowing of wealth distribution tops the list of macro economic maladies affecting corporations and the working man alike. Unfortunately, this sets the stage for future economic crises that will carry our current problems forward should the pattern of behaviours at all levels not change.

The main considerations of anybody planning should be the direction of future activity that is beneficial to the individual and/or the organisation. It is not possible to get all things right but in general terms, the following should be borne in mind for strategising on future spending and direction:

Economy - understand economic growth that correlates to real world metrics separating statistical inconsistencies that skew the picture of growth on the ground from more accurate metrics showing the state of the economy. For example, Ireland on the ground is experiencing growth of about 3-4% GDP whereas the central statistics office reported 26% GDP over the same period. Tax Inversion has effectively distorted Ireland’s growth trajectory, which if taken at face value can lead to a dangerously positive outlook on big decisions. Economic upturn in fact can transform into fantasy. GDP against GNP, % of Sales Tax/VAT to overall tax, jobs created to unemployed registers are all good metrics. They provide a broader macro economic view of the economy where one can reasonably assess future expectations.

Politics - how stable and engaged are government in the management of the economy and its infrastructure? Also, how committed are they at stimulating growth? Is there any help for a direction you may take and how will government react if it all goes wrong for you?

Currency - will currency remain stable to positive and will capital markets pose any risk to your plans directly or indirectly via wider economy impact of currency and/or trade movements? Will the basics in life become dearer, cheaper or remain relatively stable? If in exports as a business, how will currency movements affect trade and what exposures are present in goods transit and/or associated costs? If a multinational, what capital controls are likely in territories where you have assets in the form of cash and/or manufacturing centres, etc. Are you locked in?

Risk - do you know the strengths and weaknesses of your plans? Are your risks both positive and negative cataloged by their likelihood to happen along with the impact of it actually happening?

Support - do you have what you essentially need to achieve your plans bearing the above environmental factors in mind. E.g. Are finance, logistical, educational and technical supports in place? Do you have a plan b, c and so on if unforeseen problems block your progress?

It’s not easy in our complex and sometimes volatile world to be ready for all eventualities but our chances of success only get better with understanding of the world around us through engaging with it and developing a thorough approach to planning. In times of calm, it allows us to sail better than our unplanned and unprepared peers. In adversity, it allows us to be more focused, flexible and successful in the game of life.

Sources/Credits:

Pics;

https://stocksnap.io/photo/PXTYJ9NX25

https://stocksnap.io/photo/TVUSUD00B6

Credits;

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/corporateinversion.asp

Reputation - An individual cornerstone for all in society

Why reputation feeds happiness and enables success

We all have being shocked of late by the extremist sound bytes coming from Donald Trump in the US Presidential Election campaign where apparently dirty politics, insanely imbalanced thinking and a neo conservative thrust for power has affected reputations both positively and negatively on all sides.

Donald Trump somehow managed to build a business empire in spite of some colossal errors in judgement and even more spectacular business failures that he has on his resume. He did so for many reasons including the fact that he managed his reputation astutely keeping an eye on how the world viewed him along with reconciling this intelligence to his goals and objectives. All was apparently well enough until his aspirations for higher office seemed to have sent him off the deep end in reputation management by thinking his extremist rhetoric would not have consequences. As the Presidential Office becomes apparently out of reach to Mr Trump, what are the lessons we all should learn from his performance in the management of our own reputations:

• Understand Your Interacting Environment - It’s not good enough to assume your ideas are going to be openly accepted with open arms. If you have a good point (in the eyes of your audience), make it! If you have a bad point, understand how it will affect your reputation because regardless of who you are, you will be judged!
• Embrace who you are - True power in society by definition always lies within the group. By understanding the dynamic of your group interactions, you can understand who you are to ‘your world’. Its their impression of you, not your impression of yourself that matters in reputation management. If you are it, own it and understand the shrewdest of networkers and reputation managers know they can only ascend in the social order so far thanks to inherent ability and/or their situational dynamics.
• Own your ego - Don’t let your ego own you! As you can’t force someone to like you, you should not try. Ego leads to arrogance and thus blinds one to the possibilities of influencing someone to freely chose to like you, trust you and/or even vote for you. An individual’s world should not to be blindsided in the present by lies, misinformation and incessant badgering in some cases. This will be found out and when uncovered, your reputation will be appropriately punished for your ego driven misdeeds.

 As the US presidential race heats up, the outrageous behaviour by Donald Trump should serve as a reminder to us all on the dangers of not embracing your own reputation as a critical aspect of who you are.

