My leadership story

To tell my leadership, I want to share a true story with you. A group work that changed my leadership style, and made me more confident to be a leader.

It was the beginning of last semester, and with uncertainty, I took the course named Business Intelligence. This was a data analysis class, and we needed to use some software and have some data analysis background. As a marketing student, I never learned how to analyze data. I was concerned about whether I could handle this class. I also concerned about my group, which include two Indians, one American and me. I was so nervous because I never met a group which all group members had different culture background and language with me. What’s more, I never talked with any of them before this class. We just had 2 IT students who have data analysis background and other two, including me, were totally new to this area.

At the beginning, things went smoothly and similarly to other group works. However, as time went on, group work became tougher than we thought. The problem was, nobody wanted to be the leader and arrange an after class meeting. “Unfortunately”, I was the one who first sent emails to everyone, and then, automatically, I was the “unofficial leader” of this wracking group. Since we had totally different culture, education (two IT, one marketing, one MBA), and work experience background, leading this cross-culture group seemed more difficult and meant more efforts and responsibilities for me.

I was so anxious when I realized that I should organize the whole plan for this group. Although I have been a leader before, I didn’t take the whole leader’s responsibility. In some groups, I was able to rely on someone who can control the whole situation, like in my OBC500 group. In some groups, group members were eager to discuss difficulties we faced and made decisions together. But, in this group, there was nobody I could depend on. Actually, I was so diffident to be a leader, especially in such a group----everyone was older and had more experience than me. I was so afraid to make a decision and so afraid that group members would judge me if I did something wrong because I didn’t familiar with English language and the course material. Most of time, I just listened and practiced my sentences in my mind several times before I spoke out loud. This time, I realized that I need to change myself and make my own decisions, which was something I never had to do before. 

We faced a lot of problems on the first project. I hardly got all the group members together on time although we only had four people. I was the only one who appeared at the right time and the right place. My group members were often over 20 minutes late or even did not show up. I could understand if it happened once or twice, but it happened every meeting. I was the only one who arrived on time. I complained, and I thought they didn’t take the project seriously.  However, I never told them how I felt, since I didn’t want to be a “mean” person. After all, nobody “selected” me to be the leader, and all I did was assume the responsibilities. Since we hardly got all people together, we could hardly build a structure of our project. People who missed one meeting misunderstood what we discussed at that meeting and even disagreed with the decisions we made. Then we had to explain and change our structure again and again. It was so low efficient and we all worried about finishing this project on time. However, we didn’t make any improvement. With the deadline coming, our group was full of anxiety. Group members started to blame each other, including me. All I thought was why they couldn’t show up on time, why they couldn’t do more for our group instead of waiting to be told what to do, and why I needed to write another part after I finished my own part. One of my group members even copied a whole paragraph from an article for his part. Things became more and more uncontrollable.

The final report was so uncompleted. I felt so frustrated thinking about how to solve these problems. At the same time, I felt upset. I didn’t ask to be the leader, and I had little experience compared to them. Why did I have to be the leader and do more than they do? I was really confused. I complained to every friend about this group. I felt comforted when they expressed their disbelief. They said: “how can you survive in such a group?” Until one day, one of my friends looked at me seriously, and said: “Actually, you are the same as your group members. Even you, as a leader, don’t want to do more, how could your group members want to?”

I was shocked. I never thought about myself. Why did I never use my positive attitude and personality to influence others? Why didn’t I begin to improve instead of complaining? I thought of other leaders in a successful group. They really showed a positive attitude to group members and they always were the first one to make a contribution. I should lead this team just like them---showing a positive way not the negative. After realizing that, the block in my heart just broke down. I was full of energy, and prepared for my next project---a presentation. I arranged another meeting. The same result, just one person had time that day. We didn’t have time to wait. We needed to meet as soon as possible, even though just the two of us, who could only work on the business part due to the background limitation.

