Business and finance
Master Chefs of IT serve up tantalising smorgasbord of ideas
26 January 2022 by Rebecca in Business and finance
Since its inception, the IT department has largely been relegated to a reactive, functional role servicing the needs of the organisation. But recently IT has made its way up from the basement and its executives – CIOs, CTOs, CDOs – now have strategic roles, with digital technology instrumental in business development, customer relationships and product innovation. This change has been accelerated by the pandemic, as businesses realise the potential IT-led solutions have to transform the workplace, creating virtual offices, enhancing customer–supplier relationships and streamlining processes.
Now CIONET, the world’s leading organisation for corporate digital leaders, has brought the latest thinking on information technology together in a new book authored by IT expert Roger Camrass, CIONET Cookbook: Recipes for digital success. This is a business book with a difference: instead of the customary text book illustrated with graphs and charts, readers are presented with a highly illustrated coffee-table book. CIONET Cookbook takes the analogy of a Michelin-starred restaurant and applies it to business: where a prestigious restaurant has a dynamic and creative Master Chef, the successful business of today must be led by a CIO with vision and energy. According to the book’s introduction: “Traditional enterprises face a new challenge: not just surviving, but thriving in the digital age. As the executives responsible for leading business technology, CIOs will need to meet this challenge head-on.”
The book presents its ideas in three main sections, analysing what a top-ranking digitally led business looks like, what tools make up the best IT kitchens and what is expected of IT Master Chefs and their teams. These ideas are expanded through recipes for success from 25 of today’s most influential IT leaders, and as with all the best cookbooks the recipes are illustrated with tantalising colour photography.
Featured CIOs have been instrumental in the success of global businesses from industries as diverse as food, communications, logistics and pharmaceuticals. While the businesses operate in vastly different areas, all the interviewed digital leaders are keen to point out how significantly the role of IT has changed. Tarun Kohli of reinsurance company Swiss Re sums it up neatly when he says: “We don’t need a digital strategy for business, we need a business strategy for a digital future.” This is not a technology manual but rather a guide to implementing change in business. Common themes throughout the book involve the ideas of openness and the importance of listening, with CIOs agreeing that it is crucial to get buy-in from customers, stakeholders and employees if any strategy is to succeed. As Cindy Hoots, CDO/CIO of AstraZeneca says, “When you focus on the people, you will get the results.”
This beautifully presented book will not only inspire today’s IT executives and those of the future but also make a handsome addition to their office desks.
About CIONET
With the largest membership of corporate digital leaders across Europe, Latin America, the US and Australia, CIONET’s mission is to help IT executives become both more at ease and more successful in their jobs so they do not merely keep up with change but ultimately define it.
About lead author Roger Camrass
A pioneer of today’s internet at MIT in the early seventies, Roger has spent over fifty years helping global corporations harness the power of digital technologies. He is now director of research for CIONET International.
CIONET Cookbook is published by Infinite Ideas on 28 January 2022.
ISBN: 9781913022303, hb, full colour, 210 x 210 mm, 160pp, rrp £40.
Also available as an eBook.
Review copies available from marketing@infideas.com; 07802 443957
Buy CIONET Cookbook
Secrets from inside the world of luxury wine
16 September 2019 by Rebecca in Business and finance, Lifestyle, Wine and spirits
Wine has been collected by enthusiasts for centuries and today luxury wine is a growing market, yet little has been written explaining how a wine business can attain a coveted position among the world’s luxury brands.
Enter Peter Yeung and Liz Thach MW. Both have worked in the world of luxury wine for a number of years, he as a strategic marketing consultant to several high-end Californian wine producers and she as a professor of both wine and management. Recognizing the need for serious analysis of this subject they have pooled their expertise to write what is destined to become the go-to book for anybody working within the world of luxury wine.
In Luxury Wine Marketing the pair present their own unique research examining the size of the market and the profile of the customer base. From this they go on to explain every stage in the process of creating, launching and maintaining a luxury brand, from crafting the product, though pricing and packaging to hiring the right people and managing client relationships.
