Analytics

“If you don't measure it, you can't improve it.” On of the first-order axioms of management, and a mantra of spreadsheet jockeys everywhere.

Benchmarking. Balanced Scorecard. SEO. What do they have in common – they are indirect measures of effectiveness.

For an artist, which is more important – the tack hammer or the paint brush? The paint brush is used to create the masterpiece; the tack hammer is used to stretch the canvas in preparation.

Does canvas stretching contribute directly to the quality or success of the artwork? It is true that a taut canvas permits the artist to be more precise in creating fine detail than does a loose canvas – so there is some value added by proper stretching. Would knowing that the short side of a canvas has an average of five tacks and the long side has eight, add anything to masterpiece or its value?

As a result of a promotion, I received twice each month a senior management detailed analytic report which was a quarter inch thick. I eagerly read the entire first copy and discovered only two items in it were useful to me and both were incorrect. Later, I instructed the report compilers to stop publishing it and not notify any recipients. After two months without any comment about the absence of this report, I canceled it.

The chart below was presented with an interpretation that our website needed CPR, when viewed against the comparator site. Our website has visitors from a restricted group who read the page about the meeting and then go to another page to register, triggered by a monthly announcement of the coming meeting. The other site is an eCommerce site for internet sales and traffic is driven to it continuously by numerous sources.

The results merely show that sites with different purposes do not generate the same traffic pattern or flow.

Analytics help us measure performance and other factors by direct, indirect, and comparative means. Comparative analytics view statistics from your organization with those of other organizations, or compare your statistics over time.

Metrics and analytics can be useful to set a baseline or measure progress – as long as they are chosen appropriately and recognized for the value they offer.

The artist's production tool is the paint brush and that is the focal point for creativity which produces the value as perceived by the buyer.

The report recipients get information elsewhere or go without as they manage their functional areas, because the content does not provide benefit.

The page views of a different website does little to improve planning or delivery unless the site functions are virtually identical.

When all is said and done, analytics are like observing the wake of a boat underway – they provide some feedback about how smooth the course has been, but say nothing about the progress toward the goal or destination. Planning and execution get us there.

As leaders we must use our resources effectively to achieve results – focus them on doing rather than curating.

What are your thoughts?

Must A Leader be Brave?

We have an image of leaders – whether it is John Wayne leading a charge in combat, or JFK declaring to the world the USA will put a man on the moon by the end of that decade, or Steve Jobs radically changing established market segments like music, telecom, and computers with new technology.

Traditionally, when the leader spoke, we listened; when the leader gave a command, we followed. Leadership relied on this command & control model, harkening back to the Roman Legion. Leaders issue orders and the tribe executes them. Collaboration, dissent, or suggestions were not rewarded.

Management theory has evolved, workers have become more educated, global markets have developed, and the pace of change has accelerated dramatically – the traditional has been replaced with rapidly changing and expanding norms, globalization, and new devices to advance technology. This is the New Normal and it dramatically affects how leaders lead.

Leadership is moving to a collaborative model – the leader articulates vision and goals then seeks input on how to get there. Success requires developing an environment of trust and for stakeholders to offer honest input. Collaboration and willingness to adopt offered changes – an open source approach – is a fundamental difference between traditional command & control and New Normal collaborative leadership models, but effective two-way communication is the critical factor.

To illustrate the shift to a new model, here's a brief case study on an organization changing from traditional to New Normal leadership:

Background: A specialty product/service firm using a traditional leadership and sales approach – the sales person armed with brochures, catalogs, and a price list visits each prospect for a show & tell session to make the sale (or not).

Situation: The down economy causes sales volume to tank! With reduced sales, the company is suffering financially.

Options: The leader (company owner) could:

• Try to sell the company (no prospects identified) [quit option]
• Try to ride out the recession until market (and sales) return [dream option]
• Make changes to meet the new challenges by: [evolve option]

1. Add web-sale portal (social business channel); 2. Qualifying customers and guiding lower probability customers to the social business channel; 3. Reserve personal visits only for high probability customers; 4. Enroll employees, tell the truth about the situation, plans, vision, and commitment of the leader to create a sustainable new model company.

