Clive Simpkins

‘Re-evolutionising’ your business

I mulled a potential topic for this article on a flight from Jo’burg to Cape Town. No inspiration. In Cape Town I addressed a group of pharmacists – both ‘chain’ and private – who are all affected by mad Manto’s legislation. That got me thinking about the insurance brokerage business. Which is also under siege from a number of quarters and which will also require what I call a ‘re-evolution’. Both the revolution part and the re-evolving part.

Here are some thoughts: The more highly ‘specialised’ you are, the greater the hazards for you when macro, micro or market ‘environmental’ conditions change. You can easily join the ‘endangered species’ list if you’re not proactive. When there’s a ‘seismic shift’ in conditions, we need to move into creative solutions focussed mode. If we bury our heads in the sand and hope the situation will ‘go away’, diminished options will be available when we do finally decide to act.

Proactivity, optimism, entrepreneurism and a ‘never-say-die’ spirit of resilience is needed to cope with rapid change – particularly as we grow older. On my business stationery I use the Cantonese symbol for ‘Change’ or ‘Crisis’. Like many Chinese pictograms, it encompasses two meanings. Look at the symbol. The top part on its own, means danger. The lower part on its own, means hidden opportunity. So change or crisis embodies two elements: either we can focus on the danger and what may go wrong or we can direct our energies into the hidden opportunity.

Marketing as we know it effectively started with Harvard Business School Professor Theodore (Ted) Levitt’s iconoclastic thesis, ‘Marketing Myopia’. You’ll recall that he wrote of the folk who used to manufacture leather whips to motivate the horses that pulled buggies – the favoured means of transport at that point, in the absence of cars. They made a good living. But what they didn’t do was pay attention to steam engines, the locomotive and cars and the threat they posed to a low-tech industry like leather whip manufacture. Levitt cautioned against ‘myopia’ or short-sightedness. We can’t wait for an industry to turn. We have to think proactively, ‘What would I do if….xyz changed or happened.’

There’s a new term in marketing usage at the moment. It refers to the individual who turns an industry sector on its head as a ‘Disruptive Innovator’. In the medical field in South Africa, Dr. Jackie Shevel of Netcare fame (or notoriety, depending on your viewpoint!) and Adrian Gore of Discovery Health – ditto comment. These are people, who, love ’em or hate ’em, turned existing but moribund industries into brand new incarnations and money-making machines.

The endangered business model
Years ago I was a GM at the renowned John Orr’s department store on Eloff Street, in Jo’burg. The family owners refused to acknowledge the emerging demand for ‘boutique’ speciality stores and hung on to the bitter end with an outdated business model. They wouldn’t hear or respond to market forces. Those magnificent stores are no more. Beware! Y

You need to know what the market wants to find in your brokerage – whether you’re a really big player in the sector – or the one-person operation. There are good opportunities for both large and small in the brokerage business in South Africa. But only if your business model, market segmentation and service mix is fluid, responsive, innovative and ‘alive’ to market needs, expectations and demands. The service differentiator Clients (of the discerning kind) will be prepared to pay a price premium for quality advice, care and service. Personalisation is the professional differentiator in our sometimes cold, de-personalised and hi-tech business world. Capitalise on it.

So what practical things can you do?
1) Maintain the personal, warm touch. Don’t allow impersonal service to creep in.
2) Organise and become part of, a ‘Master-Mind’ brain-storming, networking and market intelligence group in a spirit of ‘co-opetition’.
3) Other brokers and broker groups are not necessarily your enemies. They’re your opportunity for differentiation and maybe even collaboration!
4) Think of the food pyramid. You need lots of the ‘essentials’ and less of the ‘nice but unnecessary’. Now do something similar when planning your service-offering mix!
5) If your core competency doesn’t include marketing, PR or other essential business survival skills, then get help! Stick to your knitting if you choose, but ensure that your business delivers what the market wants.
6) Are you targeting both existing and emerging market segments with your offering? Revisit who you think your target audience is and work at understanding them.
7) Understand generational theory. Go read ‘Getting them to give a Damn’ by Eric Chester. If you’re not factoring young people into your business equation, you’re inviting trouble.
8) All business models that aren’t renewing adapting and evolving are headed for extinction. Remember Dinosaurs and the Dodo!
9) You can’t shrink or ‘save’ your way out of a cash crunch. ‘Sell’ your way out of it. Whether small or large – think service offering and value-adding diversification!
10) Being ‘Knowledge-Partners’ with other industry players can provide useful ‘clout’ and synergies.
11) Ask for feedback - from all stakeholders.
12) Read voraciously – outside of your discipline – to keep in touch with where the world’s going. Otherwise you’ll be left behind. Finally – remember this quotation: ‘My interest lies in the future because that’s where I’m going to spend the rest of my life.’ John F. Kettering – American inventor and engineer.

