The Full Blog

Experiential – Giving a consumer-facing business, business cred

Monday 2 November 2009 · Leave a Comment

There’s increasing emphasis lately on what’s called “experiential marketing”, but like many things in our marketing world there’s nothing new about it – apart from the name.  These things just used to be referred to as “promotions” and looking through my archive of case studies that fall readily into the “experiential” category, I’m reassured to see that there have always been clients who recognise the value of this kind of initiative and are good them.

Take a client of mine from 2002/3.  A telco from Central Europe, now absorbed by a global operator, that had made headlines for having built a powerful and successful (by any measure) consumer-based brand and was trying to build on the values that had made them so successful with private subscribers and repeat that success in the business sector.

Our target was successful, entrepreneurial businesses, which in a developing market meant SME’s and Sole Traders.  We found a dozen (who we nicknamed “The Daring Dozen”) that had already succeeded and produced a book of case studies and a series of ten-minute TV programmes profiling each.  National TV, eager for local content were happy to run these in pre-evening-news slots.  We then launched a national campaign called “The Thirteenth Chair” throwing down the gauntlet to would-be entrepreneurs to take their place alongside these successful small businesses.

The red swivel-chair that we used throughout, photographed empty and in a spot-light, became the campaign icon and the key competition and the book was promoted through trade associations, on the telco’s web site, in their stores, using viral and press media with  links at the end of the TV segments, and in the book, to the campaign web site where candidates could register and subscribe to the campaign pack.  The mechanic was straightforward enough.  Candidates completed a business plan using a template that we provided and each submission went through a short-listing process, culminating in a chosen few being invited to a “show and tell” like “Dragon’s Den” where a panel, made up from the twelve original entrepreneurs and representatives of my client, voted to contribute to financing to one of the plans.

From there the winning candidate was filmed as their business evolved throughout the next twelve months.  Press coverage was phenomenal during the run-up and after the award was announced and we were almost fighting applications off with a stick (although, as you might expect from a developing market, there were rather a lot of “spoiled applications”).

Was it one of those “big ideas” that I tend to ramble on about? – Well, yes, I guess it might qualify.  Could you repeat this event in a more mature market? – Probably not, certainly at the level of investment we were making back then, but with the new mobile technologies that are now available, there would be a whole lot of additional elements and valuable mileage to be gained if you could.  It just goes to show that “experiential marketing” isn’t something that was just invented and I’m sure that it will be with us, whatever its called, for a long time yet.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Big Idea · Brand promise · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · below-the-line · brand development · branding · brands · central europe · communications · experiential · integrated marketing · marketing · mobile operator · phil darby · telco · the big idea

Are marketing services failing clients?

Monday 12 October 2009 · Leave a Comment

I don’t agree with Saatchi’s Kevin Roberts on everything, but there’s a big overlap in our thinking and, hey, differences are what prompts innovation and make the world go round, so that’s good.  Yes?

The thing is that on the fundamentals we are on the same page and its always reassuring to know, when, as we marketers do, you are ploughing the lonely innovation furrow, that someone of Kevin’s gravitas agrees with you, at least in part.  That’s why I was delighted to hear him make three key points in an interview in Singapore recently (he probably made many more) that really resounded with me.

  1. The current economic situation is causing far more radical change than most people still realise and it’s going to go on for a year or two yet.  As a result, business leaders are desperate for ideas, but nervous of change, so the ideas that we take to them have to be bigger, better and more than ever before, grounded in sound commercial thinking.
  2. Marketing services businesses (Kevin focusses on Ad. agencies, I’d put brand consultancies up there too but all the other disciplines are failing their clients too) are generally way behind their clients and end users/consumers when it comes to realising what’s happening and responding to it (which, given that we are paid to be thought-leaders, is pretty damning)
  3. Awards are becoming counter-productive.  They are encouraging agency people to entrench in old-thinking.  It’s almost as though given their failure to deliver in the real world, agencies are retreating to a world of mutual admiration inhabited solely by their peers.

