Business Transformation
Marketers, get ready for the social networks?
Marketers are continually hopping onto social media marketing as a perfectly productive means of reaching out to more and more people. Even if they are not able to measure the numbers yet, they are keen on using this tool as an effective means of creating the right buzz about themselves
In an innovative big to promote itself, Aquafina created a contest on video networking website MySpace for users to create a winning video. The reward was a trip to none-other-than the Sundance Film Festival. The brand has profiled itself on MySpace since 2006, filling in with podcasts and film festival updates. This was one of their most innovative and effective ways to reach out to the film community. The influence that social media marketing of this kind provides cannot be met with a single line ad.
Closer home, a recent instance is the promotion of Bollywood [s1] film Tashan on Facebook, YouTube and Orkut. Promoters of the film have created a community specific to the film. On Facebook, it runs with the tagline, “Don’t worry about who you are, just carry your Tashan in your heart.” The film got popular even before it was released and the reader profile perfectly complimented the audience the film required.
Social media marketing can be a tricky game. If your existence on the web is simply a platform for your company, you might want to get involved with B2B media marketing that allows you to access the communities you specifically want to target. You can access this on networks like ITtoolbox or LinkedIn.
On the other hand, you can involve more publicly by hosting podcasts, webcasts and blogs for your brand on the numerous social networking websites with their readership of anything like a million. Since people are talking about you anyway, you might as well don the discussion hat and play along. It will only benefit your brand. Cincom Systems, a global software company, has made available a series of online educational & promotional videos, podcasts and screencasts, on the social media sites YouTube, Ning and Facebook. The famous bollywood actor Amitabh Bachan, Aamir Khan and other are hooked to blogging. Marketing experts like Dale Wolf runs the perfect customer experience management (www.perfectcem.com) blog, Steve Kayser’s Expert Access newsletter has managed to achieve a phenomenal global subscription base of nearly 141,000 subscribers. These examples truly accentuate the importance of the next generation tools for marketers.
For those who have still not recognized the perfectly simple and productive marketing tool that social media provides, it is time to wake up and smell the coffee. There is no challenging the tremendous traffic that a good posting can attract. These will be people who can add to your business and a lot of them will be ones who will keep coming back to your website.
Thanks to Web 2.0 you can use this master of a marketer to attract more links to your website or the company. The idea is to create a posting or an advertisement that connects to the user on the website you are choosing to harness. Added to this is the low cost advantage that all of us are eventually happy to employ. Search engines also pick up websites that receive natural links from known domain names. These are some first hand advantages of social media marketing that many of us are meaning to ignore so very far into its development.
It’s easy to assume that most of the traffic generated thus will not be productive. But a trend that has been noticed is that while initially you might see a spurt of visitors, the numbers will stabilize soon after. And this will be the number to reckon with. It could be clients, customers, partners, potential partners,. All of whom need to be on your list. It is also not presumptuous to say that a lot of the secondary traffic that visits your website could be people interested in what you provide.
Simply advertising on Web 2.0 is an efficient means of attracting traffic to your website. Because the number of users is so high on this case, it adds to the traffic you will eventually attract. Again, the only trick is to make it available to your target audience because the click, as we all know, is only a flick of a second.
While the profits of such marketing do not add up immediately or even evidently, it will generate a linkage on the web that will support your business through mentions, connects and recommendations. Social media marketing perfectly compliments your other forms of marketing. It can even be a support system for you as this is one means of communication that has no time span or recurring costs involved.
Another term touted with as much ease as social media marketing these days is ‘social media optimization’. With this, brands aim to alter their website such that it makes it easily searchable and receives more mention on blogs and podcasts etc. Adding a blog to your own website is a greater way of going about it. If your website is static, it will get more dynamic with regular updates and with several links connecting to anything that you post.
Social media marketing can therefore be a great means to promote your site through social media networks as well as within 3D worlds like Second Life and There.com.
Instead of randomly rushing through this sea of information, marketers prefer to build on a specific idea for brand awareness and then encourage brand attention and feedback with increased albeit more casual visibility. What cautions them is the user feedback that can also be negative. But one cannot forget that users in this case also become contributors and when the product is good, gladly act as ambassadors. As more threads are attached to your name, viral marketing picks up at an unprecedented pace. And this is where the crux of the game lies.
Marketers are therefore now busy fine tuning themselves to the new needs of this growing media that cannot be ignored. Social media marketing is far removed from traditional concepts of marketing. This makes it a more challenging medium but one that can be most effective in the medium to long run.
Intellectuals are still pondering over measurements that most correctly define the reach of this new media. There are four broad measures identified so far—audience, content tracking, online media analysis and online market research. Whatever the measurements and whatever its reach, opinion is unanimous for social media marketing. There seems to be nothing like it in the near future.
By Shiraz Datta, a blogger & a marketer at Cincom Systems India. www.shirazdatta.com
[s1]The Indian Film Industry like Hollywood
Posted by Shiraz Datta on April 25, 2008 at 01:35 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink
Web of many dimensions
As intelligent as the human, as responsive and as understanding. Web 3.0 is likely to be something most of us have not even imagined. And yet, it is going to be something we are all going to create!
Thanks to Web 2.0, we are all leading successfully virtual lives. Building communities, sharing knowledge, even searching information on the future and from the annals long lost. Web 2.0 has been more of a revolution than the dotcom boom and proven its success like nothing else has. It has got almost everyone hooked to the internet with localized communities as well as very popular communities like orkut and facebook.
This version of the web, created by xxxx, is being followed by different versions, the immediate being Web 3.0. Yes, it is simply a version, but it is likely to change the way we use the internet in the same way that Web 2.0 did. Web 3.0 is being discussed, debated and fabricated to further replace this interactive version of the world wide web. Semantic technology, autonomics and autopoeisis are some very confusing terms being used to describe what Web 3.0 could possibly be like.
We’ll go on a tangent and try to describe what Web 3.0 is in layman terms and what it means to the end user, who is eventually going to make up the intelligence of this greater phenomenon.
Where Web 2.0 gave us the interactivity to share information real time, to create communities and to make transfer of data oh! so simple, Web 3.0 is going to be a drastically more intelligent version. It will be a smarter assistant, who will understand our needs, requirements and if everything goes well, even our psychology. It will make the internet available everywhere—on mobiles, TV, even bathroom mirrors if you please. Artificial intelligence will take on a whole new meaning as the web understands internet pages as well as we do. It will be clever enough to relate media to media instead of depending on words, commands and strings.
