The Parable of the Three Stonecutters

The idea of leadership is often related to management roles or senior positions. The thinking is management training, and postgraduate qualifications can help acquiring leadership qualities. In fact, many MBA programmes are promoted that way. The curricula taught in these courses are developed around administrative tasks and business processes. It is true learning them will help in running a business or heading a section, but will not make you a leader. 

The notion of a leader is the same as that of a shepherd. A shepherd, almost always, is mentioned in the context of looking after his or her sheep. We often refer to ‘the shepherd leading the sheep’ or ‘the sheep following the shepherd’. Likewise, a leader is one who has “followers”. If one claims to be a leader, the obvious question to ask is ‘who are you leading’ or ‘who is following you’.

Social media websites have modelled the idea of leadership. For example, your Twitter account offers a simple indication of leadership in the number of “followers” and “followings” you have. The number of friends on Facebook seems to give people a sense of connectedness until that becomes ridiculously large like 500 and 800 friends. If you had initiated the majority of friends on Facebook, which is somewhat the natural thing to do but you are merely following others.

As you can see, leadership is a trait that is evident in the way we deal with others. When people who lack this quality take up leadership or management roles, they become taskmasters and box-tickers. Let me explain how to spot a leader with my rendition of the parable of the three stonecutters, popularised by Peter Drucker. A famous builder built a palace for a king with cut stones. The king liked his work so much that he wanted all the official building to have the cut stone finish. The builder received more contracts from the king and his business flourished. He wanted to appoint one of the stonecutters to oversee the rest. He got a friend to help him find the right stonecutter. The friend went to the site and came across the first stonecutter and asked, “what are you do?”. The first stonecutter said, “I am cutting this stone” point to the stone in his hand. The friend replied, “I can see that, and you are doing a good job”. After a space of silence, not able to get anything more, the friend carried on to the next stone-cutter working a short distance away. He asked the second stonecutter, “what are you doing?” The second stonecutter replied saying, “I am earning my wage for the day”. The friend replied, “Oh, I see” which started the second stonecutter off ranting and raving about his work and family. At the least, the friend learnt something about this stonecutter. The friend carried on looking for the next stonecutter. On seeing the third stonecutter, he went up to him and asked, the same question, “what are you doing?”. The third stonecutter replied without taking his eyes off the stone he was working on, “building a castle”. Having heard a rather different answer from the previous two stonecutters, the friend asked, “what do you mean?”. The third stonecutter placed the tool down, with glee replied, “Our King deserves a castle and the best one in the world. We will fly our flag over the castle, and that will make us proud of our king and land”. The decision was obvious; the third stonecutter was made the head of the stonecutters.

The third stonecutter was made the head because he had the big picture before him. He was passionate and interested in the well-being of others. What differentiated him from the rest was his outlook. A simple question “what are you doing?” identified the leadership trait in him. The second stonecutter was self-centred, none would want to follow him. The first stonecutter knew his job well but was short-sighted as far as the big picture was concerned, perhaps he would be a good player to have on the team. In life, we come across all three types of stonecutters taking up leadership positions. Imagine having each of them as your boss. The first stonecutter would be a taskmaster, focused on ticking boxes. Working for him will be stressful. The second will be toxic to the environment – find a new job. If you have the third stonecutter as the boss, every day will be a pleasure going to work.

Next time at work, ask yourself “what are you doing?” to find out whether you are cut-out to be a leader.

Reliability and Validity - What are they?

Two fundamental virtues to look for when using information in making decisions - they are reliability and validity. Both are closely related yet different in what they represent. Here is a simple explanation of the two using a common example

Consider a weighing machine that a doctor uses to weigh patients to decide the dosage of medicine to prescribe. The doctor needs the scale to record the exact weight every time patients stand on it. Let’s assume the scale sometimes registers weights that are less than the actual weight of patients and at other occasions more than the real weight, perhaps because of not being calibrated to start at 0 Kg each time it is used. A patient seeing the doctors at two different times would have two weights recorded on the scale. You can see how the scale can mislead the decisions the doctor makes concerning dosages for this patient. The scale is consistently failing to measure the correct weight of this patient. Once the doctor is aware of that, he or she would discard the scale, knowing it is no longer reliable. Reliability, therefore, is about consistency to record the exact measurement every time the scale is used.

