Are you a professional engineer considering studying for an MBA?
We are pleased to announce that applications are now open for our Sainsbury Management Fellows MBA scholarship – applications can be made via the Royal Academy of Engineering. Follow this link for further information and details on the application process.
Read interviews with the winners of the SMF MBA Scholarship.
![Large group of business people sitting on a meeting. The focus is on blonde woman looking at camera. [url=http://www.istockphoto.com/search/lightbox/9786622][img]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/40117171/business.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.istockphoto.com/search/lightbox/9786738][img]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/40117171/group.jpg[/img][/url]](https://www.smf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Group-of-students-iStock_000018482555Medium.jpg)
To a large extent, that’s up to you. An MBA (Masters in Business Administration) is much more than qualifications and getting the most out of the experience requires the right mindset and purposeful action.
Pursuing an MBA programme is likely to be one of the biggest development challenges you will face. Certainly, for full-time programmes, the time commitment, the temporary loss of a regular income when you leave your job to study, and the fact that so many MBA graduates are filling the market each year, leads prospective candidates to question whether an MBA degree is worthwhile.
An MBA programme with a great reputation at an internationally renowned business school is invaluable for those looking to advance quickly to senior management roles. If you reach your full potential, it can be a genuine stepping stone for getting ahead in your current sector, or starting up successfully in an alternative sector. An MBA not only opens up opportunities in terms of experience and contacts, it also gives you an excellent practical and academic background in essential areas of business including finance and marketing.
The MBA will stretch your mind, not only through academic rigor, but also by enabling you to work with a diverse range of people with differing views and perspectives. You will also benefit by pursuing new interests through specialisation and developing long-term goals that help your personal growth.
A map for the future
Where do you want to be in the next five years? To ensure an MBA makes a difference to your career trajectory, you should ideally have some clarity about your future career path. At the outset, this doesn’t have to be as specific as working in a defined sector or industry, but it should cover factors such as time-bound career progression (eg when you want to be in a senior management role in a blue-chip company or set up your own business) and a strategy for using the MBA programme as a springboard to achieve your goal.
A roadmap will help you to decide which business school to apply to and in which country, the length of programme and electives. Your roadmap doesn’t have to be set in stone; it can be continually updated as opportunities arise and your interests develop throughout the course of your MBA.
Specialisation
Your MBA gives you access to a wide range of elective course modules both within and outside of your current programme. This might be anything from life sciences, property, environmental studies to digital media and computer science.
The MBA allows you to contextualise your studies within a business perspective. You might spot a new opportunity within a sector for a start-up. You could use that elective in ‘big data’ to work out new, broad strategies for your current company. Alternatively, you might be looking to move from a technical expertise-oriented position towards management, and require new skills and knowledge.
One of the most powerful things about an MBA is that it enables technical specialisation and growth of expertise in the context of a strong, business-oriented education. By making the most of your options on your course, you’re ultimately enhancing employability – boosting your expertise, opportunities, and potential salary.
Many people, rightly in my view, place a high value on the people they connect with during the course of their MBA programme. You are in a diverse, international environment full of very talented people with vastly different experiences and aspirations who enrich the learning experience. But do be careful not to see this as an enhanced networking opportunity. Your MBA represents a major opportunity for developing new expertise and specialisation.
Many MBA programmes involve a company placement period where you will gain real-life experience in management on major projects, often at big brand companies. This is a powerful element of the MBA: it throws you into the deep-end of the management world and demands rapid learning and quality work. This experience will not only enhance your cachet and boost your CV but provides a valuable insight into what’s to come when you complete your studies. The lessons you learn during your placement will come in handy in your later career. Often placements turn into real jobs.
Different business schools have different teaching styles and cultures so naturally, produce different kinds of managers and entrepreneurs. How you fit into the programme or a school’s environment will have a large impact on the outcome of your MBA – not least because the best schools are often recruiting grounds for big companies.
The impact an MBA will have on your career prospects and personal development will most likely change the course of your future. This is a major chance to study, develop your expertise and personal skills, make new contacts and collaborators, and even travel. How you approach it that will determine whether your MBA fast-tracks you into your dream career, or whether you’ll end up having to learn on the job regardless.