You will need no keywords. Search engines of the future will be able to fathom what you need, maybe as soon as you log on or maybe as soon as it understands your needs. This is why it is being referred to as the Semantic Web, a term coined by inventor of the first world wide web Tim Berners-Lee. So the web will be smart enough to understand what you are looking for and to understand your needs at various points in time. It will be able to guide you on what meetings you need to prioritize, what movies you need to see and what goodies you need to purchase. You will even be able to visit the supermarket next door or the brand store in another part of the world, courtesy Web 3.0.
It will almost be a virtual world, where you can socialize, entertain and even travel with the web, while sitting in the suitable realms of your room. It will take our lives beyond day-to-day to create a 3-D experience that is able to provide us with an alternate reality where we can collaborate and connect with a whole new set of people. What’s more, you will be able to develop and change the web according to your needs and imagination. People will be able to change the way this world works. And we will not have to depend on the expertise of a programmer to do this.
Web 3.0 will also be a more advanced form of the current searches. So search engines of the future will be able to look for music on the basis of the music that you provide. It will be able to search pictures according to ones that you provide. You needn’t try different keywords, all meaning the same thing, and toss around words to find what you need. It will be able to understand what you mean, without your having to rack your brains over words, strings and keywords. Yes, SEO might very soon become a thing of the past!
This simply means that we will be able to enjoy the internet more than ever. We will be able to intermingle with the internet the way we interact with the outside world today. We will be able to share thoughts with the internet and possibly get a response from it. The web won’t simply be a canvas where we can find our answers and solutions but one that can understand our needs and provide us information and solutions that we have been looking for.
According to Mills Davis, founder and managing director of research consultancy Project10X, “The problem is that existing knowledge on the Web is fragmented and difficult to connect. It is locked in data silos and operating system file system formats… Web 3.0 changes this.” So we will have access to large amounts of data—easily. Different applications will come together to provide a more enhanced experience to the user.
The end user will therefore not be simply a consumer but become a ‘prosumer’. It will be a kinship of internet users with the world wide web. We will be able to evolve the web according to our needs and the web will be able to provide intelligent solutions, as it learns your requirement while you interact with it. It will know when you want to do what task and execute it for you. If you want to make a presentation, for instance, an intelligent user interface like Web 3.0 will know how you would want to present it and set it for you in the desired format.
Essentially, it will be an interactive web that will evolve with the user over a period of time to understand the user’s psychology, needs, habits, methods and requirements. The web will develop with its users to recognize habits of communities across the globe, across ages and even across aptitudes. Furthermore, you and I will be able to develop what the internet should be like and what it should offer.
While this is how Web 3.0 might function, it will be supported by high speed broadband connections and numerous ways in which one device connects with another.
Posted by Shiraz Datta on March 14, 2008 at 03:05 AM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Web 2.0: It’s not really that technical!
"Simplifying Web 2.0"
If you are not comfortable with technology and its concocted numerical nomenclature. If you haven’t figured out Web 2.0 yet, we give you a load up on what it really means to get connected!
How many of us are comfortable with technology and advancements in it? Not too many, I’m sure. The recent generation is a little more ‘Tech-savvy’ they say, but even then it’s just a very superficial understanding of the terms and their purposes. Under this condition, when someone mentions Web 2.0, it seems a little over your head! Have they actually reinvented the web? Isn’t that what 1.0, 2.0 etc are supposed to mean? Different versions of the same thing. So does this affect the way we use the web? It will probably become more complicated with more tools, more buttons, more of everything to make the user think even more while using it! So many questions that tend to make Web 2.0 seem like some enigma which is understood by just a few and blindly used by the rest. But the fact of the matter is that, Web 2.0 would not exist if it was not for the common user. It is us that make the new version of the Web, and not the geeks in their cubicles writing innumerable lines of code.
Web 2.0 was a term introduced to the world during the first O’Reilly Media
Web 2.0 conference in 2004, but has never really been accepted widely as the right nomenclature. We could possibly define Web 2.0 as a knowledge-oriented environment where human interactions generate content that is published, managed and used through network applications in a service-oriented architecture.
This by itself is obviously confusing and is not how you would want to describe it to someone who you are trying to explain the simplicity of Web 2.0 to! However, I have mentioned it here for those who are interested in knowing the technical description of the term. For the rest, it is basically trying to say that Web 2.0 is a place where you, your friends, your family and anyone else can come share information in various forms and get connected to each other in the process. Basically, let’s come hang out and exchange information!
Simple isn’t it?
Let’s take some examples to get into the spirit of Web 2.0 a little more. How many of us have an Orkut, Facebook or MySpace account? Pretty much everybody. And this is exactly what Web 2.0 is all about. People no longer use the Web just to check their mail and send out information at fixed points of time.
It’s now all about making everything real time and sharing and exchanging information then and there. The sites mentioned above allow you to put up photos, write down your thoughts, make a profile that people can browse, share videos and lots more. Suddenly no one on the net is a stranger. People can look through your profile and learn more about yourself even before they have met you. You can connect to people you would never have directly met, but who may be able to help you in a number of ways from hobbies, to accommodation, to education and a lot more. These sites function on user-generated content and that’s what Web 2.0 is all about.
Putting the power in the hands of the user!
You will no longer be told what to do online, but will be asked what you want to do. The Web is no longer a place for the ‘Tech –savvy’ or the professionals who want to showcase their skills. It’s all about the common user who wants to share his thoughts, his work, his skills and allows others to view and rate his work.
Everybody can now have their own web page, and even a custom URL to give them their own online identity. Blogs have already been advanced enough to allow you to not only write about your experiences, but to also include pictures, videos and lots of other features that make them a rich source of information and an outlet for the creatively inclined to showcase themselves to the whole world.
Gone is the time when you had to have big bucks behind you to do anything online and even then have technical expertise to execute it. Now, all you need is some basic computer knowledge and you are on your way to destinations unknown! You no longer need a space ship to “Boldly go where no man has gone before!”
But for all its plus points and advantages, the Web 2.0 advancement also has some serious privacy invasion and identity theft drawbacks. With the amount of personal and potential sensitive information online, you need to make sure you take care of who is looking at your web pages and blogs. Identity theft for creating bogus accounts, image theft, misuse of personal information are all very serious and real threats that abound in this brave new world of the Web.
The movies “The Net” and “The Net 2.0” dealt with a fictional situation of the ill effects of the World Wide Web, but these seem very plausible with the simplification of the Web of late. But with the ease it introduces and the scope for enrichment of our lives, Web 2.0 cannot be viewed as a bad advancement at all.
It’s just up to the user to ensure that he/she uses it responsibly. “With great power comes great responsibility”, said Spiderman and that applies to the Web as well. With the new power and control that it offers to the common user, it is up to him to ensure he uses it carefully and makes sure he watches his own back and other’s as well. At this time of sharing information and thoughts, sharing concerns and watching out for your online colleagues is a must. After all, isn’t that what Web 2.0 is all about. Sharing, exchanging and experiencing what others have.
