Category Archives: Miscellaneous

I’ve Lost My Marbles!

Last time I saw them, three days ago, I was playing a rousing game of Ringo (not to be confused with Rango, who is one heck of a lizard may I add) with my developer colleagues (who are very easily amused, and even more easily distracted by giant rubber bands — but that’s a story for another day). I know this because I distinctly remember sticking seven marbles in a row and trouncing my competition in the final game. But that’s not important. What’s important is that they’re gone! Gone! GONE!

Like your average genius, I’m a few cards short of a full deck, and they were probably the only things keeping my eccentricities and insanity in check. (All geniuses are insane. We don’t all reach the depths that von Neumann or Tesla reached, but other than my marbles, and the tires on my car, I think all things should be square. Because it’s Hip to Be Square.) I’m already losing it. Since that time, I’ve joined every social network known to me. I’m fully aware that Tweets are NOT conversations, that Twitter will likely make me stoopid, and that, with the Facebook double-whammy (where one can spend his days poking, prodding, and writing grafitti on infinite walls), I’ll have no time to be social. I know I should remain faceless, spaceless, and twitter free but there’s a big disconnect between logic and action. I know it would be more productive to try and resolve P vs. NP, capture a Higgs Boson, or to try to answer why Hulk Hogan is still in show business … but all I can say is Game On!.

I’m now linked-in, plaxo’d (which I guess, these days, is for the old and plastered), Google-plussed (but given that, as a degreed mathematician, I actually know what a googol is, I’m not sure how that is physically possible), slide-shared (even though playgrounds don’t exist outside of schoolyards anymore), pinned (but not pinned down, thanks to wireless and the power of the Macbook pro), living in twitter-space (and hoping I don’t get flattened by the fail whale — although it might be cool to get eaten by it if it’s anything like Möbius Dick), and facebook’d (even though I haven’t been arrested — what’s up with that)? And now I’m zanier than the Sourcing Maniacs after a month in the boardroom! (And fondly remembering the days of the APE Circus.)

All I can say is that I hope I find my marbles soon! I don’t think I’ll last as long as Tootles if I don’t. (But if it takes them that long to be returned to me, I hope they are returned covered in pixel dust. I’m gonna need it to fly through the ever expanding social media space.) In the interim, feel free to link to, contact, circle, share, pin, follow, and friend me as appropriate — and be sure to join the Sourcing Innovation groups on LinkedIn and Facebook.

And join me in a rousing verse of the zany socialites! (Sung to the tune of the maniac’s theme song.)

It’s time for social-maniacs
And we’re zany to the max
So just sit back and relax
You’ll tweet ’til you collapse
We’re social-maniacs!

Come join us on the Facebook
And the Twitter Channel too
Just for fun we poke around … and see who’s keeping tabs
You’ll find us in the Starbucks on our laptops and our pads
Reading mail and timeline trails
And tweeting off the rails

‘Cuz we’re social-maniacs
Who take pride in Twitter-yak
We’ll pack away the bits
While the servers store our twits
We’re social-maniacs!

Now someone raise me a picture of Wil Wheaton collating paper!

Has the Best been Bought from Best Buy?

StorefrontBacktalk recently ran a couple of pieces on Best Buy that followed up their recent pieces on “Best Buy’s Black Friday Fiasco” and “Best Buy’s Wifi Porn”, which was expanded upon by SI in its recent posts on how if you wanted a best buy experience, you weren’t going to get it at Best Buy (Part I and Part II). In its first piece on “Best Buy’s Last Hope”, the author says that Best Buy has one shot — an expensive, painful, highly disruptive shot — to truly turn itself around. It must embrace customer service in-sore to an extent that would make Nordstrom, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods blush. That means store associates who are true experts in the electronics they are selling.

Frankly, I don’t think this is going to happen. The mentality would have to change from “who will work for us for minimum wage and pretend they know enough about this product to actually sell it” to “where can we find someone who knows what they are talking about, is passionate about the products they sell, and will actually work for us as a sales rep” and “what is it going to take to get that kind of people”. Right now, the type of service I’m used to is “this isn’t my department, you’ll have to find someone that is working in this department” to queries as simple as “can you tell me if you still have any of this product in stock” (which any associate can do simply by logging into one of their terminals and doing a query) or, my favourite, in response to “I’d like that” (pointing to something in a cage). Get the key, open the damn cage, give it to me and/or walk it to the cashier. An untrained monkey could do it! (And monkeys are smarter than you think. Pete the Monkey taught himself to do dishes.)