Various scholarships exist for MBA programmes. If you’re an engineer seeking a scholarship, why not consider applying for our Sainsbury Management Fellows scholarship. Ten of these are awarded annually to professional engineers by the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Read part 2: Will an MBA really make a difference to my career? Choices & Options.
If you are making decisions about taking an MBA course, you will also be thinking about whether to study in Europe or America. For some thoughts on this topic, read our blog USA or Europe – where to study for your MBA?
You may also be interested in reading interviews with the winners of the SMF MBA Scholarship.
The way we hire, work, and organise has fundamentally changed in the last ten years. The rise of mobile data and social networking, spurred on by corporate involvement and investment, has resulted in a situation where many of the old rules and concepts we used to understand in the world of work are becoming less and less relevant.
This is particularly true when it comes to recruitment. With 94% of recruiters now using, or planning to use social media for recruiting (2014, Source: Jobvite), the web is fast becoming the primary location for new opportunities, connections and networking.
Whether you’re looking for a new opportunity on LinkedIn, search engines, or other social media, it’s important to make the most of these platforms. The game may have changed dramatically, but the same old principles still apply when it comes to actually nailing contact-making, that job application, or getting an interview.
Let’s discuss some of the ways you can make the most out of these platforms, and find your dream job in today’s social media-driven world. Today, we’re going to be discussing how you can align with a company’s values and vision while still projecting a unique personal brand to recruiters.
Aligning your aspirations with the company’s brand, ethos, or vision
One of the major advantages of the social media age for recruitment is that your potential employers have a presence online—and often more than just a Wikipedia or LinkedIn page. While LinkedIn is great for finding new opportunities, many companies and corporations now operate a comprehensive social media presence, which offer valuable insights into what they might be all about. This will ultimately strengthen any application or interview you may be invited to complete.
Social media recruiters are actively trying to give the best candidates a very clear idea of why you should work with certain companies. If we’re talking about the challenge of aligning your aspirations with a potential employer’s vision, then social media can be a major help in a number of ways.
Firstly, many brands’ careers pages on social media offer a glimpse into workplace culture and brand ethos. Take the example of Nestlé’s UK careers page, many of their posts are focused on new work opportunities and facts about the company, but some also show light-hearted, fun moments from around the workplace – such as Christmas decorations or brownie recipes using their products. Use this – you’re looking to find out what they’re all about. Look at your potential employer’s Facebook pages (both the brand and career pages) and review the content.
Pay particular attention to their social media ‘voice’, as it may give you clues on the workplace culture. Find as many of their Twitter feeds as you can (including those of senior figures within the company directed at staff) to get an idea of the direction the company is moving in. It goes without saying, of course, that their LinkedIn company page will provide a wealth of information on initiatives and news, as well as employee testimonials.
Using all you have learned on social media, see if you can produce a list of the company’s core values. Does their social media profile live up to what they say about themselves on their website, marketing material and how they are portrayed in the media?
Promoting your personal brand
After researching the company’s output on the different social platforms, it’s time to start thinking about where you might fit in.
Think carefully about the image you are projecting of yourself on social media. Read your own Facebook, your own professional Twitter, or your own LinkedIn profile. What are the similarities and differences? If a recruiter were to examine your social presence as you have the employers’ profiles, what would they list as the top five values being projected? What does your voice tell them about you? Compare these to the list you made for the company to see the parallels.
It’s here that you can start developing a strategy for how you’re going to present your personal brand to the recruiter. Think of your brand and the employers’ brands as being part of the same social media dialogue. You want to be part of the discussion; you want what you say to fit coherently with what they say, but – as in a physical conversation – you don’t just want to be a yes-man who agrees or mimics everything said by the other.
Recruiters are looking for someone who can move ‘the conversation’, and therefore their clients’ companies, forward. By promoting yourself as someone with certain personal and business values, recruiters and companies are able to clearly see where you might fit into their own vision – and if you have a place among them.
Building stronger networks and finding your path
You’ve got to grips with your potential employer, you know what they want to see in a candidate, and you can already see a place for yourself in their organisation. However, that’s just one job. How can you use social media to get not just a job for today, but also help build a career for tomorrow? In an age where many argue that the traditional career ladder no longer exists, the answer lies in building bigger, stronger networks and developing a goal-oriented career path.
