Having used, and been unimpressed by, some online presentation tools in the past I decided to try something new. Having recently learnt about SlideRocket I figured that importing my presentation into SlideRocket would be a good way to put the application through its paces.

As you can see the results are quite good. The free version was easy to sign up to and the import process handled the animations and transitions in the original PowerPoint pretty well. There were some minor fidelity issues, but nothing that couldn’t be sorted within a couple of minutes editing. All told I was able to sign up, take the interactive tour, import and tweak the presentation in under ten minutes. I was pretty impressed.

In addition to standard presentation tools SlideRocket offers some interesting looking analytical features in the professional version such as who is looking at your slides and how long people are spending on each slide. One question I couldn’t find answered in my brief excursion on the site though is how well such analytical data can be shared with other analysis tools for further investigation.

Update: According to SlideRocket you can export your analytics as CSV files:

@BenMeadowcroft you can export analytics from SlideRocket as CSV files and then do with them what you like. :)

— SlideRocket (@SlideRocket) February 17, 2012

1. Focus on the strategy not just on the financials.
2. Depend on operational excellence

Focus on the Strategy

One of our failings was that when our strategy was going well we were tempted to deviate from our strategy in an effort to capitalize on the strength we had built up in the market. For example at one point with our low cost base we were operating profitably in one market without competition who could undercut us without them losing money. We took advantage of this to drive out competitors. We then decided to raise prices substantially only for a new competitor entered the market and undercut us. We came back into the market with aggressive, but profitable, prices and won back our market share. Later in the game this competitor responded by lowering their prices below cost in an effort to damage us financially. If we had not seceded this market by raising our prices and instead stuck with our strategy I think it would have made the market less attractive to others and prevented some of the aggressive moves that occurred.

Operational Excellence

One of the keys of our strategy in the game was to invest in quality and operational efficiency. We tried to lead the industry on capacity and so we could leverage our fixed costs and cumulative quality investments over a larger number of products, thus lowering our variable costs per item and keeping a low cost base. Ensuring our operational decisions were always aligned with our strategy allowed us to be really efficient and operate at levels other companies couldn’t approach cost wise.

Some of my favorite adverts are those that are able tap into our emotions in order to effect a change in our behavior. The “Dear 16 year old me” social media advert by the David Cornfield Melanoma Fund is one that I really like. A skillful blend of poignancy and humor delivers a powerful message to it’s target audience with a clear call to action. I also really like that the advice is coming from the “older self”, this reference group is far more influential to the target than an authority figure.

This second advert is again targeting people’s emotions but with a very different style. The Think! campaign aims to change behavior when it comes ot speeding. I like how this advert helps viewers to picture themselves and imagine their emotional response to the situation. This advert certainly grabbed my attention and made me more aware of my driving.

Advertising that connects with us emotionally is more effective than advertising that promotes product features. We tend to make our decisions emotionally and then justify them rationally to ourselves later. Creating an emotional advert is much more difficult than creating a feature or usage based advert and can backfire if the emotions are not consistent with people’s existing perception of a brand. The adverts in this post are relatively easy to tie to our emotions because of the subject matter. My next post will cover some examples of how business advertising can successfully leverage emotions in its messaging.

Do you have a favorite emotion based advert?

Finding a Neighbourhood

So you know where you’ll be working but you don’t know where to live yet? There are often several choices but how do you narrow them down? I have found the city-data.com forums valuable for getting people’s opinions about areas where they live.

Getting people’s opinions is useful but there are a couple of other tools that I’d recommend to narrow down where you want to live. SpotCrime provides an easy way of viewing recent incidents reported to the police in a given area. Knowing that there are clusters of crimes on certain streets can help you to know that you should be avoiding particular areas. Another useful website is greatschools.org. This site lets you know which schools serve the areas you are looking into and how well they rate compared to each other.

Finding a Rental

So now you’ve found a neighborhood you like it’s time to find a place to live. I’m not planning on buying a house so I’ve been looking for somewhere to rent. Everyone already knows about craigslist but one tool I’ve found really useful is padmapper. As a visual thinker being able to view a map of the neighborhood with all the available rentals visible is really useful.

Organizing the Move

After figuring out where you are going it’s time to figure out how you’re going to get there. I’ve not found any good resources that help you to select moving companies to assist with the move. Are there any you would recommend?

One of my favorite adverts from 2011 is the Bold Choice advert for Jim Beam. I was reminded of this advert as I am facing some career choices of my own at the moment. The message that “the choices we make, and the ones we don’t, become you” certainly hits home when contemplating a dramatic change. When making these changes we look to the future and try to see what impact the choices will make on our lives.

One of the questions I have often been asked in interviews and during reviews revolves around this idea of seeing yourself in the future: “where do you see yourself in 5 years?” For me knowing the answer to this question has always been a bit vague, personally I don’t find motivation in considering what destination I may achieve after 5 years but what experiences I’ll gain and what impact I’ll be able to make over the next 5 years.

Why not focus on the journey and not the destination?

Here’s the video [1 min, 30 seconds] of Matthew Gardiner, Chief Executive of Trafford Housing Trust talking about working with Mobsyoft and the RentSense product.

In closing here’s a quote from Sam Walton, another visionary who understood the importance of serving customers:

There is only one boss. The customer.
And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down,
simply by spending his money somewhere else.
—Sam Walton

1. Routine
2. Imagination
3. Reasoning

At the Routine level decision making is requires little effort as decisions are typically arrived at by default in this situation. At the Imagination level the decision making requires more effort and the ability to see oneself in the opponents position, it is here that the majority of decision making in business is made due to the additional costs of moving to the next level of decision making, Reasoning. Interestingly moving from the imagination level to the reasoning level may not yield better results, especially if the computational complexity introduced is prone to error or bias.

Determining at what level to make a decision is a real skill. I have read a couple of contrasting books on this subject, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and Think by Michael LeGault. It is the decision, whether to approach a decision with the intuitive thinking promoted by Gladwell or the critical thinking promoted by LeGault, that is of interest to me. In the end I guess it comes down to situational factors, what is the timeframe for the decision, the relative costs, and ability to change a decision when more information is known.

Well interview season is coming up for me as I look for an internship this summer. One thing I’ve learnt from my HR class last semester was that behavioral interviews were one of the most accurate way of assessing future performance. So I’ve been busy practicing to be a good interviewee, it’s a different mindset than I had approaching it from the other side of the table as a hiring manager!