Steve Marr.org

In 2011 Ron Johnson was hired to run J.C. Penny. Johnson had been responsible for running Apple’s retail sales unit. Now the company is struggling with poor sales, and stock prices have declined 50% in a very good stock market environment.  The Board of Directors for J. C. Penney recently dismissed Ron Johnson.

I received a question from “Peter” who was thinking of starting a mechanical engineering business with three other engineers. Each is currently employed, receiving a regular paycheck. The presenting question was how to proceed. My response surprised Peter.

When I am asked to give a talk I start with three questions:  1) Who is the audience? 2) What do you want the audience to do after your presentation?  3)  How will you measure success? Most organizers have not thought about these questions. They might be able to describe the audience, but have no real plan about how to communicate to them. An event without producing action is often a waste of everyone’s time, except when used as entertainment. If we start a project without asking these questions, it could be the big reason that a project flops.

I often work with people who are technically competent in their field. Some of these people are true masters. Frequently they struggle with business issues and wonder why. The answer is that technical skill is not enough to generate business success.

No matter how you feel about outsourcing jobs, we need to understand that jobs will be outsourced. Some jobs are outsourced overseas.  Others are outsourced domestically.  Still others outsource to technology. Outsourcing helps the companies that get the work, but it’s not so helpful to the workers whose jobs are outsourced.  However, when we complain about outsourcing, we miss the critical economic principle:  division of labor. While it is true that we outsource jobs at a price, at the same time other work will come to us because someone else outsourced.