Developing your career path
In order to develop the right strategy for achieving this, you first need to become goal-oriented. These should initially focus on what you’re currently doing (ie your current and immediate goals at work and at home), what position you’d like to get next, and what you’d like to be doing in five years’ time.
Consider where you were five years ago and the progression you’ve taken. Now, think about how your employment history fits with where you want to go. Building up a strong idea of the trajectory you want to be on is key. When you finally get to that big interview for the job you’ve dreamed of for years, you need to be able to demonstrate that all your previous work has been leading up to this moment and this interview – that you know where this opportunity is going to take you and how you’re going to make the most of it.
Again, you can use social platforms to your advantage here. Many companies manage and operate careers pages on LinkedIn (the Deloitte page is a good example), which are well worth a browse if you want to find out more about not just its current opportunities, but also the company’s structure and where others’ experience has taken them. It will also give you further insight into the different groups of jobs (rather than specific roles) available. This can help inform your strategy and broaden your options further down the line.
Building stronger networks
After you’ve got a fairly comprehensive idea of your goals and planned trajectory, you need to work out who you need to know to help get you there. There is a lot of literature on working out who these people are (this Forbes article is an excellent example), so assuming you have a list of the types of people you need to know, let’s get down to the business of using social platforms to build strong(er) networks based on that information.
The connections that will jumpstart a new opportunity are very rare finds, so it’s important to be proactive – especially on social media. Let’s take Facebook as an in-depth example.
Facebook has spent the last few years making its services more professional and career-oriented. You might be thinking of brand pages or profiles, but it’s also true of individuals. Many people have professional Facebook profiles as well as personal pages.
Regardless of what your formal presence is on the site, there are a number of ways you can optimise your Facebook profile in a technical way for networking. As this helpful guide outlines, these are some of the ways you can ‘clean up’ your social media image:
These principles don’t just apply to Facebook, but also to Twitter and other social networks you use.
Once you have a work-friendly profile optimised for networking, it’s time to start using it. One great facility on Facebook is the search bar, which has a tab entitled “People I may know.” You can use this to find people of interest who fit with your goals – and, best of all, they’re picked from your friends’ friend lists, meaning you have a mutual contact who can introduce the two of you if you don’t feel comfortable approaching them directly. (Again, the same goes for LinkedIn connections).
You can also ‘follow’ people not on your friends list, which allows you to see their content and engage with their public posts (either on a personal or business page). By making small, thoughtful contributions in the comments section (or through Twitter retweets), you can build a rapport and lay the groundwork for approaching the person in a professional context. This is also true of Facebook groups, which can be used as a very quick and efficient way of social networking.
Don’t forget about the interconnectivity of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Once you have someone on Facebook, you can automatically connect with them on LinkedIn or Twitter, and vice versa. By managing your network of new contacts across multiple platforms, you’re maximising the reach of your personal brand, thereby helping to ensure you’re getting the most out of social media.
Social media is a hotbed of recruiters and companies looking for new talent – make sure that key platforms are part and parcel of your job search; both from the perspective of you exploring prospective employers online and ensuring that your online presence and profile are a magnate for recruiters and employers.
Photo: iStock.com/opera3d
If a crisis hits your company, clear thinking and decisive leadership is essential take your team through the ensuing storm.
As you’ll have read in our previous blog post on this topic, preparation is vital to ensuring that your organisation can deal with a crisis effectively. With a thorough risk assessment and management strategy in place, you’ll already have a good idea of how a crisis would impact your operations, and a plan deal with the issues. So, when that crisis hits, what’s next?
Face the music
When crisis hits, your first instinct might be to cover your own back. Self-preservation is a natural reaction in circumstances like these, but unfortunately, that’s not going to get you nor your organisation out of the woods. Before anything else, you may need to swallow some hard truths.
These might include your own role in the crisis – if you’re leading your company, then you no doubt exert a large influence on how the crisis affects your organisation and any solutions to it. You should consider yourself as one of the first figures who needs to make sacrifices if any tough choices need to be made.
After that, it’s important to develop a consensus on the causes of the crisis. This is vital, as no long-term solutions can really be implemented unless you know what the underlying problems really are.
