Tablet vs Laptop
Some time back, I
wrote my first article on my impressions of the productivity gains that I made
after buying an iPad.
It’s now over a year since that article appeared, so where do
things stand and was my initial reaction correct?
My needs were to:
1.
Manage
my diary
2.
Manage
my contacts
3.
Manage
my ToDo lists
4.
Produce
documents/spreadsheets/presentations
5.
Send/receive
email
6.
Internet
Access
7.
Listen
to music
8.
Watch
films
I
didn’t want a screen that was too small or too big.
So, in
order:
1. Manage
My Diary:
On the whole, a success.
My only gripe is that, now that I synchronise everything through iCloud
to Outlook, I can only amend notes on diary items through the iPad. This may be my problem, but perhaps
Apple/Microsoft could look into this.
2. Manage
My Contacts:
No problems.
3. Manage
My ToDo Lists:
Minor niggle here: the Apple “Reminders” app doesn’t allow
for start dates (as far as I can see). I
switched to a third party app which does this and a lot more besides.
4. Produce
Documents/Spreadsheets/Presentations:
Tablets aren’t fully functioning PCs, so expecting full Microsoft
Office functionality is unreasonable (although I gather that the new Windows
Surface will overcome this). I can
produce Word/EXCEL/PowerPoint documents/spreadsheets/presentations, but without
much of the functionality that one would find in the full Office version. I load templates of the documents I need so
that I can save them as new files.
Altogether, I’m pleased.
5. Send/Receive
Email:
No problems here, especially if your email uses an Exchange
or IMAP server which enables you to synchronise folders and their
contents. POP3 servers don’t allow this
functionality (and my “works” email is POP3…).
However, for sending/receiving, absolutely no complaints.
6. Internet
Access:
No issues. As more
places “go WiFi”, you don’t to dig into your precious data allowance either! Social networking apps are plentiful, so I
can access LinkedIn, Facebook and my blog.
7. Listen
To Music:
I use my iPhone (more portable).
8. Watch
Films:
Only limit is memory.
iTunes only plays MP4 films, so if you have something in WMV, AVI, MP3
or MKV format, you need another app.
I’ve found a great one which plays all the common formats.
Screen
size: perfect. I've looked at the new iPad "Mini", but it's not for me, despite it's obvious portability.
In my
previous article, I considered buying a wireless keyboard for when I had to
type long reports. I bought the Apple
keyboard and am very pleased with it (although I find the lack of a “Pg Dn”/”Pg
Up” key a nuisance). It connects
seamlessly with my iPad and iPhone.
I also
commented on lack of ability to read/comment on PDF documents. There’s an app that I’ve since discovered…
I
bought a longer (6’) charging cable and a Griffin Survivor case. It’s pricey, but my
expensive iPad is protected from falls up to 6’ onto concrete (I’ve tested it
up to 3’) and from rain. It has a handy
fold-out stand that holds the iPad in landscape mode. The case makes the iPad heavier and thicker
(25.5 x 20 x 2.5 cm), but it’s safer.
The
other item I bought was an external battery pack no larger than an iPhone 4
which charges my iPhone up to 3 ½ times or my iPad to about 80%. This helps on long train or plane journeys where
power plugs aren’t available.
As an
experiment, I took the iPad on a 2-week business trip and left my laptop
behind. I did take an external hard disk drive with all my documents (and
also backed them up to my Dropbox account), because I knew that I’d have access
to various PCs. I have to say that there
were times when I missed my laptop.
Since then, a friend has shown me an app that allows me to remote access
my laptop wherever I am provided that the laptop is on.
So…:
·
No
regrets about investing in a tablet.
·
There
are free and paid apps out there which meet almost every need; these will
continue to increase.
·
For
“heavy duty” work, the laptop is still needed, but if you have access to a
desktop/laptop and all your files on memory stick, external HDD or Dropbox, you
can still function.
I have spent more than half my life delivering
change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging”
economies. With more than 20 years in the world financial services industry
running different service, operations and lending businesses, I started my own
Performance Management Consultancy and work with individuals, small businesses,
charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An
international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email
. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services. For strategic questions that you should be
asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610.Labels: Productivity
Reputational Risk Lessons From Dhaka
Primark
says it will pay compensation and offer emergency food aid to victims of the
Bangladesh factory collapse who worked for its supplier (Headline).
A
BBC news article published at
the end of April revealed that Primark – an Irish clothing company operating around
200 stores in Austria,
Belgium, Germany, Ireland (as Penneys),
Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Whilst Primark’s main headquarters are in
Dublin, they are a subsidiary of British food processing company Associated
British Foods (ABF).
So far, we
have a tragic story involving some 1,000 deaths, 3,000 injuries and one
survival story little short of miraculous.