Where maybe I differ from Kevin is that I believe that its our job to lead our clients.  Not just to give them great ideas, but to help them fully exploit them.  This requires bigger thinking.  I am trying to go much further than most agencies, by not only coming up with new creative ideas, but having ideas about how business can change and reshape themselves, communicate internally as well as externally and do new things operationally that will enable them to get more out of the ideas.  And I go further than that even, because, as I just said, business leaders are not only desperate for ideas, but nervous of change too, so its my job as a marketer (and if you are a marketer, its your job too) to help them along the way with implementation.  That’s why I spent months working with buyers at a supermarket group to get them to think differently about their role and what they were buying and why I just devoted weeks to convincing a software organisation to take another look at the environment their otherwise great software creates for users, before they take it to market.

Sure its a lot of work, but that’s the game we are in now.  Be sure about that!

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How agencies in developing markets could hang on to their margins.

Wednesday 23 September 2009 · Leave a Comment

It’s difficult for those of us grinding away in the recession-ridden Western marketing communications sector to imagine what things would be like if the organisations we worked for operated on a margin of 25%+, but belive me, there are agencies in developing markets for whom numbers like this are all in a day’s work.  That is, of course, why they get bought up by the global networks.  The big deal, though, is that despite these massive margins, many are still struggling to see that money in the bank.  So, where does it all go?

Asking around I’ve developed a league of the top five profit drains in these marcoms companies and I guess they don’t differ from the list I would get in London were it not for the systems and practices in place in western agencies.

  1. Mistakes by agency personnel that lead to expensive corrections, re-prints and the like.
  2. Refunds to clients for mistakes and missed deadlines.
  3. Unauthorised purchases – stuff ordered for jobs that were never started, media that was bought without written client authority.
  4. Accounting errors.
  5. Stuff that client has asked for for “private use” without expecting to pay for it.

All of this comes about because of an absence of foolproof systems.  I heard last week of quite a large Chinese agency network that until recently had absolutely no management technology.   They did have a system and, like many in these countries it was amazing what it facilitated considering everything was done on small slips of paper that were stuck with Sellotape to desks, walls … you name it – not even Post-Its!  It was, apparently, like living in a snow-drift!  Apart from anything else though, it enabled all kinds of avoidance and manipulation by employees at all levels ands as a result the place was a money drain.  The agency in question turned out to be one of the few forward-thinkers who recognised the wisdom, while they could afford it and had the time, of installing the hardware and the systems that enabled it to bank (almost) all of its massive profit.

Normally if you talk to the owner of such an agency about recession even in these times, when you would think that everybody was feeling the pinch, you’d probably find his attention drifts away.  Try and persuade him that the reality of a 5% margin is just around the corner and he’ll likely wander off to buy a Jag or something!  So, a big hand for enlightened agency owners in developing markets.  May your profits be large and untapped!

Much of my work in Central Europe in the last few years has been with agencies like this, although sadly, the heady high-margin days are well gone there now.  I’ve seen a golden goose operating at a 30% margin get bought up by our biggest global network, who promptly cooked it.  I know how it works, but its tough trying to persuade an Indian entrepreneur with a fat cigar that his shiny and profitable ad agency is going to be less than a memory in twelve months time unless he replaces his paper and abacus with some processes and systems, he just can’t visualise fighting for margin or indeed how rapidly this reality can advance.  Sometimes you get half-way to persuading these guys that something has to be done, but your best intentions are scuppered when he introduces his brother the computer programmer, who is put to work on solving the problem and spends the remainder of his natural life developing a programme that does about a tenth of the job.  Worse-still maybe, they opt for an off-the-peg software solution, and there are many, install it on half their network and discover after six months that it isn’t up to the job – I have seen such a case this morning in fact.

The only way to tackle this issues is with a suite of processes and an information application that is installed on every computer on the network and is unavoidable for anybody doing anything in the agency.  There are solutions that can be installed like this, but they are usually accounting packages or production management software that has been adapted and extended.  However, I just discovered one that is designed and developed by advertising people for advertising people to work just this way and I can’t believe why everyone isn’t using it.

I’m going to keep it to myself for now while I test it out, but meanwhile, I’m interested to hear of any others that you may know of that might compete.  Add a comment or drop me a line and I’ll swap you for the name of the one I have found.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: MIS · Management information systems · agency management · production management · profit · traffic systems

A brand by any other name …

Wednesday 26 August 2009 · Leave a Comment

Radio-ShackI just came from a visit to the Duets Blog, in particular a piece called “A Shack by Any Other Name” that takes a look at a spate of questionable re-naming projects in the US.  The piece by Randall Hull of BrandRanch highlights Radio Shack’s plan to re-brand as “Shack” and Pizza Hut’s infamous new “Hut” branding and asks, among other things, how a brand name should add up.

