What is lateral thinking?

I’m pretty sure you’ve already heard about lateral thinking. Probably you’ve even read something about this. Lateral thinking means thinking out of the box, looking at problems from unusual angles. It means finding answers to your questions by thinking unconventionally. Because of our educational system, we tend to use some standard connections when looking for answers. Lateral thinking is exactly the opposite. It tries to break the thinking patterns and it tries to break the default bonds. We all tend to think in default patterns, patterns which were formed during our education. Probably that is why we all have similar lives, we all go to school and try to get good grades, then we all do our best to get well payed jobs and become good managers. Our life plans look pretty similar because we’ve been taught to think in some predefined patterns.

How can lateral thinking help me?

When you are facing a problem and you think that no usual method will work, you might find a great solution by using lateral thinking. I was facing this problem while thinking about how can the advertising industry be revived? Even though it makes a lot of money yearly, the ways the ads are spread aren’t very efficient. On the internet, the most used types of ads are banners and text ads. I’d say that video ads are much more efficient and can transmit much more information. But how can you make the readers watch video ads? By using lateral thinking, you might find a few good answers.

Finding solutions using lateral thinking

Let’s think about peer to peer networks. They offer means to download content like music, movies, software, without paying. The conventional thinking is that the ones who download also have to pay. But from a lateral thinking perspective, I’d ask: why? Why shouldn’t I be able to download content without paying? Why shouldn’t or couldn’t someone else pay? Why can’t the money come from some other source, not from the ones that download. It sounds good, but where could these money come from? I give you one hint: advertising .
If you read my article about Advertising industry crossroad you will see that I have suggested a solution for reinvigorating this industry. Why shouldn’t the publishers share the money with the consumers? There are a lot of money spent yearly on advertising industry, how to make this more efficient, how can we make sure that more interested people get to see the ads? You’ll get some hints inside the article. This is another example of lateral thinking.

Advertising

What is Advertising? What does Advertising focus on? What is it’s purpose? We all know the answers to these questions. Shortly put, advertising means letting the consumers (people) know of new products, services or even new companies. Every day we are fed different audio, video, pictures, banners, text or other types of adds on several information channels. What I want to talk about in this article is the efficiency of these information channels (from the advertising necessities point of view) and some simple ways to make them more efficient.

Existing types of advertising

The most known types of information channels, used also as advertising channels, are: radio, television, magazines/news papers and internet. Let’s say a few words about each one of these.
Radio ads are mostly listened to while driving. They are not the most efficient type of advertising, but they get the message to a lot of people. When we play radio ads, we have to make sure that the target people are the same or a big part of people driving cars.
Television ads are probably the most expensive type of ads. Even if the consumer likes it or not, an interesting movie or a tensioned sports game is interrupted for advertising. We’ve come to accept this and it’s almost natural now.
All types of magazines and news papers use 50% or their space (probably even more) for advertising. They are pretty much targeted ads because you’ll rarely see a dog food ad inside a business magazine.
Nowdays the internet is already a very efficient advertising channel. It has started displaying ads by using banners and pictures and links. Now the best way to advertise on the internet is by context ads, which are basically text ads which provide links to different sites with products and services.

All these type of channels have a very important characteristic: no matter the channel, when an ad is broadcasted / played / displayed / clicked, the channel owner will charge the ad owner. So all the money from the ad go into the channel owner’s pockets.

Problems with the existing type of advertising

Existing types of advertising get ignored by a lot of people each day. Some of us change the TV channel when the movie is interrupted for ads, some of us do not read or even look at ads inside printed magazines, and probably a lot of us have developed a sense in reading web pages without even seeing the ads (I know I have). How do we make people pay attention to our ads, how can we increase the efficiency and return of investment of ads campaigns? What can we do in order to make more people pay attention to our ads?

Solutions

Let’s think about Text Ads. They are probably the youngest type of ads. They tend to change a lot but something remains the same: who cashes the money. It’s always the one that displays the ads. These text ads haven’t embraced the Web 2.0 concept (I used this “Web 2.0″ tag because it’s so used these days that we all know what it means). They haven’t adapted to the “empowering people”, “collaboration” or “social networking” concepts. They have given power to the publishers, so they’ve made a few steps ahead, but they do not bring anything new to the readers, to the users.

The money on ads get to the channel owners without doubt. But you, as a channel owner, how can you make more people pay attention to the ads that you broadcast or publish? It simple: Start sharing the money with the users. Start giving money to your consumers. You don’t have to give your own money, you just have to take less than before and give to your users or viewers a part of the money that you’ve charged for broadcasting or publishing the ads. Is this a crazy idea? I’m sure it sounds like a crazy idea right now, but I don’t think it will sound like a crazy idea in a couple of years. Sharing the money with your users gives you the guarantee that they will start watching the ads. It gives you the guarantee that the users will start noticing the ads. The problem that you need to figure out is how to do that. How can you share with your users the money from advertising? How can you be sure that there’s no fraud? How can you attract people and also ad owners?

