How to “game” change

There are two types of change – change that is imposed externally, and the change we choose to make ourselves. Both can be difficult, but only one is inevitable.

In business, we have change imposed on us all the time. Company restructures, legislative change and compulsory competitive tenders are all examples of externally imposed change. This kind of change can shake us up in unpleasant ways and make us feel exposed and vulnerable.

The opposite of change is inertia. In physics, an “inert” object continues in its existing state, unless that state is changed by an external force. In other words, when something pushes us, we have no choice but to go with it.

Self-imposed change, however, requires US to do the pushing. This makes it elusive and harder to achieve – even when it is essential.

Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, authors of Immunity to Change, found that desire and motivation aren't enough on their own to create change, and that change remains maddeningly elusive even when it's literally a matter of life or death. For example, they note that even when doctors tell heart patients they will die if they don't change their habits, only one in seven will be able to follow through and make the change successfully.

Inertia can trap us into under-performing, even when we think we are working hard and doing the right thing.

In Who Moved My Cheese? - one of the world’s best-selling change management books - Spencer Johnson suggests that most of us spend far too much time looking after our “existing cheese” (what we have now) and not going in search of “new cheese” (what we could have, if we only got off our butts and went looking for it). “Movement in a new direction helps find new cheese,” concludes Johnson.  “Life moves on, and so should we.”

The most successful suppliers know they need to overcome inertia to avoid being left behind. They aren’t content with just doing what the customer or contract says they should do, and are always looking for ways to add more value. In contrast, others – who have more of a “set and forget” mentality – don’t realise that they are setting them up to lose.

The good news is that you get to decide today which one you are going to be.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

Hard worker or clear winner?

There's a lot of joy that accompanies winning a new contact or customer. The hard work is over, and finally, we get a chance to do what we really want to do – the work itself.

For most people in the services business, no matter whether you're in commercial services, human services, or professional services, “the work” is what you actually signed up to do when you chose your career. You want to get out there. You want to deliver your knowledge and expertise. You want to get stuff done and to help people.

And when you’ve won the business, it’s easy to assume that doing good work is all you need to do to keep the relationship humming.

Unfortunately, it isn’t.

Good work is an expectation: it’s what we get paid to do. So what more do we need to do to keep business that’s important to us, apart from doing good work? That’s surprisingly simple.

There is a distinct difference between the hard workers, who do good work but don’t always retain it, and the clear winners who do both.

Hard workers tend to treat the customer transactionally, obsess about the work, and are only comfortable working with what’s comfortable and absolute.

Clear winners, on the other hand, treat the customer strategically, obsess about the customer’s business (not just the work), deliver what the customer doesn’t yet know they need, and are comfortable working in a space that’s conceptual and abstract.

When it comes to winning again, the way we THINK about our important contracts and customers is even more important than what we do for them.

If you are you part-way through a contract term with a big customer, or faced with a renewal or re-tender process in the next 12 months, join me on August 6 and find out how to get ready to re-compete. 

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

The role of a Bid Leader

When you’re in charge of a bid for an important piece of business, you are an important role model for your team and your organisation.

The amount of energy and enthusiasm they will display for the bid is directly correlated to how you feel about it yourself. Is this something you really want to win? What will it mean for your role, your team or your business if you win? What about if you don't? What are the great things that will happen if you win? What are the consequences of a loss?

Bid Leadership is an active project leadership role where it is important to lead by example.

When leading a bid, you are neither a figurehead nor a task master. You need to be right in there, actively working with your team, and supporting them when they need it most.

When you do, you will find that your energy and enthusiasm are contagious.

Make sure that you share what you are doing among the informal power networks inside your organisation so there is a groundswell of support. Enlist the help of other line managers, if you need to, to get help with your projects and extra resources to cover for you and your team while you are deep in delivery of the bid.

It’s fine to ask your team to work longer hours on project delivery or bid delivery, as long as you are doing this yourself. Use the opportunity to give your people extra responsibility and make sure they are rewarded for it.

Own your role as Bid Leader, and you will own the bid’s success as well.

How a “pre-cation” can help you deliver a more compelling bid

Lately, I’ve been talking about the ways in which energy and enthusiasm power our bid efforts. Unfortunately the way most organisations handle bids is rapidly depleting these precious resources.

