I’ve recently answered a question on what brings a product to life.

I disagreed with some people who thought that the answer was when the “money owing for the product clears in the bank account and exceeds the
liabilities that were created in the process of production”

I thought these answers were too simplistic and actually don’t describe “coming to life”. It could mean that a £1 profit meant the product had come to life and for me that’s not a good description. What I think describes a product coming to life is when it starts to “excite” the producers and purchasers. It’s only through an emotional state can a product actually have an “exciting life”.

Let me give you some examples.

a) In her recent Royal engagements The Duchess of Cambridge has worn coats from last years fashions and the shops have been inundated by people wanting to buy the same coats and shoes and have gone into new production to fulfil demand.

b) Apple creates a loyalty for its products and makes visiting the store exciting, energetic

c) Abercrombie and Fitch have an opposite product to the rest of the high street. The stores are dark, you can’t see the product clearly, it’s unbelievably expensive (in UK if not in USA) and yet kids crowd in, desperate to have a photo taken with half naked models where their muscles are highlighted by clever downward lighting and spray tanning to accentuate the bumps. The products are bought because it’s “Cool fashion”. It’s an exciting product.

The other thing about the examples above is that the product isn’t just what’s bought!
It’s the experience, the emotion of ownership and belonging to a group of other owners.

Products that don’t build this into the product mix may have a “Birth” but they’re likely to have a short life 

You would think that the topics of talent shortage and managing employees productivity were two business issues. I’ve had a few conversations with senior Directors bemoaning the shortage of talent, particularly in IT, banking and technology and both have been linked to how to manage employee productivity.

The Talent Crunch
Most people would think that with the financial crisis that finding good talent would be easy, but in fact this isn’t the case for many specialist areas. Indeed the Manpower Group report that a third of companies report difficulties in finding good talent. There is a talent crunch in India, where it’s reported that sixty seven percent of companies are unable to find the people they need. In Brazil the figure is thirty four percent and the shortage is pushing up wages and inflation.

The skills shortages in these countries is likely to have an affect on our own talent pool and attract our own talent towards high salaries and a better style of living than can be gained within Europe or the USA. This will be true even of bankers who see career progression in terms of London and New York.

Managing Employee productivity
If most businesses can’t find all the talent that it requires, or afford it when it can, then it needs to invest some time and money to improve the productivity of its existing talent. That’s the reason that people have been asking me how to measure, manage and improve their people’s performance and productivity.

It’s been interesting that in the mind of the Directors I’ve spoken to that they seem to have a vision of a “One size fits all” solution. The problem is that there isn’t a one size fits all nor is there an immediate solution to making internal talent more productive. Different strategies need to be employed for salespeople as opposed to IT,  Senior staff as opposed to Non-Executive Directors and so on. In the long-run, however, it might be the only viable and affordable solution. 

After only five months of regularly using video on my blog over 2000 views. The most popular have been those on asking and answering interview questions for sales jobs. Perhaps in the current financial climate that’s not surprising but it has encouraged me to upload more videos on recruiting and managing sales teams.

Most viewers come from The UK, USA, Canada, Kuwait, Australia and I hope that everyone will continue to find them useful.

This is an answer I made to a question on Linkedin today about the failure of leaders to sack under- performing people. I thought it worthwhile also posting my answer onto my blog so that more of my network could read it.

I believer that business is going through a revolution.

In past credit squeezes firms and Governments would shed talent to reduce costs (the UK Government is about to do this again by reducing civil service personnel by up to 25%). The result was that essential knowledge and skills were lost and recovery took longer as a result.
So, this time round, firms have attempted to retain their talent, even those less productive, as leaders hope for a quick upturn. The problem is that the upturn is slow in the west.

Further problems are that with coming food inflation and possible grain shortages, extended insecurity as the credit crunch continues and Government policy that increases tax whilst reduces spending businesses are now being forced to start to look to their staff costs. This means that some of the “good” people will be shed as well as the “bad” and that the trend is to hire part-time employees.

I suspect that the result is that the “business revolution” will generate a significant percentage of the working population having a number of part-time jobs as opposed to a single full time position. (including professional firms such as lawyers, accountants and financiers)

There is security in this position for employees who may be “shed or fired” in that income is not reliant on one employer and totally and immediately lost on redundancy whilst the employer has a capability of expanding and contracting a workforce more easily.

So, in my opinion, it’s not “under-performers being hired or fired” it’s that we may be witnessing a change in the way employment may work in the future.

A friend of mine that I’ve been working with has received three job offers in the past two weeks. One of these he was told was through networking and only 8 people were approached.

He’s encouraged me to post the advice. So whilst I am definitely NOT a head-hunter or run a search firm here goes.

Most job roles are now only advertised on-line and the role of newspapers in attracting job applicants has almost disappeared, along with the advertising revenue that such adverts produced. However, most job roles  use personal networks and aren’t even advertised.

Indeed it’s said that 60% of roles are filled through networking. At one time this meant using ‘the old boy network’ or ‘the golf-club’. Nowadays, however, this is mostly via networking sites such as linkedin.com where professional recruiters source possible candidates and reference them before any formal approach is ever made. The advantage to the employer is that it avoids receiving thousands of applications through the post.