Validity relates, to the measurement being what it is meant to be. In the case of the example used here, validity is recording the actual weight of the patient standing on the machine. The doctor on recognising the lack of calibration in the scale ensures the scale started at 0 Kg the next time it is used. Assuming all other things are working as they should, the scale would record weight that is valid. It can happen that the scale is off by 5 kg every time it is used, perhaps because of the spring not positioned correctly. The scale consistently produced the same weight each time the patient stands on it but is off by 5 kg. You can see the scale appears to be reliably but the weight recorded is not valid. Thus having reliability does not ensure validity to be assumed, they need to be separately established.   

Tool kit for examining reliability and validity

It is up to individuals to be fully satisfied with reliability and validity before relying on the information. Without being too scientific, reliability and validity can be assumed when similar results can be obtained from different sources within a given time frame.  Below are few questions to ask when examining reliability and validity, particularly when the information is from a small group of individuals as in the case of surveys, website visitors or customers who fill in a satisfaction form. The providers of the information must provide answers to all the questions and individuals must be satisfied with the answers. To help know if the answers are satisfactory, the nature of the answers deemed acceptable when it comes to reliability and validity is mentions against each question.

•       What is the margin of error reported? The margin of error places a range around the figure or estimate. A narrow range is indicative of precision. As the range gets wider, the precision becomes fuzzy, which should raise concerns.
•       What is the sampling technique used? The sample technique needs to be probability-based to allow generalisation of the findings.
•       What is the sample size? Results based on small samples (perhaps less than 500) should be treated with caution, particularly when results are reported for subgroups.
•       What is the sampling frame used to draw the sample? The sampling frame must relate to the target population of interest.
•       What is the methodology used? The methodology must support probability based sampling techniques.
•      How representative is the sample to the population? The results must include a demographic makeup of the sample, showing comparison to the standards such as the Census data.
•      What is the response rate? A low response rate is indicative of poorly conceived methodology been used.
•      How credible is the source? Assess the reputation of the organisation responsible for the information.
•      What is the wording of the question used to collect the information in the case of surveys? Question working must be established through scientific investigation. 

What makes you happy? Implication for individuals and policy makers

There is a general acceptance that “wellbeing” is a more comprehensive indicator of progress than traditionally used economic indicators. The challenge however is to estimate wellbeing in a precise manner. One approach is to ask people how happy they are (“Taken all together, how would you say things are these days? Would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?”). The assumption that “happiness is well being” set me on a path to investigate “happiness”. This research was carried out in collaboration with 3Di, a leading digital advertising sales network that operates one of the largest permission database in New Zealand. Over 1200 people from the 3Di's permission database were approached and asked to describe happiness in one word. They were then asked to state the three most important things that contributed to happiness.

Prior to discussing the results, I would like to add a note on the methodology that was used to collect the data. It is true that describing something like happiness in one word is difficult. However, the regular use of search engines to find information on the World Wide Web has trained us to do just that, that is, to come up with a word or set of words to convey what we want. After few tries we are successful in entering the precise word or set of words that gets us what we want. A similar approach was used in this study and almost everyone answered the question without any difficulty. Considering the range and nature of words collected it appears that they were based on the respondents’ personal context.

The top five descriptors of “Happiness” were contentment, family, satisfaction, love and peace (see in the Word Cloud 1). The word “wellbeing” was mentioned but very few times in comparison to the top five ones.

Word Cloud 1: Describe happiness in one word

Four of the words (contentment, satisfaction, love and peace) are abstract in nature; in contrast, family is a concrete entity. In considering the top five words together, it could be argued that “family” was the context for the four abstract entities. Thus it appears for many in New Zealand, happiness is centred on their family. This was confirmed in the responses given for the three most important things that contributed to happiness (see in Word Cloud 2).

Respondents were asked to indicate three most important things that contributed to happiness. The responses were ranked by its frequency to produce three lists corresponding to the three most important things. In the first list family and health ranked first and second. The remaining responses were emotions that are generally associated with happiness (see in Word Cloud 2). In considering family and health alongside the emotional variables, the implicit suggestion that could be drawn is that relationship and individuals are the building blocks of happiness. The presence of the qualifying adjective “good” suggests the recognition of quality in the relationships (e.g. “good family”, “a good wife”, “good relationship”).