But luxury wine marketing is about far more than selling product, regardless of how high its quality may be. It is about creating a world, a narrative, around a brand to draw people towards it. Peter and Liz point out that “It is usually the story of the wine brand that captures the attention and can lead to a desire for more wine and, eventually, luxury wine. It is critical that the story emphasize what is unique about the wine, as well as provide the consumer with a sense of pleasure and privilege.” What that story is will vary from brand to brand, from the quiet focus on craftsmanship and heritage of some top Burgundy estates to relatively new Californian producers such as Screaming Eagle, which has traded on scarcity and a certain amount of mystery to create a cult following that has seen the average price of its wines increase in price from $50 to $3,000 per bottle in under 25 years.
It is perhaps through the case studies of high-profile wine brands that we learn the most about the world of luxury wine, gaining tantalizing glimpses into this privileged environment. Learning that Penfolds’ limited edition ‘Ampoule’ (of which only 12 were made) can only be opened by a senior winemaker, flown to the customer with a special tool, will provoke a variety of reactions among readers. What comes across above all though is the clarity of vision and consistent quality of product that all these brands share. This book makes invaluable reading for any company with aspirations within this market.
About the authors
Peter Yeung is a leading wine business consultant. He was previously Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at Kosta Browne Winery and Realm Cellars, both in California, where he developed and executed strategic marketing plans, and a senior consultant at McKinsey & Company. He holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and a BA in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr Liz Thach MW is the Distinguished Professor of Wine and Management at Sonoma State University where she teaches on both the undergraduate and Wine MBA programs. She is an award-winning author who has published over 150 articles and eight wine books. Thach holds a PhD. from Texas A&M. She also works as a wine judge in various competitions, and has served on many non-profit wine boards. She became a Master of Wine in 2011.
Luxury Wine Marketing is published by Infinite Ideas on 23 September 2019.
ISBN: 9781913022044, hb, rrp £50/$69.95, 234 x 156mm, 300pp, b/w figures.
Also available as an eBook.
Review copies available from marketing@infideas.com; 07802 443957
Technology vs the art of being human
6 April 2017 by Rebecca in Business and finance, Lifestyle
By Kate Cook, author of Kate Cook’s Wellness Guide
Most businesses are eager to be at the cutting edge of the technology revolution and quite rightly – falling over themselves to be hyperconnected, ahead of the trends. There are downsides to the worldwide web but there are very positive up sides too. Most of the nutritional research papers I read to update my body of knowledge I obtain through web digging – something that would have been quite impossible a few years ago. It enables me to be very nimble in my uptake of the latest research, something that chancing on a book, or waiting for a published journal to appear on my desk made it impossible to do a few years back. I am also very grateful that we are able to connect with like-minded people across the globe, of course that has its downside too, but used in the right way we are able to build communities of people who can generously help each other.
But in relying on tech too much are we in danger of forgetting what it is to be human? We need to remember to solve business problems in a human way, not merely focus on box-ticking, or allow a computer to dominate our decision making. We are more and more often letting machines take over, and becoming distanced from what makes us human. One area where this really impacts our lives is in the world of food. Eating is one of the crucial things that makes us human and what we eat makes us either dynamic, engaged, happy, healthful humans or depressed, demotivated, sick humanoids. But we have become increasingly distanced from the real food that nurtures our bodies, favouring instead manufactured foods and convenience eating.
When we eat conveniently, we fuel our bodies with food-like imitations, where life, energy and essence have been replaced by synthetic sensations. These foods are designed to look, smell and taste appealing but are largely devoid of the energy and nutrition that come from eating food grown by the sun, full of the life-giving micronutrients that power our energy output. When we replace real food, of the sort our ancestors would recognise, with these chemical concoctions, we reduce our ability to function as human and lay ourselves open to the possibility of a whole host of minor, and not so minor, ailments; from tiredness to type 2 diabetes and beyond.
As employers we know how important it is to maintain our machinery, our hardware and software, but what about our human resources – how many of us are making sure our people have what they need to function optimally? For example, studies suggest that there is an association between obesity and lower productivity at work -and if that tide doesn’t turn then we may find that we are unable to find employees fit enough to work. One study estimated that lost productivity time (LPT) costs the US economy $42.29 billion annually. This was thought to be a conservative figure because studies which use BMI data rely on self-reported weight, which is often understated. The estimate also does not include the costs of recruiting and training new staff and the impact on co-workers’ productivity.1 A study of 15,000 people in the US and UK found that employees with poor nutritional balance reported 11% lower productivity than healthier colleagues.2 Surely it is time to pay attention this powerful connection. Though the focus on nutrition and its impact on the workplace has, to date, mostly been on the link between poor diet and chronic disease and obesity (the long term impact) it stands to reason that poor diet will also have a short term impact in terms of energy and productivity.
