Before I get into the symantics of the "how to's", one needs to ask one self- why create an org chart in the first place? Why take the time to do this? Great question really as this endeavor can take some time - several hours, several days or a few months actually - depending on how big the company is or what departments you need to figure out. What's your goal in doing this in the first place? There are many ways to use an org chart - competitor analysis to compare organization structures by departments, size, titles, product lines, etc. because you want to reorganize your own firm or get ideas from the competition that's kicking your butt; maybe you're in sales and need to find the decision makers or talk to others to get to the decision maker or buy-in of others; maybe you're a recruiter and looking for candidates; perhaps you're in a role of Merger and Acquisitions and looking at the value of a potential company purchase and want to know who the people assets are?
Back in 2001, one of my Executive Search firm clients called me and asked me to build her an org chart for a Fortune 50 client of her's . She was attending the Board of Directors meeting and wanted to know how the Executive team was structured and all their direct reports before her meeting. I asked her a seemingly obvious question to me, "you've been doing business with this company for years now, do you not know the Executives and their structure already? You talk to the Executive team all the time." Her humble response back, " Yes, but structures change all the time, I'm not visual where I can piece these people together without an org chart and this company pays me $2M a year to know their company in and out. It would look bad on my end to not know who the team is when talking to their Board of Directors and I can't ask them for this information because they expect to me know and pay me a lot to know this. " Made sense to me then and I gladly took her $10K for a 40 hour gig. :-) Peanuts to my client.
Before you start building an org chart, I highly recommend white boarding - brain storm with yourself. Ask yourself, simple Business 101 questions - what do I know about Company A's industry, who are their competitors, what do I know holistically about departments in general (ie, Marketing, Sales, Legal, Finance, Operations, HR, etc.) . Example, no matter the industry, an HR department tends to have the following functions: Compensation, Benefits, Recruiting, Employee Relations, etc. The larger the company, the more these roles are divided up. It could be that Recruiting has 100 recruiters - Recruiting could be divided by internal skill sets/function, geography, etc. Again - white board and think about the industry and size of the company...If a smaller company, these HR roles may combine somehow. With org charts, roles in a company and quantity of roles within a company - size does matter - lol! The more employees, the more structure a firm tends to have!!
Think about titles - President, VP, AVP, Sr Director, Director, Sr Manager, Manager, etc. Maybe the structure is a services model: Partner, Principal, Associate, etc.
Step 1, Forecast what the company might look like as far as structure by department in general. In other words, write down on your white board all the functions of a typical department whether Sales, Marketing, etc.
Step 2, Research the company's industry, the location (is the company in 1 location or do they have multiple sites), how does the company generate revenue and who are the clients they service (example, do they manufacture goods {Pepsico}, do they resell a product by combining other company products to make a new widget to sell {Dell}, do they distribute products {Wal-mart}, do they only provide a service {Accenture}.
Step 3, Research - the fun stuff. Start with the company website. Websites these days spill the beans - Executive summaries, customers, product lines, EMPLOYMENT/CAREERS - golden info for a researcher. What positions are the company hiring for - titles given away for free and often, listed out by department.
Step 4, Assuming you have no budget and absolutely no access to proprietary tools like Zoom Info, One Source, Hoover's (paid version), Monster.com, etc., build upon what you drew on your white board. You don't really need these tools though these tools can expedite your time. LinkedIn is a great tool to use these days and free. Though, paying $50/mth is worth it because you have access to so much more data and LinkedIn has started to profile firms with % of female - vs-male employees, connect others in similar industries, shows references, etc. Tools is an entirely separate blog entry to come later...organizing the information overload highway is yet another blog entry too...
Step 5, You should now have somewhat of a "shell" for the organizational chart. At least, an idea from your primary research to start secondary research - pick up the phone. As a CI professional, I always have a specific purpose in calling someone and always honest about the purpose. Before you pick up the phone, if needed, write yourself a script so you are prepared with questions in advanced.
Example, so you know the VP of Sales is Brad Pitt, but you want to find out Brad's direct reports. Prepare questions for the receptionist or Executive assistant in advance. "I know Brad is the VP Sales, but he is too busy and not the person I need to talk to "Angelina". I need to talk to the person under Brad that does XYZ. Can you transfer me to that person?" Be prepared for objections though...without a name, some will not transfer you, though I really don't have issues still today because I've done my whiteboarding and prepared in advanced. Answer - I'm not sure who it is Angelina, but I know they are responsible for XYZ, your company is so large that it's hard to understand the organization or who does what, but the reason I need to speak with them is because....As simple as this sounds, this is the truth and I 99% of the time get transferred believe it or not because I'm honest. Maybe, being polite helps too or southern charm.
