The East of England Development Agency held an event called Destination Growth back in November, with the goal of providing a "tangible impact on the businesses that attend". To that end a pretty reasonable list of presenters and keynote speakers were lined up and the event seemed to be well received.
My involvement was as one of the panelists for the "Innovating through IT" session led by Lars Lindstedt, software economist from Microsoft UK. In summary my contribution was that:
"There is a need to take risks but it is important to understand the consequences of these risks and put strategies in place to manage the impacts"
A quick summary for some of the other sessions I attended:
Jerry of
We were advised at the start that this was Jerry’s first time presenting outside of the US. My initial reaction was "poor sod, does he know what he has let himself in for", because compared to your average US audience, we Brits are about as "low reacting " as you can get. I am not sure whether his nerves, our low reaction or simply the content, but the first 10-15 minutes when Jerry was providing the "history" of B&J’s was very flat. However as soon as he got into the "ethical business" piece things warmed up for all concerned. A few points I noted as interesting:
- Why when most CEO’s are good, kind, generous individuals, is there predominant focus "profit"
- You only get what you measure
- B&J have 2 bottom lines: financial and their Social Report
- The challenge of 2 bottom lines is finding ideas that can support both goals and whilst instinct may say that they must be separate this is simply a mind set e.g.
- franchises run by "at risk" groups, B&J get the same unit price, but provide social support to the community
- Chocolate Fudge Brownie is top3 in the UK and B&J purchase $2m of brownies from a bakery run to support people with poor track records
Some selected items from the Q&A at the end:
- Where are we on the continuum from ridicule to acceptance regarding businesses with social consciences? We are past the violent opposition where we were considered lunatics and are now respected business people
- What about selling B&J to Unilever? Very difficult and we wanted to maintain "the path", however being a plc left us no choice
- You mentioned "Ben" many times, could you have done it without each other? "Ben is the man", he is the real entrepreneur, but yes it probably need both of us.
Professor Malcolm McDonald – How to Avoid Competing on Price:
He opened with the oldie but goody "Of all the introductions I have had over the 70 years of my life that is the most recent"
His basic premise was that you need to be buying not selling, because if you are selling then you are competing on price, you need to be picking your customers. Key to this was personalised segmentation where you are not just focused on the sector, but the characteristics if the individuals who you are targeting e.g. the sector might be retail, but you need to approach the food buyer differently to the warehouse manager. You also need to be realistic about who your attractive customers are and then treat them differently – you cannot have 1000 key accounts.
Some comments I noted:
- ISO 9001 simply shows that you are making crap perfectly
- CRM fails because it is used to get costs down rather than creating customer value
- Why is there only one Monopolies Commission? 🙂
- You need courage to not try and delight all your customers
Gerald Ratner
I was pleasantly surprised to find myself entertained and enlightened. He completely took the piss out of himself and demonstrated the art of turning adversity to advantage. Some snippets:
- I am known for one mistake that was taken out of context, but nobody gives me credit for all the other mistakes I have made
- You have to admit to your failures, don’t pretend it wasn’t you
- He sent out CV to 20 companies and got 21 rejections, the Chairman and CEO from the same company
- The secret of success is the ability to survive failure – Noel Coward
Edward de Bono
Although the session was interesting and clearly having a chance to hear directly from such an icon was great, my lasting memory of the session was his repeated and embarrassingly sexist comments to a blonde lady in the room. This is not about political correctness gone mad, but more the unnecessary comments about "the token blonde", "lets see if our blonde knows the answer", "it’s good to have a blonde in the room".
My regret for this session is that when Mr de Bono introduced the interactive part of the session, where we were going to use the "6 thinking hats" to discuss "whether arranged marriages were acceptable", I had the balls to suggest a different title "is over sexism towards blondes acceptable"
Cloud Questions 