Technology Brochures From The Drawing Board To The Rubbish Bin

Check most technology companies' promotional materials and you realise that when they were designed, the focus was on creating glitz and glamour not results. The objective was pontification and self-aggrandisement not educating readers and invoking the next step leading to the sales..

These companies were kidnapped by some graphics designers and the result is just that: Nice graphics that will enrich the designer's portfolio but doesn't make a dickybird of a difference to the company's sales results.

And then salespeople spend around 30% of their time to hide all the rubbish created by the marketing department and to create some meaningful sales materials they can hand out to prospects and leave behind after meetings.

It reminds me, the former farmer, of a cattle rancher with a big hat and a fancy branding iron but no cattle. They can impress the market until potential buyers want to take a look at the beasts. Then our rancher is in deep shit...

So, in this month's article, we discuss how to put together client-centred brochures, entitled...

Technology Brochures From The Drawing Board To The Rubbish Bin

Value-Pricing At NHL Level...

Over at the Verasage Institute we talk a lot about value pricing and the elimination of timesheets. One of the Verasage Fellows, Ed Kless, has just posted a brilliant example of value pricing at the Verasage blog.

If your company is still...

• selling expertise on an hourly basis
• forces employees to fill in timesheets
• hire new employees for an hourly wage

...then you should read this post. It's pretty eye-opening, and rest assured this is how it plays out in the work of technology as well not only in ice hockey.

Actually, I've just read an interesting article about the performance of people who work for hourly wages. They were told that as soon as they complete normal eight hour's of work, they can pack up and go home for the day. On average, eight hour's of work was completed in three hours and 19 minutes, 41% of the allotted time.

What does that mean to you, the employer? It means that your people are smart. They learn the system and have become pretty good at playing to the weakness of the system. Their focus shifts from improving performance to marking time and filling hours to maximise their wages.

For many companies people relax during normal hours and then request overtime to complete the work. And you can't blame them because this is what they are motivated to do. There is a definite motivator to work slowly and inefficiently.

So, what to do? Well, you have to recognise that they are knowledge workers of the "knowledge age", as Peter Drucker defined it about a half a century ago, but most managers were so busy managing their feudalist empires that they didn't pay attention.

Then put your people on annual salary with a bonus structure, create an environment in which people are naturally inspired to do great work and leave them alone. If there is any problem, give them instant feedback and forget about the annual review. If your HR goons insist on the annual review, then throw them out of your department or, if you can, fire their arses.

Through living history, traditional HR practices have never contributed anything positive to the work environment, so there is no reason to keep old-fashioned, time-focused HR practitioners on the payroll. They have taught people how to lie on their resumes, how to doctor references and to perform consistently at sub-par level.

Anyway...

Read Ed's post at the Verasage blog and see how you could replace your time-centred organisation with a value-focused organisation.