Step 6, document your calls. ALWAYS, when you get someone on the phone that is willing to talk to you, in turn, be helpful back to them. Keep them on the phone and talking. Bond - can you set aside business and figure out something you might have in common?? Are you from a similar region, traveled somewhere similar, like the same sport, college, etc. TRUST me - people like to talk about themself or their passions. It is much more enjoyable for me too talking to someone from my home state or someone who likes my favorite NBA team. It helps set yourself apart too and people are more willing to talk openly about business when they share a bond with you. I'm like this anyway with no motive really because I like people in general, but if you're just after the business factor in the end...highlight this tip.
In Summary, creating an organizational chart is simply a puzzle. Start at a very high level with what you THINK an organizational chart might look like. Gather information from various primary sources. Fill in the blanks and verify your information through secondary research (phone calls).
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Organizational Chart Builds- How to's (Part 1)
I began my headhunting days in 1998 and right before the onset of the internet craze so we didn't have all the great proprietary tools or sophisticated search engines as we do nowadays. A Researcher like me had minimal tools to work with and relied heavily on phone skills to get the information we needed. In Part 1, I'm going to share a true story that I encountered on building a competitor organizational chart. In Part 2 of this blog, I'm going to share standard techniques that I use today as my first story is rare (not one of my Research friends has ever had this occur to them), but I do encounter similar situations today though not quite as easy as this story in such a protected information world that we're in. Finally, Part 3 will outline how a CI professional handles situations versus a Social Engineer. I have traits of a Social Engineer and aware of these techniques, but I am a CI professional and practice CI methods.
Mission Background:
One of our clients was struggling with revenue and getting their butt kicked by their top competitor and hired our firm to find a couple of top notch Sales Executives to turn around Sales. As a Researcher, my job was to create a target list of companies to start identifying executives in other companies that might make sense to call for headhunting. During this process, I started to see a trend in the direct competitor and went to my Partner and suggested that maybe the reason for the loss of revenue could be due to the way the competitor was structured as an organization.
Our client was aligned purely by geography and their competitor was aligned by product group, retail channel, etc. My Partner thought maybe I was on to something and asked me to go create a full blown Organizational chart for this competitor. This was a large company with several Directors and VP levels which I think was close to 70 or so at these levels. This is not as easy it sounds really and takes time - usually a few weeks to do, but I had one day to do this.
Information Gathering Phase:
I started with the basics - pulled names/titles from our database (10 names), looked at the paid tools we used which was all of them at that time (OneSource is an example and only VP and EVP levels were listed), and their website (nothing except the EVP's were listed here). The challenge was that I needed to find out who all the Directors under the VP and EVP levels were, but I had at least a starting point and could tell this competitor was aligned as I stated above - by product group and retail channel. I had to begin making phone calls directly into the company.
Researchers in Retained search firms tend to be Library Science majors and dread the phone work. I have a different profile than most researchers back in those days (quite different today) and actually trained as a stock broker first before going into headhunting. Cold calling doesn't get any harder than being a stock broker and I actually liked this part of being a stock broker oddly enough as I found it exciting and challenging. Now, I must point out, that I worked for some prestigious retained search firms and had guidelines to follow with ethical practices. Though, some people didn't follow the guidelines, I did.
As an example, if you were asked who you were, what company you were calling from, etc. the ethical guideline was to tell the truth.
Luck or Being Nice Really Pays Off?
One tactic we have as Researchers and Headhunters like Sales teams is to find several different locations for a company so that we have different places to call into. If you call into the same person, they get suspicious. I had my list of different locations and started making the calls. The hardest skills to teach is how you plan for potential obstacles you encounter. I've trained many recruiters on this, but how to handle situations is the hardest to train or prepare for because you are dealing with the human factor and can never be prepared enough on what an individual will ask or how they react to you because you never know. Planning what you will initially ask is easy. How the other side of the phone reacts, well - you can't full proof this into a roadmap.
I started making random phone calls and simply asked "I'd like to speak with the Sales Director for Product X please." First phone call, "Sure, let me transfer you." Sales people are on the phone all the time so I got a v/m - splendid. I found out the name and this person left their direct line on their v/m. That was easy. Next phone call was to a different site, same question, but for a different product. Not so easy this time. "I'm sorry, but I can't tell you who it is." OK - "Can you transfer me to John Doe instead because John is the VP of the entire group." I knew this because I had obtained the VP's name already from preliminary research. Her response, "He is out of town so I guess its okay then since you know of him; I'll transfer you to the Director instead." That was easy too really.
Third phone call, similar request for a Director of Product X, but this time it was music to my ears as a Researcher. The nice person on the other end answered and told me she didn't have access to the internal directory because she was a temp admin that day as the receptionist was out for the week. At first, I was thinking that it was a dead end, but simply started talking to her about being a temp and how her day was. This particular location happened to be in Virginia where I grew up so we had that in common. Part 3 will explain this further. After a few minutes, Roxy (made up name) told me to hold on and she would go ask someone and she came back and told me the exact person's name and gave me the direct phone # - gold mine for me.
