Professional Services

Next year more than half of UK firms expect to create new jobs according to a survey released this month from CBI/Accenture called, ‘On the up’. The report stated that 51% of firms expect their workforce to be larger this time next year, the highest figure since the start of the recession in 2008.

With more jobs being created and the UK finally experiencing economic growth, 2014 could prove a fresh start for many people who have been considering a new job or a change of career but have held off looking during the recession.

In this age of dynamic information technology developments power is being distributed like never before. For example, Andrew Haldane, Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, writing in The Spectator (2 November 2013) notes that at the root of banking is market information. Banks have been the middlemen between savers and borrowers. The arrival of the great icons of the peer-to-peer market place, Amazon, Google and eBay have cut out the middleman and it is this disintermediation that marks the revolution of our Age.

How many times have you heard organisations make the declaration, “Our people are our greatest asset.”?

“Millennials” (born between 1982 and 2000) are referred to in marketing and research circles as the largest and most elusive generation of all time. They are often painted as a group of self-obsessed, multi-tasking, digital natives with short-attention spans, limited brand loyalty and a sense of entitlement that knows no bounds. In other words, a generation that seems like a marketer’s worst nightmare.

In business - new isn’t always better. New technologies might appear attractive, but they require time and imagination before they realise their full potential. The best business innovations don’t come from innovating for innovation’s sake nor are they always borne out of wild or prolific ideas – they come from strategic thinking and applied process. They come from assessing existing technologies and information across industries and business functions and matching them with core competencies.

On 26 December, 2012, Shinz┼ì Abe took office to become Prime Minister of Japan for the second time, and in doing so once again became head of government of the third largest world economy by GDP. In the year since his return to power, Prime Minister Abe has perhaps been most synonymous across the plant with the term ‘Abenomics’.

It was almost 350 years ago that the seeds of Canada’s mining sector were sown with the discovery of coal on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Three and a half centuries on and there are more than 800 mines across the country providing direct employment for more than 363,000 workers.

Today Canada ranks first in the world for the production of potash and uranium, and among the top five for the production of nickel and diamonds, with its mining industry contributing approximately five percent of its gross domestic product.

Some years ago, I worked with a major equipment supplier whose products were relevant to virtually every vertical market. The president of this company had decided to define a new sales model, motivated by his observation that “As I spent time in the market, I learned that we had customers everywhere, but that we weren’t special to customers anywhere”. That’s a common issue for firms with broadly relevant products and services, and there are always good reasons and strong advocates for almost every possible opportunity to make a sale to a customer.

A too small sales force is a loss of income and a too large or incorrectly allocated one is a waste of resources. Many companies use their sales managers’ gut feelings to determine how many sales people they should have and how they should be allocated. This means that one of the most important decisions for growth and profitability is based on the hidden assumptions of a few people.

Moving one’s home can be, I’m sure many will agree, a challenging, stressful experience at the best of times. The same holds true for relocating a business, something the Business Excellence team have experienced first-hand recently. As anyone in the publishing business will attest to, there is a lot more to a company like ours than simply a few individuals who produce the features you see before you.