Before meeting, I made an outline of our presentation and sent it to everyone. I took preparing so seriously. I tried to think of it as my individual project with no body to depend on. I read the outline again and again until I felt it made sense and covered all the important points. Surprisingly, they all agreed on my idea. After my outline was approved, I felt more confident to explain my ideas, and after I spoke out once, the rest of explanation would be easier. The other group member and I tried our best to do whatever we could, and we finished 2 out of 3 questions, which was much more than I thought. We also found that after we began to work on the right route, we did it at really high efficiency. After I stop complaining and tried to get some feedback from them, I found they didn’t really want to be late. The bad traffic was the big problem. And also, they started to show eagerness to give more ideas and put more effort into our group work. Everything became more positive.

I started to put myself in their position. Maybe they had the same thought as me. They didn’t refuse to contribute. Maybe they just didn’t know how to start, just like me. I suspected that everybody wanted to avoid the work, and that was the reason why I saw everyone seemed so uninvolved. But once I put myself in their shoes, everything became better because I understood why they behaved the way they did.

For me, I can’t tell that I became a good leader after that group study. But now I have the confidence to be a real leader, and I can put my best effort into group work. Sometimes influence is not comes on purpose. If I do my best, I can influence to other people. And the group would be more positive because of me. I still tend to be a listener, and I still need to think twice before speaking, however, as long as I have the confidence and try to do whatever I can for our group, I can make an improvement and be a real good leader. 

Engaging Story- Mini Muffin

I used a animation website to build a short animation. This animation described one of our value proposition, save time for customers. Our target customers are middle high income level people who care about the quality and home-made taste, but have no time to mix dough to by themselves. 

Here is a example of our customers who have no time to make cookie for her child. The little boy wants to have hot cookies before sleep, but his mum is too tried and have no time to make them in the late night. She wants to give her little boy the good quality product and try her best to satisfy her child. However, she just has no time. 

Our product is high quality and home-made taste, at the same time, cost little time for them to cook. This product fully fulfill what this mum needs. 

(It's just a demo, I will make pivot if we decide to use animation to show our engaging story on final presentation.)

Here is the animation link:

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/13935348/mini-muffin

Market analysis for mini muffin

Demand:

Cookie industry faced with challenges in the past five years, but has a little increasing recently.  During recession, Americans had less income, and then they decrease the spending on unnecessary products, just like cookies, a kind of snack for entertainment time.  With the economy recovering, people have less time to cook or sit down and eat. Then they back to consider snack.

As the revenue changed through year shows beside, we can see that cookie industry went through a big increase in 2006, decrease %change in 2008, and will keep 2%-3% increase after 2012. Since the market size will not change dramatically, but the structure of the industry changed recently and will keep changing in the future. With more health-conscious, people tend to choose low sugar, low fat and more “green” cookies when they choose products.  

Market:

As picture shows below, we can see that the whole industry of cookies, crackers, and pasta account to 22.5 billion dollars in 2012, and the cookie industry take 27% of industry. So the total revenue of cookie in 2012 should be 6 billion dollars. And the grocery wholesalers account for 60% of the market in 2012. That’s one of the reasons why we chose grocery companies like wholefood and Trader Joe’s as our target customers.

The whole market is low concentrated. Top four companies take 32% revenue in 2012. And most of the companies in this market are small to middle companies. 46.1% of firms have less than 10 workers, and 84.2% of firms have less than 100 workers.

Realistic opportunities & competition:

The competition in this industry is high. The big two competitor in this industry is Kellogg Company, which takes 13.5% market share, and Kraft Food Co, which takes   13% market share. Recently, Kellogg started to buy other companies. In 2008, Kellogg acquired certain assets of IndyBake's business. IndyBake produced cookie, cracker and frozen dough products. By doing this, Kellogg step into frozen dough products, and would become to our direct competitor. There are also some other brand like “Lava Cookies” and “Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough”, which may not use the plastic tray, but have the same reheat need, fresh taste, and home-made taste cookies. All this companies should be our direct competitors. And other snack cookies and self-mix dough cookies companies are our indirect competitors. 