Plus, as the author notes, they would probably have to fire most of their staff and replace them with Apple-store caliber employees. And any employee of that caliber is probably going to go work for Apple or, if they prefer Windows, Sony where knowledgeable associates are preferred.

After all, as the author notes, they currently think they can win a price war with Amazon. A company with massively deep pockets, minimal physical overhead (compared to a retail store chain), and a willingness to go eight years without turning a profit just to conquer a market. Winning a price war against Amazon in the electronics space is not going to happen. Amazon can, and will, win on margin every time if that’s what it takes to be the next major electronics retailer and put Best Buy and its competitors out of business. (And it won’t be hard when it’s customer service reps often give better service over the phone than Best Buy associates in store!)

The other piece that got my attention was that “Best Buy Planned Outages Due to Its Move to the Cloud”. If you believe the hype (and the doctor does not), the whole point of moving to the cloud is so that you don’t have outages. But the most ironic aspect to this story is that Best Buy is cutting Amazon a check for its cloud efforts. They might as well just sell to Amazon.com now and become Amazon’s mobile presence. One little glitch and a propagated purge command and — voila! — no more Best Buy online. (Not that it would make a huge difference anyway. What good is a web store that a growing portion of your market can only order one item from at a time anyway? [See Best Buy Experience? Not at Best Buy! Part II.] the doctor is now ordering more electronics from the local office supply depot because their web site actually works! And if you send them an e-mail, customer support actually responds! On the other hand, it seems that Best Buy’s method of dealing with problems is just to ignore them. It’s not a problem if you don’t recognize it, right?)

The nostalgic part of me would like to say that Best Buy still has a Bright Future, but, in the doctor‘s view, the only chance of Best Buy lighting up the sky is if the same thing happens to it as happened to the Buy More in the season three finale of Chuck. The way things are going, it’s going to be closing 50 stores on a regular basis. And I don’t think China’s going to save it. If Best Buy truly takes off in China, there’ll likely be so many indistinguishable clones in three months that it will just be hastening its demise.

Is Supply Chain Losing the Talent Race?

PWC recently released a report on Winning the Talent Race which was Volume 5 of its study on talent management. Although it contained some not altogether unexpected results (given the talent shortage predictions back in 2007 and the lack of focus on talent management in Supply Chain), the numbers are still quite shocking in magnitude. Not only are 400,000 more truck drivers needed in the US trucking industry alone (up from about 100,000 five years ago), but current estimates by the CSCMP (Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals) are that the US trucking industry will need to hire 1 Million new drives in the next 15 years just to deal with replacing retirees (as 35% of professionals in the transportation and logistics industry are over 50) and projected freight level increases!

But the real problem is that, first of all, this problem is global. Across North America and the EU we have the situation where 35%, or more, of our professionals are nearing retirement age and the number of potential recruits (eligible to hold a commercial driving license) is not keeping pace in an industry where the number of professionals needed to keep pace with global trade. Global trade is expected to at least triple in the next 20 years, due largely in part to emerging markets around the globe, and as a result, the number of professionals needed to staff the industry is going to triple in the next 10 to 15 years (as they need to be hired in time to get the requisite training and experience to take over before we lose all of our greybeards).

And, second of all, rising stars do not want to work in the industry. The researchers found that the new generation of recruits typically view jobs in the T&L sector as “dead-ends” because of factors including low wages, unfavourable working environments, and a lack of career advancement opportunities and that 27% of current T&L workers compromised in accepting a job they felt had less career potential / opportunities for advancement than they had hoped and over 50% of logistics and supply chain professionals are actively looking for another job with better offers. This is terrible and shocking. Supply chains fuel the business world and half of the people we have want out?