Transparency is vital here. Quick fixes and concealment are not a way out, and will only exacerbate the crisis and make things worse.
All hands on deck
As we previously discussed, any risk management strategies should be communicated transparently and openly with your organisation’s stakeholders; and ultimately to the public as the media will inevitably report on the crisis.
Crisis can create a lot of uncertainty and fear among stakeholders, but particularly employees who will be worrying about their job security. If you didn’t involve them in risk management before the crisis hit, as is the ideal, now is the time to do exactly that.
First of all, your employees need certain reassurances. If redundancies have been deemed necessary because of the situation (for example, if an economic crisis requires cost-saving measures to be made), then this needs to be a part of your crisis consultations with the
other members of your organisation. The potential impacts of any planned changes must be outlined in full – in particular, if redundancies will be necessary or if there is any possibilities for employee redeployment.
As a crisis will affect your whole organisation, it is vital that you involve the whole organisation in the dialogue aimed at resolving it. Consultations should take place with employees and, if present, unions. Giving employees clarity and reassurances about the
situation will make your organisation more likely to weather the storm. There’s been more than one company that’s hit a survivable crisis but found it lost a key portion of its top talent, perhaps those who find it easiest to get a new job, through a lack of clear consultation.
Furthermore, as crises often call for new, creative ways of thinking and problem-solving, a
company-wide dialogue could potentially produce new solutions and answers at an uncertain time. These cannot be implemented without the help of staff.
Fight your way out
Think of a crisis not just as a disaster, but an opportunity for change. A crisis might actually empower you to make important changes to the company – changes that may have stalled in the past, but can now be implemented in the name of crisis management.
Indeed, many companies saw the 2008 financial crash as a business opportunity. Take Dan Simon’s piece in Forbes, How to turn a financial crisis into a business opportunity: “During this turbulent period we managed to grow the company into a major player in financial PR and open successful offices in New York, Los Angeles, Singapore and Sydney.”
Calmer Waters
Keeping a level head and turning the tables to your advantage can help the organisation emerge from the crisis not only intact, but more successful and efficient than before.
Click to read part 1 of Leading in a Crisis.
Cathy Breeze took up the role of Director of Communications at Sainsbury Management Fellows (SMF) around the time that email started to take off in business! 20 years on Cathy is managing a wide ranging campaign that embraces everything from the Annual Dinner and the Annual Report through to social media communications; running an active LinkedIn Group, Engineers in Business; an e-newsletter for Fellows, publications, research projects and a university business competition.
The communications channels may have changed, but the mission of Sainsbury Management Fellows remains the same – to help ambitious young engineers gain the skills and experience that enables them to become business leaders, either in their own start-ups or in blue-chip companies.
Cathy has spearheaded the external communications campaign to raise awareness of the scholarship scheme and attract high calibre candidates to apply for an award, as well as working with SMFs’ Trustees to build relationships with leading institutions such as the Royal Academy of Engineering and EngineeringUK. Cathy has helped to foster many mentoring relationships between Fellows and young engineers and helped the Trustees in the organisation’s transition to a registered charity.
At a dinner to celebrate her 20th anniversary as SMFs’ Director of Communications, Cathy said: “This has been the most rewarding job of my career, and I’ve had some interesting posts. I am fortunate to work with Trustees who have a strong vision for the charity and a commitment to deliver great results. They have inspired my work on the communications front. I very much look forward to our next challenge – raising £10 million to continue the charity’s work. We have already raised over £1.7million, which is a great start.”
When crisis strikes your organisation, who are you going to call? A consultant? The bank? Your legal team?
Unfortunately, there are few easy fixes to a business crisis. Crisis can strike at any time and in any form, and some can end up being so severe that your company may have to cease operations entirely. There is no magic wand to wave, and while crack teams of experts who will solve all of your problems are the stuff of dreams, it is ultimately you who must lead the company’s ship through the storm. So what is a crisis? And how do we best prepare an organisation for such an emergency?
The problem of risk
Risk management seems to dominate the day-to-day operations of our institutions and workplaces more than ever before. The very phrase can send even the most hardened manager into cold sweats, conjuring up memories of hours of paperwork to protect the company or premises against anything from fire to burglary.