Now for my confession. For years, I ignored proper networking, reputation management and personal branding on the grounds that I was honest, trustworthy and technically competent. Apparently, the world saw me a little differently as I had forgone the opportunity to develop my brand and sell myself to the world for who I am, not what some guy with half an opinion and an agenda wants me to be! With my kernel error uncovered in recent years, I have worked hard at personal branding, updating my skills and networking as hard and as fast as I can. The experience has transformed me from a technically competent process manager to a technically competent Technologist who believes in people, process and technology.  Reputation management is now part of who I am thanks to my embracing of it, owning it and using it to be a better version of myself! In refactoring my life into a community based iteration, I face new challenges that starts with where I belong and continues to a happier tomorrow.

Sources/Credits:

Pics;

www.abtopimages.com

http://www.gratisography.com/

Credits;

Getting Started - Creating Value in a Tech Startup

Turning ideas into companies, tips on making it happen…

The startup scene in Dublin is vibrant yet many have poured their hearts and minds into their startups, with little to no success to date. Over 90% of startups fail, which by the numbers alone are turning out newly seasoned and committed entrepreneurs who are more learned, more agile and capable of achieving success with a start up then was probable before. With the climate in Dublin and elsewhere nurturing start ups with grants, tax breaks and mentorship, there is never been a better time to start up a new business. As the world slowly recovers from a horrendous recession, we see the buds of new business in cases such as India’s announcement of a $1.5 billion fund for startups just a few weeks ago.

From my own start up experience and observations, here are some points you may consider as central to increasing a startup's chances of success:

• Start like you mean to finish. Plot out what you want to become in success with a start up. Is it the next multi billion dollar company or a business to support you and your family with no wish to expand the business beyond a “mom and pop store”?
• If successful, will you sell your business? If so, when will this be? Plot a company size in revenue, employees and asset size (value of assets to turnover of business) when you will start considering offers to be bought out.
• Embrace modern Risk Management. Risk mapping, risk registers, risk assessments, 3rd party country risk, financial risk reports are all useful and are a good way to see your mapped future unfold as you build your business. If done from the start, you build into your structure a culture of risk management and thus information awareness.
• Scaling Systems. If you want to be the next billion dollar enterprise, you need to think about how IT infrastructure, systems design and development will fit into this vision. Will it be costly or seamless to scale your IT resources to fit business needs? Bootstrapped startups have great opportunities to develop low cost scalable systems using cloud and hosting providers. How it’s designed and built however will determine its true worth in availability, stability and scalability.
• Your digital brand. Market yourself for credibility, expertise and leadership as a Founder. Build your social media profile and creds with consistent high quality posts, blog articles and actions online that reinforce your digital brand message. If you approach a VC for funding, they will investigate you thoroughly including social media because in a startup, it’s the people, not the products that make the bew business successful.
• Network Network Network. You need to find co-founders, business partners and indeed potential customers in the marketplace. Meetup.com is a great start in your networking efforts that you should approach strategically.
• Community. Make sure you build bridges with your marketplace but also with the startup community. The access to people and shared experience is incredibly useful especially to a newly minted entrepreneur.
• Marketing. Build your marketing efforts based on tested Marketing models such as the 4P (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) and seek inputs on how you can develop a marketing strategy and a marketing mix that fits your startup
• Finance. If you are not funded, be sure to bootstrap everything you do, make sure your efforts are within a projected finance curve (ie. within budget) to where your business will start earning money for itself or you can reasonably expect to get VC capital on board so you can develop your business into a self sustaining entity.
• Create Value, then create Customers. Make sure your market research and everything you see from that point on is consistent with your products and services creating value for the customer. Qualitative approaches to service quality influence pricing and also create repeat customers. If you cannot create value in your customer's eyes, you will not have any customers.
• Stay Flexible. Start ups often start with a great plan and product. When the marketplace interacts with the start up, it often turns into something very different. Be sure your startup is structured flexibly so you “touch base” with your customers in a manner that creates value for them in what you do.
• Disrupting a market? If your product revolutionises a market place by its disrupter effect, then be ready to capitalise upon it. Have base plans for this type of dynamism in place so you don’t waste time wondering about what approach to take to capitalise upon it. Large companies act fast in protecting their market share from disrupters, so be sure to have a plan.

The need for flexibility, dynamism and intelligence is never more relevant than it is today even with a support structure in place. As the information era moves onwards, more and more opportunities will appear for aspiring Entrepreneurs. Taking that opportunity and turning it into something meaningful is often a hard learnt lesson through business failure. Once the budding Entrepreneur does not give up, their time will come and the days, months and years of trying will be rewarded by success.

