Andrew Lark

Thinking of Christchurch

It’s difficult to watch any tragedy unfold – it’s even more difficult when it is happening at home. Thankfully all our friends, family and colleagues in Christchurch, NZ are well. But many others aren’t.

Thanks to all of you that have send kind words and thought of us. While every New Zealander has been impacted in some way, there are many hurting at home. Here are a few of the places you can make donations:

• Christchurch Earthquake Appeal
• Fundraiseonline
• Red Cross

If you have ideas and thoughts on what we could be doing, let us know. At Dell we are reaching out to the local community and offering all the assistance we can. We have today supplied gratis Dell Latitude laptops to the Salvation Army, and St John (both are Dell customers) who are doing emergency work in Christchurch. Thanks to all their people for the incredible work they are doing.

We are also responding to other requests for replacement systems by Government and Enterprises. If you need help, please let us know.

Hugh’s Got A New Book…

‘Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination‘

You can read an excerpt on Tim’s blog… if the book is up to the standard of his last, it will be worth every cent…

Why Marketing Fails

I’m liking what Aakers has to say more and more… he is right on:

The astonishing fact is that most marketing results in no change in sales or profit if you disregard short-term blips. Nearly all marketing budgets are designed to affect brand preference in established categories and subcategories with established competitors. The great majority of these, on average, have no long term sales impact….

…. The implication is that firms should spend less, probably far less, on brand preference competition and more, probably far more, on brand relevance competition, winning by creating new categories or subcategories. That means that more investment is needed on big innovation i.e. those that are substantial or transformational, and less on little or incremental innovation.

Five Ways New Facebook Pages Can Benefit your business

Well worth a read. I’d also add community creation. Facebook gives you the benefit of being able to fragment and build your communities at zero cost.

10 Ways to Unleash the Best….

From the MIX this week: 10 Ways to Unleash the Best and Ignite Passion in Your People.

1. How to Start a Movement in Your Company (3 parts), Story by David Choe
2. Start with a better question to create a better talent management system: the Talent Management Cloud, Hack by Lisa Haneberg
3. A Company Run by Self-Managed Teams, Story by Alyson Huntington-Jones
4. “Soft” R&D: You don’t have to be a geeky engineer to experience the thrill of inventing, Story by Erika Ilves
5. Atlassian’s Big Experiment with Performance Reviews, Story by Joris Luijke
6. A True Learning company—free of management, Story by Andres Roberts
7. The Tube: IDEO Builds a Collaboration System that Inspires Through Passion, Story by Doug Solomon
8. Bonus Fund: Empower Employees to fund initiatives with company-matched bonus money, Hack by Kartik Subbarao
9. Commando Mentoring, Hack by Steve Todd
10. Restoring Faith in the Institution: How Mission Shaped Communities Revitalized St. Andrews, Story by Drew Williams

I really liked the case study from Atlassian on reshaping the performance review. This struck home with me: “every month, one of these meetings is dedicated to a discussion on how the person can enhance their own performance and play to their strengths”. And, I really like this:

Two Axis
In addition to an evaluation of performance/achievements, we've added the scale on 'how often you have stretched yourself'. Put simply, the reason for using both scales is to acknowledge both effort and results. Two people can both deliver similar results, yet one of them has been slacking whilst the other person has really injected extra energy in improving things outside their normal work responsibilities (e.g. themselves, their team, etc) which has made a real difference to Atlassian. Feedback from Atlassian managers was that they wanted to acknowledge this. - - Image here

Go China

Interesting snippet from Nielsen … with over 420 million online users and counting, it's not surprising that China can claim the title of world's largest Internet community…

• More than half of Chinese Internet users regularly blog and use social media
• The average user now spends nearly 20 hours per week online
• Significant growth opportunities exist in the business transaction space

Great Idea. Not so clever Marketing.

I really like the idea of readability. Remove all the clutter. Save stuff you want to read in a clean, easy to read format… read on any device… Trouble is I already have one App for that and no way of testing Readability without paying the monthly fee.

Here is what I’d suggest they do:

• Intro a 30 day trial
• Charge for Apps but not the browser plug-in
• Remove the monthly charge – this is a perceptual leap for many folks like me. Sure, it’s only five bucks, but monthly? Give folks a three month option. Or let them buy a year packaged with a discount.
• Not sure I get the writer/publisher benefit angle. Sounds nice but hardly seems like a cause to support?

Selling on the web is all about pricing dynamics. Readability looks great and will do well with some.