http://www.imbizo.com

Technorati Tags: Specialization Insurance+Brokers macro+environment micro+environment Seismic+shift Proactivity Entrepreneurism Cantonese+pictogram Crisis Change Theodore+Levitt Marketing+Myopia Disruptive+Innovator Personalization Co+opetition

UPS in South Africa a crap experience

I’ve been driven demented over the years by shoddy-to-shocking service from courier companies. That’s about the breadth of the continuum. Narrow and consistently dreadful. From the Post Office’s Speed Services, to DHL to Sun Couriers, on and on. So yesterday, being midway through reading the almost hagiographic book ‘The World is Flat’, by Thomas L. Friedman, featuring UPS big-time, I thought I’d give ’em a try on a tiny but urgent delivery to Melbourne in Oz. Dear God, what a disaster!

 

I’m not going to bore you with the ludicrous chain of incompetence and lies – yes, twice on the same issue from two different people! But I have it all chronologically logged, with names.

As you know, escalating anything that’s routed through a call-centre these days is well nigh impossible. But I did get to a supervisor at 16:30 who swore she’d sort it and get back to me. Still waiting for your call, ma’am!

This morning I thought what the hell. Surely if UPS is this global phenomenon in terms of the size of its ‘airforce’ and logistics/supply chain hubs, they’ll be interested to hear how truly crappy the local UPS SCS operation is in South Africa.

Clearly though, UPS believe their own PR and what Thomas Friedman’s been writing about them. Because there is no mechanism on their (very extensive) website via which you can lodge a complaint. There are many other websites bitching mightily about the perceived arrogance and alleged ‘don’t give a darn’ attitude of UPS around the world, but nuthin’ that I can track to UPS itself.

The cherry on the top was the driver who finally did pitch at 17:15 and attempted to gippo the collection time on the waybill to 16:30 until I forced him to put the carbonised copies together, scratch out the lie and re-write the correct time. I asked for a spare waybill and he tore one off, leaving a sizable chunk of the bottom right corner missing. So the shoddy service goes right through to the smallest detail in Johannesburg it  would seem. Not a good experience. I wonder if UPS senior management know what doing business with their outlet in South Africa is like?

http://www.imbizo.com

When does an ‘internal’ Investec issue stop being a ‘private matter’?

I’ve been intrigued by Investec (feisty, in your face and usually media savvy) floundering whilst trying to damage-control allegations by the disaffected young Bonga Bangani, of racially biased favouritism. Among many media reports, you’ll find online detail of the story at http://www.fin24.co.za/articles/default/display_article.aspx?Nav=ns&ArticleID=1518-24_2084068 It’s a short and worthwhile read and a lesson in ineptitude.

This brief posting is not about the merits or otherwise of whether Investec does indeed favour white male Italians with laptops, flat screen computers and overseas trips. It’s about the startling comment by Stephen Koseff, the Investec CEO. He said in response to certain media enquiries, ‘It’s an internal Investec matter.’

Synchronicity being what it is, I reluctantly took myself off at the weekend to see what turned out to be a stellar performance by Helen Mirren in ‘The Queen’. Not being big on fiction I didn’t want to waste time on the movie. As it turns out, it’s more ‘faction’ than fiction and holds some seriously powerful lessons for CEOs and others who misjudge sentiment among ‘their people’. It should be made compulsory board-room viewing. Not only are there some deliciously funny moments, but it’s a valuable education for institutions that fail to keep pace with the inexorable march of progress and social dynamics.

In the movie, the Queen (Helen Mirren) infamously says, ‘Diana was no longer an HRH, therefore her death is a private matter’. As the royal Ma’am (to rhyme with ham and not farm! – a line in the movie) learned to her cost, what is in the public interest, given the role of tabloids, the Internet and Citizen Media, is never any longer a ‘private’ or ‘internal’ matter. If it affects stakeholders (as does the Investec issue) it becomes a very public matter.

I suspect that PR practitioners are not evolving rapidly enough in their strategic thinking. What was once a relatively controllable environment now exemplifies the adage, ‘herding cats.’ The sooner they get to grips with the concept, the better they will serve their clients’ needs.

http://www.imbizo.com

Is there any morality left in the ANC?

There are times that I'm really embarrassed to be a South African. Our deafening silence and inaction on Zimbabwe is one of them. This latest development in the ANC is another.

Foreign Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma unilaterally and unconstitutionally protected the now-convicted sex pest and former SA Ambassador to Indonesia, Norman Mashabane. He was then slipped into the employ of the self-aggrandising Premier Sello Moloto of Limpopo province as a 'political advisor'.