Team members need to be inspired to do their best work on proposals, and pretty much everyone is stretched and hassled and working on the bid as well as their day job. Worse still, there are no thanks or recognition for contributing to proposals. All staff really see is a mountain of thankless work that they don’t get paid for and that eats into their personal time.

If your organisation cares about its win rates, and more importantly, about employees and their wellbeing, it’s time you did something about this. Here is an idea that will definitely win you points with staff, and probably on the proposal too.

While it’s common to give time off after a bid to compensate for the extra workload, a better way to generate energy and enthusiasm is to give your team at least part of this time off in advance.

Technology employers Atlassian and 42 Floors noticed that new staff members often came into their organisation exhausted from their previous job. To solve this problem, both now offer staff a “pre-cation” (paid holiday) before they start with the company.

This is a great way to make sure that people show up for work fired up and ready, not tired and burned out. Atlassian is now considered an employer of choice in an industry where competition for talent is high, and regularly rates a mention on lists of "best places to work" in both the US and Australia.

If you’re about to start work on a must-win bid, offer your team a “pre-cation”. It could just mean the difference between a proposal that really hooks the customer, and one that lies there as lifeless and exhausted as the people who wrote it.

Energy and enthusiasm – the fuel powering a bid effort

We need our people to bring their best work to bids, but energy and enthusiasm are finite resources that need to be carefully managed — especially when things don’t go to plan.

Last week I wrote about the importance of “five-to-niners”- the unsung heroes whose work powers a bid effort.

Many years ago, I worked on an important bid for a services organisation. There were probably at least 20 of us on the team and for six weeks we were pretty much chained inside a room. (It was a nice room, and there were pastries, and someone came to bring us coffee every now and again, but still). The team was made up of a mix of outsourced specialists, like me, and junior people from the organisation itself. It was very difficult to get the senior associates or leaders’ time and most of us didn’t have a clue what we were writing about. I felt for the internal staff — it was high-pressure work, with long hours. But they took it on enthusiastically because they hoped to work on the account, which was with a high-profile, multinational company.

I will never forget the celebration lunch that the organisation put on to reward us for our hard work. We were waiting for the senior leaders to return from lodging the bid, and expecting cheers and high fives all round. Eventually they did arrive, late, with faces like thunder. It turned out we had been asked to pull out of the bid due to a last-minute competitive conflict. It was over before it had even begun.

The energy drained out of that room faster than a sinkhole can swallow a truck. Tim, the staff member sitting next to me who had been working overtime for weeks and missed his son’s basketball final, was absolutely gutted. It was obvious that the lunch we were about to eat (mostly in silence) just wasn't enough to reward Tim for everything he had invested.

Senior leaders often feel comfortable betting big and living with the consequences, but staff usually don’t have the same appetite for risk. When asking staff to join us on a business growth journey, it’s important to recognise — and empathise — that they will be sharing the risks, as well as the rewards.

“Five-to-niners” – the unsung heroes of a successful bid effort

It takes more than just a mandate to get people to bring their best work to proposals.

What does it really take for a bid to be successful? A compelling offer? A sharp price? A great-looking proposal that is well written and interesting to read? Yes. All are important.

But each of these things is in itself highly dependent on the energy, enthusiasm and creativity our teams bring to the project. Without these, our proposal efforts can really struggle.

The other day, I was talking to Cameron, a program manager who works for one of my most successful clients. Cameron hit the nail on the head when he said, "Bids are not a nine-to-five job for me. They're a “five-to-nine” job."

Cameron isn’t complaining. In fact, he is very proud that his contribution helps his company to win work. But like many people who have an operational role and a lot of valuable knowledge, bids aren’t part of Cameron’s job description. They are something that gets done on top of everything else he needs to achieve in a day.

So spare a thought for the Camerons in your world. These are good people with a great work ethic, but their reserves of goodwill run dry eventually. When the next big thing comes up (after the last big thing) many are inwardly groaning. "Geez, another bid? I'd really like some time with my kids. I'd love to get to the gym. It’s been ages since my wife and I went out to dinner."

A simple way to maintain goodwill with your five-to-niners is to reward them for their hard work — no matter what the outcome— and always make sure there is a real celebration when you win.