Posted by Shiraz Datta on March 9, 2008 at 11:34 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0)
Code me a code that codes!
As we veer towards automation, efficiency becomes important. Between the race to ace time, we are forgetting an important innovation that might help us better. Must we think about automating codes? So we don't have to waste man hours doing just that?
In today's world of high automation and a wholesale shift to the digital, real time and live systems take front seat. It therefore becomes imperative that time be spent wisely and care be taken to avoid unnecessary activities. Work hard but work smart is the mantra.
This of course is easier said than done because working smart requires more effort to be put in at one point to ease up the load later and most of us with our myopic vision cannot see beyond the present!
Automation comes only after a level of manual struggle to perfect the tools that achieve it. We come up with ways and means to convert, time consuming manual labor into a simple and effective but most importantly time and money saving automated process. A set of machines or a few lines of code can achieve in a few minutes what 10 people can achieve in a few hours. Though the initial investment for this process could be sizeable, the return on it is very healthy.
However, we always stop at achieving just that and move on to the next process where we make a whole new system to automate it. But, can't we apply the same principle here as well? Automating various systems is a system in itself.
So why not automate that? Why not develop a system that reads processes and develops systems to automate them? Seems like the next logical step but it is far more complex than it sounds. Let's take the example of the simplest and most widely used automation systems we have.
Softwares. These simple lines of code do a number of tasks which we ourselves find too tedious to carry out. But behind every program are three programmers who have worked day and night to get it right. They have indeed worked their magic to come up with innovative ways to tackle the problem, but for every innovation they have also invested time in writing some repetitive lines of code.
This is where the process of automation can come in handy. Why not write a code that will automatically generate lines of code for situations that match certain pre-set parameters within it. Eg., every time it sees a choice and the alternatives, it generates the appropriate switch command, or every time it sees a condition, it generates an if-then-else loop. All it needs to do is learn to recognize such patterns. This can be achieved by a set of instructions to loop through a document or reference material to find certain conditions and then take an action based on their nature.
This will require some really intelligent coding to ensure the program doesn't generate garbage lines of code. It will almost require some predictive systems that may come close to mirroring human intelligence. With the development in adaptive software, this is not too difficult to achieve, at least in principle. The program may take a few runs to get the right combinations, but it will definitely achieve the right result faster than a human can.
We will of course still need humans to apply the final touches on the result, but it will ensure that time spent is spent doing intelligent coding and not repetitive stuff.
An Indian software company had come up with software of this sort some years back, but the buzz surrounding it never really matched up to what it deserved. They had a software that would recognize common elements in a program like brackets and key phrases and fill in the other lines to code itself.
So, if we typed "If", the program would automatically generate a variable and give you options of what conditions to enter and fill in the other fields based on information already available in the program. This saved time for the programmer apart from ensuring that there is no repeat of variables, misplaced syntax, infinite loops etc, which would make debugging difficult in larger programs.
For a corporate level this may be an apt solution. But even on a more amateur level, this is being racticed, but without the knowledge of the people involved! Web designers and data entry operators often use or write software that automates some everyday tasks like table conversions, entry listings or even macros in excel. These do exactly what we have discussed so far.
They follow the user's instructions to complete some manual chores in a fraction of the time using intelligent lines of code to generate more lines of code that are easily edited to achieve the desired result. However, since these are at a much smaller level, their impact is not felt in a big way. But their importance in the process involved should never be underestimated.
People tend to stay from these options because of the need to control the data, lack of faith in automation for important processes and mostly due to ignorance about the method of functioning of the process.
Ignorance is bliss they say, but in this case it's because people are not aware of the available tools. Hence, they end up losing out on the bliss some knowledge could have given them. Figuring out the process to achieve this automation sometimes takes a little time and effort which we are not ready to devote and hence we end up wasting a lot more time, effort and money in doing things the hard way.
The solution is simple. With the pace at which the world is progressing today, the adage 'Time is Money' has never carried more weight. We can either continue carrying on working hard and not worrying about innovations, or we can work smart and invest time and resources now to achieve results and reap benefits for a long time to come.
This happens or not, of course I cannot tell now and will let the time answer. However the choice is there to be made, but will we make the right one? This is one decision a few lines of code would not resolve for us!
Posted by Shiraz Datta on March 5, 2008 at 09:59 AM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Mission:Make Compliance Sexy
Attending Pilgrim Software’s User Conference this week, on the shores of the emerald-green and blue Gulf of Mexico at the Don Cesar Hotel (a classic pink lady of a hotel build in the 1920s) I just can’t get over the ironies, the paradoxes of what compliance, in my mind, has represented and what is going on here. In my mind, compliance, the use of audits, and all that goes with tracking non-conformance conjures up images of stern and sober folk who revel in sameness and predictability. They want the world, I thought, predictable and pure in cause and effect. I was prepared for many, many acronym drive-bys. None came.
Paradox of paradoxes, this user conference made compliance sexy tonight at a major blow-out of a Pirate Party that looked more a toga party. And the presentations weren’t bad either during the day. Linking how to measure compliance through dashboards – the ability to show in real-time how compliance is making a difference with customers – was analytical sexiness as well.
The bottom line of all this was that compliance’s new face is all about taking customers’ requirements and expectations to the heart of what Quality Management and Quality Control Departments do. The best paradox of all was the impatience many quality management professionals have with being even more aligned to their customers’ measurements and not their own.
Posted by Louis Columbus on March 5, 2007 at 11:01 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink
Entrepreneurial Leadership
-- by Tom Nies
“Entrepreneur” is a French word meaning “to take an opening.” But before one can take an opening, one must first see it. This seeing we call "vision." In other words, a visionary sees an opportunity, or an opening, and then shares this vision with others who help to realize that opportunity.
Successful entrepreneurial leaders create a compelling vision of where the organization is headed. They also continuously communicate how to proceed, and energetically guide the development of the organization to advance that vision. Unshakeable will, undaunted determination and relentless pursuit of goals are key hallmarks of these endeavors.
Rigid rule-followers (or deliberate rule breakers) need not apply
Entrepreneurial success, like success in any pursuit, is about the consummate understanding and mastery of key principles – and not about following rules. A rule states, “You must do it this way.” A principle says, “This works well – and has done so through all remembered time. The difference is crucial
The less experienced rigidly follow rules, while the rebellious delight in breaking them. Worse still, they both try to succeed focusing upon subsets of situations – without realizing how all of the forces at work interact in both conflicting and supporting ways. But the master of any art develops mastery by using time-tested and time-proven principles. Mastery should be the ideal of every entrepreneur.
Many fine authors on business, commerce, marketing and sales have never been entrepreneurs. So, these teachings, as valuable as they may be, must be accommodated to the world of the entrepreneur as each tries to build their own future.