If you understand my suggestion and then figure out a solution, you’ll have your idea for a golden startup.

Successful businesses and new companies have a lot of key elements contributing to their success. One of them, and a really important one too, is MANAGEMENT. Many businesses started to change the way they are managing people, or they started with a “workers as people” type of management from the beginning. Workers are valued as individuals, they are given more power and more trust; also, the decisions are not taken somewhere at the top and communicated to the workers, instead they are taken together with the workers; managers talk to their people and take decisions based on their feedback. We started to understand that two or more heads are better than one. It was about time, right?
There are many types of management, but if we think about how these types of management see people, we can divide them into two categories. Let’s dive a little bit into these two and see how they influence our company and our company’s success. For the sake of example I will talk about management in a software company, but the examples and observations apply to other types too.

“Engineers as Resources” type of management

Many companies, mostly older companies, use the type of management where they treat engineers as simple resources. No one is irreplaceable or even important and management treats them like faceless people, with no individuality. They don’t care what an engineer does as long as it works fine, to them he’s a simple, replaceable resource. It’s not important if that engineer likes what he’s doing, it’s not important if he’s motivated to do that, it’s not important if he’s better at something else, it’s not even important if he’s looking for another job. All that’s important is for the project to be finished on time and on budget.
Some of these companies try to say that they believe in collaboration, trust, talent, but these are empty words. How can you believe in and pay for talent when you don’t value each individual?
This type of managers also tend to lie to their people. They tend to tell and repeat unclear things and keep their people into an uncertainness. They think that it’s better to lie than to tell the truth because people are not smart enough to understand certain things. Like for example “if this project is not delivered on time and as requested we’ll all be fired”. Instead of transmitting this message, managers say “it’s very important to deliver this on time because … or …”. I think transmitting the truth does more than enough and it motivates people enough to do their job right. If telling the truth doesn’t do the job, than no other lie would.

Problems caused by the “Engineers as Resources” type of management

People working in these types of companies don’t enjoy their work. They don’t enjoy what they’re doing. They don’t feel motivated and they don’t contribute to innovation. They simply execute their tasks and wait for the day to be over. The management team is responsible for creating the right environment. It’s your job to start care about your people, it’s your job to start knowing what they like, what they’re good at, what stimulates them and where they want to go, where they want to evolve.

“Engineers as People” type of management

This type of management cares about the people. They care about each and every engineer. They care about what stimulates his imagination, they care about what motivates him most, they care about his plans or even help him plan his future. This type of managers don’t lie to their people, they are straight forward and honest to their people. Even more, they make decisions based on the team’s feedback and give engineers the opportunity to work on what they want. Let’s take Google for example. Engineers at Google have 20% of their time allocated to work on whatever they want. This means that they can work on anything they want, they can work on new products, they can work on new services, they can work on whatever they wanted to do but probably didn’t have time to do it. From this were born most of the Google’s services. They believe in empowering people. They believe in letting the engineer evolve in whichever direction they want. That’s why they’re so successful. There are many other examples. I’ve read an article a while ago about managers at BMW talking to people on the assembly line, about workers submitting new ideas and being listened by the managers.

Problems solved by the “Engineers as People” type of management

The biggest problem into a company is motivating people. Making them more efficient. Well, here’s the recipe. Let people work on what they want. Listen to them. Give them the possibility to be creative. Involve them when making decisions. Show them that their opinion is important (and I mean really show it, not just tell it). Give power to your team and they will surprise you. Also, allow them to change the environment. Don’t just put them into cubicles with no individuality. How can an engineer feel creative into his own cubicle when all the cubicles look the same. Better yet, stop using cubicles . Start creating the right environment and you will get the productivity that you’ve waited for so long.

Adaptability Century

What type of management to use in the adaptability century? We thought that the 21st century is the speed century, but actually it’s the Adaptability and Speed century. Deliver quickly and with real features. For this you need innovation, you need you’re people’s full capacity, their full intelligence and their full imagination. Start stimulating that. Make people work at their full capacity and make them enjoy it and you’ll be able to achieve anything.

Do YOU need to change anything?

Think about your company, and then think about this: do people at your company wait for 5 PM to go home? Do they start looking their watches every 5 minutes starting from 4 PM or even earlier? Then you need to change something and you need to start right now. Don’t invest lots of money on consulting some specialized companies, instead start asking your people what they want. Ask them how to improve their life and their experiences at work. It might be hard at the beginning but it will pay off in the end.