An hour later, I called Roxy back and let her know "I needed to now talk to another person that handled a specific Retail channel." Again, she put me on hold and went and asked, gave me the name and direct line again. I was making some serious headway, but had a long way to go though. I made a few more calls into other locations as to not overuse Roxy's kindness. After several phone calls during the day, I was able to have a decent puzzle put together, but clearly had many gaps in the Organizational Chart I was tasked to build out.
Organizational Charts are puzzles and you build them piece by piece - back end information that you have access to and then adding to the puzzle through supplemental phone conversations for information.
I called Roxy a 3rd time. We were pals by now. I let her know "I was appreciative of her help today and that I had a deadline to hit and needed to talk to a few more people, but was confused on whom this time. " I gave her some details on what I needed (gaps in my org chart puzzle). She put me on hold again, but this time, she went and retrieved an org chart for the entire sales team. OMG! Roxy started rattling off names and numbers left and right. At this point, I only had about half of the 70 folks still after a full day’s effort though. Yes, org charts take a lot of time.
Roxy then told me, "I have to put you on hold for an incoming phone call." She came back and asked me, "why don't you just give me your Fax # and I will send you the org chart." WHAT? Of course the Social Engineer in me thought immediately, I can't believe this and then put HER on hold. I went down the hall and asked an Associate I worked with if our FAX line was secure and if our FAX line disclosed who we were. It was secure - even back then. Headhunting firms are like that.
I got back on the phone with Roxy and said, "Okay, I have my FAX #."
At 4:00, I went to my Partner with the entire competitor org chart. She was blown away and couldn't believe I was able to deliver it. Her expectation was some information, but not all of it.
Mission Background:
One of our clients was struggling with revenue and getting their butt kicked by their top competitor and hired our firm to find a couple of top notch Sales Executives to turn around Sales. As a Researcher, my job was to create a target list of companies to start identifying executives in other companies that might make sense to call for headhunting. During this process, I started to see a trend in the direct competitor and went to my Partner and suggested that maybe the reason for the loss of revenue could be due to the way the competitor was structured as an organization.
Our client was aligned purely by geography and their competitor was aligned by product group, retail channel, etc. My Partner thought maybe I was on to something and asked me to go create a full blown Organizational chart for this competitor. This was a large company with several Directors and VP levels which I think was close to 70 or so at these levels. This is not as easy it sounds really and takes time - usually a few weeks to do, but I had one day to do this.
Information Gathering Phase:
I started with the basics - pulled names/titles from our database (10 names), looked at the paid tools we used which was all of them at that time (OneSource is an example and only VP and EVP levels were listed), and their website (nothing except the EVP's were listed here). The challenge was that I needed to find out who all the Directors under the VP and EVP levels were, but I had at least a starting point and could tell this competitor was aligned as I stated above - by product group and retail channel. I had to begin making phone calls directly into the company.
Researchers in Retained search firms tend to be Library Science majors and dread the phone work. I have a different profile than most researchers back in those days (quite different today) and actually trained as a stock broker first before going into headhunting. Cold calling doesn't get any harder than being a stock broker and I actually liked this part of being a stock broker oddly enough as I found it exciting and challenging. Now, I must point out, that I worked for some prestigious retained search firms and had guidelines to follow with ethical practices. Though, some people didn't follow the guidelines, I did.
As an example, if you were asked who you were, what company you were calling from, etc. the ethical guideline was to tell the truth.
Luck or Being Nice Really Pays Off?
One tactic we have as Researchers and Headhunters like Sales teams is to find several different locations for a company so that we have different places to call into. If you call into the same person, they get suspicious. I had my list of different locations and started making the calls. The hardest skills to teach is how you plan for potential obstacles you encounter. I've trained many recruiters on this, but how to handle situations is the hardest to train or prepare for because you are dealing with the human factor and can never be prepared enough on what an individual will ask or how they react to you because you never know. Planning what you will initially ask is easy. How the other side of the phone reacts, well - you can't full proof this into a roadmap.
I started making random phone calls and simply asked "I'd like to speak with the Sales Director for Product X please." First phone call, "Sure, let me transfer you." Sales people are on the phone all the time so I got a v/m - splendid. I found out the name and this person left their direct line on their v/m. That was easy. Next phone call was to a different site, same question, but for a different product. Not so easy this time. "I'm sorry, but I can't tell you who it is." OK - "Can you transfer me to John Doe instead because John is the VP of the entire group." I knew this because I had obtained the VP's name already from preliminary research. Her response, "He is out of town so I guess its okay then since you know of him; I'll transfer you to the Director instead." That was easy too really.