However, this simplistic understanding of risk can obscure some of the most important lessons of security culture and the problem of risk. Successfully preparing for a crisis and managing its subsequent fallout ultimately requires a shift in organisational culture – one which seeks to manage and limit insecurity. This further requires a parallel shift in how we conceptualise risk.
Risk does not just refer to specific areas of potential crisis, such as property damage. It refers to a whole range of potentialities that could negatively – and significantly – impact your operations. Cisco offer a useful definition of risk as “Risk = Value x Threat x Vulnerability”.
Preparing for disaster
Of course, we can never be fully prepared for risk – its very nature implies it is always a possibility. Whether a crisis is caused by external factors, such as a major environmental disaster, arson or an information breach, or something internal, such as rogue bookkeeping or sabotage, it can be so unpredictable that preparation and security thinking should be of the utmost priority. While risk or insecurity can never be eradicated, they can certainly be managed.
Start by developing a clear process and strategy for gathering information about every one of the business’ operations. There are innumerable sources of risk within any company, and unfortunately, board members are often blind to these until it is too late. Line managers will be aware of many of the potential risks associated with their department, but they might also not have the same perspective as the employees they’re managing. The same goes for external experts who are able to assess your risk planning objectively and bring a fresh perspective to your situation.
It’s therefore worth entering into a dialogue with all stakeholders and at every level of the organisation. This can be achieved through stakeholder mapping, which involves:
This will not only give you diverse information about potential areas of insecurity (allowing you to plan for crisis scenarios), but it is also the first step in establishing a permanent culture of security throughout the company hierarchy. Any so-called ‘security team’ should ideally be drawn from this diverse knowledge base.
Keeping this flow of information regular and comprehensive is vital in keeping your executives and managers informed and involved. In other words, every member of your company should be constantly aware of the risks around them. With the right protocol and procedure in place, developed according to rigorous risk assessments, you are already well on your way to being prepared for a crisis.
Simply put, open and transparent communication with stakeholders is a must. It is vital to remember that any crisis you have is going to affect not just your internal operations, but everyone around you as well. Therefore any considerations of risk should not just extend to your internal organisational culture – how it will impact you – but also the impact it is going to have on your company’s image and, most importantly, your consumer base.
Managing your people and making sure it works
You’ve been through a successful acquisition or merger. All the legal proceedings and necessary preparation that needed to take place have been done successfully. But this is only the beginning of a long and important process of integration. A lot of post-M&As are mismanaged and result in poor outcomes.
Too much can often take place too quickly, leading to an erosion of previous internal cultures, a loss of staff, and a dangerous loss of profitability. After the acquisition, it is the task of management to ensure that the new, combined teams are able to build a shared vision of where the firm is going. It’s time to build a new internal culture forged through cooperation and consensus.
Start while you’re ahead
The most important foundations of post-M&A integration are established during pre-deal negotiations. Setting targets for integration should be considered as much of a priority as the process of establishing key benefits and risks from the deal itself and, indeed, should be based on this evidence and analysis. That’s why it’s vital to assess the internal structure, values and culture of the other party before the deal is done, and vice versa; due diligence is key.
One way this can be achieved is through the use of a clean team. This is an independent group of individuals bound by strict confidentiality agreements who gather the necessary data for integration, which usually lies out of the reach of an acquirer’s employees pre-deal.
To enable comprehensive integration planning, many organisations have begun using clean teams to gather information, analyse scenarios, and make preliminary integration decisions prior to deal consummation.
These clean teams operate under strict protocols that enable competitive or confidential information to be aggregated and summarised in a form that helps leadership review the analysis about the future combined organisation without violating competition laws – Aon Hewitt.
Have meetings with the other party involved in the merger or acquisition and work together to collate your findings and establish the sources of risk and possible friction. Establish an integration plan together, structured around core values, will save your company a lot of pain in the long run.
Making the hard decisions manageable
A merger or acquisition can be a stressful time for everyone, but especially employees. A particular source of employees’ anxiety stems from concerns about job security. Employees and line managers alike are unsure if there is going to be a place for them after the deal. Everyone knows there could be difficult decisions ahead, and that some staff may become surplus to requirement as the new business is forged.
