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.

Fortune Magazine published and article about Ram Charan, management consulting guru. The reporter says Ram is peaceful and happy and obviously doing what he was meant to do, though he travels every day and has no home. How much more can any of us ask?

Ram Charan Could Lead Proposals

Proposal work is hard and not too gratifying for the proud. We often toil long hours under great pressure and must submit our work for criticism from less than ideally qualified critics. Yet, we can’t afford to take much credit and discourage our SMEs.

When we win, credit goes to the executives and sometimes the technical professionals. When we lose, folks wonder whether we’ve lost our touch.

However, a specific kind of person is attracted and retained in this profession. We all recognize each other as cut from the same piece of cloth. Others puzzle over why we stay in these pressure cookers, what do we get out of it?

Somehow there is a satisfaction to knowing where to dig for the right questions to ask, even when they aren’t particularly appreciated by the questioned. However, we know these are the questions the selection panel will ask. So, we are obligated to be the thorn, or risk losing to a team more willing to answer the hard questions.

Proposal professionals carry a quiet sense of accomplishment when we hear the echo of our questions being repeated by those with whom we’ve worked. Often our fingerprints are all over an organization in a way many executives can only envy. And sometimes that is just enough.

. . . . Supporting Good People Doing Great Things

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.