And if your team could use some tactics to deliver bid-winning thinking, get in touch – I can help.

Manage Your Commitments, Master Your Success!

Although we all want to win new business, in truth, we are often valuing something very different when it comes to the way we are spending our time.  Woody Allen famously said that 80% of success is just showing up.  What he really meant was that 80% of success is doing the work, and then “showing up” well prepared, in the right place and ready to pitch to the right people.

“People used to always say to me that they wanted to write a play, they wanted to write a movie, they wanted to write a novel, and the couple of people that did it were 80 percent of the way to having something happen,” Allen has said. “All the others struck out without ever getting that (far). They couldn’t do it, that’s why they don’t accomplish a thing, they don’t DO the thing. Once you do it, you are more than half way towards something good happening.”

He’s right — success starts with commitment and intention.

Something I have noticed in my Persuasive Tender and Proposal Writing Master Class— through which I’ve trained several hundred people — is that the students who are highly committed, keep promises to themselves, and do the work get huge value from the program. Students who lack commitment, or become distracted, don’t end up achieving as much as they could have. Their success has little to do with how smart they are, or what they have to offer. It’s all about how they show up.

Likewise, if you have a growth agenda, and are pursuing new business through formal bids and tenders, don’t get distracted by other things while you’re waiting for the RFT. Successful pursuits are the result of intentional positioning, and being clear about your personal commitment to the outcome.  To start with, ask yourself these questions:

• What will it mean for my business if we win, or do not win?
• What do I personally stand to gain from this?
• Have I really committed to this outcome?
• Do I know what it will take, and do I have a clear plan to get there?
• Is there space in my life and calendar?
• Do I have mentors around me who can accelerate my success and keep me accountable?
• Do I have supporters who can help me get the work done? 

Feel Like Your Workload is Taking Over Your Life?

You’re definitely not alone. According to a report by Kinsey & Co, cited in The Age recently, professionals now spend 28% of their time, reading, writing or responding to email, and another 19 per cent tracking down information to complete their tasks. Communicating and collaborating internally accounts for another 14% of the average working week, with only 39% of the time remaining to accomplish role-specific tasks.

That’s 61% of your time getting lost in email and information.

Not surprisingly, this ratchets up the stress levels to an untenable level.  In a study by the Institute of the Future (California), 71% of professionals said they feel stressed about the amount of information they must process and act on while doing business and 60% feel overwhelmed.

Senior managers, sales leaders, front-line managers and technical professionals often tell me that writing is a core expectation of their job role these days.

Unfortunately, after your day has been spent going to meetings, talking to customers, managing staff, and going out to site, there isn’t a lot of time left. So when you need to write something that takes longer than a few minutes, it probably tends to get done after hours.  And I’m willing to bet that you absolutely hate being chained to your desk writing.

There is a way to write more effectively that is easy to learn and won’t take a lot of your time — in fact it will save you time and also help you get better results.

• The Persuasive Speed Writing Program will give you everything you need to write business documents that are twice as persuasive – in half the time you’re probably spending now.
• You will also learn how to get your best thinking out of your head and onto paper wherever you are, without being chained to your computer.
• You can learn how to do this in just two weeks.

This program starts on March 27 and enrolments close next week. For more information, go to http://www.winningwords.com.au/public-speedwriting/

Proposal Reviews — Can We Make Them Better, Faster, and Less Prone to Going Off the Rails?

Proposal reviews are the bane of most bid managers’ lives. The stress factor ratchets up exponentially when you have multiple people involved, spread across multiple sites in multiple time zones. And that assumes you are just making one submission! Combine dozens of version changes with deadline pressure and you have a recipe for mistakes, frustration and a process that gets harder to manage by the minute.

I recently came across a terrific article on the topic of proposal reviews by American proposal specialist Joe Latta, who has clearly given this issue a great deal of thought.

Joe shows how we can leverage technology to make the process better, faster and less prone to going off the rails. His article centres around the capabilities of Adobe Acrobat products, including how to annotate comments in PDF; export comments to Word; keep track of everything in SharePoint; and use new features of Acrobat such as EchoSign to get electronic signatures on PDF documents.

There are some great tools and techniques in Joe's article for anyone who manages complex bids.