The Rana Plaza building which collapsed was apparently home to a number
of factories which employed approximately 5,000 people. Other well-known names which allegedly sourced garments
from factories in the building include the Benetton
Group, Joe
Fresh, The Children's Place, Primark, Monsoon, and DressBarn.
A browse of Wikipedia shows that in 2008, Primark
had been indirectly exposed by the charity War
on Want revealing that conditions at Bangladeshi supplier factories hadn’t improved
over two years. The same article states
that in 2009, a supplier to Primark was apparently obliged to remove their brand
from Primark after media investigation alleged use of illegal immigrant labour
which was paid less than the UK legal minimum wage. This entry, whether true, false or poorly
researched is available to anyone.
Primark clearly
felt the need to do something. Whether
management had noticed a fall in sales following the Bangladesh tragedy isn’t
clear, but being associated with a situation where little attention was paid to
workers’ rights as a matter of course was clearly not acceptable to a European
customer base.
“Trial by media” is becoming more
prevalent. It takes little for anyone to
become a “reporter” – all they need is a smartphone with camera and an internet
connection. The proliferation of email,
social websites and other networking sites means that news of any sort (whether
true or false) can now be spread in, literally, the blink of an eye.
Large organisations such as Starbucks
and Google have found themselves targets of media attention as it was revealed
that they paid minimal corporation tax due to using perfectly legal tools to
minimise exposure. The problem here was
that, in a time of global belt-tightening, austerity and job losses, people
felt that it was morally wrong that a
few greedy bosses and shareholders should benefit from the exploitation of “tax
dodges” (which weren’t). Result? The G7 has now agreed to crack down as a
group on tax avoidance and will press the international community at large to
join in. Starbucks has agreed to pay
more tax. No doubt, countries that refuse
to join will be vilified and their reputation will suffer.
Conclusion: reputational risk is more
of a danger than ever before, and you need:
·
A strategy to build
and manage reputation;
·
To manage potential
fallout from negative media and/or public attention;
·
To think about third
parties with whom you deal and assess whether they might expose you to
unwelcome attention;
·
To have a “contingency
plan” that can be put into action immediately if a “PR disaster” strikes.
Don’t wait for things to go
wrong before you think about this.
I have spent more than half my life
delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to
“emerging” economies. With more than 20 years in the world financial services
industry running different service, operations and lending businesses, I
started my own Performance Management Consultancy to offer solutions for
improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses,
charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An
international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email
. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services. For strategic questions that you should be
asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610.Labels: Crisis Management, Customer Care, Financial, Risk, Selling, Social, Strategy
What’s Your Reputation Worth?
Your character is who
you really are. Your reputation is who
people think you are.
Reputations are peculiar things. Good ones make life easier; bad ones mean
that opportunities fade away and doors close.
Clearly, it pays to have a good reputation, just as it pays to have a
successful brand. In some cases,
people/businesses may have reputations that are totally undeserved.
“Reputation”, according to my old Concise Oxford English
Dictionary, means: "what is generally said
or believed about a person’s or thing’s character; state of being well reported
of, credit, distinction, respectability, good report". Whilst these may not be the best definitions,
they give an indication of the meanings of “reputation”.
The “halo effect” exaggerates both good and bad
reputations. The way that I think of the
halo effect is: seeing, hearing or understanding what you want to see, hear or
understand, believing what you want to believe (often on the say of others and despite any evidence to the contrary). Experts refer to it as “cognitive bias”
thanks to which your judgements of a person’s character can be influenced by
your overall impression of them. We’ve even evolved sayings to support these
misperceptions and misconceptions:
·
A leopard
doesn’t change its spots
·
The apple
doesn’t fall far from the tree
·
Like
father, like son
·
Birds of a
feather flock together
·
No smoke
without fire
Human brains like simple, easy-to-understand
explanations. We like to believe the
judgement of others, or that if the majority say that something is so, then it
is so. How many people believed that
that the sun revolved around the earth, or that the world was flat until the
likes of Galileo and Christopher Columbus proved them wrong? It takes little to give someone or something
a good or bad reputation or brand, but it takes the equivalent of a seismic
event to change that perception, even if all evidence is already to the
contrary.
So what might be the key steps to managing your reputation?
1.
Know what you want as a “reputation”.
2.
Have a clear Objective, Strategy and Tactics for
managing this.
3.
Bend every effort to manage your “story” (many
people pay PR agents to do this).
4.
Have a plan for when things go wrong and your reputation
is “on the line”.
Just as people will buy on the say-so of “trusted advisors”
(which could extend to comments from relatively unknown people on the internet
– Amazon for example), so they will avoid on the same basis. I’m now seeing requests from developers of
“Apps” for smartphones and tablets for people to contact them if they have
problems rather than posting unfavourable reviews in the iTunes store. They’re trying to manage their reputation in
the face of demanding (and at times, perhaps) ignorant buyers. The problem is, one person can now reach out
to millions through the internet.
