Mike Hohnen

Learning by discovery and collaboration once again proved its value.
This week we spent time in Oman working with COWI Gulf. Together with their finance department we developed a 2 day training on the ins and outs of running a project from the financial point of view.I.e. are we on track financially, does this tally with our budget and that sort of stuff

The challenge here is always: how does one make a subject fun and engaging when it is already considered drab and dull before we even get started.

The traditional approach is of course to arm yourself with a large deck of power-points outlining the does and don’t of financial management.

That may be how you teach finance - but that is not necessarily the best way to actually learn finance.

So instead we created a scenario that very much resembles their day to day situation, with the problems and pitfalls of real life and had them work through that in teams of 3 - if they got stuck they could ask questions - but essentially they worked it out between themselves - collaborative learning in full bloom - what a pleasure!

Next week we shall take it up a notch…

Florida:

“It’s almost as if everyone is stuck in the same place. It seems to me that the mental models and frameworks of the Fordist economy, of the mass production economy, are so powerful and so deeply engrained in the way we think, it’s hard to think in other terms.”

Maybe we are managing ourselves to death - our core competency , managing, is becoming our major incompetency.

We need less management and more leadership.

Watch the inspiring interview with Richard Florida

What does it imply for the way we organise, hold meetings and…

“Conversations are the way workers discover what they know, share it with their colleagues, and in the process create new knowledge for the organization.
In the new economy, conversations are the most important form of work …so much so that the conversation is the organization.”
—Alan Webber, “What’s So New About the New Economy,” Harvard Business Review

FORBES INSIGHTS asks the question:

Can webconferences, videoconferences and other virtual meetings really take the place of face-to-face contact?
With travel budgets slashed in the wake of recessionary belt-tightening, companies are increasingly turning to technology as a substitute for in-person contact. Yet business executives overwhelmingly agree that face-to-face meetings are not just preferable but necessary for building deeper, more profitable bonds with clients and business partners and maintaining productive relationships with co-workers.

Predictably the answer to their own survey is that 84% prefer F2F meetings.

But is that the right question to ask if you are trying to understand what is happening in the meeting industry?

Not in my mind it isn’t!

This is the kind of question Kodak asked photographers 5-8 years back: Do you think that digital photos will replace film based photography? No way they all hollered.
This is the question big newspaper publishers asked thier readers 3-4 years ago: “Can you imagine not having a daily morning news paper in print form” Since then a large number of them no longer exist.
This is the question publishing houses where asked 24 months ago “Will the eReader replace books?” - that was before Amazon sold 2 million Kindel’s in 6 months. Now they are not so sure. More on eReaders here

But the reality is this:

This is borne out in Forbes Insights survey, where 58% of respondents said they were travelling for business less today than they were at the beginning of the recession in January 2008, with more than a third (34%) indicating they were travelling much less frequently.

This is my point, it may not be what they prefer - but this is what they do - not because it is better but because it is cheaper, and more convenient.

Surevy: would you prefer to fly Business or Turist?… No brainer right?
But why is tourist class then jam packed and Business reduced to 2 rows that are half empty on many European flights? It is not what we would prefer. It is what we do.

The big danger is that we in the industry stick our heads in the sand as a result of surveys like this - pat each other on the back and knowingly nod to each other: “f2f meeting are better - we know that - they know that. All will return to normal soon, you just wait and see….”

I don’t think so

That is what KODAK thought

The question we should be asking is : Is the market broken? - see this by Seth Godin: “What every mass marketer needs to learn from Groucho Marx”

See also my previous post on this subject: Is the meeting industry doomed?

Read the Forbes Insight survey here

What do you think?

A coming paper in the Journal of Marketing addresses that very subject. Building on past research on the role of gratitude in human relationships, it argues that a customer who is made to feel grateful most likely becomes enduringly loyal as a result. Gratitude, as the paper bluntly puts it, can “increase purchase intentions, sales growth and share of wallet.” Robert Palmatier, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Washington and an author of the paper, says that making a customer feel truly grateful toward a business is harder than it might sound. And the hard-wired feelings of reciprocity that can trigger gratitude can just as easily trigger the sense that you’re being treated unfairly.

Read the full article in the NYT