So how do you position yourself to be identified as someone to be “networked for the job” on sites such as linkedIn and Facebook?

Here are my top ten tips to being networked for a job through Social Media:

1. Have a large network. Most people on social networking sites have less than 300 people in their network. When looking to be sourced for a job your network needs to be as large as possible. This also means researching the membership each network will give you. For instance Linkedin will connect you with individual professionals mainly based in UK and USA. Twitter gives you the opportunity to connect with businesses as well as individuals.
2. Have a good mix of people in your network. Link with friends but also link competitors, people in other industries and professions, head-hunters and those in search companies. If you’ve not got a Twitter account then consider doing so. This will allow you to connect with search companies as well as individuals.
3. Communicate with your network. Having a large network gives you no visibility if you aren’t contacting them on a regular basis. Send personal messages and responding to questions and contact a few people each day that you haven’t connected with for some time.
4. Link your Twitter account to your other Social media accounts. This allows your tweets and updates to be read by your entire network
5. Become an expert. Answer questions on Linkedn to be seen as an expert. As a result of answering questions on Linkedin and having 14 best answers logged I’ve received emails and connections from USA, Canada, Middle East and Malaysia.
6. Post slide-shows on Slideshare. This is essentially a PowerPoint slideshow. This also promotes your expertise and link these to your linkedin profile. Linkedin allows you up to three slideshows.
7. Have a facebook profile.Though be careful about your on-line reputation. Lots of people are making a lot of money on Facebook. Those that have used it to promote their drunken parties have often come to regret their posts.
8. Don’t over-promote your products and services. Remember that social media is like “going to a party”. You wouldn’t make many friends at a party if all you did was to talk about work. Create a personality. You also don’t want to be Blocked for spamming!
9. Have a YouTube film about you and your products and services. Place it on your website as well as other Social Media sites.
10. When posting be complimentary about people. Avoid criticism and  try to sound motivated and upbeat. No-one wants to offer a job to “Mr Grumpy”. However also consider that you are wanting to share expertise so be as generous as possible with the advice you offer others.

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A couple of days ago I was talking to a friend of mine, Chrissie Lightfoot, who has written a great blog titled The end of Lawyers on the changes to how the legal profession will be changing. The article is very revealing and Chrissie has made some excellent observations.

Her blog has caused some discussion with  friends who use the internet for business. It’s been agreed that now we can offer experts in India, China, Thailand and all over the world work that would normally be done very expensively such as marketing, research, print design, professional advice and even pay someone to write our blogs,  monitor the results and only pay for what we have had satisfactorily delivered at a fraction of the price. Why would we want to hire expensive people or firms locally?

The result must be that professional firms in Europe and the USA must consider that to survive they must identify Micro-niche products that can’t be easily replicated.

A couple of days ago I was talking to a friend of mine, Chrissie Lightfoot, who has written a great blog titled The end of Lawyers on the changes to how the legal profession will be changing. The article is very revealing and Chrissie has made some excellent observations.

Her blog has caused some discussion with  friends who use the internet for business. It’s been agreed that now we can offer experts in India, China, Thailand and all over the world work that would normally be done very expensively such as marketing, research, print design, professional advice and even pay someone to write our blogs,  monitor the results and only pay for what we have had satisfactorily delivered at a fraction of the price. Why would we want to hire expensive people of firms?

The result must be that professional firms in Europe and the USA must consider that to survive they must identify Micro-niche products that can’t be easily replicated.

The potential of three million being made unemployed in the USA if General Motors, Ford and Chrysler fail to gain financial backing from Congress coupled with Woolworth’s collapse and general downturn is the world heading for a “Depression” in 2009?

This morning a number of people have contacted me over the headline that the Chamber of Commerce has predicted a rise in unemployment in the UK to three million whilst at the same time blaming the UK and US Governments as well as the banks for the situation.

It seems that people are now beginning to become angry at what is happening.

People are failing to understand how the UK Government is reducing benefits, cutting grants to students, unable to force banks to maintain loans whilst continuing to pay bankers their bonuses.

The tone of the telephone calls seems to be:

a) That as people feel they are having to pay (physically and through redundancy) for an unjust system of rewards to those that caused the current situation the more likely we are to have social unrest.

b) That people’s demands for protectionist policies such as reducing immigration will begin to increase in volume.

c) That if the tax cuts that are promised don’t satisfy the public expectation then there will be even more anger.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been speaking to some senior bankers about the financial crisis that’s gripping us all. One thing that seems obvious is that the one sector that is likely to make a lot of money over the next few years will be the corporate lawyers.

My reasoning is that the banks are beginning to argue over themselves over who was to blame for selling AAA assets to financial institutions that weeks later were assessed as being worthless. Who was to blame, the banks, the buyers or the rating agencies?

Then there are the law enforcement agencies such as the FBI investigating some of the “deals” and “Sell-offs” to see is some acted fraudulently.

What is interesting is that whilst the US authorities are taking action the UK Government is not instigating any criminal investigations. Perhaps the UK Government is too afraid of what they might find or perhaps they intend to let the US authorities extradite hundreds of our top bankers to face the courts and imprisonment. (Someone asked me last week if they would have a prison big enough).

In any event most corporate lawyers must be thinking that all the Christmases until 2020 are about to come early.