Innovation and differentiation
The entrepreneur focuses on innovation of some type. But something every successful entrepreneur well knows is that differentiation is at least as important as innovation. While innovation focuses upon the offering, differentiation focuses on the value, satisfaction, utility or delight that the innovation provides to the customer.
Innovation without differentiation seldom produces optimal appeal to potential customers or optimal results for the seller. When these innovative differentials are significant, whole new categories of business opportunities can be created. Then within these new categories, opportunities are provided for many others to expand the possibilities spawned by entrepreneurial leadership. In this way, entrepreneurial leaders are major dynamic forces which significantly transform our world.
Servant Leadership
Successful entrepreneurial leaders also well know and consistently practice the art of “Servant Leadership.” Such leaders realize that their staff does not work for them, but with them in their joint and unified pursuit of common goals. “Servant Leadership” helps each to do more, and perform better
Each entrepreneur will seek to lead an organization which reflects the substance, style and structure consistent with each one’s own visions and values. In turn, businesses must attract customers, staff and capital. And it is in these attractions that trust is the coin of the realm. Entrepreneurial leaders understand that we, and the organizations we serve, are all parts of a vast cosmos of interacting relationships. This network must be structured such that there is a harmonious, valuable and profitable sense of community among all involved.
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Much of this we surely already realize – at least to some degree. But in life we learn forward; it’s only in hindsight that we are able to understand. We will make many errors as we proceed forward, yet we must not let our failings cause us to become discouraged or cynical. If success were easy to achieve, then all would be successful. But success, like anything truly worthwhile, is never easy. That’s why dauntlessness in the face of adversity is a hallmark of the successful among us. And it is in our retrospective understandings we become more able to successfully lead others.
Posted by TomNies on January 24, 2007 at 02:53 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink
Drive Innovation by Getting Out of the Way!
-- by Tom Nies
Thanks to Cincom’s long-term success, we are often asked how do we, as a medium-sized, privately held company, effectively compete with larger, publicly held companies.
In 1985, Gifford Pinchot III coined the phrase “intrapreneurship” to describe the marriage of an entrepreneurial spirit – complete with its fierce independence and lack of deference to established views – with the resources of a large corporation. While these two spirits may seem in conflict, they actually thrive in many of the world’s best-run companies.
Intrapreneurship is a strategy for stimulating innovation by making better use of entrepreneurial talent. When effectively promoted and channeled, intrapreneurship not only fosters innovation, it also helps employees with good ideas to better channel the resources of a corporation to develop more successful products.
Some of the greatest business leaders of the past century made their early mark in business as intrapreneurs. Former General Electric chairman Jack Welch made a name for himself by building GE’s engineering plastics business as if he were starting his own company. Lew Lehr, former chairman of 3M, similarly built his career on his intrapreneurial pursuit of 3M’s expansion into the healthcare industry. Both General Electric and 3M are long-time Cincom customers, and both are very successful.
Cincom fosters an intrapreneur ethic within our company. The result is many of our associates are empowered and enabled to become company “change agents” who are comfortable bringing new ideas forward and promoting their execution.
Posted by TomNies on November 14, 2006 at 04:10 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink
The Power of Negative Thinking
-- by Tom Nies
We’re all familiar with “The Power of Positive Thinking.” Well, quite frankly, too many people today seem to be practicing just the opposite, saddling themselves with negative thoughts and self-doubts, and seeing only flaws and faults all around them.
This reminds me of someone beginning a climb of the Himalayans. The plains are very low and gentle at first and they become steeper as the air becomes more thin. Finally they become very steep.
Now if you will imagine a big empty knapsack on your back, and each time you have a negative thought such as, “I can’t do this, we don’t have that, if only this, if only that,” you bend over and pick up a pebble and place it in your knapsack. And as you go on walking the gentle slopes, you’re putting more and more rocks from your negative thoughts into your knapsack.
The result is that when the climb becomes steep and the air very thin, when you really need to be able to climb, you already have so much weight pulling you back that you can’t progress any further. You, in the easy going, have destroyed your potential for later on.
Each one of us does it. What we need to do instead, as we walk forward, if we are loaded with a big burden, figure out every way you can (every day) to throw a pebble out of your knapsack. Every five minutes, every 10 minutes, get rid of another pebble, another impediment.
Realize that our greatest agent for progress is each one of us, but we’re also our own greatest liability. We’re our greatest friend, our own worst enemy. In realizing this, decide to be a businessperson, not a sales rep. See the big picture, and prepare your knapsack for the “steep climb” just ahead.
Posted by TomNies on March 6, 2006 at 02:22 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Creativity Labs Stimulate Innovation
Where do great ideas come from?
The answer in terms of physical location could be the shower, or in the car on the way to work, or at your desk daydreaming what could be. These places for creativity are all commonplace. But being corporate beings, we tend to gather in a conference room and brainstorm ideas in a group setting. You know that setting ... four wood-paneled walls, a conference table and chairs, and a white board. Not a terribly stimulating place to innovate new products, new promotions, new ways of doing things. Kind of like a white shirt with a starched collar.
What's missing in the traditional conference room is mental stimulus.
Paul Williams, a clever marketer who has passed through the halls at Disney and Starbucks, shares his concept for what a conference room should look like if you want to stimulate creativity instead of same ole' thinking.
Located in Starbucks Coffee Company's headquarters (Seattle Support Center) in Seattle, this once drab conference room, filled with corporate-stock chairs and boardroom style table, is now a 336 square foot haven for brainstorming, problem solving and thinking. The room can hold up to 15 people comfortably - and all the ideas anyone can think of.
There are more visuals of the CreativityLab at Paul's blog Idea Sandbox.
The promotion agency that I ran for 20 years had a similar ideation room, with tack walls, bar chairs at high round tables, bean bag chairs, and funky stuff (idea starters) scattered everywhere. Actually, we borrowed the idea from a business partner -- Doug Hall who ran the Eureka Ranch and hosted product innovation sessions responsible for about 90% of the products under your kitchen sink. I like these kinds of settings. They help break the log jam in our heads.
But there is also a need for those boring old conference rooms where we all meet incessantly to exchange information and plot out big deals -- so don't sell off all your conference room furniture just yet.
But maybe there's a seldom used room at your office that could be converted into a creativity space. Kill the fluorescent lighting. Put marker walls around the space. Bring a bunch of old used, comfy furniture from a Good Will store. Pop in a CD of thumping music and play ideation games. You just might invent the future.
Thanks to Jackie Huba at Church of the Customer for bringing Paul's Creativity Lab to our attention.
Posted by Dale Wolf on February 20, 2006 at 10:52 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Imagine
-- by Tom Nies
“Technology,” Daniel Bell* once said, “like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.” Here, Bell wasn’t simply talking about technology and artist disconnect. The Greek word “techny” actually means “art.”