Although we have all those competitors, we have confidence that our product would be competitive. Since customers have less time to cook, they definitely have less time to mix dough. For people who still want self-mix taste and high quality product, they can simply put our dough into oven and make exactly what the same with the cookies mixed by themselves. Also, people care more about the quality of ingredient. Our chocolate chips are Nestlé’s and we will monitor all the ingredients recourses. Although we don’t produce law fat product right now, we believe that our high quality product is also attractive. 

Targeted selection of "winnable" market opportunities:

We chose Worcester and big Boston area as our first market, because we familiar with this market and have more network resource here. The target market we choose is the middle high level since those people may have high requirement about cookies but have no time to mix dough and clean kitchen after mix dough. We choose wholefood and Trader Joe’s because these grocery stores sell the health product and have the high end and “green” image in customers’ minds. We are the only company who produce plastic tray which saves customers’ time of cleaning kitchen, and we use the recycle material for trays which is environment friendly. So we think we have the opportunities to gain optimistic market share. 

Resource:

http://clients1.ibisworld.com/reports/us/industry/default.aspx?entid=265

Can company survive solely depending on inbound marketing?

With developing of internet, inbound marking are playing a more and more important role on customers. Customers tend to purchase a products not only based on advertising but also based on users feedback on social media. They are also trying to find information by themselves through search engine. Marketers noticed this change clearly. The number of marketers who think facebook is important to their business has increased 83% in last two years, and the average budget spent on company social media has nearly doubled in the last two years. 

For small companies, inbound marketing is definitely a good way to open market. It costs 62% less per lead comparing to traditional marketing. How could a small start up company compete with a big, well founded company through traditional marketing methods? The total revenue for a month might not support a five seconds TV ads. Inbound marketing provide small companies a new way to keep in touch with customers, provide product information to customers while interact with them. 

Although inbound marketing is a trend, I hold my opinion about that companies can survive just by inbound marketing in recent years. Once a company became bigger and got fame, it may want to get a higher percentage of profit. And as a result, it needs a faster buying cycle from customers. However, the process of building trust, interactive, and then achieve a purchase is too long by inbound marketing. Big companies need shorter buying cycle to enlarge their markets at a rate matched the companies' growth. 

What's more, we had to admit that there are still a lot of laggers who still show their loyalty on traditional marketing tools. For those products which target customers would contain these laggers, companies still need to use outbound marketing to get their attentions. 

So, I think inbound marketing would be the future trend. But most of companies can hardly depend solely on inbound marketing in recent years. 

Reference:

http://mashable.com/2011/10/30/inbound-outbound-marketing/

http://blog.pointclear.com/blog/bid/27681/Outbound-vs-Inbound-Marketing-What-s-the-Right-Lead-Generation-Mix

http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-studies/

Big companies’ dilemma

Thousand times I heard about big companies lose abilities to innovate successful, but I didn’t totally understand why these failures always happed. This article really gives me a reasonable explanation.

That’s true-- innovation is just not in big companies’ DNA. They need to give up something when they gain big success. When there is one more thing to considerate, there is less chance to achieve success. Too many things need to be considerate while a big company makes a whatever decision. It remind me about experiences in big companies, I had to wait for couple of weeks or even months for just a simple idea approved by managers, senior managers, directors, and executives. That would take some efforts to explain—they need to take so long time to make a small decision, don’t mention a brand new innovated product. To launch a new product, big company should persuade most of leaders. Once one leader hold negative attitude, it’s would be harder and more time consuming for them to make plan into real. But for a start-up company, it’s would only take a night from make a plan to take an action.

