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Number
19: September 10, 2003
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This week in Katydid:
Survey:
Oceans Getting Smaller
A recent
survey from ITToolbox, a technical knowledge base company, outlines
some trends in the outsourcing of technical services. What struck me was
that the larger a company was, the less likely it was to outsource
services within the United States.
Medium to large companies outsource primarily to India with the U.S.
being third and fourth largest respectively as a resource. The U.S.
leads outsourcing only for small businesses (less than 100 employees),
though 48% of small companies don't outsource IT at all. While this
trend may not seem to impact marketing directly, together consulting,
education, and management services comprise fifty percent of the
outsourced solution for all businesses. Additionally, web site development is part of a
company's IT responsibility. It is very likely that marketers will
interact with offshore developers or consultants soon.
Customer service jobs are going offshore also, and marketers need to
be involved in these decisions to make sure that service and support
remain consistent with the corporate value messaging.
Politically, this trend may be argued both positively and negatively
as it concerns our economy. Will the flow of white-collar jobs offshore
help business, which is good for the economy; or will the trend increase
unemployment? Who gets to be right will depend on how quickly the
workforce adjusts to different business requirements and how many jobs
the new requirements will support.
However, knowing that the weather is changing gives you an
opportunity to plan. As businesses outsource to reduce operating costs,
management will need to focus strongly on defining strategy and
converting processes into discrete components that may be handed off.
You will need to define expectations more explicitly, and tie the
outsourcers' goals to the company goals. Additionally, you will need to
define areas that need to stay on shore for reasons of culture,
language, and expertise.
Finally, you may discover that offshore trends will tend to pull your
organization to branch out internationally. As services centralize and
consolidate, you will have natural support to extend your brand
overseas. In this case, you will want to standardize your communications
for easy translation – removing idioms, using consistent phrasing, etc.
You will also need an initiative for brand awareness that delivers your
strategy consistently, while modifying tactics to work effectively in
each country.
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Don't
Just Walk the Walk
There comes a critical time in business where it's just as important to
talk the talk. It's an essential element of leadership to communicate
your strategy as well as carry it out. It is part of building consensus
for your vision, and failure to do it well might even overshadow your
talent as a strategist.
When asked what I think is the most influential book on leadership or
business, I always point them to Integrity,
by Stephen L. Carter, a book only tangentially related to business.
Carter is a law professor at Yale University and the book deeply
examines the social and political aspects of integrity. It's a seminal
work you can go back to continually.
Integrity
means the state of being whole or undivided. It's a word tossed around a
great deal these days because now it makes good marketing sense. In
tight economies, everyone wants to appear trustworthy. Carter goes a bit
farther and breaks it down into three components:
- Deeply examine what you believe
- Act in accordance with your beliefs
- Let people know why you're acting
I'll save you the trouble of reading the book. He's right. Although,
if you do read the book you'll know how difficult it is to achieve these
three components and how rarely anyone does. To understand why they are
important just consider the extreme example of each. The person who
deeply examines their beliefs without acting or communicating them is an
intellectual. The person who acts in accordance with their beliefs
without deeply examining them or communicating them is a zealot. The
person who communicates their beliefs without deeply examining them or
acting consistently is a politician.
Okay, that's kind of a joke, but you get the picture. A better
example is Fascism where people as a group declare their intentions and
act consistently but never deeply examine the issues. If they did, they
would respect the rights of those they oppress. Carter goes a long way
to explore how deeply examining your beliefs means literally being able
to see the other side, and once you see the other side for its own
merits, it becomes more difficult to oppress it even when the other side
is misguided.
But for leadership and especially entrepreneurs the trap may not be
in the first or second components, it may be in the communication of the
strategy. It also occurs often in the marketing communications of a
company — when a company seems to shift with the winds rather than
following a strategy.
The reason for this is simple, management locks themselves away in a
boardroom, or on retreat and come back with new direction. For good
reason, management shuts out their employees from the process. It does
not instill confidence to hear the second-guessing, the devil's
advocates, the yelling, and the confusion that goes into discovering
what is right for your business.
The risk is that if you come down from the mountain with the new
stone tablets and fail to communicate a context for them, your staff may
think the decision is arbitrary, or that your strategy has changed for
expediency. For entrepreneurial companies, the leadership may seem
capricious and fickle when they fail to communicate how this new
direction fits into the overall strategy. People need to see the work.
They need transitioning to the new approach.
We want our leaders to deeply examine their beliefs and act in
accordance with them, but even if they have, if they fail to communicate
with us, we will not follow them. We won't trust them. In politics, they
don't get our vote. In business, we look for new work, or buy another
product.
You can do three things to make sure you communicate your strategy.
First, remind everyone what your strategy is; second, let them know how
your tactics have changed rather than the strategy; and third, connect
your changes to the strategic goals.
Sometimes strategies do have to change. In those cases, first,
describe the conditions that reduced the effectiveness of the previous
strategy; second, describe how the new strategy takes advantage of the
new environment; and third, provide the benchmark that will let everyone
know you have succeeded.
The same holds true for your communications with customers. After
doing so much to build consensus between management and employees on
your new direction, you need to put that into words your customers will
understand. You want to show how your values remain consistent even if
the method of operation, or pricing, or product structure needs to
change.
Companies who do this well will not only retain their customers, but
also they will remind the customer of why they were doing business with
the company in the first place. And that just might be incentive enough
for some of you to go out and change tactics.
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Kind regards,
Kevin Troy Darling
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