Jeez, didn't know Limpopo was that tough to govern. Its Premier wastes huge sums of money on advertising its 'new', yet curiously mundane corporate visual identity in newspapers, whilst unemployed and homeless people starve within eyesight of the Limpopo legislature buildings. But that simply demonstrates that Moloto and his cronies are doing a truly crap job. So why bring in a convicted woman-abuser who clearly needs help himself, to give 'help'?

When the media blew the whistle on Mashabane's far northern reincarnation, he stepped down from the post. Yet now we find him appointed to the Limpopo legislature instead. My take: He must have something on a lot of people within the ANC to continue being protected like this. He and the ANC are a total disgrace on the moral front. What kind of signal does this send to the youth of this country one wonders? Steal, touch up women, engage in fraud, lie, take kickbacks, do what you will in fact, but as long as you demonstrate loyalty to the ruling party, you'll be taken good care of.

This is not a sustainable script...now where did I put that ANC membership application form?

http://www.imbizo.com

The crime mind-set and change

http://www.news24.com/News24/AnanziArticle/0,,2-7-1442_2080116,00.html
This is the URL for an article on Media24.com quoting psychology Professor Dap Louw from the University of the Free State in South Africa. Here's the beginning of what he said..... then go read the rest. It's appeared in most of today's Sunday media. It makes a great deal of sense...
 
"South Africa should not see itself as the 'criminal skunk' of the world because many other countries in transition had the same high crime prevalence.

"Dap Louw, a psychology professor at the University of the Free State, said South Africans should also not develop a 'learned helplessness syndrome' - characterised by powerlessness and incapability in the fight against crime.

Louw, also a renowned criminologist, said during a symposium in Bloemfontein on violent crimes: "A positive national self-image should be promoted to combat the cynicism, distrust and depression that disempower South Africans to actively take part in the fight against crime. We can do something about it instead of just talking about it around braais."

Louw said the crime situation in South Africa should be put in perspective because this was something the South African media 'clearly did not specialise in'. He went on to say, 'We lived in an abnormal society (apartheid), now we live in a normal society in a country in transition.' Louw said other transitional countries that had experienced the same crime situation as South Africa were Russia, Estonia, Cambodia and Poland. He said that other non-transitional countries like America, Wales, England and Australia had also reported 'concerns' of an increase in violent crime in 1996.

Interesting, wot?

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Some practical tips for managing crime in SA

This is a long posting. Not typical Blog material. But it’s best said in one piece rather than as a series of articles. So here goes…

A legitimate criticism levelled at most of us who whinge about crime is that we don’t propose solutions. That’s a fair crit. So after some thought, here’s my provisional background thinking and a few ideas that might help kickstart such a process.

Anthropologists and those steeped in historical African culture, like the late Dr. Ntate Kgalushi Koka (he's the little man with the stick in the middle of the picture) and former Radio 702 talk show host Jon Qwelane, tell us that the prime focus of old-school African crime management was the rehabilitation of those who wronged society, and their sustainable and successful reintroduction to and integration with mainstream society.

This constituted Ubuntu or African Humanism at its very best. The crime was hated, but not the person.

The tragedy today is that only tenuous vestiges of Ubuntu remain in African culture and largely in the rural community at that. But I’m optimistic that in generational theory terms, the wheel will turn and young people of all persuasions may one day go back to these sterling values. To a place where the needs of the community and others will find a complementary fit with their own. It’s only when the greater need of society or others can (where appropriate) be put ahead of our own that we put a foot on the first rung of the ladder of humanism.

In the ‘old days’ of African culture, a sentence considered appropriate was meted out to the offender, but that sentence inevitably involved serving society in some or other way to make amends for the transgression. It may even have involved serving the family of or the actual person affected by the crime. The idea of keeping the individual within the community – albeit under ‘supervision’ of some sort – was so that they weren’t alienated from the community or social progress. So there was a parallel intervention taking place. 1) They were working out their debt to society – inside of that society and 2) they were undergoing consistent and sustainable rehabilitation at the same time. That this concept has not been embraced and applied in a more modern context is our loss.

Apartheid has left many black people in particular with the mindset that reporting perpetrators of crime, or being a law-enforcement ‘informer’ in even the most constructive sense of the word, means being an ‘impimpi’ – which is about the worst thing you could be in the Apartheid days of ‘them and us’. Yet without complete community involvement and a collective zero tolerance for crime - but not in the kangaroo court or ‘citizen justice/vigilante’ sense - we’ll never achieve normalisation in our society.