Outcome: No magic – it took plenty of hard work and caused lots of angst. Everyone was kept current with the progress – good or bad. With the checkbook down to less than a couple of months of operating funds, sales volume increased from both the traditional channel and the social business channel. Sales volume grew at a steady pace and in the fourth year after starting this transition the company is profitable and stable.

The leader bet the ranch on creating a viable organization and came within a few months of losing everything. However, with the commitment of all stakeholders, hard work, honesty in assessing the situation for what it is, a good and flexible plan, and some luck – a leading-edge company emerged.

Is the leader brave? Or bold?

You decide.

Thrice Welcome!

This is the third post on our Leadership blog.

My name is Jack Gates – and I believe technology is how we do things, not the things we do them with, and leadership continues to evolve through technology. Some key elements to consider.

1. Leadership has changed to a hub and spoke structure – no pyramid, no flat linear hierarchy – leader is hub and doers are the spokes – together is a strong and stable framework for solid results (rim).
2. Leadership thrives with an open source approach and a collaborative team drawing the best resources when needed – internal, external, or international.
3. Just as we learn by doing, leadership is developed by doing – it benefits from shared experiences of others as well.
4. The 'New Normal' is a result of changes in business structure, available resources, and markets – leaders examine traditional approach, revising as necessary to adapt.
5. Leadership is sharing the vision and communicating – sometimes by speaking, sometimes by listening – the what and empower the doers for the how.

For more, come back to Leadership often – big things are in the plans!

We are creating a community of leadership learners and welcome you to be part of this community. We welcome your thoughts and comments – and sharing your experience to deepen and enrich the discussion.

Share and others will benefit – share and you will learn...isn't that really what leadership is about?

Quit Presupposing And Just Do It!

As a leader we are expected to be decisive and to advance toward the envisioned goals.

So why do we find ourselves making excuses to postpone a meeting or delay an action? We sometimes rationalize deferring a task by convincing ourselves it would be better done later – based on perceived factors not directly related to achieving goals.

For example, we are introduced to a person Friday afternoon who will provide referrals of people who are prospective clients for our services. We suggest a follow-up meeting for mid-week, but know from experience that many people leave Monday morning open. Why not suggest getting together first thing on Monday and have 4 ½ days to use for prospecting instead of just 2 ½ days from a mid-week appointment?

As a CEO, my sales team spent considerable effort to persuade me against submitting a proposal for a project because the client was too tiny and the local organizations probably had a lock on the project. No sale - we submitted the proposal and won the project. The team was presupposing conditions that did not prove out.

In the War of Art, author Pressfield identifies how individuals create internal roadblocks to taking positive action to meet goals and offers advice about overcoming these barriers. The section on Resistance and Rationalization speaks to the seemingly rational argument for deferring action based on a presumed view of circumstances, as illustrated above. He suggests breaking the spell by relying on facts instead of opinions and suppositions about a situation.

Parkinson said Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion – strong support for building momentum and keeping it. Does going off track really provide anything positive – or simply grind down the velocity of the forward progress. Seems like the latter to me – additional time does not translate to productive time.

As a leader we are aware that the stakeholders are observing us to learn about the real culture of the organization. It is better to take action now rather than later - when possible, and to plan outcomes based on facts instead of presumptions.

Do it now. Finish it promptly. Ship often. Ignore Surface Thinkers.

Keep the conversation going – What are your thoughts?

Metrics, Analytics, And Common Sense

A tenet of Leadership is if you don't measure you won't change.

There's plenty of software and tools available to measure just about anything and provide statistics as well.

Some items can be counted – like responses to a survey questions. Other items can be measured by the responses – click-through sales. Sometimes an indirect approach is required – effect of a sales campaign by measuring gross sales before, during , and after the campaign.

There are some situations which are not quantifiable and effectiveness must be inferred – like the effect of print advertisements on sales.

A key to useful metrics and analytics is identifying what you want to learn and how best to measure it - by direct or relative measurement.