To confirm Daniel Bell’s point, we can point to Albert Einstein who said, “Imagination is more important than intelligence.” I’ve always liked that thought because I feel that even though I may not be much more intelligent than anyone else, I can still work my imagination harder around what is possible – in other words, I’m willing to think big!
And I encourage everyone else to think big also. This way, even if I don’t achieve the “big objective,” it doesn’t frustrate me. I’d much rather go for a gigantic accomplishment and fall just a little bit short, than try to put a little tiny step forward, because too many tiny little steps forward can cost a lot of time.
And look what can be done with technology when we think big! When we in our business now talk about “real time,” we’re saying something that happens here in Cincinnati instantaneously is known in Tokyo, Australia, Rio de Janeiro, and all other points in the world. That’s what real time is ? virtually at the speed of light. When we talk broadband, we’re talking about tiny filaments of light, millions of those concurrently traveling around the world. So, instead of single handedly channeling information, voice and/or data, we’re sending many channels of information. That’s amazing – and it’s all the result of people using their imaginations and thinking big!
So, let’s go for it and make the most of our life. We humans, each and everyone of us, have gifts of adaptive skills and redirected thought, which enable us to prefigure or imagine innovations and improvements and seek to change the reality that exists in accordance with the thoughts we imagine.
* Daniel Bell is perhaps the most famous sociologist of our time. He put forth the concept of a post-industrial society or information age in his book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973). Later, he re-named this concept the “information society,” for which he is generally considered as the creator of the term (1979).
Posted by TomNies on February 20, 2006 at 04:04 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Michael Crichton's 3 Guides to Managing Complexity
Strategic planners take note: complexity is here.
Michael Crichton has raised a lot of questions about global climate change in his fictional “State of Fear.” His speech at the Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy further explained the line of thinking that guided his research for the book. His conclusions on complex systems can help us all move to a model where we can more effectively manage the systems that operate in our companies and in our marketplaces.
He defines complexity:
“By a complex system I mean one in which the elements of the system interact among themselves, such that any modification we make to the system will produce results that we cannot predict in advance. We live in a world of complex systems. The environment is a complex system. The government is a complex system. Financial markets are complex systems. The human mind is a complex system---most minds, at least.”
There is danger in complexity.
“A complex system demonstrates sensitivity to initial conditions. You can get one result on one day, but the identical interaction the next day may yield a different result. We cannot know with certainty how the system will respond... when we interact with a complex system, we may provoke downstream consequences that emerge weeks or even years later. We must always be watchful for delayed and untoward consequences.”
"Organizations that care about the environment do not seem to notice that their ministrations are deleterious in many cases. Lawmakers do not seem to notice when their laws have unexpected consequences, or make things worse. Governors and mayors and managers may manage their complex systems well or badly, but if they manage well, it is usually because they have an instinctive understanding of how to deal with complex systems. Most managers fail."
Fortunately, Crichton points out, studies show that we can learn to manage complex systems. There are people who have investigated complex systems management, and know how to do it. But it demands humility and the ability to admit when we are wrong.
"The science that underlies our understanding of complex systems is now thirty years old. A third of a century should be plenty of time for this knowledge and to filter down to everyday consciousness, but except for slogans—like the butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane halfway around the world—not much has penetrated ordinary human thinking.”
His first counsel is that we must avoid over-simplifying complexity. When we make this mistake, we come up with wrong answers. “Our human predisposition is to treat all systems as linear when they are not. A linear system is a rocket flying to Mars. Or a cannonball fired from a canon. Its behavior is quite easily described mathematically. A complex system is water gurgling over rocks, or air flowing over a bird’s wing … An important feature of complex systems is that we don’t know how they work. We don’t understand them except in a general way; we simply interact with them. Whenever we think we understand them, we learn we don’t. Sometimes spectacularly.”
His second counsel is that we approach this task with humility and admit when we are wrong and to realize that we will be wrong more often than we are right. “If you manage a complex system you will frequently, if not always, be wrong. You have to backtrack. You have to acknowledge error. You’ve probably learned that with your children. Or, if you don’t have children, with your bosses.”
His final admonition is to eliminate the tendency we all seem to have of using fear to galvanize those around us to follow our solution. “Fear may draw a television audience. It may generate cash for an advocacy group. It may support the legal profession. But fear paralyzes us. It freezes us. And we need to be flexible in our responses, as we move into a new era of managing complexity. So we have to stop responding to fear.”
Posted by Dale Wolf on January 22, 2006 at 10:13 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
2006: The Year Services Become King and other predictions
It's going to be a very busy 2006 and one that will truly be transformational. Predicting the future is always risky business, yet here are predictions for the coming year, foremost being a shift from a purely-oriented product focus in many software companies to service first. At the center of this transformation is that selling with a transaction mentality will continue diminishing, and selling through educating and by earning the trust of prospects and clients will flourish.
Here are predictions for 2006:
- Selling services based on being a trusted advisor makes transaction selling obsolete. This ties back to the services-oriented approach many best-of-breed companies are going to adopt in 2006. Transaction selling ignores relationships and focuses purely on closing deals on incentives and price. Trusted advisors will outsell transaction-oriented sales reps by a wide margin in 2006.
- The biggest CRM spending category of the year will be on integration and services. A few of the CIOs I know are holding onto their decision making responsibility due in large part to this point. They own the customer data and maintain its many integration points. Look for the vision of a unified customer to be a major focus during the coming year throughout CRM.
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) breaks out of CRM and into the rest of the enterprise. Credited with the rejuvenation of CRM, SaaS continues its torrid growth pace anchored by Salesforce.com and RightNow Technologies in 2006. In keeping with a services focus into the coming year, SaaS will find its competitive strength in the greater depth of functionality relative to licensed applications and more affordable pricing. Expect to see the option of single- versus multi-tenant SaaS models in 2006 depending on the feature refreshes required by customer. Ultimately SaaS will find its way into providing supply chain visibility back to channels through CRM systems so orders, quoting and pricing are in synch with each other constantly.
- Service-Oriented Architectures prove they are ready for prime-time. In keeping with the dominant trend for 2006, Service Oriented Architectures will prove themselves ready for the more complex business processes including consolidated order management and fulfillment and pricing integration.
- Measuring Marketing and Voice of the Customer Programs using analytics and dashboards gains momentum globally. Marketing in many companies is constantly fighting battles related to the results of their strategies and debates of whether their efforts are making a contribution to Sales. Look for Marketing departments to champion hosted analytics apps like Sales is championing hosted CRM and SFA apps today.