If not well managed, the post-acquisition/merger stage can be messy and cause grief for those taking redundancy (voluntary or compulsory) and the managers who have to implement the programme. Losing a job can trigger a lot of personal issues that can damage employees’ well-being, resulting in loss of self-worth, feelings of betrayal, and a loss of identity. It’s important to handle these situations properly – negative effects and perceptions don’t impact on outgoing staff and those staying with the company. Creating negative perceptions of management ethos will make it hard to win ‘hearts and minds’ and to take the business forward.
Managing properly not only means treating people with dignity, but providing concrete support, for example, offering outgoing employees resources and support to help them transition to another job or career. There are many outplacement and career transition services available. It’s good practice to organise such services as part of a redundancy package, or to allocate individuals funds to enable them to choose an outplacement agency themselves.
Building a new shared culture
Having identified and planned your post-acquisition or merger integration, it’s time to implement it. The problem with many integration plans is that management can fall into the trap of coming in and saying to the new team, “this is how things are going to work.” Communicating a vision is important, but workplace cultures tend to develop organically; they can’t be manufactured.
If you’ve already established what sort of culture will benefit the integrated company, it’s time to start incentivising the sort of behaviours you want to emerge, particularly for line managers. This can be achieved by getting the staff engaged in the vision for the company, involving them in decisions, listening to ideas as well as providing attractive reward and recognition schemes. As well as this, you’ll hopefully have identified key time frames for achieving your integration plan fully – 100 days is a popular and effective starting time scale. A cohesive strategy covering planning, communication, action and co-operation is the name of the game.
In previous blogs, I’ve discussed how you can prepare to leave a business you’ve built using various exit strategies and preparation methods, such as appointing a corporate finance advisory; stabilising finances over a period of five years; and setting personal objectives for the future. Continuing this theme, then, I want to get down to brass tacks regarding the actual sale preparation by focusing on three key themes: selling the future, balancing negotiations, and knowing your buyer. Hopefully, this help to build up a better picture of what needs to be done by the seller in the ‘legal’ stages of selling a business.
Sell the future, not just the past
You might have heard that when selling your business, it’s important to provide a detailed five year financial history (including audited financial statements) to potential buyers. This isn’t wrong, and a lot of preparation activities take place in light of this; you must stabilise profitability over five years, you should hire a corporate finance advisory with the final sale, etc. It may feel slightly underwhelming, as if you are only building the company for its retrospective value at the point of sale.
However, you aren’t just selling the past. Buyers see businesses as valuable because of what their pasts signify about their potential futures. It might feel demoralising to be building a stronger company for different future owners, but, actually, you will reap the benefits as well, because a bright future is obviously much more marketable.
That’s why, alongside a detailed financial history, it’s vital to establish a two to three year sales forecast for your company. Gilmore Lewis suggests the most accurate forecasts utilise an array of data from multiple sources, not just data from a financial history. These sources frequently include: the business’ current sales pipeline; its historic run rate; its field forecast; and sales management discretion. The aim is to build up as accurate a forecast as possible based on past data in order to establish a marketable future for the company. That’s why he suggests:
“Accuracy of forecasts can be measured by providing actual results side by side with previous time period forecasts. This can provide a level of visibility into the accuracy of the forecast as well as the individual contributors.” For more information on developing accurate forecasts, read Gilmore Lewis’ excellent article How to Develop an Effective Sales Forecast.
So, to return to preparing the business for sale, it’s good practice to develop regular quarterly or annual forecasts for the business, and this is hopefully something your company has already been doing. This allows you to judge the accuracy of past forecasts by comparing them with the actual financial history of outcomes. Now, fast-forward to the sale itself. This information will ultimately strengthen your negotiating position, as you are now able to present not just a financial history and a forecast for the future, but also evidence to verify just how accurate your forecasting methodology is. Working with the future in mind in your medium-term sales prep will therefore make your short term preparation much easier – in fact, stronger.
Integrative negotiation
This brings us to the issue of negotiation, as forecasts and financial histories are ultimately what will support your negotiating position with any potential buyers. Negotiating tactics are frequently presented in popular media as almost back-handed or otherwise ‘hard and fast’ ‘moves’ aimed at more or less manipulating the other party into accepting your position.
