What Does it Mean to Be a Hero?
When you were a child, were you inspired by stories of knights, supermen and courageous men and women who did wonderful things and changed the world around them? They were your heroes. You looked up to them, didn’t you? And you admired them and read stories about them late into the night? Weren’t you inspired by their courage and hoped you could grow up brave and strong? Weren’t you thrilled by their exploits and their charisma?
What about now? Who are your heroes? Are they baseball champions or Olympic swimmers? Or are they perhaps explorers and adventurers, crossing the North Pole single-handed or rowing the Pacific in a two-man boat?
What does it mean to be a hero? Is it someone fulfilling an ambition at great personal and physical struggle or is it someone doing something for the good of mankind? And why do we all need heroes – what is it that inspires us about certain people and makes us hold them up as examples of greatness?
The truth is that we look up to people who make a difference to our lives while at the same time overcoming personal struggle and hardship to achieve that goal. We admire their bravery and dedication; we aspire to be as courageous and focused as they are to achieve what they set out to do.
So being a hero isn’t necessarily about achievement only. It’s the effect that their achievement has on the rest of us and what we can learn from the struggle and hardship they underwent. They are what we could call exemplars – they are people who demonstrate high standards of character and dedication and who inspire us to achieve the highest that we can in order to emulate them.
However, being a hero isn’t always front page news or the stuff of films. Being a hero can mean working all the hours under the sun and earning enough to send your children to college so that they can have a better future than you had at their age. It can be as simple as making sure that the elderly people in your area are always warm and well fed, or dedicating yourself to improving community amenities and overcoming all the obstacles that get thrown up in your path.
So you can achieve great things like win an Olympic gold medal by being fast on your feet and become an icon. Or you can achieve great things through strength of character and perseverance, and become a hero. You can doubt your ability to complete the journey, but having the strength of character and purpose to overcome your own fears about completing it – that’s the stuff of heroes.
That’s what inspires others – that you falter and doubt your ability to carry on, but that you then pick yourself up again stronger than before, doubly committed to your goal, and you press on to the end.
What is Management?
Management is different from leadership but just as important. To understand the nature of management, we need to be clear how it differs from leadership. The first step in answering the question: “What is management?” is to understand the basic tasks of all organizations. Like any other species, an organization needs to take care of its immediate business of survival but it also has to evolve to ensure its fitness to cope with changes in the environment and the actions of competing species.
Management is the function that organizes the execution of today’s business. Leadership is the evolutionary mechanism that changes organizations to prosper in tomorrow’s world. Whenever a species or individual animal runs into obstacles, variations occur and new forms are selected from those variations. Leadership is a risk taking type of action that explores new frontiers and promotes new ways of behaving. It follows that, in a stable environment, good management is all that is needed to prosper; leadership in this context isn’t required.
This portrayal is not the popular one where leadership means being the top dog in a group regardless of what’s going on in the environment. Also, management has been cast on the rubbish heap since the late 1970′s following the initial wave of Japanese commercial success in the West. We wanted a scapegoat for our failure to compete with the Japanese, and management was fingered for this role. Jack Welsh, Tom Peters and other gurus called for more leadership and an end to management, which they saw as stifling innovation. The reality was that a lack of competition created a complacent attitude AND lackluster management. It was the way management was practiced that was the problem, not anything to do with management as a function. We simply needed to upgrade management for a new reality.
Being hierarchical by nature and inclined to worship heroes, we tend to regard the person in charge of our group as a leader. But complexity demands specialization and executives need to perform multiple roles that depend on the unique demands of their situation. If their main function is to maintain quality, low cost and good customer service while motivating employees to perform to their potential, then they are performing the management function, not showing leadership.