The truth is that few brandnames are ideal, but the organisations concerned nevertheless manage to achieve success. However, in today’s competitive environment, no organisation can afford to miss any opportunity, however insignificant that might appear to be to increase the return on their investment, so any organisation setting out their stall for the first time, should start with a name that ticks all the boxes.

Bearing in mind that we are talking brandnames and not logos, there are three components or boxes to tick. Firstly the name you choose should give an indication of (1) what you do or the sector that you operate in.  Add this to your (2) unique name and (3) do so in a way that reflects the language of your brand character.  Apart from demonstrating that you have to have a Brand Model before you start thinking about names, which is the other way around to how most people tackle it, following this path means that you should end up with a brandname that is working as hard for you as any name could – like ToysRUs or ElectroWorld.  All you have to do then is build on that.

So what brandnames can you think of that tick all the boxes?

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Brand Model · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · brand · brand character · brand development · brand name · branding · brands · communications · integrated marketing · marketing · phil darby

Brand Failure, or when it just doesn’t add up

Tuesday 25 August 2009 · Leave a Comment

I’ve spend the last few weeks trying to deal with a pretty big organisation in Central Europe and getting really frustrated.  “Trying” is the operative word here.  I made fifteen calls to their corporate headquarters, only eight of which were even answered!  To make matters worse, when I did get a telephonist on the line (It seemed to be  a different one each time) and they couldn’t get a reply from the extension I was after, instead of taking a message they asked me to call back.  On one occasion I enquired if there was anybody else who might help and was told that the person concerned may have gone home.  “Its only three o’ clock” I exclaimed.  “That’s nothing” came the reply with absolutely no irony “sometimes they go home even earlier”!

Add to that the fact that when extensions weren’t answered they just cut me off, so I couldn’t leave a message and when all I wanted to do was get down to business, each time before my call even rang at the switchboard I had to listen to a tinny recording of their latest TV commercial right to the end – I know it by heart now!

Things actually got worse, because when after all this I was finally put through, via a low quality mobile phone link, to the person I was after, she told me she was doing some shopping and would be back in the office later.  “Drop me an e-mail to remind me” she said “and I’ll call you back later”.  I did as she asked, but never heard from her again.  And despite a plethora of e-mails and messages I didn’t hear from anybody else either, until I upped the anti and contacted the CEO.  My very short relationship with this organisation was packed with other similar experiences.

As in most organisations the senior managers here seem to be clued-in and when I spoke to one of the directors it was because he called me to apologise for the instances I had recounted.  It was, however, clear that focus became severely blurred the further down the chain of command I went.  This suggests pretty conclusively that what’s wrong here is not just about skills deficiencies, its about brand development and specifically, that all too often ignored, internal marketing thing.

I have to say that the organisation concerned has invested a great deal of time and money in advertising that I guess they think is creating a brand.  Of course, it isn’t – well not a positive one anyway, as long as they continue to fail to deliver their Brand Promise.  I turned up at their threshold with the expectation, created by their advertising, of a switched-on, caring, fun and happy organisation only to be abused by a bunch of morose, lazy and inhospitable border guards, who, had their mission been to repel all boarders, couldn’t have done a better job!  The experience of dealing with them just didn’t add-up to the expectation they had given me.

Of course, this gulf between expectation and reality doesn’t just add up to a waste of investment in the expensive marketing communications that drove my expectations in the first place – which is criminal at any time, but especially so these days – it has actually caused residual damage to the brand and the organisation that will cost them business and necessitate additional investment for years to come.  Repeat this a few times with other people like me and you’ll soon have a grounswell of negative brand perceptions.

I will admit that, while I have always felt that the company concerned had tremendous potential, I am not a fan of their brand strategy.  They have clearly recognised that a brand is a community, but failed at every turn to act on that understanding/.  They have clearly had bad advice too and as a result tried to build their brand personna on the sandiest of foundations.  Basically their message adds up to nothing much, but the real issue is that they have failed to deliver even that.

The problem for this organisation is that even though the brand may not be particularly inspiring, its employees aren’t behind it or fully committed to playing their part in the delivery of the Brand Promise.  Maybe they don’t know what that is, or fail to understand what it means in the context of their role, but these are not excuses.  That’s the point of internal marketing and its exactly what Brand Discovery is all about.