- Indian outsourcing companies start acquiring software companies. Infosys and HCL are two specifically who could make an even deeper move into the retail by acquiring retail software companies who focus on order management, pricing or data management.
- Google acquires at least four more companies and firmly establishes itself as a enterprise platform. The names of these four companies may or may not be publicly shared, yet Google is well on its way to be an enterprise platform due to the constant contribution of content from both indexed sites and new initiatives including Google Base, reliance on advertising by smaller companies that can’t afford more expensive advertising strategies, and the fact that search engine technology is the quickest fix for the most broken of content management systems. Look for Google to be the first out with video Instant Messaging and other collaboration applications that will serve as on-ramps for entire content management taxonomy support.
- AdWords sparks an industry of optimization tools due to lead generation successes. The technology behind constraint engines could easily be applied to Google AdWords to further optimize word selections and the optimal allocation of budgets by keywords chosen. Google offers a Budget Optimizer today yet it doesn’t allow you to see the median bid for a keyword network-wide. If a constraint engine could define the median value for a key word, its optimal performance for your subject by time and location then the economics of buying them would change drastically and greatly improve individual companies’ performance.
Posted by Louis Columbus on December 22, 2005 at 02:08 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Peter Drucker: The Great Teacher
The first responsibility of managers, Drucker said, was to ask themselves a simple question: What is your business? He was of the opinion that only the customer could really answer. That was a statement made way ahead of the current CRM boom. And yet it is a definitional problem that most managers still struggle with.
What can Drucker teach us yet today?
Posted by Dale Wolf on November 17, 2005 at 03:23 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Motorola's About Face is Built on Simplicity
By Dale WolfWhat’s all the furor about simplification?
Cincom has believed since its inception in this concept. It is what we enable our clients to achieve – simpler, smarter businesses that have distinct competitive advantage.
Does simplification work?
Look at how Motorola turned simplification into an advantage that stunned its competitors and literally transformed Motorola’s company into a new, more aggressive business.
While most players in the cell phone industry centered their product innovation of adding more and more features to their phones, Motorola did a counter-move. They said less is more. With it came their Ultrathin Razr V3 cell phone in 2004. This dandy weighed in at just 3.35 ounces and was just a half-inch thin. Something so light and small it would fit in your shirt pocket without making you look like a dufus. How sweet is that?
Scott Anthony, writing for Harvard’s online newsletter Working Knowledge, tells you the whole story of how stodgy Motorola transformed itself.
To successfully introduce what it now refers to as an "iconic" product, Motorola maintained a single-minded focus on simplicity, avoiding the temptation to layer in additional features that would have made the phone bigger, heavier, and less distinctive. The company also had to dodge some of the classic traps—such as consensus-based decision-making processes that can result in compromised products—that make it so difficult for big businesses to follow new strategies.Perhaps the biggest challenge facing the Razr team was Motorola's internal innovation process. Usually, when Motorola planned to develop a new phone, representatives from each of the company's major geographic regions were asked to weigh in on the concept. The regions would request the sorts of features and functions they wanted included in the design. Each region would then forecast how many units of the model they thought they could sell. The aggregated regional plans would help Motorola then decide whether to invest in a phone's introduction.
It was a complicated dance. If a development team ignored features that a specific region deemed critical, that region would project low sales for the phone. The lowered forecast would make it tougher to get approval to move the project forward. Design teams knew they had to appease each region or their projects would die on the vine.
The real kicker is the end result:
Razr exceeded Motorola’s total lifetime projections for the product in its first three months.
And this is for a product retailing at $450 per phone.
This is the same struggle we all face. Cincom recognizes the contributions that various teams from throughout the company can make when we are developing new software solutions. It helps, however, that all of us work in an environment that trusts and supports simplification. While many software companies load features on to software until the camel can barely stumble out of the stable, we stay focused on the simplest path to success. Therein lies higher value, lower cost, faster return and lower risk. Very simple.
Posted by Dale Wolf on November 7, 2005 at 03:08 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Life's Works
By Skip Press
Earlier this month I went on a road trip to Hannibal, Missouri to explore possibilities with a new lady in my life. These possibilities included finishing a novel long-in-progress and beginning a new screenplay. All in all I thought the results were spectacular. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, I was reminded of my trip this morning when I heard someone on a the Laura Ingraham radio show talking about the work he does - giving a home to orphans. See the Big Oak Ranch site and you'll see why I made a donation this morning before I even had my coffee. The guy's son is the quarterback of the undefeated Alabama U. football team and on the cover of this month's Sports Illustrated magazine. On the way to Hannibal we passed through Clarinda, Iowa where I saw Glenn Miller's birthplace. If you're not familiar with his music, his was the best of the big bands in my opinion and he died in World War II enroute to playing a concert for the military. Further on up the road we stopped at Marcelline, Missouri and toured the Walt Disney Museum. Marcelline is where Mickey Mouse's dad grew up and a place he loved to come back to - always traveling there by train because he loved trains so much. Out back of his family home was what he called the "Dreaming Tree" where he would think about his hopes for the future and things he wanted to create. I learned something there I didn't know - Walt Disney died of lung cancer; apparently he smoked a lot. Then in Hannibal it struck me one day how many people there are currently making a living off Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and Becky Thatcher and Injun Joe and Jim, a century-old legacy of good feelings and literary thrills. Hannibal is still a backwater town on the Mississippi; there's really not much to it. People visit places like these out of curiosity and some times, I think, to try to capture some of the magic that they think might be resident in places where great creators lived, or even were born. It's generally not there, in my experience, because the creators in question took normal circumstances and places as inspiration and made them special. I can just see it, 100 years from now, some place that is supposedly the inspiration for Hogwarts, or the apartment where J.K. Rowling was living as a single mother on welfare when she couldn't afford to make a photocopy of her first Harry Potter manuscript (the one that got turned down by the first publisher). So what do all these creators have in common? Inspired imagination and, I believe, a deep love of people. I don't see this enough in people in Hollywood. Recently I sold a book on the video game business, finally landing it with the third publisher I tried. Somewhere along the way of negotiation of contracts, someone (maybe the publisher, more likely the lawyer for the two game writers I brought in to write the book) tried to ace me completely out of any credit, with a flat fee for editing and not even an acknowledgment in the book. Nice, huh? I stood my ground and got that changed, but I know now that one of two things will happen: (1) the co-author probably responsible for this kind of cutthroat activity will get on his high horse and walk away in a huff (he's already started some of that); or (2) the book will get done despite somebody's lunacy and writers will benefit from the knowledge. I negotiated a decent royalty for myself and a cover credit (as editor) but it still amazes me how someone's hubris might kill the project altogether. In contrast, I've started a novel and a screenplay (two separate projects) that fit the kind of legacy creation that I know Glenn Miller, Walt Disney and Mark Twain left us. So if the video game book falls apart, maybe that's God's way of telling me to work on something with longer-lasting impact. Recently I've been very grateful for what I get to do in my life. I work at home, I get the bills paid, and I'm there when my kids need me. I help other writers all over the world and I teach people who repeatedly tell me how much I'm helping them. Oh sure, I still have big ambition. I still want to win the Oscar - to tell kids out there who are as dirt poor as I was they can do it, too. I still want several books and novels on the NY Times bestseller list. I'd love to buy a big house by the sea and play golf every other day with a lady I love. Meanwhile, via things I've created, I get to help people feel better about their lives and prospects on a daily basis - unless they send me a really crappy script, of course. ;-) So hey, it's a wonderful life. Today I'll be at the Beverly Pavilion moderating TV agent & manager events for Sherwood Oaks. I get paid lunch and parking for doing this, and probably a lot of smiles. That's enough.
