7 posts tagged “management”

Jerry Flint in Forbes is one of the most intelligent motoring industry commentators in the world today. I pretty much agree with his latest column on saving GM. Highlights:

The issue is not whether there can be a rescue at General Motors; the issue is whether the current management can save it. The record is not good. Since 1992, GM’s U.S. market share has fallen steadily—from 34% that year to 19% in May. Many of GM’s leading executives are from the finance side of the business, but the financial failures are numerous. The company wasted $2 billion on an investment in Fiat and many billions more on the Delphi spin-off. Management also wrecked GMAC, its car loan subsidiary, by lending mortgage money to people who could not pay it back.

   And:

Unlike some commentators, I do not think GM’s problem is that it has too many divisions. It is shifting Buick, Pontiac and GMC to common dealerships, which means some divisions are becoming more like individual models rather than full-fledged brands. It causes less public relations damage and legal liabilities to leave Buick with a few models, rather than endure the type of bad publicity it endured a few years ago when it phased out Oldsmobile.
   I think that GM made a big mistake and did a great disservice to itself and to its dealers when it recently announced that it was looking for ways to unload Hummer. Yes, the biggest Hummers are gas pigs, but Hummer is a strong brand to put up against Jeep. It was a mistake, too, to cancel production of the Hummer H4, a smaller vehicle to compete against the iconic Jeep Wrangler. Just because consumers are flocking to vehicles that are more efficient does not mean that they do not want exciting, macho, sport utility vehicles.
   Russia has plenty of oil and enough wealthy people for vehicles such as Cadillac Escalades and Hummers. Why can't GM step up its export business to such markets?

   Jerry Flint also believes that Bob Lutz and many GM folks can lead the company to recovery. This might be worth a post on the main blog.
   Incidentally, I have been told that Condé Nast Portfolio published my letter to the editor about the US auto industry.

I don’t know why good British programmes are on at 11 p.m. or thereabouts on TV One these days, other than the pro-American, anti-British and anti-New Zealand-drama* attitude of TVNZ management that is so out of keeping with the nation’s tastes. (As I say to young people: whenever grown-ups make an irrational decision, follow the money.)
   Unless tonight’s 2006 episode of Parkinson was a re-run, which might explain the late timeslot.
   But it did remind me of Katherine Jenkins’ lovely mezzo-soprano voice and an old favourite hymn.

* Shortland Street excepted?

My comment on the Journeyman Blog today:

Mike, you are being generous. I’m no longer going to watch American serials that don’t have self-contained episodes as my “default” position, making exceptions for presently unforeseeable situations. I feel that strongly about Journeyman.
   Journeyman was an exception, but I have managed to stay away from all the other so-called hits with “story arcs” anyway (Lost, Heroes, The Nine, Traveler, Prison Break, 24, etc.).
   Like you, I was a Day Break fan and we managed to get, fortunately, all 13 episodes networked here (albeit at a really sucky time). I gave Journeyman a chance on the strength of a fabulous pilot but now, if I hear ‘Made in USA’ along with ‘story arc’, I just won’t bother.