Third phone call, similar request for a Director of Product X, but this time it was music to my ears as a Researcher. The nice person on the other end answered and told me she didn't have access to the internal directory because she was a temp admin that day as the receptionist was out for the week. At first, I was thinking that it was a dead end, but simply started talking to her about being a temp and how her day was. This particular location happened to be in Virginia where I grew up so we had that in common. Part 3 will explain this further. After a few minutes, Roxy (made up name) told me to hold on and she would go ask someone and she came back and told me the exact person's name and gave me the direct phone # - gold mine for me.
An hour later, I called Roxy back and let her know "I needed to now talk to another person that handled a specific Retail channel." Again, she put me on hold and went and asked, gave me the name and direct line again. I was making some serious headway, but had a long way to go though. I made a few more calls into other locations as to not overuse Roxy's kindness. After several phone calls during the day, I was able to have a decent puzzle put together, but clearly had many gaps in the Organizational Chart I was tasked to build out.
Organizational Charts are puzzles and you build them piece by piece - back end information that you have access to and then adding to the puzzle through supplemental phone conversations for information.
I called Roxy a 3rd time. We were pals by now. I let her know "I was appreciative of her help today and that I had a deadline to hit and needed to talk to a few more people, but was confused on whom this time. " I gave her some details on what I needed (gaps in my org chart puzzle). She put me on hold again, but this time, she went and retrieved an org chart for the entire sales team. OMG! Roxy started rattling off names and numbers left and right. At this point, I only had about half of the 70 folks still after a full day’s effort though. Yes, org charts take a lot of time.
Roxy then told me, "I have to put you on hold for an incoming phone call." She came back and asked me, "why don't you just give me your Fax # and I will send you the org chart." WHAT? Of course the Social Engineer in me thought immediately, I can't believe this and then put HER on hold. I went down the hall and asked an Associate I worked with if our FAX line was secure and if our FAX line disclosed who we were. It was secure - even back then. Headhunting firms are like that.
I got back on the phone with Roxy and said, "Okay, I have my FAX #."
At 4:00, I went to my Partner with the entire competitor org chart. She was blown away and couldn't believe I was able to deliver it. Her expectation was some information, but not all of it.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
What the heck is Competitive Intelligence anyway?
In a nutshell, Competitive Intelligence (CI) is an ethical and legal business practice where one gathers information and converts this information into actionable intelligence for business decision making. CI is not industrial espionage, lieing, market intelligence or business intelligence. CI professionals as myself follow a code of ethics as described and outlined by the The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP).
How do CI professionals obtain information? Competitive information may be obtained from public or subscription sources, from networking with competitor staff or customers, or from field research interviews.
CI professionals are not hackers or social engineers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_(computer_security) though some people confuse us with these fields - we practice legal methods.
Life is a CI playground for Kristin. I gather CI everyday all around me purely by being observant, extroverted and highly OCD. You would be surprised what you can learn at Starbuck's, on an airplane, sitting at a bar, or my personal favorite - playing poker or blackjack at a casino by simply listening. People like to talk when they don't think anyone is around listening. Perhaps this craft is why some confuse CI with Social Engineering. A good friend of mine lent me a great book I'm currently reading that is all about Social Engineering - "The Art of Deception" by the most famous social engineer there is - Kevin Mitnick.
I've been a recruiter/headhunter and business development professional for several years now. Being highly trained in CI techniques gives me a competitive edge over my peers and competitors as I tend to know more about their own company then they do often as well as their customers. My aspiration on my blog is to share stories and knowledge on interesting topics that have CI foundations and that can help others learn how to be more observant in the world we live in.
How do CI professionals obtain information? Competitive information may be obtained from public or subscription sources, from networking with competitor staff or customers, or from field research interviews.
CI professionals are not hackers or social engineers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_(computer_security) though some people confuse us with these fields - we practice legal methods.
Life is a CI playground for Kristin. I gather CI everyday all around me purely by being observant, extroverted and highly OCD. You would be surprised what you can learn at Starbuck's, on an airplane, sitting at a bar, or my personal favorite - playing poker or blackjack at a casino by simply listening. People like to talk when they don't think anyone is around listening. Perhaps this craft is why some confuse CI with Social Engineering. A good friend of mine lent me a great book I'm currently reading that is all about Social Engineering - "The Art of Deception" by the most famous social engineer there is - Kevin Mitnick.
I've been a recruiter/headhunter and business development professional for several years now. Being highly trained in CI techniques gives me a competitive edge over my peers and competitors as I tend to know more about their own company then they do often as well as their customers. My aspiration on my blog is to share stories and knowledge on interesting topics that have CI foundations and that can help others learn how to be more observant in the world we live in.
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