Another marketing strategy review to look forward to
Closing out 2015, I look back at the year’s most viewed posts as a chance to reflect on blog topics, from project management, marketing, and mergers and acquisitions failure, here is what people viewed.
In descending order:
10. Change management bottom up or top —
The more you look at an organization, the more you identify where the work gets done. An executive team can not command change from the top without awareness of actual change people care about:
- their job,
- their compensation,
- their role,
- their skill, and
- their motivation,
Stock options, bonus packages, and executive parking privilege do not resonate with the majority, let’s start with culture, forget leadership. Leadership doesn’t drive change, change relies on culture and in the case of culture, leadership is along for the ride and rarely in the driver seat for how change travels.
9. Competing values drive your organization out of business —
Another post in the top 10 viewed that involves culture and business. This post, as well, advocates understanding the organization makeup of the competing values of where you are and understand the values required for where you need to get to.
As a planning tool, for use from enterprise through team planning, the Competing Values Framework and Organizational Cultural Assessment Instrument in this post provide a great view of the frames that compete for resources and disrupt change.
8. The cost of culture, a 50% turnover of the Fortune 500 —
Slow and steady wins the race. This was a fine rubric for a time and in a market place. Now rapid test, rapid iteration, and most important, rapid failure, keys business relevance. Today the organization that is incapable is inflexible.
What does this have to do with the Fortune 500? Rapid failure is a blessing when coupled with rapid learning. Since the 1980s technology and digital disruption provides rapid ascension for nimble start-ups and new companies over entrenched and entombed.
7. Scope or: how to manage projects for organization success, part 1 —
Where competing values, as seen above, create unique views of organization strategy, project scope needs careful vetting, articulation, documentation, socialization, and emergent reviews to create a very variable sense of what needs to get created or what needs to get improved.
Projects that launch without constant, customer feedback to prove value delivered and benefit gained have a walking dead model to deliver some day, some thing, to some one … perhaps.
This post embraces more of the classic, waterfall-defined scope approach. An Agile model may leave this view of scope a bit … blasphemous? … naive?
In the old model media companies controlled access to space, or real estate space as access, to customers. Marketing was a real estate invest to gain access and vie for attention.
The marketing budget was accountable to both craft the message and rent real estate. The target market segment was the heart of the business strategy and that led the marketing planning strategy. When you change strategy you need to look at every role, responsibility, process involved with customer experience.
New roles require compensation model reviews and new ways to measure accountability. The entire system gets affected, and that takes a reengineering view to account for the scope of change.
Next: Top 10 blog posts for 2015, 5 to 1
Compare to: Top 10 blog posts for 2014, 10 to 6
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