The health of our employees is key to our business success – yet a large proportion of our human resource is sick. How can we restore it back to full, engaged, dynamic power? Through the power of real food.
Kate Cook’s Wellness Guide is available free for Kindle for a limited time. Download the book here.
- Reilly, Sally, ‘Eating the Profits.’ Personnel Today, 4 July 2006: 26.
- ProQuest online article, 6 Aug. 2009.
Game of Thrones is full of business strategy – if you know where to look
3 May 2016 by Rebecca in Business and finance, Entertainment, Game of Thrones on Business
As our winter draws (reluctantly) to a close we plunge once more into a world where winter is coming, and brings with it sex, intrigue, swordfights, skulduggery and dragons. Unless (or possibly even if) you’ve been living on a wi-fi free desert island for the last five years you will realise we are talking about Game of Thrones, season 6 of which reached our screens this month. The programme makers have been teasing us for several months with what we do and don’t know; what may or may not have happened (yes, we’re talking Jon Snow here). One trailer had Bran declaring that ‘they have no idea what is going to happen’, something that over the years has proven true time and again. We knew the programme was fabulous entertainment right from the start of Season 1 but what we didn’t realise until Ned Stark lost his head was that in this series anything can happen. Bad things will happen to good people, heroes will die, villains will prosper and at no point will we feel this world is safe.
Game of Thrones is possibly the most widely discussed programme on television. With only ten episodes per season it is on our screens for little more than two months out of every year, yet the internet is alive year round with articles on the characters, photographic memes and speculation regarding what’s going to happen next. Why has this programme so inspired us? It has to be in the quality of the storytelling. Compelling characters, a mysterious universe that not even the characters who live in it understand (people thought dragons had died out years ago and nobody believed the white walkers were anything but a myth) and events that frequently extend beyond the protagonists’ control have us perpetually on the edge of our seat. Now, what if we could get people this excited about business?
Business is the dynamic force that shapes our economies and our lives. It’s crucial to the survival of western society as we know it. Business is about progress, wealth creation and opportunity. It should be exciting – fun, even – yet it is frequently discussed and taught in dry and theoretical tomes or through the clumsy medium of presentations reliant on screens of charts and bullet lists. You might not remember every single intricate detail of what happened in the last five seasons of Game of Thrones but we bet you could easily give a rundown of the key highlights. But how much of the last business seminar you attended can you remember? How much of it did you go home and relate to your family or discuss with your friends? How many memes did it generate?
So by bringing the worlds of business and Game of Thrones together we hoped that we could imbue business theory with some of the excitement we feel when we watch the series. Once you take away the dragons and swordfights you start to see more similarities than differences. This strange medieval fantasy kingdom may not look a lot like our world but a lot of its essential ingredients – ambition, deceit, bravery, folly, triumph, disaster – feature in many a news story in the business press. Here are just a few key places where Game of Thrones and business touch.
Nice guys finish last: In the Game of Thrones universe it is not sufficient to be morally right like Ned Stark and his family; one must also be a clever – and lucky – player of the game. The same can be said for business: in this high-stakes world success is not granted simply to those with the best ideas, those who entered the market first or even those who put in the most work. Business, like Game of Thrones, is full of surprises and those who make it to the top do so by not only staying one step ahead of the game but learning to control it rather than having the game play them. Lose focus even momentarily and you lose your advantage. This does not mean you have to be an unprincipled swine to get ahead: the dastardly Petyr Baelish is the exemplary game-player but Daenerys too has demonstrated strategic skill while maintaining a strong moral code.
It’s not what you know but who you know: In Game of Thrones that also includes what you know about them, and how you use it. In business it usually means networking rather than blackmail (though of course that’s not unheard of either). Cersei, Lord Varys and Petyr Baelish all operate networks of people to bring them intelligence on other game players and help them leverage their strategic advantage. So vast is Varys’ network in fact that he is nicknamed the Spider. We all know we need to network more but often only think of it when we need something (a recommendation, a job). But networking is a daily business – Ned Stark left it too late to try to cultivate relationships, staying holed up in Winterfell after the war, and look how well that turned out for him.