Obsess about Your Customers, Not Your Competitors

Do you spend a lot of time watching what your competitors are doing? If so, it might be time for a re-think. It's summer time in Australia, and for many of us in business, it represents an opportunity for down-time and reflection that we don't get time for during the year. It's tempting to spend that time in contemplation of what competitors are doing — but if you do this, it will only make you crazy.

We all present the best and shiniest face of ourselves to the public. So if you're trolling competitors' websites, looking at their social media feeds and everything that they're putting out publicly, it's likely that what it looks like they're doing is a lot shinier and more impressive than what they actually are doing.

At best this is historical (and sometimes aspirational) information, and at worst it’s simply fiction — not to mention a huge waste black hole of wasted time and effort.

I've worked with companies in industries where every player focuses obsessively on their competitors, and it is a great way to get a headache, not a customer.  This makes perfect sense when you think about it. If everybody in your industry is spending time watching each other, then who is looking at what the market is struggling with or asking for?

So, if you are planning to spend this summer developing your strategy for 2014, start by looking at what your market and your customers are doing. What did they achieve last year? What are they looking to do in 2014? Where are there gaps that you can help them with?

Focus on your customers and what you can do for them — not your competitors — because that's where true competitive differentiation (and sales) actually come from.

Dear Procurement: all I want for Christmas is…

Last December I ran this letter in the Winning Pitch, and it had the highest open rates of all my newsletters in 2012. So if you missed my Christmas letter to Procurement it, here it is again, with a few amendments to bring it up to date for 2013. Unfortunately, the bad news is that not much has changed in the buyer/supplier relationship in the past twelve months. The good news is that there is still room for improvement!

Here's hoping that the New Year brings more balance for all of us in the tendering system. No matter what side of the fence you sit on, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year :-)

Dear buyers,

You need stuff done; we know how to do things.  We need each other, and we really want to work with you to do great things together.

Unfortunately, the tendering system is turning us into adversaries, not collaborators. Like us, you are probably drowning under a pile of forms and schedules, and you must be wondering if there is a better way to make buying decisions.  We think there is.  Here is how, with only a few small adjustments, we can change this system for the better.

• Let us talk to you again. A tender isn't the only way to scope the market and for complex purchases, it really isn't the best option. So let’s have a chat. Things change quickly and you might be surprised about what we can do for you now that you haven't yet heard about. And, while we’re on the subject…
• Bring back Expressions of Interest.  If you want to assess potential suppliers on paper, why not use an EOI, rather than an RFT? These are short and reasonably straightforward for us to complete. They make us feel like we’re in with chance, and not like we are jumping over a very high hurdle for a very small likelihood of return.
• Say what you mean. Years have passed since the introduction of competitive tendering, but the tenders themselves haven't changed very much in all that time. They are often hard to interpret, and the evaluation criteria don’t always match the questions. With better instructions, any supplier with a bit of common sense will be able to bid confidently. That’s good for you, and it’s good for us.
• Timetable a response period that’s reasonable. We run a pretty tight ship these days; our staff are stretched and it can be difficult to keep up with complex RFT requirements and shrinking deadlines. Crunching us for time because you’re late to market only means you get rushed, poor quality submissions. On the other hand…
• Don’t issue a timetable and then grant a last-minute extension just before the deadline. This unfairly disadvantages (and discourages) the suppliers that are prepared, and have made it a priority to respond to your RFT.
• Please, answer our questions when we ask them. We think very hard before we submit questions about an RFT, because we don’t want to waste your time. But often, we don’t get meaningful answers (or sometimes, any answers). Better information will mean better proposals for you to evaluate.  And finally…
• Have a heart - don’t drop a tender on 21 December.  We know you like to come back to a full inbox, but we would like to see our families too.

There's no doubt the tendering system could work better, and together, we have the power to make it happen. 

You know, at the end of the day, we are all just people. We all put our pants on one leg at a time. So come meet some of us; we bet you will like what you see and hear.

With hope and best wishes for a Happy New Year, Your Prospective Suppliers

Why Exam Swots Make Good Bid Writers

It's been a long time since I was last at school, but in some ways it feels like I never left because my job involves developing bids and responding to tenders. Answering RFT questions often feels like you are sitting an exam every day of your life.