However, I want to dispel this myth, as negotiating is rarely this simple – plus, sticking to such methods can seriously damage not only your professional relationship with a potential buyer, but your negotiating position itself. For example, saying something is “non-negotiable” is more likely to scare a buyer off than convince them of your terms. The end goal of a negotiation is, ultimately, to maximise outcomes for both parties involved. Although a negotiation may only confront you from one angle, the other party is seeking to benefit from buying the business just as much as you are seeking to benefit from its sale. Therefore, a little empathy with the other’s position (their angles, goals, and value) can go a long way. You want to aim for a deal that will benefit the other party as well as your own – a negotiation should not be seen as adversarial.
This raises two important issues that you should focus on in the early stages of integrative negotiation.
Reservation point
First, you need to have a clear position on what your objectives are within the sale. This will includes personal profit or recompense of some kind, but also things like the speed of transition between owners (eg for the benefit of employees and managers who will stay on afterwards) and various legal or contractual terms. It is especially your terms – rather than price – which can come to make or break a negotiation. It is here that you firmly establish a reservation point, or limits of your party’s terms beyond which you will not go. Between your reservation point and theirs lies the space in which negotiation and bargaining takes place.
You can think of your reservation point as your “walk-away” point – the stage at which you know a buyer will not meet your terms or needs. This isn’t something you want to use as a ‘threat’, but you need to demonstrate that you are prepared to walk away if necessary. From here, you can properly negotiate and deploy tactics such as ‘expanding the pie’ – giving away small losses that the other party will receive as a boon, in order to make your terms more appealing to theirs (read more on the MIT site about these terms here).
Full information
Second, as we’ve already discussed, you need to provide any potential buyer with complete and transparent information about:
Knowing your buyer
The flipside of this is knowing your buyer. You should establish profiles of their histories and angles (whether the buyers are a group or individual); you want to try and build up as clear a picture of the other party as possible in order to understand their terms and where they will (or won’t) accommodate yours. This puts you on stronger ground when laying down your terms and negotiating the details.
Although the negotiation process can be hard, it should take place within a collaborative environment to include both your own team as well as the potential buying party. It’s worth considering adding an intermediary or business broker to your team, which might already include a corporate finance advisor and a legal team. Their role is to support you by facilitating the sale; by helping to build your selling package; and by maintaining a well-researched awareness of potential buyers. They can also help with the legal aspect of negotiations, having the ability to draw up confidentiality agreements and being involved in due diligence.
By preparing your business for sale in a way that is transparent, collaborative, and forward-looking, you will already be well on the way to getting the best deal possible out of a future sale. Although an intermediary can help a smooth business sale in myriad ways, it is ultimately down to you as the head of the business to pull the whole thing off.
Over-used, over-hyped, misunderstood, and much maligned – the word ‘innovation’ often gets a bit of a rough ride in the media. Part of the problem is that the word’s literal meaning ‘to bring in a new idea’ is very broad, and depends very much on the context into which a new idea is brought. The conceptual novelty of innovation differentiates it from the mere renewal of old stuff or ‘renovation’. And as I am often reminded by my patent attorney, innovation or novelty alone is not the same as invention which requires a non-obvious connection, an inventive step. If I repaint my front room, I am renovating. If I use a robot to repaint my front room I am innovating. If I design the first robot that can paint rooms, I am inventing.
Of course, technology innovation is only one type of innovation. Innovation in the arts, in fashion, in media, in politics, and even in religion is possible – any field of human activity or thought in which an old idea can be displaced by, or incorporated into, a new one has the capacity for innovation (Whether there is an appetite for such innovation is another story).
But technology innovation is different, because both supply and demand for this type of innovation are accelerating. Population and economic growth, demographic change, resource scarcity and climate change each present major challenges, and create the demand for new approaches and ideas that technology innovators are racing to come up with. On the supply side, rapid progress across many disparate fields of science and engineering in the past few decades has created and proven a vast array of new materials, equipment, information and method/process technologies. Technology innovators can pick and chose from this body of ideas to create valuable new products and services, and as the library of proven technology inventions generated by research and development expands, the potential for technology innovation grows exponentially. For the technology innovator, this poses a number of key questions, for example:
The connectivity and reach provided by the internet has slashed the information costs of answering these questions. It has helped researchers disseminate information about their technology’s progress and performance in current applications, and has helped innovators reach out beyond their own industries for the technology elements they need to create the products and services of the future.