You know nothing: Well all right, not nothing, but you rarely have all the information and skills you need to succeed entirely solo. Which is why you need to develop a great team around you. Daenerys has many queenly attributes but she could not have got where she is now without Jorah’s strategic advice, Daario’s muscle, Missandei’s cultural knowledge, or her dragons. A weak spot left unguarded provides an advantage for a rival. Which is why truly successful individuals know themselves well enough to pinpoint their weaknesses and take steps to do something about it.
You win or you die: If you want to succeed you have to be prepared to fail too. But that need not mean taking foolish risks, plunging into the unknown and hoping for the best. Instead you need to follow Baelish’s example and learn how to take calculated risks. Petyr Baelish has been the invisible hand, influencing events, even orchestrating the death of John Arryn, which began the war of the five kings. But at no point has he got those hands truly dirty. He’s always kept at a safe remove from the action – we know he was behind Joffrey’s murder but nobody in the world of the programme could connect him to it. His options are still open and he can pull away from a plan at any time. If you are patient and take incremental, small risks you stand a much better chance of achieving your goals than if, like Renly, Robb or Viserys you insist on going in all guns blazing.
Once you start seeing similarities between Game of Thrones and business it is hard to stop. Next time you have to give a business seminar why not throw in a few examples – it’s almost certain to get you more notice than yet another pie chart, spreadsheet or bullet list.
Game of Thrones on Business by Tim Phillips and Rebecca Clare is available to buy. To be in with a chance to win a free copy, tweet us your top business tip from the show to @Infinite_Ideas
Alice in strategy land by Kate M. Santon can help improve your business
1 April 2016 by Catherine Holdsworth in Business and finance
Why replacing the rulebook with a 150-year-old pair of novels can improve your business strategy
Rules abound in our working lives. Many people follow these rules unquestioningly, adhering to procedures, attending meetings and handing in reports. But are the long accepted ways of conducting business always the best? Are these rules and procedures helping or hindering our organizations?
Perhaps it’s time for business leaders to take another look at how they strategize and run their businesses. A new book suggests we might turn to an unexpected source when it comes to reinventing our working lives. In Alice in strategy land Kate M. Santon suggests taking a sideways view – going down the rabbit hole could be a useful way of improving business strategy. When Alice stepped through Lewis Carroll’s looking-glass into the surreal world beyond it made her question all her assumptions about the way the world worked. And by taking some advice from Carroll’s array of eccentric characters Santon suggests we can open our minds to new ways of practising business.
Much like Alice’s path across Wonderland, business strategies can be dominated by rules, riddles and dead ends. We don’t always think about what we do, tasks can become monotonous, and there’s nothing quite like another (Mad Hatter’s) meeting to dampen the spirits. Like the White Knight, who’s had ‘plenty of practice’ at falling off his horse but never considered changing his approach to achieve a more positive outcome, we rarely stop to reconsider our assumptions and methodology.
While a 150-year-old book by an Oxford Don may not be the most logical place to look for business advice Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass were never about logic.
So what lessons do the books have when it comes to changing our business routines? Some of Santon’s suggestions include:
- Take a pragmatic approach to meetings. The Mad Hatter’s tea party seemed to have all the usual suspects but no direction or purpose. If this resonates with you, think about how you can shake up meetings to get real results. Who really needs to be there, what are you hoping to achieve? Business leaders can learn from innovative companies like Hootsuite, which imposes meeting-free days and keeps meetings as short as possible.
- Rethink your online presence. Pinterest, one of the Internet’s most popular websites, has become hugely profitable precisely because it ripped up the business rulebook and did things the way it wanted to do them: creating the infinite scroll, reducing advertising and doing away with ranking so that it is more of a community. As Alice sees time and again rules are there to be broken.
- Sod the competition. Running with the Red Queen can be incredibly exhausting, not to mention fruitless. If you’re desperate to beat your competitors at their own game, innovation will slow down. You will never get ahead simply by trying to keep up. What do you think you should be doing?