   This cannot be good for the US TV industry, but if it has morons running the networks, then what can it expect? Journeyman was the last straw, especially as I tracked how the show unfolded and how inept NBC had been. This isn’t the first series that I have followed that was cancelled prematurely—but after so many of these, where American networks cannot understand that loyalty to the network brand also depends on overall product quality, I am just fed up.
   This is the Ford Taurus syndrome. The story is this: the Taurus was a huge hit for Ford. Instead of continual improvement, Ford opted to abandon the Taurus, letting it get trampled by the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord, when the SUV boom happened. Toyota and Honda, instead, kept improving their sedans and developed SUVs. By 2006, the Taurus was a joke, sold to rental car fleets. It was only for the 2007 model year that Ford transferred the Taurus name on to its Five Hundred. By that time, Ford lost a lot of customers to the Japanese and there are people who felt their loyalty had been thrown into their face.
   It also had the Ford Contour in the US, which the company refused to market properly, probably because it had been co-developed with its European branch. The claim was that Americans were not interested in the CD-sized market that the Contour occupied. Reality: Dearborn probably wanted to cover its own butt by saying, ‘We are not taking this European stuff because we have to sell domestically designed.’ It’s perhaps all political. Meanwhile, Americans were buying the same-sized car from BMW and Mercedes. Buyers just kept going foreign.
   Ford’s latest refusal to sell the German-designed C307 Focus, and instead facelift the older model for American buyers, is yet another example. Now the Focus is getting trampled by the Honda Civic, and the next Toyota Corolla will beat it even more. History keeps repeating there at Ford.
   In other words, Ford thinks Americans are dumb Yanks.
   NBC has combined these moves, but really, every network is guilty of this. While Journeyman was not a huge hit, NBC knows its poor scheduling and non-existent promotion are to blame. Instead of allowing an audience to build (the numbers were growing), it decided to interrupt Journeyman’s schedule just as the show found its legs. It had a quality product which it intended to kill. And in the meantime, viewers are feeling that the networks are not listening. They will happily go to cable, DVDs and other services. NBC’s remaining offerings—dumbed-down reality fare—will be like the 2005 Ford Taurus.
   In other words, the US networks think Americans are dumb Yanks. 
   No, foreigners do not think Americans are dumb because of George W. Bush. Foreigners think Americans are dumb because that is how American corporations treat American citizens, by making decisions that disrespect the American consumer’s intelligence. Foreigners then make an erroneous presumption that that is what consumers have asked for—when in fact most Americans are as upset about the strange corporate decisions that take place.
   As television globalizes—and it will—the US networks will be like Ford, where perceived quality and loyalty will no longer be there.
   Bad moves against quality products do affect the overall parent brand—something that even brand consultants need to remember.
   And, sadly, the parent brand’s image can often be tied to the national one.

Anita Roddick was an inspirational lady. Here are some quotations from her last interview in The Daily Telegraph.

On the US wealth divide
It’s a society that is absolutely separate, it’s a gated community living next door to a society that is impoverished, a gated community living next to ghetto—you see that all the time and it will happen here—the two poles of our society.
   Everything is here for the wealthy. You can hide your money away in tax havens, you can find ways of making more money.

The global credit crunch in the US
It's like that fresh flesh: I want it now, you know I can’t work for it, I can’t be an apprentice, I can’t look up to it. And people are living longer. The elderly don’t want kids in their home. Everybody’s staying at home and there’s not a work ethic that I’m seeing. There’s got to be more creative ways of finding jobs and getting skilled or finding jobs that are worthwhile and you don't have to be skilled for.

B-school
This notion that to be in business you've got to go to a business school: it’s crap. Because business schools only shape you to be a very efficient person working in a very traditional system—but the most exciting things are what’s being done untraditionally.

L’Oréal and the Body Shop
I’m thrilled with it, absolutely bloody thrilled with it. I think they’re going to do amazing things. I think they’ll be able to—with the research companies that they’ve bought—not the product companies—of completely eliminating animal testing in the future. It will not be part of the industry. Because they're doing cell culture testing—they’re making their own cells and their own skin. Every ingredient, every food product will be tested.
   For me it’s been a wonderful gift because a company that is a strong understanding brand bought it. The alternative was that a group of financiers would come in and asset strip it—they wouldn't give a toss for anything.

Outsourcing
We’re not a manufacturing country anymore. But I think you get people to understand the story behind what they buy—to make that one jump and say what's the real cost of something, if everybody got another 25pc for the garment they made then you wouldn’t get this big social dilemma.
   I remember going to a sweatshop area in Nicaragua, and it was quite a modern factory but there was no place to eat or have half an hour off. And the women were walking some 3 miles to work every day. And I walked back with them, and they were living in cardboard huts. One woman said to me, whatever you do tell them all that we want to do is move from slavery to poverty. They were forced to take contraceptive pills, they were thrown out if they had a grey hair and this is nothing compared to what goes on in Bangladesh.

The futility of “marketing”
We never had a marketing department for 20 odd years. Every year we were getting awards for our marketing, and we didn’t know what it was. The minute we brought in marketing as a traditional thinking—cover your trucks with messages, environment human rights etc, went out the door.
   We had an enormous amount of humour. I remember on Mother’s Day we had a message saying ‘God couldn't be everywhere so he created mothers’. We were doing really quirky things that got people engaged.

