December 2009

DANGER: your “dance confidence” maybe falling

by philhill on December 16, 2009 · 0 comments

Beware: your dance confidence is in danger

Beware: your dance confidence is in danger

I was listening to BBC radio yesterday, getting in holiday mode, and I was flabbergasted to learn that my propensity to want to dance is in it’s descendancy. Apparently, my confidence  in shuffling my feet and swinging my hips- aka my “dance confidence” – is at a low and it’s going to get worse. All is not lost, the minute i hit 65, i transform back into JT and my life becomes an all round Saturday Night Fever. Naturally, these revelations led me to ask, how is going to affect my business because obviously it has to – think of the impact on VC pitches or customer presentations.

Research conducted by Dr Peter Lovatt from the University’s School of Psychology on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme’s website asked people to imagine they were at a party dancing with other people and then asked them to rate how good a dancer they thought they were compared with the average person of their own age and gender.

Almost 14,000 people filled in the Dance Style Questionnaire and the results show that although up to the age of 16, men lack confidence in their dance moves, after that their dance confidence rises steadily with men over the age of 65 having higher ratings than men between the ages of 55 and 60.

Women, on the other hand display immense confidence up to the age of 16, experience a drop between then and 20, and then confidence levels rise steadily up to 35 and then drop steadily between 55 and 65.

We all remember Elaine

We all remember Elaine

Dr Lovatt, who conducted this research as a follow-up to conducting an experiment into the links between genes, physical attraction and dance, believes that the discrepancy in dance confidence between men and women lies in their genetic make-up.

“Up to the age of 15 or 16, girls quite often validate their moves through dance classes which give them more confidence than boys when it comes to dancing,” said Dr Lovatt. “Then after 16, they improvise and show their hormonal and genetic make-up when they dance. Men seem to be more comfortable in their genetic make-up and in tune with their natural biorhythms and therefore feel more confident when they dance.”

The next question that Dr Lovatt wants to answer is “Why do you dance?” or possibly more pointedly “Why don’t you dance?”

“We need to know if people’s reasons for dancing change as they get older,” he said. “We know despite our research findings that lots of men don’t dance and we wonder why this is. It may be that they perceive it as a non-macho activity and if this is the case, we need to find ways to introduce it as a fun vital health measure.”

A guide of how to grow your small business by making small changes.

by philhill on December 7, 2009 · 0 comments

When mini is good

When "mini" is good

I’m immersed in the throws of getting Openstudy (@openstudy) out the door and it makes me realize, once again, how important it is to work the smart and effective way with a limited amount of resources – especially, when you’re in major start-up mode. We subscribe to the Agile development methodology for building  a product, which lets us get things done quickly in small bite sized pieces. While this is a good way to get a product out the door quickly, the approach is also remarkably applicable to running a small business.

The essence of this approach, is that your business will develop and grow through an ongoing series of mini-changes, not one big step change or an all in one redesign. Since these changes are driven by your customer requests and involve all your company, marvelous things will start happening.

If you take a blue print for this process – I like the way the guys at Aardvark lay it out – you can easily see how this can be applied more broadly to a small business (you might want to read through the Aardvark blog post on this topic to get a better reference point). Here’s what it looks like . . .

If you overlay this thinking onto the more general aspects of a small business you get the following.

  • Learn from users – Choose a part of your business you want to improve. Talk to your customers in a structured and detailed way. Set up an interview time. What do they think? Gather ongoing feedback  from Twitter, blogs, people in your company etc, the key word here is ‘learn’.
  • Design – take the what you’ve learned and design a very narrow and well defined response (involve your whole team). This may take the shape of a new twist on an existing product -or improving the way your do something, like adding a new way to respond to customer complaints. Set up a smaller group responsible for working out the details, they should come up with some alternative options and settle on one. Sketch things out, no design agencies needed, this is down and dirty.
  • Sanity check with users – time to take your ideas back to your customers. Try and ‘simulate’ the solution you have worked out in your Design and see how people react. Make this down and dirty, you’ll still need to refine it so dont spend too much time on ‘making it pretty’ at this stage.
  • Design Review with Team – take what you have found back to the team and make refinements.

Now you need to make it happen . . .

  • Implementation notes – the team responsible for implementing the new change, prioritizes it in the context of the changes from the last few weeks that are already being worked on and creates some brief implementation notes. Since everyone, had been involved in the process there’s no big surprises or need to ‘educate’ people on what is being done.
  • Implement – Push out the changes and let your customers know what you have done. Start gathering their feedback and continue the learning cycle.

Remember, this process is continually happening within your business. Positive change comes from continually making small refinements, derived by listening to your customers and involving everyone in your company.