This is my first blog post. Let me know what you think of it, will you? Happy creating.
Posted by Baron of Burbank on October 21, 2005 at 11:33 AM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Leaders are Teachers
-- by Tom Nies
It is axiomatic that leaders are learners. They learn from their own experiences, from others directly, from their readings, and from their studies of situations before them. But, in a very real way, leaders are learners who realize that they must also teach as they lead.
As every teacher knows, the teacher often learns more in the process than do the students. It's been said that, "When the student is ready to learn, a teacher will appear." This suddenly appearing teacher may be a book, a friend, an experience, a success, a reversal, or any of a virtually infinite number of possibilities.
Quite likely, however, the teacher that appears may be one's own self, in that the learner adopts a more inquisitive, open-minded, thoughtful attitude based upon a humble but growing awareness of one's need to know more, and a willingness to do what is necessary to learn.
True humility is the groundwork for all good growth. But just as none are so blind as those who refuse to see, so too are none so stupid as those who refuse to learn. Good and humble leaders who well understand this, therefore, are not only are eager learners, but also are willing and helpful teachers as well.
Posted by TomNies on October 21, 2005 at 09:56 AM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Free Software Anyone?
One assumption about simplicity is that it requires less involvement. That's not the case of the companies highlighted in Rob Garretson's "The Benefits of Making 'Partner' Deals with Vendors." It appears to becoming more common for companies in health care, financial services and other specialities to work with a vendor to develop customized software.
Doesn't sound that big a deal right? But here's the best part of the concept: It's free. Mr. Garretson gives the example of Colorado Access which worked with Thomson Medstat to develop a custom medical-decision-support applications. Why was it free? Instead of paying with cash, Colorado Access paid with knowledge. Colorado Access provided their expertise on their industry to help Medstat to develop a product that they could resell to other clients. In essence, Colorado Access was a consultant who got paid in software.
What a great concept.
Posted by DonnaBurns on October 14, 2005 at 02:32 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Leaders are Learners
by Tom Nies
In his brilliant book entitled Links of Leadership, John Laffin notes that, "Most great leaders have, throughout history, studied the campaigns of their predecessors, profiting by their mistakes, capitalizing on their successes.” Therefore, “an ingredient that makes a commander great is the readiness and the ability to profit from the experiences of others."
These insights are simply loaded with guidance for modern leaders in the combat of competitive commerce. We must learn from the experiences of others. Failing to do so, we are subject to repeat and experience the same failures. Santayana perceptively noted that, “those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.”
True, we sometimes learn our lessons best by the pain of our own errors. But experience gained the hard way, by trial and error, is as painful as it is limiting. Study and consideration of the experiences and understandings of others are very great aids to learning. The best leaders everywhere were and are also voracious learners.
Posted by TomNies on October 14, 2005 at 11:34 AM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
3 Requirements for Great Entrepreneurship
-- by Tom Nies
Entrepreneurs are a key driving force of our economy. They help to create the jobs that deliver value, that deliver paychecks to people to raise their families, send their kids to college, and buy cars from the local car dealer. Entrepreneurship, for many, has now become the new “Great American Dream” – that is, to become an owner, and so more able to shape and control one’s own destiny in today’s globalized world.
- Seven out of 10 new jobs are created by entrepreneurial businesses.
- The National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Commerce and others have reported that since World War II, "smaller entrepreneurial firms have been responsible for 67% of all inventions and innovations, and 95 percent of all radical innovation in the United States.”
What are the three factors for entrepreneurial success?
- Passion
- Luck
- A willingness to risk everything
I define passion as the willingness to suffer and endure pain for one’s beliefs. Any business builder must possess passion for what he or she does if success is to be achieved. Without the willingness to endure very hard and uncertain times and to defer gratifications, there will be little chance of success, and little reason for others to follow.
Luck, I believe, is everywhere – although not everyone sees it when it beckons. But an entrepreneur does recognize luck when it happens and seizes lucky moments to advance. The word entrepreneur means “to take an opening.” And the word opportunity suggests an open port, or portal, for success. One simply cannot overestimate the importance of being in the right place at the right time.
But finally – and this is what separates an entrepreneur or job-creator from a job-seeker – is an entrepreneur’s willingness to risk almost everything – comfort, income, home, health, and yes, even family involvement, to seek opportunities, to take openings, and to satisfy as yet unmet demands. Success demands action. The greater the success, the bolder the actions required.
Fortunately, successful entrepreneurs quite often feel a responsibility to encourage entrepreneurship not only in the United States but also throughout the world. That’s why Cincom launched its “Encouraging Entrepreneurship” program. In the United States, we’ve begun to sponsor programs at colleges and universities, such as business plan competitions and fellowships to further encourage entrepreneurship. Take a look.
Posted by TomNies on September 20, 2005 at 04:14 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Think Like Your Toughest Competitor
It is easy to bog down when you are looking for transformational innovation. So many internal barriers. So much confusion coming from the customer focus groups.
Try this role-playing to break out of the box.
Pick one of your competitors. Imagine you are on their staff. Start thinking like this very smart competitor -- assume this competitor is employing a customer-centric viewpoint about your product so that he can build his own product that will be much better for customers.
The advantage of this role-playing is that such a smart competitor will not believe any of your company statements that are not well supported. He will uncover your weak points and know exactly how to create a solution that will knock you on your heels.
Actually, he's already doing it ... or at least contemplating it ... so you need to think like him and beat him to the solution first.
