Laura’s Winning Ideas

Sometimes you have to wonder just what these executives are thinking when they cook up stupid stunts like this. . .

Adidas won a Trademark suit this week as covered in The Wall Street Journal here. (available for 7 days from this post, thereafter you’ll have to register in order to access the story)

It seems that Payless Shoe Stores purchased Adidas shoes, sent them to a Chinese manufacturer with instructions to copy but change the three strips to either two or four stripes. They sold approximately $400 million of these knock-offs.

The jury agreed with Adidas, that Payless had infringed the trademark of Adidas with the intention to benefit from knocking off the Adidas shoes. The award of $305 million drove down the stock price by over 16% with the news.

The formula for the award was as follows:

Actual damages = $31 million
Disgorged profits because the jury found willfulness in the defendant’s actions = $135 million
Punitive damages (equal to the disgorged profits) = $135 million
TOTAL VERDICT = $305 million (figures above were all approximate and added up to $305 million)

Payless says they plan to appeal, but they might want to rethink this strategy. The attorney for Adidas acknowledged that the verdict might be reduced on appeal, but it is possible it could be increased because the judge could add plaintiff’s attorney’s fees and may also triple the actual damages portion of the verdict. Add the plunge in stock price to the mix, and this was a very expensive stunt to pull.

Food for Thought

Copyrights and Trademarks are protected property. Next time someone delivers a nifty photo they found on the internet for a proposal, you might want to ask a few more questions before inserting it into your document. And don’t think a quick photoshop “editing” of an image makes it your own, it is merely proof of “willfulness” and expensive when discovered.

If you’ve heard me speak on the topic you know that photographs are exceptionally well protected by copyright law, so don’t think you’ll even get as much grace as the music industry has extended to folks caught downloading music files illegally. (which ain’t much grace if you’ve followed the news.)

Vincent Wright posted a note about Scrum project management and pointed to this article about Scrum on Wikipedia. Next time you need to train a new person (on your team or interfacing with your team), this might be helpful.

Scrum is taken from a term in Rugby, a sport similar to Proposal writing.

A scrum project is organized into sprints, just as proposal teams organize around individual proposals.

Team members are divided into Pigs and Chickens:

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. However, while chickens make a contribution, pigs are fully committed.

Chickens include the SMEs, salespeople, management, technical staff and stakeholders in your organization. The pigs are the ones who must get the proposal out the door. Chickens can edit the “Product Backlog” (AKA the proposal storyboards) and provide input to pigs as requested. However, the Pigs are fully committed to the effort and will make the proposal happen.
At the daily status meetings, only pigs are allowed to speak, though chickens may attend. The daily meeting is “time boxed” to 15 minutes, and everyone arrives on time or suffers the team punishment. This meeting is held standing.

The Sprintmaster (aka proposal team leader/proposal manager/proposal coordinator) keeps a Burn Chart, detailing what remains to be done before the end of the sprint (proposal delivery).

Every “sprint” (proposal) is followed by a debrief meeting called a Sprint Retrospective.

When trying to explain what and how we work, having other examples is helpful.

Mark Vickers of the Institute for Corporate Productivity has a white paper out which outlines the state of management in the virtual realm. Click here to take a look.

My experience backs up his research: Corporations think good managers are able to manage virtually, as well as site-based, but unfortunately this isn’t true.

In my experience and research, superb virtual managers differ from superb site-based managers in several ways. I found by tracking manager’s profit performance that there is a distinct difference between the managers who were successful with virtual projects, and the managers who were successful site managers. Virtual skills might be taught, but the skills aren’t intuitive to successful site-based managers.

Organizations with an advantage in the next decade:

• Train managers in Virtual Skills
• Watch for new managers whose natural talents give them an advantage in virtual realms, and make sure these folks are promoted to best advantage
• Evaluate managers to match the skill set to the specific challenge.

Read about the results we found by clicking here. 

Things to do now:

• How are the virtual management skills in your team? Proposal teams need these skills to manage proposals across offices and with subcontractors. Do you struggle to communicate action needed? Have you built rapport with those you’ve never met?
• Second, how are the virtual management skills of your project managers? Can you document capabilities in this area? Now would be a good time to dig up statistical evidence of your firm’s virtual management expertise. This will be a real deal maker for capable firms who can prove their virtual management expertise.

And of course, if I can help, please call me! I’ve worked with several large organizations to train and help identify upcoming virtual managers. Lately, I’m training managers of one branch of the U.S. military.

“Only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Speech 1933

This holiday week I had a proposal due. (Doncha’ just love those RFPs that land so close to the holidays?)

A young gal who works for me was sent to start copying pages at Kinko’s, while I finished pulling together pages.

I didn’t give her much instruction, and she didn’t call with questions, so I was surprised when I arrived and found that she’d copied every page on a color copier at six times the cost per page of a laser copier.

We were mostly finished, and the remaining pages had color, so I decided we would continue copying on the same machine and began collating the pages she’d completed.

However, she was upset by her mistake, realizing it was a costly error. (360 pages so far)

And then she began making more errors: punching holes on the wrong side of pages, copying double-sided pages to single sided versions, etc.

Her fear overtook her and created more errors. Now it got really expensive, throwing away color copies we couldn’t use. (586 pages final count)

How often do we let fear overtake us, thinking we are working harder, but actually just making a bigger mess?

Reset

We each need to find our reset button.

1. How do you know when fear is taking hold? Do you know what it feels like in your gut? Do you need to find this feeling so you can realize when you are entering this troublesome arena?

2. When fear is taking hold, how do you reset yourself? What kind of break will work for you in your environment? A quick walk around the block, a break for coffee, a walk to the mailroom, a break for the restroom and fresh lipstick (no George, not you.)?

Fear is rampant among proposal teams. Sometimes we catch it from anxious, anxiety ridden project managers whose jobs may be on the line. More often we self inflict the wound because we all take our responsibility very seriously.  

This young lady is so fortunate. She has a crystal clear idea of what fear feels like for her. She also knows how much disaster it causes, because she had no problem with the tasks until the fear took control. She has living proof that  the “only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.”

Once we have this knowledge, we are powerful beyond measure.