What’s needed is, among many other approaches:

a) Adopting an aggressive hearts and minds program in which we position civilian co-operation, involvement and participation with the justice system and law-enforcement authorities as loyalty, patriotism and nationalism which rises above perceived or actual ethnic and cultural divides.

b) It’s not a problem using modern high-tech mechanisms, to have someone in society, but under restraint. There are leg-worn monitoring devices which can be tracked in real time and even programmed to sound an alarm on site and also remotely, if the wearer attempts to mutilate, destroy or remove it.

c) We need a ‘Small Claims Court’ version in the management of crime. Appropriately qualified commissioners can mete out swift and appropriate community-involved justice to ‘perps’ of crimes up to a certain level. That would unblock the pending-trial, waiting-for-bail applications plumbing problem and divert large numbers of people into community-serving processes rather than into prisons. This becomes particularly important with young people. So they’re not held, awaiting trial, with older, hardened criminals who are likely to negatively influence them even further. There are also enormous sexual abuse risks involved in mixing youth and older criminal populations. A prison rape today will very likely be an ARV or death sentence given escalating HIV infection rates.

d) There’s a huge disparity in sentences meted out for a range of offences. This is something that could be codified and standardised within certain parameters so we don’t have someone stealing a chicken and waiting three years for the case to come to trial and then being sentenced to five years in total. Contrast this with someone guilty of culpable homicide getting a suspended sentence. Inequality of note. Such an approach would also eliminate people sitting in prisons because they can’t afford paltry sums of bail money. Our focus needs to be on doing the best for society by returning to it a useful, rehabilitated and contributing member. Not some dysfunctional individual, who will almost certainly commit further crimes, sometimes simply to get back to the ‘security’ and familiarity of the prison or gang world.

e) There is a critical skills shortage in ‘artisan’ territory throughout the country. The old ‘apprenticeship’ schemes should be revitalised and used to train people working out community sentences so that they’re learning and contributing as they do so, but more importantly, at the end of their sentence, they’re qualified to do something consecutive with their lives. Industry and commerce need to be co-opted as participants in this process so that former offenders don’t run into an unemployment brick wall due to their past.

f) We need a very aggressive and proactive youth diversion program. The thrust of any crime prevention strategy needs to be aimed first and foremost at reducing the ‘recruits’ that are attracted to it. Diversion programs ensure that youth offenders don’t get sucked into the mainstream world of crime and punishment. Many of the young people caught up in the crime web come from desperately dysfunctional, unhappy and unsupportive homes. What they need is life skills coaching and borders or parameters within which they can safely operate and live. Ellen Sirleaf Johnson, the current president of  Liberia says that the single biggest challenge facing Liberia right now is inculcating a sense of discipline and social responsibility into a generation of young people dislocated by war and traumatising violence.

      In South Africa, many of our present 25 and upward young people still bear scars and the burden of our unbalanced past.

g) There’s a reality TV series entitled ‘Redemption Hill’. Based in New Zealand, its taken some really hard-core, seemingly ‘beyond redemption’ young people and put them into a mock prison system with warders (in fact highly-skilled social workers in disguise) as a last-ditch attempt to get them back on the proverbial straight’n narrow. It’s made for fascinating viewing as one sees the progressive transformation of these young folk. It’s a process that can be successful if there are the resources and the will behind it. As former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan once said of African genocide prevention or intervention, ‘We have the means to stop it, but not the will.’ We need to bear that in mind as we cope with crime in our country.

h) Recidivism is the word used to describe the return-to-crime of prisoners after release. The recidivism rate in one prison I visited in my freelance days on Radio 702, was something of the order of 90%. Meaning that only 10% of the people released didn’t get trapped in the cycle of imprisonment, release and re-imprisonment. That tells us that the current system doesn’t work at all and that there’s no rehab of any sustainable sort taking place.

The idea of keeping people (other than the really ‘un-rehabilitatable’ or extremely dangerous) offenders in society, under supervision, monitoring, management and mentorship, is the only course of action left to us.

In summary: 1) Introduce ‘small claims courts’ equivalents for crime. 2) Engage civil society in the employment, skills-transfer and rehab process – using high-tech monitoring and supervision devices. 3) Protect our youth offenders from the mainstream hard-core criminal element while we re-direct their energies and talents. 4) Reduce recidivism by giving offenders solid skills training while they’re working out their debt to society. 5) Have society embrace these people and employ them at the end of their ‘time’. 6) Have a council of interested and concerned citizens and subsets throughout the country, to constantly brainstorm innovative approaches to the problem. Heck, I’d be delighted to play a tiny role in such a future-altering initiative. As would numerous other South African business people.

Let’s get together a council of wise people to explore how this and other concepts can be successfully implemented and then roll out the model regionally. Just as the world is waking up the fact that we’ll leave a devastated environment to our youth if we don’t act – so we’ll leave a chaotic global and local social structure to succeeding generations if we don’t all act on crime.

http://www.imbizo.com