I'm often asked about the skills that are most needed in a bid writer, and how to identify aptitude in internal staff who might be good at that kind of work. Probably the most important is an ability to understand what's being asked for in the RFT, and to respond accordingly. Therefore, a good predictor of likely success in such a role is how good someone is (or has been) at exams, particularly in subjects requiring a complex written response.

Getting good exam marks requires the confidence to understand and interpret and unfamiliar questions very quickly and under time pressure; to plan a response that addresses that question; to identify relevant content and ignore stuff that isn’t relevant; and to weave an argument or point of view throughout. Therefore, a member of staff who has a good academic record with high exam scores in complex subjects is highly likely to be suited to the task of responding to tenders. It doesn't really matter what kind of subjects they were good at – it’s their pre-existing aptitude for this kind of work that is important.

I’ve just finished re-reading the Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith. In it, there is a character called Mma Makutsi, who is famous for having achieved 97% in her final exams at the Botswana Secretarial College. Mma Makutsi is the Assistant Detective to Chief Detective Mma Ramotswe, and together they are a force to be reckoned with. Mma Ramotswe has fantastic intuition, where Mma Makutsi is the person who dots the is and crosses the ts. I am willing to bet that if they weren’t in the detecting game, they would make a great bid team.

Likewise, in your business there is an important role for staff members that aren’t academic and don’t think of themselves as “writers”.These people are often great students of life, are good at reading between the lines and have useful insights customer behaviour. Therefore they make great proposal strategists who are good at seeing the big picture.

You need these big-picture proposal strategists, together with great bid writers who are good at the detail, to form the core of a successful bid team.

Why buyers are asking for short proposals

Like me, you are probably seeing a lot more word and page-limited tender response requests coming out from the market these days. A quick check of the tenders I worked on over the past six months revealed that more than half had page limits for responding to each criterion. On the surface it makes sense as to why this might be happening. After all, if you're a procurement officer or a buyer and you're expecting dozens or hundreds of tender responses, you would want them to be as succinct as possible so that you don't have to wade through pages and pages of unnecessary information in order to score the response. Page limiting and word limiting proposals might reduce your workload by as much as 50%.

But there's another reason why it's a good practice to ask for word and page-limited responses.

That's because buyers understand that it actually takes much more effort to write something within a tight set of limits than it does when no limits are given.

There's a famous quote by the French mathematician, physicist, and inventor Blaise Pascal, who lived in the 17^th century. Pascal said, "I have made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

To me, that sums it up nicely. When suppliers are not limited in how much information they can provide, it's easy to just throw the kitchen sink into the bid and let the buyer sort it out. This has led to a lot of lazy, assembly line proposal writing.

Buyers know that they will get better quality responses if they force you to think about how you can make your proposal shorter. If you have less space and fewer words to get your point across, the good proposals will be better —and those that were never going to be any good anyway at least won't be as tiring or taxing to assess.

What contract bidders can learn from crowdfunding – Part 2

Crowdfunding offers a new model of audience engagement that contract bidders can learn a lot from.  Here are my top four lessons from the most successful crowdfunders.

1. Keep reminding the customer of what’s great about your offer. In crowdfunding, this means up to seven email follow-ups. In your proposal, this means reiterating your most compelling points and spinning them in different ways, not just burying them in the Executive Summary.
2. Make it real. Crowdfunding projects that are supported by engaging video and visuals outsell other projects by a factor of 10 to 1. Successful crowdfunder Chris Thomas, who raised $110,000 through Kickstarter against a target of $10,000 to bring “sleep earmuffs” to market (yes, really), says that there is a direct correlation between “the quality of the video and the bids, and what you end up raising”. Think about how you can elevate your pitch above the usual boring wasteland of uninterrupted words.
3. Make it stand out. In crowdfunding, successful projects tap into needs that customers didn’t even know they had. For example, Patient Zero raised $230,000 through Pozible to stage real life zombie battles, 23 times more than the $10,000 it was originally asking for. In a bid, you’re battling for attention in a crowded marketplace; if everyone can tick all the boxes in the RFT then what makes you any different? Be bold, be an expert, and show the customer a compelling vision of their future working with you.
4. Give something extra. Crowdfunding isn’t charity, and successful crowdfunders recognise that people want to get something back to their investment. A while back, I invested $100 through Pozible in a community project that eventually raised its target of $10,000. In return, I was offered email updates, an invitation to the launch, and my name on the sponsor’s ‘roll of honour’. Rewards don’t have to relate to the project at hand; offer to share your expertise for free on another issue that you know the client is struggling with.

