Sunday, January 29, 2006
My Brief Notes On The Avian Flu
This past week I was researching some telecom reports, and I
happened to run across an outlier in the corporate mix that caught my
eye. It was a Gartner report, entitled "Prepare for Avian Influenza:
Our Interview With the World Health Organization's Dr. David Nabarro"
(sorry - subscription required).
Now I don't follow the management consulting and other firms that
specialize in risk management and human resources that closely, so I
thought I would check their sites out for a peek. Marsh has some
information on the avian flu here. AON has something over here.
Companies and organizations do not seem prepared. A survey by the
Deloitte Center for Health Solutions appears to indicate that 66% of
companies do not feel adequately prepared (poll of 179 companies).
Instapundit points out how hospitals could barely keep up with the
normal flu here.
When I step back from the business aspects and whether companies can
withstand prolonged labor shortages of 30%+, etc, I am a bit more
concerned that communities and families may not be prepared. At least I
find myself not quite fully informed to a level that hits close to
home, despite all of the press.
So I have started to make some mental notes from research reports,
like those from Gartner, that hit close to home. Maybe readers will
have other sources of info to share.
From the Gartner report (note Dr. Nabarro is the highest medical
authority, the U.N.'s top official for global pandemic response
planning), here are my key notes:
- "in the last 200 years, there have been pandemics at intervals
of every 30 to 40 years, on average" - so if even if one doesn't have
to be concerned about it, there could be an impact on one's children or
their children
- "modellers are [saying] that it may be as few as 21 days from the
initial appearance of the virus to it being a full-blown pandemic" -
note that the increased mobility of people shortens the cycle-time of
viruses spreading ; I ask myself, how and how fast would I personally
react once something hit the continent, country, or city I live in?
- Dr. Nabarro indicated he is not sure (because he doesn't know
enough about how corporations work) whether corporate CEOs should
assign senior executives to coordinate their response to avian flu
It seems the World Bank estimates
economic damage from an avian flu pandemic could cause $800 billion in
economic damage. To put that number in perspective, Hurricane Katrina
damages were estimated at $125 billion. A sickening of 90 million Americans as stated here - gee, that would be out of a population of 296 million Americans according to the CIA World Factbook.
My wife and I can barely control flu in the household between kids let
alone if one of every three people in the entire US is sick. What would
you do?
I suppose after writing all of this down, I am not more prepared for
an avian flu pandemic than I was before, but I do find myself at a
heightened level of awareness. That's probably at least one step
forward.
Update (1/29/06): As an aside, raders have choices of stockpiling N95 masks approved by the CDC or apparently, Kimchi (which I despise the smell and taste of).
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Perceptual Mapping: What Does Your Cell Phone Say About You?
Last
week I was reading a detailed research report regarding cell phones in
order to get a more structured understanding of the consumer
marketplace as it relates to upstream B2B vendors.
Now
in business school, one may learn about concepts such as perceptual
mapping, a combination of numerical factor-analysis and marketing
technique that may be used to graphically place vendor products in a
two-dimensional chart, where the products may have many more underlying
features which actually makeup the products. Wikipedia has a sample
chart here,
to give you an idea of what perceptual maps look like. What is nice
about certain-types of perceptual maps is that the charts are borne out
of people?s actual market behaviors or expressed preferences (as
opposed to some ad-hoc or opinion-driven marketing method).
In
the report I was reading, there was a picture of a less-frequently used
perceptual map that grabbed my attention. Basically instead of
products, the perceptual map placed cell phone features (e.g.,
calendar, push-to-talk, text messaging) on a two-dimensional map with
the axes ranging from a) low- to high-technological advancement and b)
high-entertainment to high-utility.
Based
on the features (each a point) on this perceptual map, one could
identify five primary clusters of points. These clusters were
essentially viewed as market segments of mobile phone consumers and
were divided as follows:
- Picture people (camera phone lovers)
- Gotta-have-it-all types (e.g., Motorola RAZR types)
- Plain old telephone people (basic phone users)
- Organized telephone people (e.g., like calendar features in the phone)
- Always on-the-road types (e.g., like productivity & synchronization functions)
It?s
funny when you look at the high probability demographics for these
mobile phone segments (and I will take some liberties here to boil down
the paragraph of demographics to a few words (demographics match the
listing order above and have *not* been written to be politically
correct):
- females, without children, poor
- males, dumb, low income
- females, married, dumb, poor
- females, married, poor
- males, married, highly educated
I
fall into the organized telephone or plain telephone crowd with my
basic Siemens flip-phone. What does that say about me? I?ve never
really cared too much about image, but what am I communicating to
people by my use of phone? Is your ringtone a mating call in disguise?
What does your phone say about you?
Saturday, January 14, 2006
Leadership Is An Innate Skill?
I saw a recent post
that raised the question as to whether leadership skills are innate (and
cannot be learned). Leadership is a bit of an ill-defined term, so I?m
not exactly sure about the context of the original discussion
triggering the post, but at face value I have to say that innate skills
can help but instilling a continuous learning process about one?s own
leadership style (and that of others) can also help dramatically. What
I share below intends to illustrate not only that one can build
knowledge to help with leadership skills but also that one may find
little progress on a day-to-day basis until one day when it all comes
together.