Posted by Dale Wolf on September 19, 2005 at 05:20 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Product Innovation is On-Q
I do not seek; I find. (Pablo Picasso)
Taped to the door of our lab, where you couldn’t possibly miss them, are what our director calls the 10 Q-mandments of R&D:
1. Question – Everything…in particular the status quo
2. Quibble – The answers are in the details
3. Quantum – Seek quantum, not incremental, improvements
4. Queue – Set priorities, keep to them
5. Quick – First to market gets the advantage
6. Quiet – Loose talk gives the advantage away
7. Quality – Not to be sacrificed for expediency
8. Quixotic – It’s not ideal if it’s unrealistic
9. Quit – Know when to walk away; failure should be avoided not fixed
10. Quagmire – Where you are when you don’t walk away
Posted by Dale Wolf on September 19, 2005 at 05:07 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Transforming Business with a Screw
Our problem with innovation is that we let preconceived paradigms confine us. How would you go about reinventing one of the seven simple tools that have been around since antiquity. And if you could reinvent this tool, how might it transform business? What tool should you be reinventing?
This report from Reveries' Cool News of the Day:
A 40-year-old fellow named Kenneth LeVey has come up with a cure for the common screw, reports Jonathan Fahey in Forbes (9/19/05). "People have been trying to come up with a new screw for 100 years, to the point where you get sick of hearing about it," says Kenneth, product development director at Illinois Tool Works (ITW) itw.com, "the nation's biggest screwmaker." He adds: "What we knew for sure was that our customers could use more performance." What he also knew was that his employer had been losing sales from companies like General Motors to lower-cost competitors and the only way out of that trap was to reinvent the screw, by shaping it "to mate with the substance it is penetrating."
Easier said than done. The reason screws don't hold things together as well as they might is that they are "so simple and cheap -- most cost less than a penny apiece to make -- that it has been easier to design around their deficiencies than to come up with a better model ... Screws are made, oddly enough, by squeezing metal rather than cutting it." The process makes it impossible to fine-tune threads to maximize their grip on concrete, metal or plastic. That kind of precision is critical, because Kenneth LeVey's initial vision was for a concrete screw with threads like "minichisels" that would "chip its way into a tight seat, instead of compressing and cracking the concrete."
After much research, Kenneth found that a "technology often used to create injection molds for detailed plastic parts" in which "very high voltage" is used to create "a powerful arc of heat, which vaporizes the steel in the desired pattern." Says Kenneth: "No one had bothered to take advantage of all this new technology available to us and apply it to this very old product." And it is paying off : General Motors has ordered "60 million annual units" of his BosScrew "to fasten the plastic door panels of GM's new pickups." The company's sales of its Tapcon screw (for concrete) "are growing 30 percent a year." Proclaims ITW's William Tursky: "We've removed the screw from the commodity realm." Kenneth LeVey, meanwhile, is onto his next challenge: Designing "a capless refueling system for autos that could banish forever the plague of gas caps left dangling from cars."
Posted by Dale Wolf on September 12, 2005 at 10:56 AM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Who Will Lead Our Companies in the Future?
Gerald Levin, former CEO of AOL Time Warner: "There is no training to be a CEO; it's an extraordinary thing," -- February 21, 2005, issue of Fortune.
CEO jobs are dramatically hard. Sarbanes-Oxley has made them harder. Developing the skills and abilities to do the job well has frustrated more than one well-intentioned and well-rounded executive. Background, experience, education, and talent may not prepare you for the never-ending-on-public-display-globally-pressured-quarterly-earnings-report work that comes with leadership at the top.
The Center for Creative Leadership reports in one of their studies that 40% of CEOs fail during the first eighteen months of their tenure. These odds, plus the demands placed on an individual for this position, have caused a decided downturn in those that want the pressure.
According to Wirthlin Worldwide (now a part of Harris Interactive), only about 35% of executives want the CEO position today, down from roughly half who aspired towards it a mere four years ago. Their research indicates that 60% of current executives do not want the job. Add this datum to the fact that CEO turnover is at a five-year high and you have a problem:
Who will lead companies in the future?
Posted by Dale Wolf on September 9, 2005 at 01:53 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Setting Mind-Bending, Company Distorting Goals
By Dale Wolf
One competitive strategy all corporate leaders should consider is the setting of super-ambitious goals.
Not just stretch goals, but mind-bending, company distorting goals. Tom Nies, our CEO has put one in front of all of us at Cincom … to grow tenfold in five years. We cannot do that with business as usual. It forces us all to question what we’re doing today that limits where we are headed tomorrow.
Here’s another mind-bending goal:
Think of the one billion fledgling consumers in China. This huge market has been made possible by China’s meteoric growth as it adopted capitalism to take advantage of the largest labor pool in the world. That labor pool will now be buying things it could not afford just a few years ago. Same thing’s happening in India and likely will happen in Russia (CIS) ... the scale is universal.
With that kind of market within the reach of every company in the global economy, what can you do to get more than your fair share of the New World buying power? It is a mind-bending goal. To penetrate, you will likely have to change how you do business in fundamental ways.
Corporate leaders should challenge business units to move quickly in new directions by creating a strategy of extreme options rather than building incrementally on existing ones.
Speed-to-decision leading to speed-to-market will be essential under-girder to corporations seeking to penetrate China and India … or to grow by a factor of 10 in a short time frame. Technology can help the transformation, but first you must look inside your management team and change how you now think and how you now work. Processes must become radically simpler. Culture must become flexible and adaptive and full of energy.
It starts when CEO’s put a mind-bending goal in front of the rest of us. Ingenuity will take over. Transformation will happen. But not until the glove is thrown down on the table in the Boardroom.
Posted by Dale Wolf on September 4, 2005 at 07:55 AM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Simplicity Cannot Happen Without Leadership
One of the volunteer things I do is post articles on a blogsite for college students. It is called Marcom Blog. Sharing experience with these college students is one way many of us who have been around marketing for a long time can accelerate their understanding of the real world outside the classroom. Simplicity is a concept they can begin mastering right now.
I did a post this week at Marcom Blog on the subject of leadership. From my viewpoint, leadership is perhaps the most important attribute needed to achieve positive business transformation. I invite you to link to this article, not so much to read what I wrote but to read what the students wrote in their comments.
These students are looking for leaders to work for and they are trying to figure out for themselves what kind of leaders they might be.
But most of all, reading their comments on leadership is a powerful testament to all of us now in leadership roles ... it is vital to see what followers are looking for, and they put in right on the line in their comments. Take 10 minutes and be inspired!
Posted by Dale Wolf on September 1, 2005 at 11:29 AM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
“Creative Destruction” Part 1 – Capitalism’s Role
By Tom Nies
According to www.investopedia.com, this phrase "creative destruction" is meant to denote "a process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one."
In other words, creative destruction occurs when something new kills an old thing.
A great example of this is personal computers. The industry, led by Microsoft and Intel, destroyed many mainframe computer companies – but in doing so, entrepreneurs created one of the most important inventions of this century.
We can see by this example why Joseph Schumpeter, “the most important economist of the 20th century” according to the Wall Street Journal, characterized capitalism as “creative destruction” in his book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy – published in 1942.