Managing your “story” and the impact that the “halo effect”
may have on it is something we all have to deal with. If you’re lucky, you may produce an excellent
product which then attracts buyers to other products (Apple’s iPod, for
example). The same may be true in the
automotive industry and (in my own personal experience) when it comes to buying
books by the same author. Equally
though, if you produce something that isn’t successful, you’re likely to have a
harder time trying to sell your next product, even if it’s superior in every
way.
In conclusion, manage your reputation internally and
externally. Plan for problems. Make sure all your staff understand their
part.
I have spent more than half my life
delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to
“emerging” economies. With more than 20 years in the world financial services
industry running different service, operations and lending businesses, I
started my own Performance Management Consultancy to offer solutions for
improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses,
charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international
speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email . My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of
services. For strategic questions that
you should be asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610.Labels: Crisis Management, Customer Care, Risk, Selling, Strategy
Operating Risk Lessons From “Horsemeatgate”
Europe is currently experiencing an issue involving horse
DNA and/or meat being present in food products labelled as “beef”. The result has been embarrassment for
supermarkets, suppliers and governments.
Eating horsemeat is not harmful to humans (there are
countries where it is considered a delicacy).
The problem stems more from two issues:
1. The
fact that products that state that they are “beef” on the packaging should
reasonably be expected to contain beef AND:
2. That
horsemeat may contain traces of medication that could potentially be harmful to
humans if ingested in large quantities.
From a risk point of view, there’s always the possibility
that a product or service can become “contaminated” with substandard parts,
ingredients or poorly-conceived processes, etc.
The question that I’ve been asking is, what can we learn from the horse
meat episode?
Basel II defined a great framework against which to assess
Operating Risk. There are 7 elements:
1. Internal
Fraud
2. External
Fraud
3. Employment
Practices & Workplace Safety
4. Clients,
Products & Business Practices
5. Execution,
Delivery & Process Management
6. Business
Disruption & System Failure
7. Damage
to Physical Assets
In this case, suppliers and retailers are subject to similar
as well as different risks, and without a full investigation in each case, we
can only guess at what might have happened.
Suppliers would most likely be at risk from:
·
Internal Fraud: someone at the supplier’s
warehouse (and/or slaughterhouse) may be deliberately adding cheaper horsemeat
to beef to increase margins.
·
Employment Practices & Workplace Safety: that
such a fraudulent individual can work in that business may be due to poor
recruitment screening.
·
Clients, Products & Business Practices: the
individual(s) in question may not be properly supervised, or the business owner
may be out for a quick profit.
·
Execution, Delivery & Process Management: results
in a “contaminated” product being delivered for sale.
In turn, the supermarkets buying
the contaminated meat are at risk from:
·
External Fraud: they are purchasing product that
is not what it is claimed to be. If
someone inside the buyer’s offices is also colluding with the supplier, then
the buyer is also at risk from internal
fraud.
·
Clients, Products & Business Practices: they
have inadequate screening processes to ensure that they get what they pay for.
·
Business Disruption &System Failure: stock
must be removed from shelves, supply chains must be investigated. The supermarket will lose money from mot
being able to sell that product.
Other readers may spot other risks. Reputational risk, for example (whilst not
considered operational risk) will be the result of a supermarket being found to
be selling products containing horsemeat.
This could lead to customers going elsewhere and bank credit facilities
being withdrawn, as well as regulatory and legal penalties.
What can be done?
Several responses present themselves (no doubt suppliers and
supermarkets will have looked into them).
·
Thorough screening of employees. Easier said than done in some
cases, especially suppliers located in “high risk” areas where the importance
of compliance with global standards may not necessarily be understood or taken
seriously as long as they “get away with it”.
·
Thorough Due Diligence (investigation) of
suppliers. Checks to include
hiring practices, supervision and spot-checking/inspection protocols.
·
Clearly defined inspection points to ensure that
the integrity of the food and supply chains is preserved. Supermarkets may have to spot check products
more rigorously.
·
Contracts that clearly state the requirements
for the product to be purchased so that there can be no doubt as to the
standards required.
·
Buyers to accept that they may have to pay more
to ensure that their meat supplies are “trustworthy”. As the saying goes, “You get what you pay
for”. In a bid to lower costs, people
may have inadvertently increased other risks.
I have spent more than half my life
delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to
“emerging” economies. With more than 20 years in the world financial services
industry running different service, operations and lending businesses, I
started my own Performance Management Consultancy to offer solutions for
improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses,
charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An
international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email . My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of
services. For strategic questions that
you should be asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610.Labels: Crisis Management, Customer Care, Productivity, Risk