Two
areas that created an ?ah-ha? for me with respect to helping me
recognize my leadership style were related to going to business school
and getting support from a client executive to develop the business
skills one of his line managers. Had it not been for these two events,
I probably would have turned out as an engineer focused on individual
contributor work as opposed to a person focused on business within the
technology space. While either of the outcomes is perfectly fine, I am
happier that I have found the business slant is more the ?natural me?.
The
first step in going to business school helped me to develop my
leadership skills by explicitly forcing me to focus on thinking about
and analyzing business issues, as opposed to passively addressing
business issues while working on the job. Business school also gave me
an extra level of confidence in knowing that I had spent dedicated time
to try to improve my knowledge.
The second step
may have occurred, in part, by chance. During a management consulting
engagement I was involved with, I was sitting in a three-person,
executive review meeting with one of the partners of my consulting firm
and the president of the company. The upshot of the meeting was that
one of the functional managers was not performing too well and both the
president and the partner wanted me to coach the functional manager to
help him take his management skills up by an order of magnitude or the
functional manager would be fired. What followed from there was some
behind the scenes work in analyzing how to approach the situation and
then direct assistance with the functional manager to improve the
business. After that particular client engagement, things started
?clicking? for me, and I was able to get into both interim and direct
management roles more regularly to foster my leadership skills.
The
upshot of all this is that combining knowledge, practice, and a real
environment to foster one?s management and leadership skills helped me
to breakthrough and reach a new level (one-time, discontinuous
improvement as opposed to gradual change). While the process of
improvement may have taken many years with slow growth, I was suddenly
able to get things to click together.
I have found similar discontinuous improvements in other areas of
life. For example, in tennis, I remember going to tennis camp and
getting a breakthrough on getting better control with my one-handed
backhand. In drumming, I started to study a completely different style
of music (jazz fusion instead of just progressive rock music drumming).
The knowledge had to sit for awhile, but one day it all clicked and
took me up a notch when I least expected it. If I hadn?t prepared for
the time when the conditions and environment were right, I wouldn?t
have reaped the benefits. Sometimes I think working on leadership
skills might be in the same vein.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
CEOs Say Blogs Are Good Internal Communication Tools
Here's a study
that yielded results of 59 percent of CEOs finding internal blogging
tools useful for internal communications. From the article:
Of the 131 CEOs surveyed, 7 percent are actually blogging while many
others say they are unlikely to start a blog themselves. About 18
percent of these CEOs say they plan to host a company blog over the
next two years.
I am actually a little suprised that the percentage is so high in terms
of number of CEOs finding (intranet) blogs useful. I don't think that
59 percent of the population knows what blogs are, let alone that
they can be used within corporations. There must have been a percentage
of CEOs that didn't know what a blog was. If that is the case, it seems
like it would mean that much higher percentage of those that knew what
blogs were about thought they were useful.
In any case, I agree that blogs can be a useful communications tool
within companies. I just wonder if I am understanding the statistics
right and whether there may be some selection bias.
Wednesday, January 4, 2006
Improving the State of Corporate Blogging
As much as it pains me to agree with Jeff Nolan on his post about corporate blogging here,
I have to say that annecdotally I do not see an immediate tipping point
for corporate blogging. From my vantage point, I see at least a couple
of other factors contributing to the sad state:
- There are very few "skilled" bloggers in any position of authority within a corporation
- Despite the grassroots nature of blogging, people still need role
models for corporate blogging. Unless a company is actively supporting
blogging, there is a (tremendous) amount of baggage that blogging
(whether right) carries with it in a professional setting.
- Academic arguments on risk management are nice, but some
corporations need to gain extra comfort level with their abilities to
handle actual blog crises (or at least criticism in the blogosphere)
- Ask yourself, who in your organization is a role model for handling
this kind of stuff? Have they proven that they can take the heat (of
any temperature) in the blog environment or is it just conceptual? I'd
be surprised if people could name three people (off the tops of their
heads) in their companies that could "handle" the blogosphere. Again
whether right, I see it as a barrier to corporate blogging.
The environment and culture surrounding blogging sets the tone
within a corporation (case in point: Malcolm Gladwell's portrayal of
how crime in New York was reduced by eliminating graffiti and the
visible signs of vandalism).
One area that I am sensing positive feedback in the corporate
environment is around serious use of blog reading. Perhaps it is
because people can digest larger amounts of information in blog format
as opposed to reading traditional new sources. Perhaps it is because
they can glean leads and subtle insights from reading blogs. Or perhaps
it is related to the richer link content in blogs.
So if companies are not ready to encourage corporate blog writing by
actively seeking, reaching out to, and elevating the exposure of
skilled bloggers in their own organizations, I would suggest that they
support blog reading (and blog intranets as sandboxes at least). The
ROI on gaining industry knowledge from blog reading strikes close to
very immediately. I think that some managers are surprised by how much
their workers' level of knowledge comes up when they are encouraged to
read quality blogs, like Om Malik, Daily Wireless, and Mark Evans (to pick a few from the telecom space).
