Jeffrey Henning

10:41 am: 2009 MR Dynamics

03:44 pm:

“The researcher’s paradox: you need to experiment yet adhere to the ‘science’. You need to think broadly yet often work within silos. You need to discuss implications but don’t stray from the data. You are comfortable with facts but expected to tell a story. You need to be fixed in purpose yet flexible on approach. You need deep specialization yet broad business acumen." - Chris Frank, vice president of B2B research in Global Marketplace Insights for American Express, "You Can't Be Brilliant Alone: How to Achieve Influence Without Authority through Effective Collaboration"

10:12 pm: Deviant Leadership for Researchers

At the AMA Marketing Research Conference, Greg Reid, CMO, YRC Worldwide, outlined eight principles for a different kind of leadership: deviant leadership.

A leader is anyone who can influence at least one person “to passionately embrace a new idea, follow a new direction or chart a new course”. Leaders do not need to be managers with direct reports.

Corporate culture works to eliminate deviant employees, to discourage deviant ideas and even to punish deviant behaviors and attitudes. “And of course, as a result, most large companies lose the opportunity to discover the future and get there first,” write Ryan Matthews and Watts Wacker in The Deviants Advantage. Deviant leaders have to struggle against that culture, since such leaders are “the source of all innovation, new ideas, services, personalities and ultimately new markets.”

The 8 principles of change for researchers to become deviant leaders:

1. Plan: Know the company’s strategy.
2. Position [within the organization] doesn’t matter. Employees need to consider how they can create change, how they can fulfill their responsibility to their employer to help it succeed.
3. Eliminate project mentality. Embrace the broader picture of what you are doing not the tactics of a project.
4. Profit: seek ways to improve the bottom line. Are you in the research business or your organization’s business?
5. Accelerate the Pace of change. Skate to wear the puck is going, don’t go where the ball has been. Deviant leaders discover the future and get there first.
6. Don’t succumb to the Pressure. Nothing produces more pressure than an office environment; have meetings outside the office. Exercise, pursue outside interests.
7. Develop partnerships. Build relationships with resources.
8. Perfection: Forget it. We’re not trying to do more with less; we’re trying to do lots more with lots less. Quantify the risks of not having perfect data, but go with the data you have.

10:11 am:

01:07 pm: Thomas Friedman: "Now is when we should be stapling a green card to the diploma of any foreign student who earns an advanced degree at any U.S. university, and we should be ending all H-1B visa restrictions on knowledge workers who want to come here. They would invent many more jobs than they would supplant. The world’s best brains are on sale. Let’s buy more!" http://snipr.com/l45s0

04:29 pm: Coworker:  It’s like aiming a phaser at someone, and they hold up a mirror and you get shot!
Me: Technically, you’re thinking of a laser.  A phaser would destroy the mirror.  But point taken.
Coworker: Aw, I thought you'd like that. I was trying to speak your language!
Me: Do you know Klingonese? Half the quadrant's learning it.

04:51 pm: One survey researcher fires his client
I had breakfast with a former coworker this morning who now has his own practice.  He simply had to share a maddening experience he recently had with a client, a Fortune 50 firm. He was doing a major, global survey of distribution partners, and at the last minute the client said they wanted to add three questions about their overall market share.  He objected, pointing out:

• The survey sample was not representative of the market and no conclusions could be drawn from the answers
• The survey was already too long
• The company already had regular tracking studies designed specifically to answer this very question.

He was overruled, told simply, "We need this data."  

To add insult to injury, when the study was done -- a major six-figure study with important strategic ramifications -- he was told to report the findings in no more than five slides.

After the project was over, he said he wouldn't do business with that group again. They were wasting their firm's time and money and were not the right fit for him.

04:28 pm: From The Economist article Tossed by a gale: 

09:23 am: George Colony: "Avoid the 'Dead Sea effect'.  As IT consultant Bruce Webster has noted, the Dead Sea has an inlet, but no outlet, so most of the pure water evaporates, leaving brine. Don't let your best people evaporate in a recession."

04:18 pm: "In the last recession, layoffs reached their peak in late 2001. But hiring didn't reach its lowest level until 2003, and that's when the job losses finally ended." - The jobs problem you don't know about