Trends are direct measurement candidates – here's my baseline of x-units over y-timeframe ...the measure is the change in volume of units for each time block.

Effectiveness can be measured on a relative basis – here's the volume and outcome of the target compared to the volume and outcome of other comparator producers or the norms of the group – like traffic on a website related to on-line orders.

Since the computer can be tasked with the slicing and dicing unlimited amounts of data, we can get hundreds of statistics from even simple measurements. When we had to pay for to compile data, the amount of statistics, ratios and comparative information requested was more focused than than a click of a key availability of today – a practical limitation of time and cost.

We can be overrun by statistics and the analytics to interpret them. The time investment now is in the use of the output. And we can be mislead by results from indirect and relative measurements if the comparator group is not appropriate to the target.

For example, traffic on a website can be mistakenly shown as aggressively above the norm or horribly behind it, if a static information site and a promoted sales-based site are compared. Apples and oranges.

Keep metrics and analytics simple to get meaningful results which can translate into changes that affect revenue.

I have run an organization using about eight key indicators available on a real-time basis. The system had capabilities of generating over 200 elements of real data and ratios – the other 192 were of no value to me – so I did not request them.

Best story about meaningful analytics was a comment from Dick Davies after we had attended a meet & greet event – he said he had spoken with 35 individuals. I asked how he knew – he said 'I counted' (resource sheets at the beginning of the event minus sheets at the end). Simple. Effective. Practical.

What are the best (and most effective) metrics and analytics you have seen?

What's a Plan?

Something I heard that rang the bell:

       A plan is a report of what has just happened.

Your thoughts?

These may be of interest:

How To Tune Your Work For The Internet

Capital Technology Management Hub

Tuesday, January 10, 6:30 – 6:35 pm

Arlington GMU Campus
Founders Hall, Room 126

3351 Fairfax Drive Arlington, VA 22226

AND/OR

How you can benefit from the strongest economic opportunity
in the history of the world!

Association Of Information Technology Professionals (AITP)

Thursday, January 12, 6 – 9 pm

Alfio's La Trattoria,

4515 Willard Ave, Chevy Chase MD 20815

Nuvo Quo

Change. It's unsettling and exciting. It's evolutionary and inevitable. It's widely initiated and frequently resisted.

Alvin Toffler, in his 1970 book Future Shock, says we can only take so much change before we hit overload and shut down mentally to additional change – like a sponge reaching its saturation point.

The pace of change has increased dramatically since Toffler defined Future Shock, and our capacity to adopt change has evolved also – but limits still affect us.

At a recent meeting, the facilitator did an observation exercise in which one person altered their appearance and the other tried to identify the changes. A few minutes after the exercise, the facilitator noted that most individuals reversed the changes – returning to the comfort of the pre-change conditions. The illustrated principle – after change, people strive to return to status quo (the old normal state) – they try to re-establish what was before.

Simple examples of this tendency – New Year's resolutions, diets, personal development training... a strong pull to return to the old way.

So what happens in an organization when the changes have eliminated the status quo for the individual? They will make up a new story – new rules – a new norm – to replace the no longer available status quo. They create nuvo quo - a new normal state – to guide them in their roles. Nuvo quo helps the person regain the feeling of control of their environment. There is no coordination with mission or vision of the organization as the individual develops a New Normal state – to mitigate the uncomfortable feeling of change overload. Communication of nuvo quo to the leaders of the organization is virtually unknown.

Conflicts develop between what the individual is doing and what the organization expects the individual to do - “Just doing my job (as I define it)” versus “not doing your job (as documented in the position specs)”. An employee of a transportation agency boasted in an external meeting that he had the ability to completely shut down an entire sector of the transportation industry country-wide with just the flick of a computer key – wonder if that's part of the ops plan for the agency and under what controlled circumstances?

Have any examples of Nuvo Quo after a change in the organization? Please share.

This may be of interest -

How you can benefit from the strongest economic opportunity in the history of the world!

Association Of Information Technology Professionals (AITP)

Thursday, January 12, 6 – 9 pm

Alfio's La Trattoria,

4515 Willard Ave, Chevy Chase MD 20815