Word Cloud 2: The most important thing that contribute to happiness

In the second list “family” still dominated, placed at the top of the rank (see Word Cloud 3). The qualifying adjective “good” continues to show up suggesting quality matters. “Friends” were mentioned more times which strengthens the suggestion that relationship is an important factor. It is worth mentioning in this second list, material objects like money, job, and financial status also gained prominence.

Word Cloud 3: The second most important thing that contributes to happiness

Money topped the third list. Family, friends and health were the other most frequently mentioned responses. Considering that family held the top position in the previous two lists and is the second most frequent response in the current list, money need to be seen in the context of family. This observation was evident in the words used to qualify money in many responses (e.g. having enough money, enough money to pay the bills, money for home and recreation).

Word Cloud 4: The third most important thing that contributes to happiness  

The observations made in this study have implications at both the individual and community level. At the individual level, relationship and health of individuals are fundamental to their happiness. Relationship building is a skill that is learnt through childhood, teenage years and young adulthood. Hence the formative years need to focus on acquiring the relationship building skills. It is now recognised that long term consequences of health are triggered right from conception, therefore the environment and habits from birth to adulthood are key factors of one’s health.

At the policy level the focus needs to be on developing and maintaining infrastructure to support families and their health. The inference about economy drawn from the position given to money is that economic activities ought to be directed at supporting a lifestyle that offers quality family life and good health.

Thank you for reading this posting so far, at this point I would like to solicit your help and contribution...please read on.

The results presented here are from my research carried out to discover happiness. My aim is to delineate the factors of happiness, for which I am requesting your help.  If the results presented resonate with you, I would like to hear how you would interpret them, either based on your own experience or with the knowledge of science behind the facts of life you may have. Please click on the comment link below to write your views, explanation and/or suggestions in the space below. Any help you can give me will be greatly appreciated. You can comment anonymously but if you are comfortable to identify yourself I would like to enter in to a discourse with you on happiness and perhaps share with you what I have discovered about happiness in my journey so far.  

Teach marketing using experiential education

One of the challenges of teaching marketing is demonstrating to students how it operates in the market place. We address this challenge by using experiential education in which students are taken placed in the big wild world. The video shows how we do that at the University of Otago.

Why businesses should be serious about Parento’s 80/20 principle?

The 80/20 principle was derived from the way wealth was distributed in Italy. Pareto the author of this principle observed that 80% of the country’s wealth was in the hand of 20% of the population. Subsequently this 80/20 split was noticed in all walks of life. For example, 20% of the inputs generated 80% of the output; 20% of the workers contributed to 80% of the production. 20% of the functions provided 80% of usage. Parento’s principle offers two suggestions, one is that any desired outcome can be produced by focusing on a small number of key entities and the second is that the key entities must be prioritised to receive most of the resources.

Parento’s principle just as well applies in business, that is, 20% of customers provide 80% of the business. The challenge for managers is to identify that core group of customers that contribute to 80% of the business and service them to their full satisfaction. Once this core group is identified, the principles of relationship marketing can be applied to develop and maintain ongoing relationship, which is the essence of Service Dominant Logic (SD Logic), a revisited concept of marketing. Furthermore, generating new business through retaining customers is less costly than acquiring new ones (click here for a second opinion), which is a further incentive for employing relationship marketing.

Most businesses tend to focus much of their resource on reaching the widest possible market. This is done for two possible reasons, one to attract customers (new & old) and two to derive the full value of money spent on advertisement. But if customers who have the potential to yield 80% of the revenue are in the business’ own database then the resource spent to reach the widest possible market is incorrectly targeted and could end up not yield the intended ROI.

The essence of relationship marketing is selling deep to existing customers. This is achieved by 1) having one-on-one interactions with customers, 2) creating marketing touch points to deliver additional value and 3) maintaining a high level of satisfaction. In addition to other infrastructure, businesses would need to set up an interactive website and access to a platform for conducting surveys. One-on-one interaction requires fronting up in person and the website and surveys to be used for generating data to inform the creation of touch-points specific to the business and customers.

Who is killing marketing

This posting was promoted by the allegations against marketing and marketers. For example, an article posted on the Harvard Business Review blog claimed marketing to be dead; a report by Fournaise stated that CEOs think marketers lack business credibility. My observation of SMEs and entrepreneurs is that marketing is the last thing on their mind. Here I present my defence to reveal the truth and nothing but the truth about marketing and marketers.