Management is like investment. Managers have resources to invest – their own time and talent as well as human and financial resources. The goal or function of management is to get the best return on those resources by getting things done efficiently. This doesn’t entail being mechanical. The manager’s style is a contextual issue. With highly skilled and self-motivated knowledge workers, the manager can be very empowering. Where the workforce is less skilled or motivated, the manager may need to monitor output more closely. By saying that management is a function, not a type of person or role, we better account for self-managed work teams where no one is in charge. Managemenet simply makes the best use of all resources even when we manage ourselves. Hence management does not necessarily entail a dictatorial, controlling overseer. Skilled managers know how to coach and motivate diverse employees. Getting things done through people is what they do.
The aim of management is to deliver results cost effectively in line with customer expectations and profitably, in the case of commercial organizations. It is not only leaders who can be inspiring. Inspiring leaders move us to change direction while inspiring managers motivate us to work harder.
Management is a vital function thanks to the complexity of modern organizational life. The need to coordinate the input of so many diverse stakeholders, experts and customers requires enormous patience and highly developed facilitative skills. Excellent managers know how to bring the right people together and, by asking the right questions, draw the best solutions out of them. To facilitate well requires managers to work very closely with all relevant stakeholders.
By contrast, the leader can be a bit of an outsider. Like Martin Luther King, Jr. promoting desegregation on buses to the U.S. government from the sidelines, the leader can induce people to change even with no direct involvement or authority over the people who are needed to take the hoped for action.
Managers don’t just keep ongoing operations ticking over. They also manage complex projects like making a modern movie or putting the first man on the moon. Leadership is only required to sell the tickets for the journey or to resell it periodically if resistance develops, but management drives the bus to the destination.
e-Marketing Strategy: 7 Dimensions to Consider (the e-Marketing Mix)
What is e-Marketing?
e-Marketing is still quite a controversial subject to talk about, since no one succeeded to unify the various theories around it; however there is one thing upon which there is no doubt – that e-Marketing first appeared under the form of various techniques deployed by pioneer companies selling their products via the internet in the early 90′s.
The frenzy around these new marketing techniques created by e-tailers and supported by the internet rapidly gave birth to a new dimension of what we knew as Marketing: the e-Marketing (electronic Marketing).
There are many definitions to what e-Marketing is, the simplest and shortest one being formulated by Mark Sceats: e-Marketing is Marketing that uses the internet as manifestation media. A working definition is that coming from a group of CISCO specialists: e-Marketing is the sum of all activities a business conducts through the internet with the purpose of finding, attracting, winning and retaining customers.
e-Marketing Strategy
The e-Marketing Strategy is normally based and built upon the principles that govern the traditional, offline Marketing – the well-known 4 P’s (Product – Price – Promotion – Positioning) that form the classic Marketing mix. Add the extra 3 P’s (People – Processes – Proof) and you got the whole extended Marketing mix.
Until here, there are no much aspects to differentiate e-Marketing from the traditional Marketing performed offline: the extended Marketing mix (4 + 3 P’s) is built around the concept of “transactional” and its elements perform transactional functions defined by the exchange paradigm. What gives e-Marketing its uniqueness is a series of specific functions, relational functions, that can be synthesized in the 2P + 2C+ 3S formula: Personalization, Privacy, Customer Service, Community, Site, Security, Sales Promotion.
These 7 functions of the e-Marketing stay at the base of any e-Marketing strategy and they have a moderating character, unlike the classic Marketing mix that comprises situational functions only. Moderating functions of e-Marketing have the quality of moderate, operate upon all situational functions of the mix (the classic 4 P’s) and upon each other.
1. Personalization
The fundamental concept of personalization as a part of the e-Marketing mix lies in the need of recognizing, identifying a certain customer in order to establish relations (establishing relations is a fundamental objective of Marketing). It is crucial to be able to identify our customers on individual level and gather all possible information about them, with the purpose of knowing our market and be able to develop customized, personalized products and services.
For example, a cookie strategically placed on the website visitor’s computer can let us know vital information concerning the access speed available: in consequence, if we know the visitor is using a slow connection (eg. dial-up) we will offer a low-volume variation of our website, with reduced graphic content and no multimedia or flash applications. This will ease our customer’s experience on our website and he will be prevented from leaving the website on the reason that it takes too long to load its pages.
