Management strategies: human resources advice for emerging businesses

Black Enterprise, June, 1992 by Iris Randall

Cautious: Cynthia is more complex. She is an aanlytical, logical, strategic thinker who is most interest in putting out a quality product. She likes to see things in writing and although she finds it difficult to make hast decisions, when she does make a decision it is usually the right one. Her work is quality work. Any criticism of her work is often taken as personal criticism. Make sure that your praise is logical, and let her know exactly why the praise is being given. Be careful with criticism. Take your time and be patient when you explain it to her; it is important to ask for her input on how to improve performance.

Generating The Big Idea

You never know where the next big business builder will come from. Consider Post-it notes. This idea used a product that had been discovered years earlier and written off as a mistake.

One Sunday, Art Fry, a researcher in product develoopment at 3M, was singing in the choir as usual, marking pages in his hymnal with slips of paper, when he remembered an unusual adhesive that had been discovered by another 3M scientist, Dr. Spencer Silver. Thinking that a "temporarily permanent" bookmark might be the ideal use for Silver's product, Fry took advantage of the 3M "bootlegging" policy, which allows scientists to spend up to 15% of their work time on projects of their own choosing. And innovation resulted in a product that the market now finds indispensable.

How do you get such ideas onto the table or into a discussion? In Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles (HarperPerennial, $10.95 paperback), Peter F. Ducker writes that there are often overlooked sources of innovation within a company. New ideas can come from unexpected events or results which at first may be seen as a problem. Customer complaints of having to wait too long for glasses led to one-hour stores like Lenscrafters.

Drucker also mentions incongruities. When something does not make sense, it usually indicates that an important change has yet to be recognized. In 1886, for example, a man named David McConnell gave away vials of fragrance to women who purchased books. Soon women were clamoring for the perfume. An astute marketer, he added a line of fragnace and the California Perfume Co. (later to be named Avon Products) was born.

"We still tell the story of David McConnell," says Evette Beckett, Director of Fragrance Marketing for Avon products Inc. U.S. Division." Our beauty heritage continues today, along with the need to be responsive to our consumer."

To allow incongruities to play a part in your business, don't be so focused on selling your product that you close your eyes to other opportunities. Look for trends, too. These are easily identifiable and often relate to demographics. For example, by the year 2010, the average age of the work force will be 29. Perhaps you can brainstorm innovative ideas that will help your company reach that maturing population.

To get your employees to speak their minds and offer innovative ideas, start by assigning responsibility for monitoring each of these three areas: unexpected events, incongruities and needs based on trends.