For clean technology entrepreneurs, there has never been a better time to innovate.
Sam Cockerill is CEO of Libertine FPE Limited, developing “Linear Power System” technologies that will make decentralised power generation the norm – bringing clean, reliable and affordable power to wherever it is needed. Sam is currently in San Francisco along with fourteen other UK cleantech start-ups as part of the Clean and Cool Mission 2015. This week-long trip is an opportunity for the entrepreneurs to hone their business pitches, learn from leaders in the field, and talk about their amazing products to potential investors and partners. Clean and Cool 2015 is organised by Innovate UK, together with The Long Run Venture, UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) and CoSpA (the Co-Sponsorship Agency). You can follow the progress of the Mission on Twitter@innovateukmedia,@CleanandCool and #cleansf.
Behind a smallish shop front on Marina Boulevard, the Long Now Foundation resembles something between a trendy coffee shop, second hand bookstore, art gallery and museum of mechanical computers. This was to be the culmination of a morning’s tour of downtown San Francisco for the Clean and Cool Mission, providing the group with a cultural, geographic and historical orientation to help frame the coming week.
Long Now Foundation Shop Front
I had previously come across The Long Now Foundation in articles written about its most famous project, a mountain-scale clock designed to keep time for the next 10,000 years.
Planet earth on the inner solar system position indicator mechanism of the 10,000 year clock
This design brief is both breathtakingly audacious and utterly perplexing. And for good reason, because the questions posed by this project run to the heart of what the Long Now Foundation is about. How do you design a clock that must outlast not only its designer but perhaps even its designer’s language and civilisation? What will power it? What events could occur in the next ten thousand years that might stop the clock or break it? How will the next five hundred generations maintain and repair it? And then there’s the small matter of ten millennia of weathering and climate change to deal with.
These questions and many more have been addressed in a beautifully conceived mechanical design which is now being installed in a man-made cavern in Texas, and a scale model of part of the mechanism stands in the Foundation’s entrance.
The Long Now Foundation is the brainchild of Danny Hills, Stewart Brand and Brian Eno ‘to creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years’. It provides thought leadership and inspiration through a wide range of activities that span cultural, linguistic and genomic archives as well as digital information, software and computing projects. The Foundation also provides a forum for debate and idea sharing both through an active online community and a series of seminars hosted by co-founder Stewart Brand at the Foundation’s headquarters.
Originally a museum for the Foundation’s work, the building has recently been developed to include ‘The Interval’ – a meeting place and café – and hosts a crowd-curated ‘Manual for Civilization’, a collection of around 3,500 books considered most essential to sustain or rebuild civilization. One striking feature of this library is the prominence of science fiction which sits side-by-side alongside more practical manuals on how to build and understand things. One of the four basic categories which the library is composed of is “Long-term Thinking, Futurism, and relevant history”. In this category, well known history, anthropology and socio-political titles jostle for position with futurology and science fiction works. What many of these have in common is the contemplation of real or imagined changes in human society across millennial spans of time. This vision stands in stark contrast to the ‘short now’ of daily life, with an urgency driven by the exponential pace of change in technology, information, resource consumption and economics.
As the morning’s fog lifted, the relevance to our Clean and Cool Mission became clear. Every one of the cleantech businesses here understands the role that new technology can play to help address global sustainability challenges in the coming decades. The Long Now Foundation has taken this idea and, by looking out across millennia rather than decades, has made it much, much bigger.
Sam Cockerill is CEO of Libertine FPE Limited, developing “Linear Power System” technologies that will make decentralised power generation the norm – bringing clean, reliable and affordable power to wherever it is needed. Sam is currently in San Francisco along with fourteen other UK cleantech start-ups as part of the Clean and Cool Mission 2015. This week-long trip is an opportunity for the entrepreneurs to hone their business pitches, learn from leaders in the field, and talk about their amazing products to potential investors and partners. Clean and Cool 2015 is organised by Innovate UK, together with The Long Run Venture, UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) and CoSpA (the Co-Sponsorship Agency). You can follow the progress of the Mission on Twitter@innovateukmedia,@CleanandCool and #cleansf. Follow the author @LibertineFPE.
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