Sources/Credits

Pics;

www.entrepreneur.com

www.stacksocial.com

www.picjumbo.com

Credits;

Disruption and Innovation - Change as the new “Status Quo”

Some industries are finding change as difficult as keeping up with innovation 

It is hard to imagine Madonna going out of style in the late 1980s but as entropy carries us forward, Madonna must have seen her pending decline in music could only be reversed with a refocusing of her music, skill-sets set and approach to the marketplace. Madonna has since had a reasonable career as an actress, a highly successful (refocused) music career and a successful career in business. The twice married mother of 4 has currently a net worth of $520 million, which is a testament to Madonna’s call to action when faced with decline. By her actions, it’s not hard to see that she embraced change as a good thing and got ahead of the curve in a dynamic marketplace.

So if an Madonna can do it, can’t we all? I think so! That said, not everybody agrees, which is why we have what is often referred to as ‘the agents of change and the guardians of the status quo’. Needless to say, a happy balance of change and stability fit into every company and product lifecycle that exists in the increasingly hyperconnected world we live in.

The fact is that we are now in a hyperconnected age and to quote Marc Andreessen “Software is eating the world”. Companies, industries and society has a whole has had to come to terms with the new information era and deal with disruption as the new norm. What has become glaringly clear (in addition to positive changes society wide) is that some companies and indeed industries are better at dealing with change and innovation than others. What makes one better at change then the other is varied, but in general terms, the more successful change agents as companies tend to be:

Less dogmatic and thus less resistant to change. Instead of looking for ways to stop or stall change, they look for ways to embrace it.

More dynamic in terms of how one approaches problems with the marketplace. The glass is always half full and not half empty ergo priority is placed in innovating a way out of a problem that creates a better outcome instead of finding a way to restore the prior state to the problem. Thinking outside of the box is seen as a cherish virtue, not a despised vice.

Organisationally flexible to the point where organisational structures are set to allow horizontal workflows in orga charts and project management to occur based on people, not transactions. Company culture underpins this point of people, process, technology, not the other way around in terms of priority.

Innovation as a process (IAAP) is a reality, not a powerpoint chart aspiration. The management practices, leadership practices, financial planning and analysis processes of the company are geared up for innovation noting X% of people’s time will be on new product generation in all areas of the business participating in project teams, idea generation platforms and process management. This “non chargeable” portion of employee time is spent generating new products and bringing them forward to market.

Competition defined by collaboration, not confrontation. A careful monitoring of competition and collaboration with suitable competitors on “common good” goals for community and/or society (e.g. Open Source Hackathons) along with a set of ethics that define not only company policy but capture company culture and employee beliefs. It’s important that the substance of integrity is not watered down by some cheap “certification” by disengaged team leaders on an annual survey that their employees have “integrity.”

People first. The new age of collaboration in the information era favours companies that value people first allowing for the emotional quotient (EQ) to succeed. The days of awareness are here with hyper connectivity generating more and more understanding of the world around us thus connecting with our humanity, which is becoming understood as an essential driver of successful change. If employees are made redundant, it is the last, not the first port of call in reducing costs and is never done by tweet.  

Cultural expectation is one of change and considered normal. The business practices of companies who are comfortable with change are geared up to not only survive it; they are geared up to thrive in it. The culture becomes comfortable with a cycle of innovation that sees cyclical projects arise disrupting their workflow and augmenting it with new innovations, which they contribute to for best possible outcome. They are in essence comfortable with a cycle of innovation/ disruption/ change/ understanding new working reality/ stable workflows/ innovation. This makes employees a driver of innovation, new product generation, high performance process structures and long term financial viability.

Innovation and disruption are often seen as threats, when infact they should be embraced fully taking the people who innovate into processes allowing a fusion to occur where like Madonna, something better is created as a result of embracing change that will not stop coming no matter how much we try to deny it. Even in the most rigid, dogmatic and vertical industries, change will reach its shores sooner or later and now is a great time to plan and effect change not only of R&D, but of the entire company making all functions innovative and connecting them by innovative connections as much as by functional lines. The outputs will herald change and flexibility along with a new sense of longevity thanks to the new version of the company, which is a powerhouse of process awareness, effective innovation and people oriented culture.  

Sources/Credits:

Pics;

www.colombiabankonline.com

www.magforwomen.com

https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1436377734980-0ee004df570b?ixlib=rb-0.3.5&q=80&fm=jpg&s=c3ebb8709eea2235a3151fd7f9e44da8

Credits:

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/ | Forbes for information on Madonna 2015

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460 | Marc Andreessen “Software is eating the world”