The Four-Ps ideology has dominated marketing since the industrial revolution. Its popularity, however, has reduced marketing to managing a set of promotional activities. Consequent to the overt focus on management, marketers are less involved in participating in making strategic decisions. What is alarming is that professionals from other functions are making marketing decisions. For example, the establishment of the World Wide Web saw the development of new forms of marketing, such as search engine marketing and social media marketing. The rules for these forms of marketing are dictated by IT professionals who lack marketing knowledge. 

Another reason why marketing is somewhat downgraded is the tasks required of marketers. In many organisations, they are employed to manage marketing activities such as promotions, advertisements, and social media campaigns. Incidentally, there is an industry now providing such marketing activities. Consequent to this industry’s aggressive marketing directed at organisations, many have outsourced marketing to outside agencies. Perhaps this could be the reason why many CEOs are questioning the relevance of their marketers (Fournaise 2011). 

In many organisations marketing decisions are made by separate teams. For example marketing strategies tends to be decided by the management and the implementation is outsourced. This leaves the marketing manager to act as a coordinator between the management and outside agencies. While marketing decisions are made by separate teams yet when things go wrong, the blame is conveniently put on the marketers. 

To answer the question by which this posting was started, to a great extent the structure of the organisation is responsible for what marketers can and cannot do. In a competitive market, organisations that don’t have a marketing team or restrict the role of marketers will hit the ceiling very soon. It is therefore up to the management and owners to decide what they want to make out of marketing. 

Marketing in the present time is a mindset that must permeate throughout the organisation. In a sense, everyone from the person manning the front desk to the CEO is a marketer. As such, marketing is more relevant now than ever before. Here is a fact about marketers; they have green fingers for growth. In good times marketers bring in the harvest; on troubled waters, they sail the boat to safe shores. Grow them to see the business grow. 

Is the process of SEO as simple as the search engines would like us to believe?

By

Siobhan Kelly

In answer to the question I posed, the quick answer is no. Let’s take Google’s search engine results ranking algorithm as an example. It is based on over 200 factors and is constantly being updated, meaning it is virtually impossible to gauge the exact ranking factors taken into account by Google and adapt a website accordingly. Although the search engine providers are not transparent regarding the nature of their ranking algorithms, they do give suggestions regarding SEO best practice that upon implementation, will supposedly give your website a fighting chance of ranking highly within the search engine results page (SERP). Due to restricted practitioner knowledge within this field and the private nature of search engine algorithms, the search engine providers hold on to the power to educate search engine optimisers and control their implementation of SEO.

In order to further knowledge in this area, through academic research I have attempted to develop a general process of SEO that could be followed by marketers implementing a search engine marketing campaign. In order to do this a number of white hat SEO techniques were applied to a start up market research website in order to test the effectiveness of individual techniques at improving page rank within the SERP.

The website has a number of different products within its portfolio: snapShuttle a survey tool, snapDemand a market analysis tool to estimate market demand, snapShare a market analysis tool which monitors brand performance , snapView a market research tool to provide an overview of the consumer within the market and snapAcademic a data collection tool for students and scholars. These product portfolio pages have been optimised using different techniques (meta-tag keywords, title tag keywords, adding keywords to copy, and have just begun backward linking) to test the consumer and search engine response.

What's interesting is that although the website has been indexed by Google, it still hasn't surface on Google's search engine results pages as of yet (has been over 1 month now). Google’s webmasters tool provided insights into how Google saw the pages. One observation was that the keywords that were used to create the web pages (from using Google Adwords own Keyword Tool) were not the ones that Google now perceived as main keywords upon indexing the pages. This is important to note as keywords form the building blocks of brand communication in digital marketing. Hence it is important for marketers to sync their keywords with Google.

Another observation that needs our consideration was the difference in the keyword density between the web pages used in this study and the web pages that feature at the top of the SERP. The top ranking webpages had an over 100% increase in keyword density, which in itself suggests more is better. However, the general search engine advice is against keyword stuffing. Perhaps further empirical research is needed in order to establish the optimal keyword density.

Results from my research thus far lead to the simple conclusion that SEO is in no way, shape or form a simple process with set rules and guidelines. It cannot be implemented on a one off occasion, but must be constantly refined and redeveloped as a consequence of regular algorithm updates. Furthermore, it is difficult to test the effectiveness of singular SEO techniques as in order to be effective in improving ranking many techniques must be implemented simultaneously.  All the same marketers cannot afford to ignore SEO as digital marketing gains prominence.