   There’s more on Dame Anita Roddick, DBE today in Lucire, along with a related op-ed from yours truly about her leadership.

I see former TVNZ news boss Bill Ralston has a column in the Irish newspaper, The New Zealand Herald, and dissed politicians for affecting the network’s culture.
   All I can say is: I told you so.
   Anyone want to link all of this back to the dawn of Rogernomics? (“Hat tip” to Robert Catto.)

[Cross-posted] For six years, I have been telling people how fab Stefan Engeseth’s Detective Marketing is. Now, here’s your chance to get the fourth edition for free and judge for yourself.
   Three hundred thousand people have already made this book a real success for Stefan (and most had to pay!), and if the fourth goes well, he promises a fifth. I personally cannot wait.
   The genius of the book is that you can flip open to any page, and if you allow your imagination free reign, you can get truly inspired. Stefan has made it very easy to absorb. I remember reading the whole 176 pp. in one sitting when he marketed the second edition back in the early 2000s and have returned to it and the third edition frequently to get inspired for marketing and management.

New Zealand is a year behind on Life on Mars, and I note from a TV One ad just now that Derren Brown’s Séance will air next week. I know we are necessarily behind the UK on British programmes, but I don’t remember us being this far behind since the 1970s. A three-year-old show? What is happening? Now with Cold Case, Without a Trace and other American shows on One, is this the end of the British influence on our networks?
   And people wonder why TVNZ as a whole is doing so poorly. It’s simply not delivering what people want. I can say that with some more authority, having been an insider.
   Incidentally, having left Good Morning, my theory has been proven right: my profile is up. The results are in: May saw eight press mentions across the company—up on 2006, but down on some months in 2003–5 where we were seeing something written about us at least daily. (The idea that appearing on TV regularly enhances your profile is, I can now say, bollocks.) It is reaching the levels (measured in column inches and mentions) it was at before I began on the show; indeed, we seem to be returning, as a company, to pre-2004 levels, before we made some bad hiring decisions. I do seem to have rid myself of the negative influences in my life—and Good Morning, and whatever sickness TVNZ has, were the last.
   I love being proved right—it was a good lesson, reminding myself to stick to my guns, remembering that sort of magic that helped us get an international clientèle to begin with, and exposing me to seeing a bad organization that wasn’t paying me to fix it. It’s not every day I have that opportunity: while I have seen ill organizations, I am usually called in after they have realized they need help. TVNZ has not got there yet and, in recent memory, is the only first-hand example I have of an organization I got to see over a period that wants to stay in its funk. It had more often been a management-textbook theory.
   As to my personal profile, I believe the slip in press mentions was due to an energy mismatch here at work in 2005–6 and the fact that appearing on Good Morning took me away from building my media appearances doing the things that mattered to me as a CEO. From a personal-brand standpoint, it was not authentic, to coin a phrase from Johnnie Moore. Not that that was the intent: I had been promised by the network that I could promote Lucire, most of all, through the show. That promise, as those of you who listened to my voice post last month, was not kept.
   Furthermore, I cannot see, with hindsight, how the ‘You’ve Got Male’ segment was a dignified forum for a company leader. I say this with respect to men like Paul Sinclair, with whom I regularly stay in contact.
   When I think of interviews I have had with CNN or the BBC, the show went against the image I had built up as a businessman.
   As each week passes, I feel more comfortable with my decision to leave Good Morning, and the positive consequences are coming up more frequently.
   My main regrets are endorsing the show to friends, getting caught up in it. I should have recommended that Laural and Sharaine Barrett not appear, though it was a good excuse to catch up in Wellington. Jennifer Hamilton of Avidiva reports no increase in profile, bookings or ‘Oh, I saw you on …’ since appearing on Good Morning.
   You may see me on C4 in mid-July (to be confirmed), and there may be some news that could net some television attention in late June–early July. The key is to not get sucked in to negative organizations or be around negative people as part of my routine—and if I have to appear on a TVNZ network, then it must be totally in line with my real job and personal mission.