Archives for July 2020

Introducing the Align Remotely podcast

July 31, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer 2 Comments

I’m excited to share that I’m finally launching a podcast, after a few almost successful attempts in the past.

The Align Remotely podcast will focus on leading distributed teams and everything associated with that topic, like leadership and operations to help achieve together, now that nearly everyone works from home.

In addition to the actual recording, the show notes will also include a visual representation of the discussion, a transcript, as well as any other resources mentioned during the discussion. This should help make the contents skimmable and also useful for anyone who prefers a more visual way to consume audio content.

The first episode was recorded with James Newson, who is a technical specialist around remote work. We cover any potential issues and possibilities around hybrid working, for when the coronavirus epidemic is over. And there is a lot more to it than I thought, because usually I was just leaning on company IT to “sort it out”, without having a proper think-through.

You can find out more at https://www.alignremotely.com and look for the podcast whereever you consume your podcasts. The first episode is over here: https://www.alignremotely.com/e/1rnkp6z8. Please leave a review as that helps spread the word!

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Just how expensive are all these online meetings?

July 23, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer 2 Comments

If you want a high-leverage way to improve your company’s culture, one of the highest leverage (even financially) ways to do so, is to take a close look at your meetings. This includes your regularly re-occurring ones, as well as big long ones when kicking off or closing an initiative.

sunk cost: watching a bad Netflix series to the end, even though you didn’t like season 2

Meetings are extraordinarily expensive, although they aren’t explicitly budgeted for because everyone is on a salary. It’s a “sunk cost”. It's relatively easy to calculate the cost of any regular meeting you hold using meeting cost calculators like this one. Just running it through for a small software development team I ran, it turned out that the daily standup of 14 people cost $100 per instance, multiplied by the number of days in the year, so around $22,000 per year.

The financial cost of organizing meetings can significantly exceed the budget authority of the meeting organizer, like at one mid-market manufacturer, where a junior assistant convened a 90 minute weekly meeting among middle managers that cost $15 mln/year:

For example, leaders at one large manufacturing company recently discovered that a regularly scheduled 90-minute meeting of mid-level managers cost more than $15 million annually. When asked “Who is responsible for approving this meeting?” the managers were at a loss. “No one,” they replied. “Tom’s assistant just schedules it and the team attends.” In effect, a junior VP’s administrative assistant was permitted to invest $15 million without supervisor approval. No such thing would ever happen with the company’s financial capital.

The cost aspect flies under the radar, because it's money the company was already expecting to spend. But this is a good example of confusing the expected outcomes with the underlying drivers of success. Just spending the time in meetings will not help you achieve your company's goals faster. It's spending time in high quality meetings that makes a difference.

And to do that, you need to design your meetings around the outcomes they help you achieve. If you don’t have a clear outcome in mind, then why keep meeting? Especially if you’ve already achieved that outcome?

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Win the fight for attention by communicating with relevance

July 16, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

The biggest challenge when introducing a new product is establishing a connection with your audience. Often, this is because you can’t do anything else until this is in place. This detail really hit home for me, when I went to an accelerator event in Mexico.

In this 2006 photograph, a man was receiving an intramuscular injection in his left shoulder muscle from a trained, registered nurse (RN), while his family was observing from over the nurse's shoulder. — Photographer: CDC | Source: Unsplash

One of the speakers was an immunobiologist client of mine, who’d developed a unique salmonella vaccine that could be combined with other vaccines. And it looks as though his vaccine is the only salmonella one which can do that.

I’d worked with him briefly as an innovation expert, and had a discussion about commercialization options as well as some pitch training. At the time he was struggling to see entrepreneurship as a viable route to greater impact. He felt comfortable as an inventor, and wanted to do more of that, not become a businessman.

It turned out I had unleashed a force of nature. Also drilling him in giving pithy explanations helped him hone down his message to something much more concrete for anyone who wasn’t already a fellow immunobiologist, or even a scientist. This one insight allowed him to communicate the relevance of his work to the wider public.

But more importantly, he started to believe that entrepreneurship was a viable route to greater impact. As it would force him to confront institutions that held him and other scientists back domestically.

Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.

As a result of both, he’s pretty much gone from a booksy academic researcher to a serious contender in getting funding to help spread the use of his product vaccine. This is the power of relevance and empathy in an age of dwindling attention.

One of the best ways to get (and stay) relevant is to focus all of your marketing and product efforts around a client profile. In theory there are millions of ways to reach an audience; in practice, you only need to reach a specific group of people. So figure out who they are, and then just focus on them. The best way to do this is the Hero Canvas tool. Grab a copy and get a quick intro for free with my Hero Canvas course.

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