Innovate points the way to the future

Delegates at last month’s Innovate event learned businesses that innovate have a much greater chance of thriving, especially when the economy tanks like it did in the past four years

Auckland once again hosted the New Zealand leg of Fuji Xerox’s Innovate conference last month. Neil Whittaker, managing director of Fuji Xerox New Zealand, welcomed the visitors and partners to the day. He said, “This is obviously around innovation. Without innovation, your business doesn’t have a future. You have keep re-inventing yourself and your business.

“In New Zealand, we have a close community and we can build off each others’ ideas and we are not too precious about that. We like to share. With that in mind, we take great delight in welcoming everyone to this year’s Innovate event.”

No secret for success
Keynote Nigel Latta, psychologist, author and host of television shows such as Beyond the Darklands, delivered a snappy presentation titled The Psychology of Success.

He says, “You see topics like this and you must cringe. The self-help industry has made a fortune from selling success. An Wang, founder of Wang Computers, said: ‘Success is more a function of consistent common sense that of genius.’ Often what we are after is the one big secret and that’s why the self-help industry is so successful. People love that kind of stuff but it’s not necessarily true.”

Optimism is the engine of capitalism but that optimism can drive you over a cliff. While you need optimism, it gives you the illusion that you can control things. You are far more likely to improve your chances of doing well by taking the outside view because the world has a random and unpredictable face. The simplest thing you can do is have a pre-mortem. Rather than sit around after a catastrophe doing a post-mortem, try pretending that you are sitting around in a year’s time trying to figure out how things went wrong.

So, part of being successful is making good decisions; the other part is being good at something. There is a difference between automatic skills and deliberate practice. To become good at something you have to invest 10,000 hours practice at it, notable examples being Bill Gates, the Beatles and Mozart. What most people do is that they do something until they get okay at it, then they stop practicing. There is more than that. People can put 10,000 hours into it and they are still not any good at it. It’s what you do during the 10,000 hours that that makes you good.

“People who persevere also do better. The SAS is a classic example of that. The SAS run their trainees ragged until they are knackered. The trainers say that inside everyone is a little man who will either say, ‘Keep going’ or ‘Give up.’ They select the soldiers whose little man says, Keep going.’ Now you don’t have to be superhuman to succeed but you need to not give up. Generally, the people who achieve outstanding success learn to put up with discomfort and put aside difficulties and they don’t give up.”

“Lastly, make people’s lives better. When you brain scan people doing good things for others, the happy centres of their brains get a much bigger buzz than for any other stuff. There is a lot of research to show that people are more productive when they do that.” themselves.”

Stay relevant to thrive
Michael McQeen’s background for the last 18 months has involved looking what is changing in society. He brought that to Innovate.

He says, “Why is that some of the world’s most successful brands are now dropping like flies. What can we learn from focusing on those brands?

“From a print industry perspective, how can you be sure you won’t join those brands? If you look at every brand business or industry over time, it follows a pattern: the relevance curve. In the early stages your relevance is pretty low. You’re still trying to figure out who you are and who your target market is.

“As time goes on you become more relevant and you reach the tipping point and momentum kicks in and you become very relevant. At this point, on the outside things are fine. Sales are still good. You are winning awards, on the money and people are ripping off your ideas. But this is the single most dangerous time.

“Now, there is a huge temptation to throttle back at this point. But at this point, if you don’t take deliberate steps, you will pass a second trigger called the second turning point. You will know when you have passed that because you will notice your momentum has slowed. Typically, you then reach a crisis point. At first, you have a bad month, a year, a decade and new players come. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste because a crisis is a gift. When you have a crisis, if you the right things you can turn things around. But if you do nothing you slide past the tanking point and you will become obsolete. This cycle doesn’t just apply to businesses or products. Every empire has followed this cycle.

“Now, where are you on this curve? Shift is happening. The world is changing and evolving and we have to keep up with that. What worked last week isn’t working today. We see business and revenue models falling apart.

McQueen advocates deliberate action to stop businesses from becoming irrelevant; this involves re-engineering.

He suggests four steps:
Deconstruct your processes
Evaluate the steps and ask, ‘Is this the smartest way to do this?’
Innovate, ask, ‘How can we do this differently?’
Put it all back together again

What I find with most of my clients is the hardest part of what they do is to innovate. Thinking of new ways of doing things, which leads us into the next step after re-engineering: reframing.

To reframe, the most valuable asset you have is the set of freshest eye. People with fresh eyes have no trouble thinking outside the box because they have no idea of what the box looks like. Encourage those people to ask why? The other challenge, of course, is to ask, ‘When was the last time you looked at your own business with fresh eyes?’’

The third thing to do is to reposition, change with the marketplace as times evolve. One thing you cannot afford to do is to ignore generation Y, that part of the population aged from about 13 to 31. In New Zealand, generation Y represents half of the population’s purchasing power. Don’t gear your business around baby boomers.

Change is happening. You can’t ignore it and you can’t fight change but you can adapt. In yachting, the only way to sail into a head wind is to tack; it’s the same in business.

