There is a saying that during his life, a man should go to the army, build a house and write a book. The cultural elements of this humorous anecdotes may be changing.
The Finnish business paper Kauppalehti published an article (July 27) on Finnish former businessmen, who are currently working as cultural business angels, investing their money on old mills and mansions. The motivation of working with the old heritage sites is not to make profit but rather to contribute to common cultural and historic good and enjoy and value beauty and restoration. There is money spent on restructuring, rebuilding and refurnishing old sites.
I sympathize with these cultural businessmen. I don´t have a million to invest in an old mansion myself but did my share of cultural wellbeing ten years ago by organizing three big events in an area which I like: dancing. Arranging something on your own time took effort, time and money. These events were new, different from normal weekly dances and are still well remembered.
The negative effect with the cultural investments is that not everybody values and favours the changes and initiatives. There is criticism and complaint. Therefore motivation has to lie elsewhere than just public good.
Another interesting news was that the share of restaurant chains in Finland is decreasing to the benefit of more independent restaurants. Restaurants are eg providing more Finnishness, uniqueness and local flavour to their offering.
Even if Finland as a country may lack in service quality and culture, our skills may very well be in the cultural and coulinaristic content.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Sunday, July 11, 2010
This years innovation trends by Trendwatching.com
Each year Trendwatching.com publishes its view on most promising innovations (www.trendwatching.com/briefing). This year, Trendwatching.com published a pool of 67 trendy ideas, inspiring on improving consumer living and understanding the mindset.
Trendwatching.com split the 67 ideas into various categories and encouraged maintaining a rough approach to innovation - we need not think of R&D labs of ultimate most astonishing innovations. Instead, innovations can be small, frivolous and inexpensive and yet succeed in enchanting and exciting people.
Reading through the 67 innovations following logics were no surprise:
* Innovations as service. Helping for self expression, excitement, making a statement, enjoyment, learning, giving for others. Hotels providing educational classes or sketching a travel accident through an online service.
* Sustainability and social causes. Innovations helping people to recycle, re-use, save energy, make donations and support less fortunate. ATM machines with charity donations, buying things and giving in return.
* Shopping made easy and local. Bringing a shop to the consumer eg at camping site, mobile soup delivery, providing regional flavours, online shopping preferences tools, navigation services, garden-for-rent.
* Personalization. iPhone and online applications for providing your preferences online and ordering unique. Yogurt, shorts, petfood, lingerie, crowdsourcing products, group buying. Having used an online photo album tool for creating a wedding gift, I was excited on BookOfFame. A custom made notebook on Facebook feeds. Having read endless funny email conversations between friends, we always keep laughing about saving the conversations and printing them out for a memory when we´re old. And we never do. Now somebody has actually thought of keeping track of these conversations just as having a photo album, a blog or a diary.
The most futuristic idea to me was RosettaStone: a tablet with an embedded microchip to represent key things of a deceased´s life in a grave. Readable through a mobile device. Is this the future of cemeteries? Will it become a true multimedia presentation in the future of what we were? Or will personal barcodes be a new way of expressing ourselves?
Most positively surprising for me was the limited number of iPhone applications in the briefing. Hooray, there are also other ways to innovate and enjoy life.
Trendwatching.com split the 67 ideas into various categories and encouraged maintaining a rough approach to innovation - we need not think of R&D labs of ultimate most astonishing innovations. Instead, innovations can be small, frivolous and inexpensive and yet succeed in enchanting and exciting people.
Reading through the 67 innovations following logics were no surprise:
* Innovations as service. Helping for self expression, excitement, making a statement, enjoyment, learning, giving for others. Hotels providing educational classes or sketching a travel accident through an online service.
* Sustainability and social causes. Innovations helping people to recycle, re-use, save energy, make donations and support less fortunate. ATM machines with charity donations, buying things and giving in return.
* Shopping made easy and local. Bringing a shop to the consumer eg at camping site, mobile soup delivery, providing regional flavours, online shopping preferences tools, navigation services, garden-for-rent.
* Personalization. iPhone and online applications for providing your preferences online and ordering unique. Yogurt, shorts, petfood, lingerie, crowdsourcing products, group buying. Having used an online photo album tool for creating a wedding gift, I was excited on BookOfFame. A custom made notebook on Facebook feeds. Having read endless funny email conversations between friends, we always keep laughing about saving the conversations and printing them out for a memory when we´re old. And we never do. Now somebody has actually thought of keeping track of these conversations just as having a photo album, a blog or a diary.
The most futuristic idea to me was RosettaStone: a tablet with an embedded microchip to represent key things of a deceased´s life in a grave. Readable through a mobile device. Is this the future of cemeteries? Will it become a true multimedia presentation in the future of what we were? Or will personal barcodes be a new way of expressing ourselves?
Most positively surprising for me was the limited number of iPhone applications in the briefing. Hooray, there are also other ways to innovate and enjoy life.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Leader behaviour analysis
At an summerish eMBA class on organizational behaviour, we conducted an assignment covering 20 business situations. Each included a question on "how would you act" as a leader in a specific situation. The objective of the exercise was to see if you can match your leadership skills with the situation at hand.
The interesting part of the experiment was the scores with our foreign students. You cannot generalize too much, but it was obvious that specific cultures somewhat impact our behaviour, including our leadership qualities.