Success or failure in brand development is most often determined by the cumulative effect of many little things, like the way your phones are answered or the breadth of the smile on your receptionist’s face, that go to make the experience of dealing with you.  My advice to the directors of the business concerned would be to get a hold of their brand, define it and promote it internally with internal marketing and training programmes that are designed to get all their stakeholders, not only employees, behind the brand and totally committed to playing their part in delivering its “Promise”.

Once they have done this they will find that the people charged with the task of making the company’s telephone communications productive will pull out all the stops to put right the deficiencies in their current system.  They’ll also discover that instead of having to legislate to make managers and employees do their job (which never works anyway) people like their department heads and receptionists will develop the skills and commitment that’s required.  But it won’t end there.  With a clear brand development programme like Brand Discovery in place they’ll unlock the full potential of their most valuable resource – their people, and that, in turn, will increase efficiency and give hem the kind of ROI that will allow them to compete in their very tough market.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Brand Discovery · Brand Model · Brand promise · Competitors · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · brand · brand character · brand development · brand name · branding · brands · business development · central europe · communications · efficiency · internal marketing · marketing · phil darby · promise

At last! A glimmer of sanity

Friday 21 August 2009 · Leave a Comment

It seems the penny is dropping, at least in a few places.  I was talking to the owner of an independent mens’ fashion chain in the UK this week and he gave me reason to hope!

Despite current trading conditions, here is one business that is expandidng.  “Money is cheap and there are plenty of independent operators eager to get out at any price so we are buying” he told me.  They have bought three new  stores and are negotiating for more.  They are in the process of refitting all their stores to strengthen their corporate look and they reckon, by the time the recession lifts they will be ready to hit the ground running.

Meanwhile the government’s Job Centre Plus announced a new programme aimed at getting the unemployed back to work in more bouyant sectors.  They announced this week that if you are unemployed for six months you can elect to start training in one of the skills designated locally as a source of employment without losing your unemployment benefit.  After a few weeks, they’ll put you forward for a role that will utilise your new skill and the employer will be able to secure grants to cover the cost of your completion of the course.  Sounds like an idea, but don’t get excited.  They shot themselves in the foot with another scheme that pays unemployed folks who can persuade an employer to take them on trial for a role that lack of experience would otherwise have excluded them from – a sort of free trial for the employer.  However the rub is that there has to be a genuine vacant job, which kinda’ neutralises the initiative.  After all, if you need to fill a role, and you get four-hundred applicants (which is not unusual at the moment), a proportion of whom are bound to be able to hit the ground running, you are hardly going to take a long-shot on someone who had never done the job before, however cheap they may be.

The fact that this scheme excludes people who want to go to prospective employers with a proposition like “give me X weeks to demonstrate that I can make a difference to your business in a way you never thought of and you won’t even have to pay me” underlines the gulf that exists between the public sector ivory towers and the real world of business, where we are in desperate need of entrepreneurship.  But, hey, mighty oaks … and all that!

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Job Centre · The Full Effect Company · business development · business strategy · marketing · opportunity · phil darby · recession · retailer

A warm feeling from Saatchi’s Pakistan

Monday 10 August 2009 · Leave a Comment

It may have something to do with my time of life, but I find these days that I spend a lot of time pondering world issues with a real sense of frustration.  Frustration that the people calling the shots make such stupid mistakes, that people are still so self-centred that they strive for the failure of others as often as they do their own success and most of all anger at the waste that prevails in every aspect of life in the developing as well as the developed world.

Just lately my thoughts have been on the issues of food resources and the question of how we Brits are going to maintain food supplies as we continue to grow in numbers, demand more variety and turn our once green and pleasant land into car park.  I see opportunities for initiatives everywhere in my day-to-day life, but, like so many others I suspect, the need for me to meet the cost of living, which increases daily because of these mistakes, self-centredness and stupidity, means that I can do little and the reluctance of the people with say-so to actually walk their talk just winds me up still further.

The fact that my eighty-year-old mother is paranoid that she might put the wrong kind of cardboard in her re-cycling bin and get fined by the bin-cops is criminal in itself when you trace the route of the waste as I did and discover that it is all dumped together anyway on ships and sent to India for land-fill.  Consequently I get a bit of a wam feeling inside when big organisations like Saatchi & Saatchi take a positive viewpoint and place emphasis on the simple things that we can all do to, at least, help not make things worse.