But we shouldn’t be surprised. When was the last time your organization actually did something to address the talent management issue that has been on your top three list for the last five years. If you’re honest, chances are your answer is a number that is further than five years in the past or never. Every year for the past four years, like The Mpower Group who has also been trying to address this issue for a couple of years, I heard lots of chatter about how this was going to be the year the organization was going to take the talent bull by the horns and get it in line and every year nothing got done as the training budget was the first to go in the lingering downturn and focus was shifted back to cost savings at all cost. You can’t ignore a talent management issue year over year and expect that it will just fix itself from an organizational viewpoint. The only thing that will happen is that whatever talent you have will leave and take your talent reputation with you. (And good luck attracting new talent then.) If you think your problems are bad enough now, imagine how bad they’ll be when you have no points of talent attraction in a world where talent is attracted to, and finds, talent.

Remember, we are entering the age of connectedness where, thanks to global mega-platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, everyone is connected to everyone else within 5 degrees of separation (actually, 4.6 and falling), and everybody knows that the dice are loaded, rolling with their fingers crossed. And everybody knows that when your top talent leaves that the plague is coming and moving fast (and, thanks to Facebook, they know before you do). That’s why one of the major recruitment weak points that the survey pointed out is social media. Unfortunately, Transportation, Logistics and Supply Chain is way behind on this front and losing ground fast.

Of course, recruitment isn’t the only issue. As the survey discovered, it’s also compensation, career path, and corporate brand. Rising stars want to feel that they are getting the best offer out there, that they can progress up a career path, and that they are working for a great company. A quick look at the top employer lists doesn’t include many (if any) T&L companies and only a few are known for their world class supply chains. Companies like Apple, where the CSCO (Chief Supply Chain Officer) can become next-in-line for CEO, need to be the norm, not the exception (and a career path from logistics manager to CSCO has to exist for the right hard-working, ambitious, and ready to learn superstar). In addition, as the report points out, the lack of diversity and understanding of demographic shifts isn’t helping.

In short, if your organization doesn’t kick its Supply Management Talent Management program into high gear this year, it may not be around in five years to figure out how it’s going to replace 35% of its staff.

Invoking Innovation In Your Organization Internally

Supply Management magazine recently ran a great piece on innovation from the head of SRM at Best Buy Europe (where they might have it together better than Best Buy USA where you are not likely to get a Best Buy Experience) on “Creative Industry” where he described the difficulty of jump-starting an innovation initiative in an organization which has not been innovative in a (very) long time.

In the article, he detailed and exemplified an eight step process which is a good starting point for anyone trying to get in an innovative mindset.

  1. Lose the Fear
    Of being judged. Of disappointing others with your idea. Of just plain doing something different. Jamie says to be childlike in your approach and embrace the initiative with excitement. And if that don’t work, and it’s not against your religion, start with martini hour. Inhibitions are bad for innovation.
  2. No Idea is a Bad Idea
    It might not be the right idea for the organization, but it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad. In different circumstances, it could be a great idea. All ideas should be captured, and explored, at the right time, in a search for a better idea.
  3. Understand the problem.
    What is the issue? What is the objective? It’s the measurement stick for any idea you come up with.
  4. Diversity is King
    Have both experts and novices in the room. Make sure the novices are not afraid to ask “why can’t we do this”. Sometimes opposition is just knee-jerk. When there is no rebuttal to the question, you’re on the right track.
  5. Get Visual
    Draw. Illustrate. Sculpt clay if you have to. Make a prototype out of cardboard and play-doh. Whatever gets people thinking differently enough to actually innovate.
  6. Safe Environment
    Everyone is equal. No idea is bad. Freedom to speak up and speak out during the brainstorming process. Keep it out of management offices where positions of authority are implicitly conveyed.
  7. Subdue the subconscious
    It has default knee-jerk reactions to everything and default knee-jerk visualizations for every concept and pre-assigned meanings to every word. This gets us through the day, but is not always good where innovation is concerned. (Of course, if you start with martini hour, this may not be much of a problem. 😉 )
  8. Be Committed.
    Almost to the point where a conservative middle manager (who doesn’t understand the importance of relentless innovation) wants to have you committed. It takes a lot of effort to get an innovation project rolling, and even more to keep it rolling until the first positive, revenue-producing, output is produced.

This is a really great starter list and Jamie’s article on “Creative Industry” is really good. Take 5 minutes and read it end-to-end. It’s worth your time.