When planning and implementing change, it is an art thinking of and preparing for needed stages; exploring, informing, engaging, influencing, executing and refining. Analyzing the possible outcome but also the likely situation at hand of a person helps to utilize an optimal style throughout the process.
In order to build your own leadership skills, you first need to do some self-evaluation to understand your own behaviour and competencies. Knowing yourself helps analyze situations and behaviours of others.
To get started and to have a nice comparison with your colleagues, to go 9types.com.
Hanna Viita
The interesting part of the experiment was the scores with our foreign students. You cannot generalize too much, but it was obvious that specific cultures somewhat impact our behaviour, including our leadership qualities.
When planning and implementing change, it is an art thinking of and preparing for needed stages; exploring, informing, engaging, influencing, executing and refining. Analyzing the possible outcome but also the likely situation at hand of a person helps to utilize an optimal style throughout the process.
In order to build your own leadership skills, you first need to do some self-evaluation to understand your own behaviour and competencies. Knowing yourself helps analyze situations and behaviours of others.
To get started and to have a nice comparison with your colleagues, to go 9types.com.
Hanna Viita
Friday, June 4, 2010
Marketeers renewal
Marketing today looks different from what it was early 1990´s. Planning direct marketing, print, tv, radio or outdoor has gotten way more complicated. Consumers lifestyles, values and behaviour plus media consumption have changed. Internet and globalization has changed our way of communicating, consuming and living. Values are now focused on life satisfaction, family, sustainability and self-actualization.
No wonder marketing as a function is changing drastically. Marketing has evolved from awareness building to understanding customer needs, finding opportunities, providing insights and linking customer needs to product portfolios, services, total offering and message. Marketing communications is the final link to optimize customer touchpoints and provide interaction.
Apart from understanding customers changing needs, marketeers follow up and even drive the changing roles of marketing, media and consulting agencies. Marketing has become a center for customer dialogue (Strategy & Business issue 54, 2009) - running activities to connect with customers on a daily or even nightly basis. New marketing positions now include "community manager", "customer dialogue specialist" and "marketing analyst".
What more, now that companies talk of social media, marketing has a golden opportunity to build its own relevance, knowledge and role. The current understanding and experiences can be extended to customer care, product development, logistics and sales. Anything to serve customers better.
Hanna Viita
No wonder marketing as a function is changing drastically. Marketing has evolved from awareness building to understanding customer needs, finding opportunities, providing insights and linking customer needs to product portfolios, services, total offering and message. Marketing communications is the final link to optimize customer touchpoints and provide interaction.
Apart from understanding customers changing needs, marketeers follow up and even drive the changing roles of marketing, media and consulting agencies. Marketing has become a center for customer dialogue (Strategy & Business issue 54, 2009) - running activities to connect with customers on a daily or even nightly basis. New marketing positions now include "community manager", "customer dialogue specialist" and "marketing analyst".
What more, now that companies talk of social media, marketing has a golden opportunity to build its own relevance, knowledge and role. The current understanding and experiences can be extended to customer care, product development, logistics and sales. Anything to serve customers better.
Hanna Viita
Monday, May 24, 2010
Structuring for service and motivation
One of our classes recent visiting lecturers was Eltel Networks´s CFO. Listening to a finance-oriented presentation got us thrilled on how employees can be motivated by simple ways of organizing and structuring the company.
Eltel did a turnaround of its operations few years ago. What they focused on and wanted to value was internal entrepreneurship and thus serving customers better. The old matrix organization with functional responsibilities was tossed. Instead, Eltel organized its sub-units as independent sales teams, having full profit and loss responsibility. Each sales team was in charge of customer relationship and had resources accordingly. No central overheads were charged to these independent sales units. Within a few years results have spoken for themselves.
If the progress is similar in other companies, sounds like the old school scorecards will be dead. Corporate employees no longer are motivated by objectives set too far apart from their daily responsibilities. People find motivation in doing, participating, influencing operations and seeing the actual results. On a daily or monthly basis, rather than annually.
Recent study on Finnish students´ employment expectations was drastic: there is no ambition to succeed careerwise. On the contrary, young employees are expecting a nice balance between work and leisure. What they want is a life they can appreciate not just looking from company headquarters.
What Eltel realized was that they can influence the success of the company by looking into what really motivates people. Let the company objectives meet the individual ones – in an ethical, inspiring and human way.
Eltel did a turnaround of its operations few years ago. What they focused on and wanted to value was internal entrepreneurship and thus serving customers better. The old matrix organization with functional responsibilities was tossed. Instead, Eltel organized its sub-units as independent sales teams, having full profit and loss responsibility. Each sales team was in charge of customer relationship and had resources accordingly. No central overheads were charged to these independent sales units. Within a few years results have spoken for themselves.
If the progress is similar in other companies, sounds like the old school scorecards will be dead. Corporate employees no longer are motivated by objectives set too far apart from their daily responsibilities. People find motivation in doing, participating, influencing operations and seeing the actual results. On a daily or monthly basis, rather than annually.
Recent study on Finnish students´ employment expectations was drastic: there is no ambition to succeed careerwise. On the contrary, young employees are expecting a nice balance between work and leisure. What they want is a life they can appreciate not just looking from company headquarters.
What Eltel realized was that they can influence the success of the company by looking into what really motivates people. Let the company objectives meet the individual ones – in an ethical, inspiring and human way.
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