What’s more, just as the article said, the fatal reason why big companies can’t innovate is they put too much care on profit and recent customers. Big companies are already successful, so they won’t take any risk. Faced with innovated products, they always think about how to cut cost and make more profit. But a new product always won’t show high profitability at the beginning as mature products. And if big companies always focus on existing customer segment, maybe they will do a good job on customer relationship, but they will never expand customer segment in a new area.

I can’t help but wondering, how if a big company totally separates its innovation team or new product manages team and trade them just as a small start-up company? Will that big company gains the same successful as start-ups? Or at least has the same opportunities to gain success? However, I didn’t hear a successful example of that. How do you think about that?

Reference:
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/09/why_big_companies_cant_innovate.html

Pain and Gains_herbal hair dye

(http://hairstylesok.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html)

Lady gaga lay down on the bed, think about her hair style next day. She has tons of concerns recently, which ask her to change some amazing style to make fans crazy. Also, her surprising dress and hair style are the most attractive factors to make her top exposure. However, she had to spend more than three hours every time to change her hair color and she needs to change color once a week or more. It’s really time consuming, and she feels sitting on the chair without move for three hours is really painful. Also if somehow the color is not what she wanted, she needs to recolor and endure three hours torment again, after all, as a super star, keeping fashion is the first thing she needs to concern. What’s more, she starts to realize that her hair is becoming dry and easily bifurcate due to frequently colorize. She also heard that every hair dye in current market is more or less harmful to health. She is so worried that she will get some disease someday just because of the chemical compositions in hair dye.  

Our product can perfectly hit the needs for actors or actresses, like Lady Gaga, who need to change their hair style often, and fashion youth who would like to try some "crazy" color on their head often. Herbal temporary hair dye is a hair dye that is purely made by herbal and contains no harmful compositions. It also can be washed off by normal shampoo, which means you can try different color every day. You can simply dye hair by yourself in just 10 mins. Unlike some other hair dye, like O'real, this product is completely harmfulness for health and hair, and could easily dye on or wash off. Customers can try some "crazy" color that would never show up on other brands without worry about whether they would not like the color tomorrow or some health issues. 

PAINS	GAINS
often colorizing make hair dry	totally herbal made and no harmful compositions
risk of choosing wrong color	can be easily washed off and change new color; can choose some crazy color
time consuming	just take 10 mins and can be totally DIY
money cost	product cheap and DIY save service fee
bad for health	totally herbal made and no harmful compositions

A3—How a piece of paper solve mass problems

Every time when I face with problems, I feel totally mass. Too many things come together and I even cannot find out one solution. But when I calm down and think about the whole situation from the beginning, I find that things are becoming clear. I think Toyota give us a theory about how to solve problem from the deep inside. And I really like this way to analysis problem, making things standard, detail, clear and in time.

Standard

All problems showing on one A3 size page and making sure all problems are understand by everyone is really not an easy thing. However, Toyota figured out this way and changes every sentence into symbols, graphs and simple words. Those simplest express ways can make sure everyone, no matter engineer or officer, can understand where the problems are, how to solve them, and how efficiency they have to be.

Detail

Root cause analysis is the part I like most. The best way to find out suitable solution is to find out every detail factor which possible leads to this problem. I tried to put myself on Potter’s position at first, and I only can think out a few solutions which are not effective enough. However, when I saw the “root cause” A3 showed about current condition, I felt much more clearly about what to do next. Since it defined every possible cause so clearly and detailed, the solution it generated would be more relevant.

Clear

When we faced to a huge problem, one thing most possible happened is unclear responsible division, which means that each department would pass the buck to each other.  If we look at A3, however, we can see that each department which related to this problem needs to not only analysis the causes and proposed countermeasures, but also give take response during whole solute process.

In time

Just as Toyota said “no problem is a problem”, we need to always get prepared to every possible new problem.  A3 is a continuous improvement learning model. What’s more, its standard, detail, and clear characteristics make further problem solving easy.

Reference:

Toyota's Secret: The A3 Report, John Shook, http://www.thequalityportal.com/notes/A3Shook.pdf