I wonder sometimes if Saatchi’s don’t have too many themes and causes on the go at one time, but I don’t get to see how it all works internally these days, so like everyone else, I have to accept the reassurance of Kevin Roberts that it works.  This initiative from their Pakistan office in response to Saatchi’s recent True Blue theme would tend to support his claim, but anyway it gave me one of those warm feelings I was talking about.  I hope it does the same for you.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Uncategorized

Innovate your way through recession

Thursday 6 August 2009 · 1 Comment

You might be persuaded otherwise by the actions of some organisations, but now is the time to innovate.  And before you respond with the old “we can’t afford it” argument, let me tell you that every piece of evidence proves beyond any doubt that far from not being able to afford innovation, you simply can’t afford not to right now.  If you think the recession hit hard and fast, you ain’t seen nothing yet!  If your organisation is sitting there with its metaphorical head between its knees, you’ll know what I mean when the recession starts to lift and your competitors who have had their thinking hats on for the last months kick your sorry backside!

The trick to innovating in recession is no different to the basic rule in boom times.  In fact its the fundamental of every aspect of all business at any time and if you’ve been on this blog before you’ll know what’s coming next … efficiency!  Efficiency is ultimately the only thing that separates successful organisations from unsuccessful ones and, by and large we are all pretty bad at it.  The thing is that most of the time we can get away with being … so-so.  In recession however you really have walk the talk! Yes, tough markets sort out the men from the boys, the wheat from the chaff and by and large this time around the recession is definitely reducing the number of half-baked businesses.

The starting point for innovating efficiently is the same as the starting point for efficiency in every area of your business – focus, and the kind of focus I am talking about is the kind that comes from having a clearly defined brand encapsulated in a concise and straightforward Brand Model, such as that which I create with my Brand Discovery programme.

Among many other things, a Brand Model gives any organisation the criteria by which to judge the suitability of everything you do and used properly will enable you to prioritise, cut those ideas that aren’t going to support your Brand Promise, help those you decide to run contribute something truly worthwhile to your business and ensure that tactical initiatives have maximum long term value – that’s efficiency!

Over that last few months I have seen an increase in the number of calls  from organisations who are fine-tuning their brands and this is encouraging.  How they go about it though is sometimes a bit of a worry.  I have just spent some time with a national UK set-up that brought in one of the big consulting firms at colossal expense to help them with this and the result was very disappointing.  The consultancy came in, helped them create something approximating a brand model, which itself left a lot to be desired, and then walked away and left them to it.  Sadly this is a common experience.

A lot of folks don’t realise that building a brand model is one thing, but bringing it to life is where the challenge lies.  The model is really just the working drawings.  To turn it into something concrete – and that includes leveraging its capability to generate business-building ideas – means taking a new perspective on your business.  This in itself represents a radical change for some organisations and involves introducing new practices and maintaining a high level of discipline, all while running the day-to-day business as usual.  Its tough and, believe me it rarely works unless you have to have someone dedicated to keeping it all on track.  Some organisations employ their own brand champion, which really should be at board level, because they need to carry that kind of weight within the organisation, but it makes sense for most businesses to bring in consultants and that’s what I do.

On this foundation you can start building your “ideas organisation”.  Canvassing ideas from within your organisation is a campaign in itself, especially if its new to your culture.  You first have to start by reassuring everyone  that regardless of their level or function, their ideas are as likely as anybody’s  to be that golden key to the future of the business .  I once turned an idea from a junior secretary into a successful new business unit for one of my clients and you could do the same.  Believe me the key to a really great future is probably rattling around the head of one of your employees as we speak.

Once you are generating ideas you’ll need a process for selecting them and developing those that show promise.  Your Brand Model will be an immense help in this, but you still have to set out your day-to-day approach.  I find that its useful for a lot of reasons to offer the person who came up with the idea a role in its development – its motivating and it helps them develop new skills.  You have to decide how you want to set up and run your project teams – one for each idea currently in development – at what points you review projects and what criteria you will introduce at each review.  Its also a good idea to have a reporting system that feeds back to your employees, to maintain their interest and commitment to ideation.