Put it all back together again
What I find with most of my clients is the hardest part of what they do is to innovate. Thinking of new ways of doing things, which leads us into the next step after re-engineering: reframing.

To reframe, the most valuable asset you have is the set of freshest eye. People with fresh eyes have no trouble thinking outside the box because they have no idea of what the box looks like. Encourage those people to ask why? The other challenge, of course, is to ask, ‘When was the last time you looked at your own business with fresh eyes?’”

The third thing to do is to reposition, change with the marketplace as times evolve. Change is happening. You can’t ignore it and you can’t fight change but you can adapt. In yachting, the only way to sail into a head wind is to tack; it’s the same in business.

Know your customer
With key skills in business development, marketing, large scale project management and market research, Chris Martin has some insights to share for print marketing.

He says, “Projections are that online ad spend will grow to half of global ad spend and right now, 25 per cent of global ad spend is print. In Europe, we are expecting mobile access to exceed desktop access. Mobile access is being adopted at three times the pace social networking and about 200milion web pages are translated each day on the cloud.

“Nothing much is holding this back. The structure that has existed for a number of years is changed and our customers are using vdp, purls and social media to sell to their customers. So we need to embrace marketing and technology.

“However, if you are going to move into the marketing space, you have to plan what you are going to do. Get your marketing planning right first. You need a marketing plan and that isn’t cold calling, telemarketing, emails; it is more than that. You need to encompass everything you do to attract clients and to keep them coming back. Understand the problems your customers are dealing with and help them find solutions to those problems

“The important part is to understand our customers’ business. Also, we need to understand that print is just a consequence of what we do; it is not a driving factor. In the last three years, we have lost 20 per cent of the print businesses in the UK.

It’s hard graft
In his day job, Neil Falconer supports printers in the transition to the digital world and into cross media services by making them more competitive in an online world.

He says, “What does it mean to be a printer? Historically, this baggage of being a printer, and printing things, is really holding us back in terms of developing our businesses. Everything is getting re-imagined and re-invented. For instance, twitter gives us instantaneous updates on news.

“So the world is constantly changing but this isn’t so much about the technology, it’s about how we can re-imagine how we can present things and how we can use data.

“What if this is good as it gets for print? We have had a good run, a few hundred years. We are seeing this dynamic change so what does this mean for your business. It is getting tougher and tougher each year. This is really our wake up call for us to re-imagine and re-focus our businesses because broadly, revenues are down 20 per cent and profitability is down 70 per cent.

“There is so much opportunity in reducing costs to be the best you can be. How do you do that? In the UK, the print companies that are thriving are running ruthlessly efficient businesses. Their investment is more about marketing than about print technology. It’s not the technology, it’s more a case of what you are going to do with your technology. The technology is more around business processes and marketing than it is about output devices. The customer is at the centre of everything they do.

When is the right time to transform your business? About 60 per cent of the market don’t think they can do that. Less than 12 per cent of the market has already made the transition. So if you are prepared to do the hard work and change, then you are ahead of 60 per cent of the market

What are you doing now to build the future value and profitability of your business? It is hard graft, not easily won. For instance you need your sales people to give proof about what service you can provide. For example, ‘We achieve a response rate of; we reduce cost by; I can guarantee that’ and so on.

It’s about planes and destinations. When you go to a travel agent, what do want to hear? Do you want the agent to talk about what a great plane you will be travelling on? About how the food service is much quicker? About how the plane flies faster? No, you want to know about where you are going: the beach and the hotel. It’s the same with your print customers. They only want to hear about the product and the price. They don’t care what technology you are using.

Revisit your business plans and look at all the opportunities to focus on all the incremental elements because in the end, they do add up.”

Sell print effectively
A gamekeeper turned poacher, Mathhew Parker, after buying print for over 20 years, now runs his own company and teaches printers about the print procurement.

He says, “Many print companies are frustrated that their prospects and customers do not engage with them effectively. I know what it is like to be on the other side of the game, as a print buyer. What I see is that most sales approaches I get from printers are identical. Their only difference is what price they are charging.

“It’s vital that as a print company, you make your offering specific and valuable and proprietary. As a print buyer, I am going to find these things more interesting and valuable than just the best price. When the seller starts selling opn price, there isn’t a lot else you can look at for differentiation and it’s likely the job will go to the lowest bid. That’s not the smartest or most effective way to do business or to negotiate.

If you are having trouble with creating a productive relationship with your clients then there are steps you can take. You don’t want to be missing out on extra jobs from existing clients either.

In my experience, there few companies in the print industry that use the customer service role to its full potential. There are certain expectations you should have of your sales staff. They should know what the client expects from them and the client’s should know what your sales staff expect as well. Those expectations need to be managed as well so you need to develop tools to do that.

Communication is vital and it’s important for sales people to understand the different ways of communicating. They should know when to be proactive with clients and how to structure discussions. They should always be working to retain clients and that means understanding customer issues so that they can avoid disputes.

“So I encourage print companies to invest time in looking at their sales process and challenge it where it isn’t working. Sales staff need to follow best practice and they need to know how to manage customers and deliver effective presentations.”

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