- Reject the ‘blame and shame’ culture. ‘Sentence first – verdict afterwards’ is not just common in Wonderland. Just as the Red Queen’s readiness to shout ‘Off with their heads’ made her a volatile leader, arrogant management can damage an organization.
The other crucial thing we learn from Alice in strategy land is that business should be fun. No, seriously! Leaders who want their teams to come to work sporting Cheshire-cat grins need to foster an atmosphere in which people can be creative. Developing a creative curiosity, says Santon, ‘can help everyone when it comes to coping with today’s working world.’
Alice in strategy land is available now and can be purchased here.
Career lessons from The Walking Dead: be adaptable
16 March 2016 by Catherine Holdsworth in Business and finance, Entertainment, Working With The Walking Dead
Rick, Morgan and the other characters who have lasted share in common an ability to adjust to change; to understand that the important thing is to work with the world as it is now not as it used to be or as they wish it could be again. Rick gets into the swing of the new world very quickly, from waking up, dazed, in the hospital to battling his way out of Atlanta in only a few days. Morgan too was quick to adapt. While his wife was looking to the past – grabbing the photo albums – he was preparing himself for the apparent present and the likely future. He had already worked out what the world was like at that time and was doing what was needed to cope with it, whereas she was just thinking of what she would miss from the past, or need when the current situation reverted to ‘normal’.
Many fields, such as law, accountancy and medicine require that practitioners keep up to date with changing processes, legislation or methodology. It should be a requirement for you, too, if you want to get ahead. Change is inevitable: once you have accepted that you can begin to move forward.
Ask what is changing
In The Walking Dead the changes are both catastrophic and sudden. Nobody really had time to prepare for the new reality or take steps to avoid it. As we see in the back story show, Fear The Walking Dead, a problem that started small rapidly escalated as the authorities misunderstood both the problem itself and its potential lasting impact. In a huge city like Los Angeles the virus quickly spread among the population.
In your working life changes can be sudden and catastrophic, but more commonly change is gradual. Is your industry changing – have you read articles about new technologies, routes to market, operating systems? What are your organization’s competitors doing and what might the implications be for you if your business follows the same route? How is the economy faring? You need to keep your eyes and ears open – you stand a better chance of surviving change if you are well informed.
Work out what you need to do to be part of the change
Having accepted that the world is changing Rick and Morgan both work out what they need to do to be part of the new world.
Seeing the changes is only the first step; understanding what you need to do requires greater thought. So Tara and her family noticed a change and realized the need to survive, but they thought the safest thing to do was hole up in their flat with all the food and water that was available. Not only was this a short-term plan but it also meant they weren’t out in the world learning more about the changes taking place. If it had not been for the presence of The Governor when their father died Tara, her niece and sister may also have been turned. Not everybody is able to make the creative leap from observation to a plan of action, so if you can do it you will have a distinct advantage over your contemporaries. As Henry Ford famously said, ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.’ While others thought change meant more of the same but better, Ford approached the advancing world from a more creative angle. .
Perhaps you work in a business that sells two different products or services. You note from reading the industry press that a new technology has been developed, and you realize that said technology could revolutionize one side of the business, the side you are not currently involved in. So what do you need to do to arm yourself with the know-how and credentials to switch to the side of the business that is shortly to be in the ascendancy?
Take steps to achieve that
When Rick decides he needs to survive and works out he needs weapons to help him he goes to the logical place – King County Sheriff ’s Department, where he used to work – and stocks up on what guns and ammunition remain. Having heard that there is a refugee centre in Atlanta, where the Center for Disease Control is also located, he sets off in that direction, calculating that his best chance for survival lies there.
It is no good knowing what you need to do in order to be part of the change if you do not act on that information. Is there a course you can attend that will give you the background or qualifications you need in order to be part of the new world? Perhaps you need to read round the subject – could you do this as part of your daily commute? Ambitious and committed people use every opportunity they have to further their careers – time on the train spent reading a blockbuster novel, no matter how entertaining, is time wasted if you could be immersing yourself in future-facing thinking. And don’t forget the N word – networking – maintain good connections with others in the industry or other parts of your organization. They can be both mines of useful information and routes to the next phase of your career.