When you have an “ideas organisation” culture, the support of your employees and the processes in place to develop the ideas you’ll be generating ideas, assessing their potential and bringing the most promising ones to market more quickly and efficiently that you probably imagine.  You can fine-tune all the elements of your innovation programme as you go, but ultimately you can’t help but be successful.  Remember, ideas are the currency of business and the race is on to emerge from the recession like a bullet from a gun with all the momentum that only new ideas can generate.

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On yer’ bike

Thursday 9 July 2009 · Leave a Comment

pod_uq_final500Britain must be the worst place in the world to be a biker. Not only do we have to contend with the arcane rules about rights of way, footpaths and bridleways (give me strength!), public transport restrictions and their inconsistency from one operator to another pretty-well kill off any attempt to take up biking as a passtime or a practical means of commuting.

If only we had government with the vision to liberalise cycling at least to the level of other European countries where you can hop on or off a train, or even a bus, with your bike at will and get out of town and hit those trails.

They have it even better it seems in Australia where the rail operators are looking at installing Bike Pods with showers and secure lock-ups, care of a great organisation called Penny Farthing, at railway stations.

We poor Brits can only look on in envy. Where is the green lobby when you need it?

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Australia · green lobby
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The future is definitely grey.

Monday 1 June 2009 · Leave a Comment

I had an interesting meeting in London last week, with a few people from one of our bigger and better-known global organisations, who, like everybody else right now are looking for ways to stretch their budgets.

I have been saying for years, the difference between successful companies and unsuccessful ones is efficiency – nothing more or less.  Its a matter of what you can do with the resources at your disposal. What’s happened in the last few months to make this issues more critical is, of course, the recession.  Now the race is really hotting up and even the most successful organisations are racing to find ways to maintain or even increase pressure on their competitors while reducing their investment .  In other words everyone is desperate to increase efficiency in every area of their organisation and that puts Full Effect Marketing bang on target.

The people I was talking to were by anybody’s standard successful and their efficiency is probably about as good as it can get using contemporary practices, philosophies and models, but as more and more organisations have discovered recently this just isn’t good enough.  They cited three issues that they are struggling with right now, all of which boiled down to the same thing.

  • Too many short-lived propositions – or as I would express it, campaigns with no legs – so they were wasting time, effort and money setting up and running a continuous stream of short tactical propositions that are going nowhere.
  • Missed opportunities brought about by failing to recognise and plan to exploit all their options ahead of time.  This sometimes means that they have had to hold up launches while forgotten elements were nailed on (with the kind of compromises that you have to expect when this happens), occasionally they effectively plan-out potential that they have missed, so that to reinstate it later means cumbersome and inefficient delivery and also, from time to time they just miss opportunities altogether.
  • Inefficient execution or just failing to engage all the expertise within the organisation early enough to ensure that campaigns are delivered on time with all the Is dotted and Ts crossed.

As they said, no longer can they afford to invest in promotions and propositions that don’t milk investment for all its worth.  If only a few more organisations recognised that.  Their problem is that they were viewing these problems as training deficiencies, when the truth was far more fundamental.

Its a fact that executives in most organisations, like policemen, are much younger than they used to be.  This has its advantages, such as high energy levels and enthusiasm (although I sometimes wonder about this), plus, of course younger managers are usually cheaper to employ and hungry for success, which enables employers to apply the carrot principle with greater success.  However its not all pluses.  There are disadvantages too and the biggest and most significant, as far as the scenario we are talking about here is concerned, is a lack of experience.  While business is becoming more complicated with a full-hand comprising more and far more diverse disciplines, executives, because they are younger, have experienced fewer (simply because they just haven’t had time to acquire more) and as careers develop, the focus seems to be on depth rather than breadth of experience.  This limits both their understanding and their management capability and adds to the reliance many larger organisations (and this one was a case in point) have on processes, the only purpose of which is to overcome experience deficiencies, but, which, in the process, limit scope for free-thought.

The thing about establishing the perspective that allows us to see all the implications and opportunities of an initiative is that its pretty well impossible, to processise.  The vision that enables an executive to see all the opportunities and identify all the departments, specialists and skills that need to be engaged in efficient delivery is simply a product of experience.  So, if you can’t processise this stuff the only option left is to employ people with the experience.  I’m not saying that youth has no place in the modern recruitment strategy, but there’s no getting away from it, if you want to up your game to the kind of level that we all need going forward from today, you need experience too and that means creating a blend of young and older executives and creating a culture in which they can work together, combining everyone’s skills to deliver the solutions a modern business needs.

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