Spitball June podcast: the changing face of productivity

We all want to be productive, but is technology making it easier or just adding to the load? In this month’s podcast we discuss productivity; what holds us back from being productive, our experiences with technology and tips on Apps we’ve tried, the traps of traditional time management wisdom, “infobesity” and the all-you-can-eat buffet, dragons and punching fear in the face!

Listen in at http://spitballbiz.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/productivity-and-technology/

Books we recommend this month include The New Rules of Management: How to Revolutionise Productivity, Innovation and Engagement by Implementing Projects that Matter (by Peter Cook) and Start: Punch Fear in The Face, Escape Average and Do Work That Matters (by Jon Acuff).

Proposal writing tip: etc = “oops, ran out of things to say”

Think your proposal is ready to go? Do a quick spell-check and see if you can find any instances of the abbreviation “etc”. This is one sign that the proposal isn't yet ready for the customer to read.

At best, finishing a sentence with “etc” looks like you have run out of things to say; at worst, like you have run out of interest in what you were writing about. It doesn't matter whether you were stumped, distracted or just ran out of time.  You don't want one little three-letter word to tarnish an otherwise great proposal.

Luckily, this is easy to fix even if you don't have a lot of time left before the deadline.

Look again at any phrase ending in “etc” and see if you have supported the main claim with at least three pieces of evidence ("...for example, X, Y and Z").  If you really had run out of things to say, consider deleting it.  The customer won't notice it's missing - but they will notice your use of “etc”!

Does the proposal you submitted last week sound like the one you pitched six months ago?

Join me for a free 30-minute webinar on Thursday 2 May 1.00pm AEST to find out to how build a great proposal library by harnessing the knowledge - and building the skills - of your subject matter experts. Pretty much every organisation has a ‘library’ of past proposals that they draw from when writing new ones. In theory, content libraries should help you answer the questions that come up - in one form or another - in all RFTs. These are core issues that every prospect wants to know about, including your past experience in similar contracts; customer references; capacity and resources; approaches to quality; approaches to Health, Safety and Environment; innovation; and risk management.

Proposal content libraries are important for knowledge management and to make the production process faster. However, the way that they are built and used tends to hinder – rather than help – the proposal effort.

Firstly, just the fact that the library exists tends to make people lazy. I see far too much cutting and pasting and not nearly enough thinking about what the RFT is asking and what the proposal really needs to say.

Secondly - let's face it - writing proposals isn't most people's favourite job to begin with, coming as it does on top of a mountain of other work. Because of this, I've seen many organisations employ writers to produce content for proposal libraries. But this is a bit like asking the cabin crew to fly the plane.

Good proposal content comes from experts who know what they are talking about. Passing the content development task off to ‘writers’ means that material is often superficial, because experts are busy and it’s difficult to get their time for interviews and reviews. The process gets drawn out and expensive, and leads to a one-shot outcome that is quickly out of date. Content is written descriptively, rather than persuasively, meaning that it lacks any expression of customer value. All of this leads to lacklustre proposals that lack insight and depth.

Writing persuasively is about taking what you know and putting it into context that the customer will understand, and that convinces them to see things your way. This is a skill that anyone can learn, and the process for doing so is actually very simple. If you missed the webinar, contact me to find out more.

Spitball, NEW business radio podcast series: The Changing Face of the Workforce

I've teamed up with Hamish Riddell from Kumbayah Consulting  and Bri Williams from People Patterns  to deliver a monthly business radio show, Spitball: http://spitballbiz.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/the-changing-face-of-the-workforce/

In each broadcast we'll be spitting out some ideas about what's happening in business and seeing what sticks. We do this when we get together anyway, so we figured we would let you eavesdrop.

This month Spitball focuses on the changing face of the workforce, specifically the rise of free agency; the decline of hierarchy; and the rise of informal learning.  Coming in April and June are programs about the changing face of consumption and competition. Tune in and tell us what you think about these issues.