Personalization can be applied to any component of the Marketing mix; therefore, it is a moderating function.
2. Privacy
Privacy is an element of the mix very much connected to the previous one – personalization. When we gather and store information about our customers and potential customers (therefore, when we perform the personalization part of the e-Marketing mix) a crucial issue arises: that of the way this information will be used, and by whom. A major task to do when implementing an e-Marketing strategy is that of creating and developing a policy upon access procedures to the collected information.
This is a duty and a must for any conscious marketer to consider all aspects of privacy, as long as data are collected and stored, data about individual persons.
Privacy is even more important when establishing the e-Marketing mix since there are many regulations and legal aspects to be considered regarding collection and usage of such information.
3. Customer Service
Customer service is one of the necessary and required activities among the support functions needed in transactional situations.
We will connect the apparition of the customer service processes to the inclusion of the “time” parameter in transactions. When switching from a situational perspective to a relational one, and e-Marketing is mostly based on a relational perspective, the marketer saw himself somehow forced into considering support and assistance on a non-temporal level, permanently, over time.
For these reasons, we should consider the Customer Service function (in its fullest and largest definition) as an essential one within the e-Marketing mix.
As we can easily figure out, the service (or assistance if you wish) can be performed upon any element from the classic 4 P’s, hence its moderating character.
4. Community
We can all agree that e-Marketing is conditioned by the existence of this impressive network that the internet is. The merely existence of such a network implies that individuals as well as groups will eventually interact. A group of entities that interact for a common purpose is what we call a “community” and we will soon see why it is of absolute importance to participate, to be part of a community.
The Metcalf law (named after Robert Metcalf) states that the value of a network is given by the number of its components, more exactly the value of a network equals the square of the number of components. We can apply this simple law to communities, since they are a network: we will then conclude that the value of a community rises with the number of its members. This is the power of communities; this is why we have to be a part of it.
The customers / clients of a business can be seen as part of a community where they interact (either independent or influenced by the marketer) – therefore developing a community is a task to be performed by any business, even though it is not always seen as essential.
Interactions among members of such a community can address any of the other functions of e-Marketing, so it can be placed next to other moderating functions.
5. Site
We have seen and agreed that e-Marketing interactions take place on a digital media – the internet. But such interactions and relations also need a proper location, to be available at any moment and from any place – a digital location for digital interactions.
Such a location is what we call a “site”, which is the most widespread name for it. It is now the time to mention that the “website” is merely a form of a “site” and should not be mistaken or seen as synonyms. The “site” can take other forms too, such as a Palm Pilot or any other handheld device, for example.
This special location, accessible through all sort of digital technologies is moderating all other functions of the e-Marketing – it is then a moderating function.
6. Security
The “security” function emerged as an essential function of e-Marketing once transactions began to be performed through internet channels.
What we need to keep in mind as marketers are the following two issues on security:
- security during transactions performed on our website, where we have to take all possible precautions that third parties will not be able to access any part of a developing transaction;
- security of data collected and stored, about our customers and visitors.
A honest marketer will have to consider these possible causes of further trouble and has to co-operate with the company’s IT department in order to be able to formulate convincing (and true, honest!) messages towards the customers that their personal details are protected from unauthorized eyes.
7. Sales Promotion
At least but not last, we have to consider sales promotions when we build an e-Marketing strategy. Sales promotions are widely used in traditional Marketing as well, we all know this, and it is an excellent efficient strategy to achieve immediate sales goals in terms of volume.
This function counts on the marketer’s ability to think creatively: a lot of work and inspiration is required in order to find new possibilities and new approaches for developing an efficient promotion plan.
On the other hand, the marketer needs to continuously keep up with the latest internet technologies and applications so that he can fully exploit them.
To conclude, we have seen that e-Marketing implies new dimensions to be considered aside of those inherited from the traditional Marketing. These dimensions revolve around the concept of relational functions and they are a must to be included in any e-Marketing strategy in order for it to be efficient and deliver results.